QUESTION TIME | Petronas, the national oil corporation owned by all Malaysians, is perhaps justifiably proud of its track record - through them we became masters of our own destiny when it came to ownership and control of our key resources - oil and gas.
They waged a long, hard war to gain control of concessions and get the oil majors to become their contractors rather than concessionaires whereby the remaining oil was shared in a fixed proportion after allocating some for the costs of extraction.
And then they stipulated that companies that service the oil and gas fields operated by these companies must be local ones. Even most of the staff at the foreign-owned oil majors such as Shell and Exxon are local, with probably only a handful of them are expatriates.
More recently, Petronas has become an explorer and extractor of oil and gas in its own right with operations around the globe but the discussion of whether that is the right move has to be matter of discussion in a future article.
Despite all those great achievements, there is one area where Petronas has been terribly remiss in terms of getting more Malaysians involved. In this area of endeavour by Petronas, which is more cultural and leisure-related in nature, Malaysian representation is a mere 10 percent! It’s true - let me explain.
I am a great fan of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) and the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas (DFP), the home to the orchestra for many years now. I have enjoyed watching some wonderful concerts there, some backed or performed by the MPO itself.
There was Count Basie’s and Charles Mingus’ big bands but of course without those great jazz maestros who have long gone into the netherworld, just their bands who would not perhaps have come here otherwise.
New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band - a living legend in one of the birthplaces of jazz which used to play for audiences on a first-come first-served basis for just US$1 - had a memorable performance some years back. Contemporary jazz great Branford Marsalis played here too.
On top of this, the MPO had numerous performances highlighting all the classical big names with guest conductors and performers from all over the world. It continues to have an active programme schedule, which gets more hectic in the weekends.
More recently, it had a “Fiesta Espanol” featuring a Spanish conductor and a Spanish clarinet soloist. Not only were the tunes all Spanish, it included a great solo dance performance to the accompaniment of music - I believe it was flamenco but I am not well-tutored in these matters and could be mistaken.
It was some time since I visited the venue and saw the MPO playing but when I scanned the members of the MPO from left to right earlier this year, I saw a sea of white faces peering down at me. I am not racist, I think, but after nearly 20 years, where are the Malaysians in the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra?
I looked up the website - the MPO has seven Malaysian musicians - seven out of some 70 musicians in total that I counted - a mere 10 percent! Why? Do we lack our own musicians? Surely that can’t be when we had a number of orchestras in the past, including the RTM Orchestra and the Selangor Philharmonic Orchestra.
The older ones among us might remember names such as Jimmy Boyle, Alfonso Soliano and Johari Salleh who were early conductors for the RTM Orchestra and its predecessors and who were household names back then...