KVT – Piano Solo Concert by Roger Muraro

Totally Magnifique et That Su Tuyet Voi

Last year I headed a piece about Roger Muraro’s piano recital at the opera house Muraro… Magnifique… Les Phap… magnifique aussi…..and the exact same applies to last Saturday night’s full house recital…. as does this bit that I also used then in euphoric mood (as I am again): ‘I love the way the French do it all so understatedly. No grand gestures or speeches, just on with the show, and in this case, on with perfectly wonderful music (mind you I love the way they gently ask audiences to refrain from using mobiles and flash photos… and the audiences always respond perfectly. It must be Gallic charm!’.
Last year we took along a young Vietnamese whose ears were virginal to western classical music ‘Sometimes we buy a seat at concerts for young students (with L’Espace prices its an easy thing to do) and young Hien from Hai Duong, as over-awed with the Opera House as could be and a lover of rap, fell head over heels into Muraro’s magic and walked away into the velvet night a convert to classical piano.’. To celebrate Muraro’s return we invited Hien to revisit the scene of his classical baptism and he fell head over heels once more…..not that he’s virginal anymore! His eye-popping, ear-popping total conversion came with Mahlers’ 8^th last October.

Since it’s the Easter weekend I guess its OK for us of other beliefs and atheists to appropriate some appropriate Christian metaphors and, for me, Muraro’s recital was sort of a communion. I sat next to a diminutive, Vietnamese boy who’s learning piano at the Conservatory and throughout a fairly intense repertoire of Debussy and Ravel, the boy was on the edge of his seat, his fingers stretching over an imaginary keyboard. When Muraro let loose with Ravel in the Manner of Borodin, the boy’s excitement was almost uncontainable and at the end of it all his little hands, like the rest of the audience’s, were red from clapping. When the pianist gave a waltzing encore, he was in raptures…as were several other Vietnamese boys in close proximity to us.

To get back to the French again! When we entered the grand old opry house we were confronted with Western…probably Phap…. families accompanied by children of all ages, including, horror of horrors, BOYS! We needn’t have worried because they were perfect angels throughout the evening and attentive to those magic Muraro fingers on the ivories.

Before I’m criticised for being sexist, I have to say that the girls were perfectly attentive angels too!

So that’s why it was a sort of good Easter communion for me….a rebirth of my faith in BOYS whom I thought had all been thoroughly stolen away by the keyboards of electronic games.

Last year Muraro gave us Chopin, Liszt and a super superb Berlioz. This year he gave us Debussy and Ravel with a delicate interlude into Faure’s Nocturnes. Two nights before I’d been beautifully smothered in Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ with the VNSO in the same venue, so it was quite heavenly (well it is Easter!) to have six of his 24 preludes and three pieces of his impressionistic Images from Book 1.

Way back in this opinion piece I used the word ‘intense’ and to a lot in the audience, this may have been a baptism into early 20th century modernist music – and what better way to be inducted than by Muraro.

A young adult, Vietnamese male who has worked out that L’Espace gives out really cheap seats to students and so therefore manages to get to hear some great international performers, was perplexed about when to applaud because his palms were itching with the desire to. Eventually he couldn’t help himself and just did and everyone else, who were similarly itching, joined in.

Another beautiful evening’s music from a master of the keyboard and a resurrection of my faith in the French after faint criticism earlier in the week.

Some French in our neighborhood have invested in a piano and lessons for their young boy child. At present we have frequent recitals of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and some post modern, dissonant improvisations. We are eagerly looking forward to that time, a few months hence, when gorgeous stuff will announce our dawn as melodiously as the notes sung by the little birds that flit in our mango and starfruit trees and next Easter I’ll request that  lovely Shaker Easter hymn appropriated appropriately by Aaron Copeland for his  ‘Appalachian Spring’………..

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Zc9enoGCg[/youtube]

I danced in the morning when the world begun….I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun….I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth………….

Footnote: the management committee of the Opera House could do a resurrection bit on their grand piano and give it an Easter rub with a soft cloth to rid it of its smear of fingerprints….and the wooden floor underneath the piano would resurrect beautifully with a bit of a wash and polish.