KVT – VNSO and the Great Symphony Plus a Great Little Pianist

KVT has a GREAT night with the greats

Vienna at the time of Mozart (1756-91) or Schubert (1797-1828)

was not a healthy place to reside. Open sewers, rats galore, rife with diseases of all sorts that cut illustrious careers short, including those afflictions like syphilis and its cankerous cousins that dumped lots, even Schubert, in to early graves

It’s no wonder that wunderkind like the two above never reached anywhere near their 40th birthdays. To us 35 and 31 are obscenely early ages to die but Mozart’s and Schubert’s contemporaries would have taken it in their stride and just thanked the heavens it wasn’t their turn just yet.

Apart from the miasma of disease and putrefaction emanating from those sewers, the aroma from unwashed clothes awash with penetrating body odors would have been enough to make most of us modern pussy cats flee for the countryside where at least the smells from human and animal manure, and a corpse or two or ten, were drifted away by fresh breezes.

But as is the case today, anyone who wanted to be socially noticed, wanted to live where the action was and unless you were filthy rich and had a country estate to escape to occasionally in the hope of reaching ripe old ages (ripe being the olfactory adjective in those days), you hoi polloi-ed it around the often slimy streets of Vienna.

So it was to these streets that the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra attempted to transport us last week but thank goodness that the patrons at the Hanoi Opera House were of the frequently washed and laundered variety and we didn’t have to hold clove studded oranges to our noses or wave scented handkerchiefs under them… even though a couple of western matrons had empathetically and liberally doused themselves with imitations of Chanel no 5 or Jean Patou’s Joy Parfum in a concerted attempt to copy the hygienic habits of early 19th century Viennese aristocracy.

The Orchestra was gussied up in formal black and white and my favorite conductor, Ong Tetsuji Honna, strode onto the podium in tails lined with royal purple velvet and led the orchestra into one of the extra special jewels in Mozart’s music box, the 5 minute long overture to ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ which begins with a lyrical oboe solo and then gradually builds up to intensity in the hope that the audience of Mozart’s day would shut up their gossiping and carousing so that the tenor and the baritone could be heard when the curtain went up

Honna made sure that the VNSO polished up several facets of the diamond in preparation for the debut of local adolescent piano playing wunderkind, Nguyen The Vinh on the shiny grand

The young man took to the piano stool…with the hearts in the mouths of just about all of us wishing him well and tears in our eyes as he played his first notes after one of those, long and spirited introductions by the strings that would have any pianist cracking his knuckles in nervous anticipation of the 26 minutes that lay ahead with the music invisibly imprinted on the insides of his eyelids

And the aptly aged13 year old played Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 13 very well, lightly but fluently in a manner befitting a much more mature performer. The VNSO came in underneath him with sympatico and at the conclusion of the three movements were beaming as widely as the slight pianist.

How often does an up and coming musician who obviously has the ‘goods’ get the chance to strut their stuff with a well regarded Symphony Orchestra under an internationally regarded conductor….and make the grade

And where to next? More years of exhausting studying and playing, hopefully in some good overseas conservatory. Competition after competition in the hope that he finally makes it into the stratosphere of the few soloists in demand.

He got a good taste of adulation though when the bouquets were loaded onto him and like a real trouper he passed them onto the female musicians…so many bunches of flowers that just about all of the ladies on stage were catered for.

Bravo we all sighed with more tears in our eyes.

Now it was testing and trysting time for the VNSO and the redoubtable Ong Honna. With Schubert’s ‘The Great’ symphony. Trysting because the musicians had to meet and come to terms with a score so difficult that Orchestras in Vienna and Paris refused to play it and an 1844 Orchestra in London conducted by Felix Mendelssohn jacked up and also said no. George Bernard Shaw said of a much later London performance that “a more exasperatingly brainless composition was never put on paper.”

He wouldn’t say that today!

With modern instruments the symphony’s length is no longer considered such a huge physical challenge but the players have to jump some musical hurdles that test them and the VNSO took to the jumps in a confident manner and didn’t knock too many over.

Schubert was a lover of the French horn and that instrument majestically introduces the first movement and its motif becomes the recurring theme. The VNSO carried the movement with vitality and ended with just the right degree of emotion and tension that makes your buttocks squirm in the best possible way with its hearty buoyancy

I thought they got a bit waylaid in the second movement but carried it through well enough and got the sadness pretty well spot on at the end.

They well and truly made up for it in the marvelous third movement when all the lyrical dance melodies seem to go on for ever and you never want them to cease. The woodwinds were at their peak.

The dance tunes were, apparently, one of Schubert’s party pieces where, because of his diminutive height he’d sit at the keyboard and play for hours while others had a good a good time on the parquetry.

The brass hit their peak in the finale which I once heard described as a hedonistic rush, intoxicating and overwhelming, a tsunami of intense exhilaration

The looks of relief and exhilaration on the faces of all the players and on that of Ong Honna told a tale of a symphony well done.

I really enjoyed watching the expressive face and physical exertions of the young, auburn haired double bass player all the way through the hour long piece. He mutely described the intensity and that final relief and a huge grin of WOW WE DID IT!

Another piece to savor from the VNSO….which has some super concerts on the way and a couple that include compositions by one of my favorites, Bela Bartok.

Try and grab a seat for May 7 or 8 when the VNSO will honor the name and feats of and at Dien Bien Phu.