KVT – Mouron et Brel

KVT is wowed at L’Espace

She’s exciting, energetic, engaging, enticing …..plus all other effervescent type adjectives.  She’s a petite bundle of vocal extravagence simply called Mouron. She’s a French chanteuse et auteur extraordinaire who stirred up a storm with her celebratory Piaf performance at L’Espace last year. She wowed us again this week in the same venue with a sublime hour of songs celebrating the life and compositions of Jacques Brel.

Enough said about this superlative performer and her equally superlative accompanist on the piano, Terry Truck. I just hope they do another Asian tour again next year and that the wonderful people at L’Espace ensnare them again for us

Super, L’Espace! World class again at only 100 000VND a ticket in the best acoustical auditorium in the city.

Formidable!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N56GdkMDm0M&feature=related[/youtube]

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How long now have I been saying that the French are the only ones who know how to present  performances…..no fuss, no bother, no unnecessary speeches? Well they just blew it!

Instead of giving us 60 dynamic minutes of the world’s best they decided to preface the show with some local, amateur cabaret singers from local universities.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the ethos of that….it’s just that they prefaced each song and singer with a verbal introduction and what could have been a nice 15 minute interlude before the grand event (in the hands of someone with a bit of dramatic direction and a total cut out of the verbals) became a 60 minute epic that left some of us wondering what had happened to the star turn.

If we’d only had 4 or 5 of the very best of the singers….those who were able to sustain the notes and a cabaret style…and left out the stuff  like Leonard Cohen’s ‘Halleluya’ (which for some obscure reason has become a favorite funeral song in some places in the West)…and sorted out the spaghetti mass of microphone cables that caused no end of concern…we’d have been able to comfortably sit through the entire Mouron without needing a wee break.

Anyhow, like the great troupers she and Truck are, Mouron gathered up the cables that snaked over the stage and soon had us gathered in the palms of her magical hands, bound by the spell of that gorgeous voice, and oblivious to all but her.

Magnifique!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiRONIMU5r4&feature=related[/youtube]

To read KVT’s review of Mouron last year, click here.