KVT – Beethoven Belles

KVT goes triple 8 with Ludwig Van

After the world-famous Spanish flamenco group on Wednesday night, I thought it may be a bit of an anti-climax to follow it up with the VNSO and Beethoven’s well known 8th but I knew I shouldn’t have worried. The VNSO are about to fly out and conquer Carnegie Hall in  New York so I knew this was a dress rehearsal of sorts. In the US they’ll dish up Dvorak’s 8th as their main meal and if they play it as well as Ludwig Van’s well known 8th then they will get rapturous reviews.

The 8th is Beethoven’s shortest and when you consider its placement between the grandeur of the mighty 9th and the patriotic appeal of the 7th you can understand why it tended to be a bit dismissed in its day. But on Thursday, conducted by guest conductor, American Dorian Wilson, it hit all the right notes.

Every movement is somehow so familiar to peoples’ ears that at Nha Hat Lon, when each started, you could feel audience members giving an inward sigh of recognition and contentment and settling back comfortably in their seats to let it all flow smoothly over them.

Apparently Beethoven really liked the 8^th; ‘my little symphony’ as he used to call it. It’s hard to have a favorite bit. Many say the third movement when the two horns are so melodious

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFqWd14pTQ[/youtube]

(in fact the VNSO made the whole symphony a melodic tout de force). Many say the fourth with its crescendos is the best and may agree with Tchaikovsky who said that the fourth movement was one of Beethoven’s greatest symphonic masterpieces. A couple I talked to find the 8th quite a spiritual experience. I was a teeny less enamoured of the brass in the third movement but that was a very minor thing.

A very mellow performance!

The prolonged applause was well deserved and the singling out of the horns and lead cello by Dorian Wilson was a necessary tribute.

The evening’s program began with three very attractive and delightful and talented young ladies playing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for piano, cello, violin and an orchestra of one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

The triple is a sort of musical argument between three soloists and you often forget that the orchestra is there. In fact, in some performances I’ve seen, the orchestra didn’t need to fit into the dialogue. (And that’s how I saw the Triple on Thursday. A really delightful discussion between the three instruments and the fascination was in following its arguing, its murmuring, its laughter and its gossip and its occasional disagreement when the piano became the undertoning voice of reason.) However conductor Wilson gave the VNSO an integral, and sometimes spicy role in the dialogue. Were it a play I’d have said that they made a great Greek chorus to the gentle comedy that the protagonists, the solo instruments, were poetically bouncing and batting back and forth. Quite Shakespearean!

Soloists, French/Vietnamese pianist Kim Barbier, Japanese violinist Matsuda Lina, and amazingly young Dutch/Austrian cellist Harriet Krijgh, were gorgeously sympatico and supportive of each others’ roles. Love to hear them in solo performances.

In each movement it’s the cello who initiates the dialogue and the violin picks up a note and plays around it and the piano, a little sonorously, joins in discreetly until at times it gets its definite point across.

Lovely playing by exceptionally lovely players….and add handsome to the equation when we bring the orchestra to its feet as well and dep trai when the conductor steps up for a bow.

I loved the whole of the Triple and listened with great delight and pleasure. In fact it made a fitting finale to my exciting cultural week and the 8th added delectable and delicious icing to an already mouth watering cake. When the conductor led the VNSO into a rousing and fast encore with The Marriage of Figaro, it was the glace cherry perched happily on top.

This week the VNSO is giving a free afternoon concert of their American program…..Barber, Dam Linh, and Dvorak. Look out for details.

I’ll be there with bells on ready to send them on their way across the Pacific, the mountains and prairies to land in New York ready for Carnegie and Boston.

FOOTNOTE: this week. Harriet Krijh will be playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Rococco Variations’ thanks to the Austrian Embassy. Will be excellent!