Fifty Candles at Hanoi Opera House

On the weekend the Vietnam National Orchestra and Ballet (VNOB) celebrated their 50th anniversary.

O FORTUNA

The celebration performance began with Carl Orf’s Carmina Burana to showcase the company’s orchestra, principal singers and chorus (with excellent assistance from the Hanoi International Choir to swell the ranks).

It was extremely brave to tackle the cantata when the memory of its last performance by a huge chorus of Germans and locals, international soloists and percussion was only three years old. That was a Burana of Buranas. This one was a good, and heroic effort by the chorus who managed the difficult rhythms and mostly incomprehensible mediaeval words very well. I was a bit worried before it all began because the cantata chorus needs a powerful male section and when I’ve seen the group before the males have been a trifle reedy but now there were lots of them, a host of youngsters, and with a collective voice that promises well for future productions. The females were as solid as usual. The soloists were adequate but didn’t have the vocal power to always rise above the music. The baritone who sang from the chorus line in the tempus es iocundum was great.

The orchestra occasionally grabbed hold of the powerful score with gusto but generally seemed to be a bit creakily overawed by the whole process, especially the brass and woodwinds.

But a brave and valiant effort that really pleased those ears still virginal to Orf’s masterpiece (which Orf deemed so fabulous after its first performance in 1937 that he made his publisher pulp all of his previous work). I still had my heart pumping along with Fortune, Empress of the World, and the hair on the back of my neck and my goosebumps still managed to be affected at approprate times.

O CHOPINIANA!

It would have been difficult for any company to perform Fokine’s Chopiniana to an orchestra that, on Friday night, was rattling away like a scratched 78rpm record. Chopin’s music should almost make you weep as it showcases this romantic poet’s dream of the ideal attainment. It has to delicately underscore the dancers as they are buoyed on the air as if on their own breaths or wafted side by side by an errant breeze… (to quote critic Mr MacCauley from the New York Times).

It’s such a difficult ballet to attempt. It can be full of posey sylphs and an equally posey poet looking terribly posey in posey tights. Full of all of everything that gives ballet a bad name (MacCauley again). Our Vietnamese poet is a fine dancer with a very taught body and he is more than capable of the dancing this part inspirationally. Unfortunately I don’t think that his female principals will allow him to reach the poetry of movement desired. The four principal females are adequate but never quite drift and leap and dance as silphilly as the dreamy sprites they represent.

The corps de ballet is allowed to be too static and when they move it’s rarely like grass in the wind with feet touching as gently as cats paws (borrowed from Tobi Tobias). Apart from the sections where their bodies become orchestral supplements, the corps has to meld into tableaux that subtly set the mood for the next set of dances by the principals. In fact they are they are almost the essential component of the choreography. The rest remains for the principals to give us some of the best movements that classical ballet had to offer and that Fokine and Diagalev were redefining.

I can’t understand how a company with such accomplished treasures as the Firebird and Spartacus in its repertoire, which has so many strong male dancers on board and which can attempt a lot of contemporary choreography effectively, would celebrate their 50th with a piece like Chopiniana that demands such a degree of classical expertise. I’d have thought that Giselle may have taught them that much… but it did look beautiful. Costumes gorgeous. Backdrop very dreamy. Man in tights swoonable.