By John Lucas
It isn’t every day that you get the opportunity to see a sitting mayor take to the stage and give a musical performance in front of a paying audience. That’s exactly what happened at Richmond’s Fraserview Church on December 7, when Malcolm Brodie provided piano accompaniment for vocalist May Ho and violinist Kan Chen.
Not by himself, mind you, but with the backing of the Vancouver Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. Brodie’s performance of two songs with the ensemble was the centrepiece of the Gentai Charity Concert. Organized by the Vancouver Sunshine Lions Club, the event raised $20,288 for the Richmond Community Foundation (which administers more than a dozen scholarships for secondary-school grads) and it also marked the Sunshine Lions’ 10th anniversary.
The two songs that featured Richmond’s mayor might not be very well-known outside of the Chinese community, but each is significant in its own way.
The first, “The Moon Represents My Heart”, is a Mandarin pop tune first recorded in 1973 by Taiwanese singer Chen Fen-lan. A 1977 version by another Taiwanese artist, Teresa Teng, became one of the first foreign songs to achieve widespread success in mainland China in the post–Cutltural Revolution era. It has since been performed by a wide range of international musicians, including Nana Mouskouri, Kenny G, and Jon Bon Jovi.
The second song performed by Brodie, Ho, and Chen, was “Across Thousands of Rivers and Mountains, There’s Always Love”, the theme song from Love and Passion, an epic miniseries that helped define Hong Kong’s dramatic television landscape in the early 1980s.
That Brodie acquitted himself well on both numbers shouldn’t really be a surprise. After all, as Charlie Smith noted in an article back in October, the mayor has a long history as a musician. In the late 1960s, he played trombone in a band called the Spectres, which was founded by Bruce Fairbairn and managed by Bruce Allen. Fairbairn, of course, subsequently became the producer of choice for legendary rock groups such as AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Van Halen before he died in 1999. Allen went on to manage megastars including Bryan Adams and Michael Bublé.
Another member of the Spectres, organist Joe Gold, wrote an award-winning family memoir titled Two Pieces of Cloth: One Family’s Story of the Holocaust. And Brodie, first elected in 2001, is Richmond’s longest-serving mayor. Not a bad set of outcomes for a band that didn’t make much of an impact in its own right.
When Brodie wasn’t on the stage, the Vancouver Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Rui Shi Zhuo, mostly stuck to Western classical repertoire, including guaranteed crowd-pleasers like the overture from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and Johann Strauss II’s waltz, “The Blue Danube”.
Among the more out-of-left-field selections was “The Lonely Shepherd”—a haunting piece usually associated with pan-flute player Zamfir but also widely known through its inclusion on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
As a nod to the season, the orchestra also played “Silent Night” and “Auld Lang Syne”.
For the Vancouver Sunshine Lions Club, the evening was a celebration of a decade of important and impactful community work. For Brodie, who has his eye on retirement in 2026, it was likely a welcome break from people asking him pointed questions about his response to the B.C. Supreme Court’s Cowichan Nation land-title decision.
John Lucas is a musician, writer, editor, and content marketer based in Vancouver. To learn more about his professional services, visit his website. Follow Pancouver on X @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
