Dinesh pointed out an article in the Business Times on Friday that talked about the choice of concert venue for the Singapore concert, and here are the interesting bits:
"But when American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega made her Singapore debut at the Esplanade Concert Hall last Saturday night, anyone who had heard the previous two nights' concerts would have wondered how Dream Theater and Jay Chou might have sounded if they had the benefit of the Esplanade's exquisite acoustics.
The Esplanade would've been a hard sell for Jay Chou's concert promoter, Hype Records, since the 1,600-seat concert hall has a fraction of the Indoor Stadium's 13,000-odd capacity. But the Esplanade might have been a possibility for Dream Theater. To be fair, it's a far cry from a traditional rock concert venue, but is still far preferable to the MAX Pavilion at Singapore Expo, and the Glass Pavilion at Far East Square, which have flexible configurations but abysmal acoustics.
Suzanne Vega's local concert promoter, Greenhorn Productions, showed how it's possible to organise a successful Esplanade concert for a niche artist with zero sponsorship.
'We did not expect to fill the venue from the start, although we were hopeful,' says Greenhorn's Sylvia Choy-Dhillon. But they did manage to fill 90 per cent of the house, selling out in every category except the $80 Circle 3 seats. Actually, the top $120 tickets were the first to go - which shows that you don't have to be Christina Aguilera to move sales.
'Our motivation stems from our desire to present top-quality artists to real music fans in the best possible acoustic setting. For this reason, we did not consider any other venue to be worthy of Suzanne Vega,' Ms Choy-Dhillon says."
(from Business Times, 25 Jan 2008)
Indeed, we could not have asked for a better and more fitting venue than the Esplanade for Suzanne's debut concert in Singapore. Thanks, once again, to Greenhorn Productions for doing such an excellent job! 