KVT – An Empiricle Evening
To end the evening the VNSO played Mozart’s 40th Symphony, his second last…and which could fit in under the Emperor category because it is often called ‘The Great’. Einstein said that the first and last movement plunge into the abyss of the soul. Others says it must have been composed when Mozart was suffering depression and terror. Mozart would have hoo haa-ed such expressions, probably retorting that his music was in the classical tradition and thus never displayed personal emotions. But of course it’s hard not to be emotionally moved by the Symphony though my digitally savvy young Vietnamese friend irreverently calls the first movement the “Supermarket Movement” because it synthetically resounds around the halls of larger electronic hardware retailers inHanoi
The minuet third movement got the orchestra’s sound in the acoustically bouncy theater back to the heroic level of the overture. Overall I thought that the conductor’s interpretation was a trifle mechanical but that didn’t interfere with the audiences’ listening pleasure and even the man in front and to the right of me who kept on inspecting his mobile all the way through the ‘Emperor’ and who seemed to inexplicably fall asleep one stage, was all ears and riveted attention…tapping his fingers and having a grand time.
A nice night’s music that had my young Vietnamese friend’s seal of approval and he can hardly wait for the VNSO and Dvorak,s ‘New World Symphony’ near the end of the month when the venue is the acoustically preferable Nha Hat Lon. And he’ll be my guest opinion giver on that performance as I saw the symphony live, by 3 different orchestras, last year and am a bit New Worlded out
For those, like me, who never get tired of the ‘Emperor’ here’s a link to a great 1966 redigitalized version by Friedrich Gulda with the Vienna Philharmonic
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYkd_3q3IfU&feature=related[/youtube]
and another to the 1st movement of Mozart’s 40th
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJf4ZffkoI[/youtube]
| Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below. |
