KVT – Another Night to Cherish with Virtuoso Imai Nobuko and the VNSO @ The Opera House

WOW! Principal Conductor Tetsuji Honna fine tuned the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra to pitch perfect – in perfect timing for the return visit by Japanese viola playing super star Imai Nobuko

A couple of years ago Nobuko made my hair stand on end when she performed Schnittke’s ‘Monolog’ with the VNSO, and a couple of years before that with a perfect viola concerto by Bartok

In fact as soon as I find out that she’s on stage with the VNSO at the Opera House – or elsewhere – I rush the box office for a top seat. Her synergy with conductor Honna and his musicians always ensures a 5 star performance and it was stellar all the way through Elgar’s Cello Concerto (apparently a viola and cello have the same intervals and the same note range which allows a brilliant soloist to weave magic with most music composed for either stringed beauty)

Elgar’s concerto, composed in 1919 after the weapons that devastated so many million lives in Europe had been silenced, should sear your soul with its despair and passion and the way in which it sometimes teeters on the brink of deep depression – with nerve twitches of bi-polarity that keen and growl and gnaw through its lamentations. The cry of despair uttered by the cello/viola towards the end of the last movement must be one of the most soulful ever made in music

Nobuko read Elgar’s intent to perfection and the VNSO were her perfect foil.

I can’t give you the superlative Nobuko with the concerto but I can offer the equally superlative cellist Jaqueline Du Pres and the emotive first movement

So how to follow that?

Maestro Ong Honna had the perfect trick up his sleeve – Bruckner’s ever popular 4th Symphony and his perfectly honed horn players who featured stirringly.

A solo horn opens the symphony with a haunting tune that quivers above almost silent string tremolos and invites the wind instruments to join in one of music’s perfect odes to awakening nature

Bruckner gave the whole VNSO’s brass section the perfect vehicle to prove that their days of mediocrity are but a distant memory

To get through Bruckner’s 4th without gasping for breath and falling in a heap during the ever changing last movement is a feat of endurance for all good orchestras and when this one got its teeth into this symphony’s breathtaking concluding coda that ‘soars across a seemingly limitless harmonic landscape’ we got all of the excitement and power and dignity that this massive work demands and yells for on its path to climax that left us all – like the exuberant percussionist Nguyen Nhat Quang – exhilaratingly exhausted and definitely very moist.

Honna ensured that his orchestra got its teeth right into the meat of Bruckner’s romantic intent of medieval knights riding into the countryside at dawn; of spurned adolescent tryst in pastoral pastures; of grand and thrilling hunts; of celebratory dances; of the joys and sexual tensions of a full blown folk festival

APOLOGIES for the necessary repetitions of PERFECT but they are deserved

PS: THE VNSO HAVE BEEN SET A VERY INTERESTING PROGRAM THIS YEAR and if their Elgar and Bruckner are the standard then audiences won’t be disappointed (though I’m a little disappointed that too few performances are scheduled for the sparkly new concert hall which is definitely a lot sexier looking than the grand old Opry which is just about as wrinkly as – though much more lush than – the writer of this hyperbolated opinion piece)