KVT – The Fabulous Frenzy that Becomes the Symphonie Fantastique and the VNSO

KVT gets totally wrapt in a fantastique story of an artist’s self-destructive passion for a beautiful woman….. his obsession and dreams, tantrums and moments of tenderness, and visions of suicide and murder, ecstasy and despair

Leonard Bernstein described the symphony as the first ever musical experience into psychedelia and last week it became another of the year’s truly great cultural experiences performed by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of wonderful Tetsuji Honna

It was in the new and excellent Vietnam Concert Hall in Hao Nam Street, Dong Da which has excellent acoustics and sight lines.

There are still diehards who just can’t give up the spectacle of the VNSO performing on the stage of the Opera House, and I guess until those types start to appreciate the wonderful auditory experience offered by the exceptional and new venue (not to mention parking availability!), the concert schedule will probably have to be shared between the two

As a gesture of sympathy and condolence for the thousands of earthquake victims-dead, injured and homeless-in Nepal, Ong Honna led the strings in a moving and very beautiful playing of Bach’s Air On The G String- originally the second movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No 3. A reprise of it below as another moment to meditate on the plight of the Nepalese

It’s a travesty when such sublime pieces, because they are 300 years free of royalty fees, are used to underscore second and Z rated video games and movies etc-but them’s the moronic breaks!

Then it was time for Schumann’s Cello Concerto with local expert Ngo Hoang Quan soloing extremely competently

My favorite description of the concerto is dark and mysterious and as one poetic person sad after hearing Jacqueline du Pres play the work: ‘It’s the soul breathing’

Schumann apparently took up the cello after injuring a hand and having to stop piano playing, so it seems only natural that he compose a major composition for cello and orchestra…even though it wasn’t played n public until after his premature death.

It’s not a virtuosic piece (neither is it an easy play) As one music critic put it, it’s rather an extended fantasy for soloist and author through three dreamscapes. But to make it succeed the cellist has to coax a singing tone from his instrument.

It’s a pretty daunting task for a player because there are no breaks between the three movements and right from the start that haunting sadness was prime in the first three chords from the orchestra-the same modified chords that are a transition between all movements.

Honna took a nicely romantic interpretation for the performace.

Ngo Hoang Quan played the first movement as though it was the soul’s breath and the orchestra smoothed his path. It’s in the second movement that real magic flowed when the cello sang its solo cantabile and was joined in duet by a cello from the orchestra (played by the orchestra’s talented principal cellist with the magnificent hair, Tran Thi Mo

The last movement’s dialogue between cellist and woodwind was gorgeous.

Only a minor glitch couldn’t mar the soloist’s performance. it was as if he was rereading a well loved poem.

THEN CAME THE BIG EVENT: SYMPHONY FANTASTIQUE by Berlioz

Just about any record sleeve or CD cover of the symphony carries a fantastic image because of the fire and eruption and spectacle that occurs in the last and second last movements when a demonic atmosphere is conjured up

Most reviewers and researchers see the story in the symphony as one of obsessive love that like the best, gothic obsessive stories desires starts as an inspiring vision of beauty and purity and proceeds to one of stalking, murder, death and satanic blasphemy. Like a lot of the best gothic intrigues it can all be blamed on an opium habit that caused sanity to go awry.

If it all sounds as weird and dangerous as Sting’s ‘Every Breath You Take-I’ll be watching you’ then ratch it a few thousand notches higher and you have the scenario.

The expectation of wild fire and volcanic type eruptions is there right from the start with an impressive array of tympani lined up at the back of the orchestra and five expectantly poised timpanists eagerly waiting to get to the nitty gritty- which began with a thunder storm at the end of a stalking episode in a country dell three fifths of the way through the symphony.

Most composers would have been happy to conclude a major work with a movement as dramatic and swirling and emotive as Berlioz’ March to The Scaffold with blares and booms and crashes and tension which ends In the last instant of the lover’s life as he thinks of his beloved and her musical theme begins but is truncated by the blade of the guillotine. The lovers head bounces down the steps, the drums roll and the crowds roar.

But not the supreme showman Berlioz….He added his fifth movement all about a blashphemic black mass and wild witches’ orgy. This would have thrilled all of the French atheists who had recently been freed by revolution from strict adherence to Catholic and Calvinist metaphors about morality but would have seen Berlioz burnt at the stake as a heretic had he ventured into near Spain and its new Inquisition.

Berlioz uses a refrain of his Dies Irae, the hymn about the Day of Judgment sung at funeral masses, and turns it into a savage, mocking and scary parody introduced by the ominous tolling of bells. He turns the sacred mass upside down. Even today the use of ‘sacred’ and patriotic music in a mischievous way anywhere in the world brings howls of approbation from officialdom, the conservative press and the easily manipulated proletariat. A late night knock on the door type reaction!

The VNSO was at its very best and not one player was off the mark all night, It’s the second time I’ve heard them being all delightfully, opulently macabre with the Fantastique and I doubt they’ll ever beat this performance

In the movements that are perceived as beautiful (and normal!) Ong Honna did the right thing and imbued them with a hint of demonic and growing tension that finally burst and vomited over us so magnificently when the dance that had gracefully introduced the beautiful maiden early in the piece, played by harps and soft strings and woodwinds, became an obscene jig when the murdered beauty attended the orgy to gloat over the lover’s fate.

I love this description of Berlioz (source alas lost): Say what you want about Hector Berlioz: He was an arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed man, full of vitriol (try reading his music criticism sometime), and he drove poor Harriet Smithson, the inspiration for his Symponie Fantastique , who was so unfortunate as to marry him, to drink and despair. All true, to be sure, but none of Berlioz’ deficits as a human being take away from the fact that at age 27, he wrote, by general agreement, the most amazing first symphony any composer has yet produced…and only 3 years after the death of Beethoven.

As a teen, Berlioz suffered from isolation and bouts of uncontrollable mood swings. These dramas, coupled with his fantasies of love and loss, provided Berlioz with the raw materials for this composition so magnifique

And was there ever a part of a symphony so beautiful as in the first movement when Honna highlighted the passions being explored with oboes echoing on and off stage? Or those two harps lilting into the ballroom

If I carry on any more in this vein readers who may have got this far may start to assume that I’m into my own mind altering opiate of choice

Suffice to say that it was a NIGHT’S MUSIC TO CHERISH and may the VNSO play as magnifique on its next outing!