Seoul Arts Centre
October 30, 2015

I had been planning to write about my first visit to an Asian concert hall and the experience of seeing the Sydney Symphony Orchestra play overseas. I was going to talk about the 15-minute walk to the Seoul Arts Center from Seocho subway station, along a main road past car showrooms and the Mad for Garlic valet parking point. And of my first view of part of the centre, at the top of the hill, a circular domed building ringed by columns – a temple to the arts.

The whole centre is massive, with a shopping arcade and three museums as well as performance spaces – it’s a ride up escalators, past the Seoul Calligraphy Museum, to get to the concert hall. I was going to talk about the stream of young girls taking selfies in front of the poster of heartthrob Chinese pianist Yundi, the soloist with Sydney Symphony, and of the fact that the Symphony Café in the foyer sold green tea latte.

I was certainly going to mention the timber-lined hall that looked, from where I was sitting, as if Escher had had a hand...