KVT – VNSO Mozart Cycle III

VIOLA……AHH THAT VIOLA

Once again the VNSO gave us music extraordinaire. The lovely, little recital hall at 16 Le Thai To was full with listeners who got much, much, much more than their money’s worth…..I mean where else on the planet earth do you get to hear a world class artist, in a lovely auditorium, for around $10 a seat?

The world class musician was Japanese viola player, Imai Nobuko who, at 68, still holds her own against the best Viola players on the planet.

Until I heard her play the last time she was in Hanoi soloing with the full VNSO orchestra, I used to say that the cello was my favorite unaccompanied musical instrument. After Nobuko I changed allegiances to the viola and still can’t get enough of its mellow sounds in the hands of a great player.

She started Sunday’s chamber recital playing Mozart’s Duet for Violin and Viola, which in good hands can sound as if there is a conversation flowing between the two instruments. With Nobuko on the Viola and deputy leader of the VNSO, the very attractive Dao Mai Anh, on the violin the dialogue was, at times, intimate, at others joyous, and always very engrossing.

The main event of the night was always going to be Benjamin Britten’s ‘Cello Suite No 1’, transposed for the viola. Britten promised to write six unaccompanied cello suites for the great cellist Rostropovich. However he died after only composing three with the first premiering in 1964. So much of Britten’s work echoes his personal convictions about pacifism and the corruption of innocence. The suites seem to carry some of the tenseness and disillusion that characterized cold war Europe but they’re offset with the ebullience loaned to them by Rostropovich and the sense of spiritual hope that was inherent in the composer.

I first heard its nine movements at a concert in a deep desert canyon on a cool moonless night and at one stage the howls of wild dogs echoed in the distance. It was enough to send delicious shivers down your spine.

The next was in Tirana, Albania, a few years after the fall of the dictator Enver Hoxha. I was staying alone at a friend’s spartan apartment in one of those multi storied concrete, warrened buildings that mushroomed through Eastern Europe after 1945. As so often happened, the electricity supply failed and plunged the city into deepest blackness. As the last echoes of soap operas slipped down the stairwells and the shrieks of anger and groans of resignation were spent over balconies, a lone cello took over the night and complete silence reigned until a smattering, then a thundering of applause filled the chasms as Britten’s Suite no 1 came to its lonely conclusion.

So it was with those memories rekindled that Nobuko’s viola playing enveloped me and provided a third, equally evocative experience.

How to cap such playing?!

Brahm’s romantic String Sextet provided the answer and a platform on which Nobuko could be joined by five Vietnamese talents. Young violinist Bui Cong Duy pleased us all as he bowed with Dao Mai Anh and with cellists Ngo Hoang Quan and Tran Thi Mo. Viola player Nguyen Thi Thu Nga must have had butterflies at the prospect of being paired with one of the greats.

Excellent playing again with the allegro, first movement, setting a mood in which the six instruments were swirling the notes around beautifully. A good, small chamber group like this has to play with an equality that gives them a oneness as they smooth out and pass and toss the sounds between them. The audience loved it all and were rewarded with an encore of the Scherzo.

The next outing by the VNSO is at the Opera House on June 3 and 4 with Beethoven’s Seventh…….you’d have to be silly to miss it.

Thanks again to the Japanese for your support of these ongoing chamber recitals

* KVT does not accept free seats to musical or dance events and thus ensures that these opinion pieces are written impartially.