KVT – Plus and Minus at the Opera House

The Fanfare started and I crossed my fingers, arms, legs and toes!

And it worked! The brass section of the Orchestra of the Vietnam Opera and Ballet fanned out the notes beautifully. Congratulations Mr Conductor Sutcliffe and whoever else works with the orchestra’s musicians.
A couple of years ago I used to think twice about their concerts but now I book a ticket in the best seats with nary a tremor.

Mr Sutcliffe had the group under good control as they accompanied three very talented and internationally accomplished Opera singers from Britain and three similar colleagues from Vietnam in an easy night’s listening of well known opera arias and duets…..well, the singers and the orchestra certainly made it all look easy which is why I am singing my own word aria about the orchestra. Pedestrian at times but certainly with it all the way!

Even the Lord Mayor of London was up there in the box seat wearing his bejeweled mayoral chain……and full of thanks the almost capacity audience would have been for his generous sponsorship of the Concordia foundation that allowed us to hear the voices of baritone, James Cleverton; tenor, Christopher Steele; and soprano Tanya Cooling. Good British talent!

The crowd pleaser was probably Cleverton and Cooling delightfully dueting Mozart’s Papagena/Papageno from ‘The Magic Flute’ while the loudest applause was for Steele and his ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s ‘Turandot’, which, when a good tenor gets into it, always gives me goosebumps. (Mind you, if the commenting local lady in middle of the horseshoe seats had interrupted it as was her wont with a lot of the other pieces I may have taken off a slightly smelly sock and politely suggested she chew on it but with only one duet to go it wouldn’t have been worthwhile.)

The Hanoi humidity must play havoc on singers’ high notes but all six got through with minimal reaching and straining.

The locals, baritone Manh Dung, soprano Vanh Khuyen, and tenor Thanh Binh managed to bring the game home to the Brits and held their own, especially Khuyen, and I’ve been Binh’s fan ever since his role as Merlin in this year’s stage hit, ‘Through the Valley’.

The choir of the VNOB was in great voice backing up Dung in ‘Toreador’, beautiful in ‘Nessun Dorma’ and pretty goose bumpy singing the folk song with full orchestra (after a day listening to a 75 minute CD of the China Philharmonic Orchestra playing Chinese composed pieces, suites, overtures and dances I am hoping that a similar thing might happen here…at the Opera House…..Vietnamese compositions! Vietnamese orchestra! Full blown concert!)

‘Brindisi’ from La Traviata was a great way to wrap up the first half of the night and for the singers and Mr Sutcliffe to get their well-deserved bouquets and exit stage right reprising it.

I must admit now that my main reason for attending last night was not to hear the opera evergreens but to see the contemporary dance ‘Minus’. This was the feature after interval and after raving about it following its world premiere in Hanoi in January, I had told lots of people that it was unmissable… but last night it wasn’t… and I was glad that at the end of the night I had “La Donna e Mobile’ bouncing around in my head for the ride home.

Somehow it was a bit of an anaemic translation of Nguyen Ngoc Anh’s vibrantly active and beautifully tableauxed and designed dance. The original in January was 50 minutes long and just about belonged in the tour de force category. Perhaps this one was a bit of a ‘Reader’s Digest’ version, divested of a lot of its original animal magnetism. It had its beautiful moments though and retained moments of its intended poignancy and some sense of alienation. The pas de deux was pretty good. Had I not seen it before in its other incarnation I would probably have given this version a far warmer and empathetic opinion piece.

The ‘stunning costumes’ as outlined in the program also appear to have been divested and the program also seemed to have Bosso’s music attached to Arnal’s name and vice versa. Spanner may have been a wrenched off in his prime.

All in all, though, a watchable dance but I didn’t get my rocks off this time (meaning euphoric, of course).