KVT – Swing and Bizet and VNSO

KVT glad to be back in the groove with the Vietnam National Symphony

After a long break from the Hanoi music scene it was good to be back at Nha Hat Lon with the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night.

I’m still spitting chips that I had to miss out on their performance, with Japanese soloists and a local  children’s choir, of the 1951 Japanese opera. ‘Yuzura’. Apparently famous singer and activist Joan Baez was in town and attended the event… thus having better luck than me

On one of those unseasonally hot and sweaty April evenings it was a relief to get to the opera House half an hour early and relax in air conditioning and contemplate the program of a nice sultry night’s music under the baton of American conductor Dorian Wilson who is a frequent guest of the orchestra and always a delight to watch on the podium.

He’s had a hugely distinguished career since receiving international recognition in 1989 at a prestigious conducting competition in Russia that led to him being invited,at the tender age of 25, to be second conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic….making him the youngest conductor in their long history (and an American at that!). He’s still highly regarded in Russia and has been given the title of Permanent Guest Conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic.

Apart from accolades in Russia he’s got a hugely busy international schedule and when he takes the VNSO in hand the resulting performances are recommended as being top notch…..and as soon as the loud opening chords rushed us into the first movement of Bizet’s Symphony in C, we knew that we were in for another Dorian Wilson Treat.

He’s got this special knack of making conducting look like a fun event and the musicians spread across the stage seem to pick up his vibes and play to their top potential. The allegro first movement with its haunting melody flown above our heads by the winds, the tympani making our blood rush and the horns offering punctuation and bravado phrases and the strings at their peak, was a real welcome back home

Poor Bizet! A prodigy at 10 when he entered the Paris Conservatory of Music and almost forgotten when he died at 37 not long after he composed ‘Carmen’ which had a short and unsuccessful debut.

He was a bit like the painter Van Gogh….fabulously successful as soon as his bones had turned to dust. ‘Carmen’ continually tops Opera’s list of favorite works and his ‘The Pearl Fishers’, with its haunting baritone/tenor duet, is in the top 20.

He wrote Symphony C at 17 in 1845,and nothing was heard of it again until it surfaced in the 1930ies and had a successful premiere in Brussels in 1935 and now, of course, has its melodies familiar to the ears of any classical music lover.

The second movement makes you shiver as it starts with its Arabian sounding oboe theme against delicate string pizzicato. It was played so elegantly that I spellbound right through and when the theme recurs at the end of the movement you are so glad that you’re there.

Then the third movement brings you rudely back to a fast and furious pace and chucks you headlong into a partying frolic, sometimes a frenzy. And the last movement doesn’t let you relax as it pushes to a couple of precipitous peaks that fall away to melodic valleys that you ski down effortlessly. Your fingers and feet tap along and , a bit like the orchestra, you finish up a trifle exhausted but tickled pink by its total effervesence that gives one final, bubbling pop…. and you give a sigh of appreciation….Here’s the whole lovely thing played by the New Zealand Symphony

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Dv5aPZrAQ[/youtube]

After a break we got into the first of Edvard Greig’s ‘Peer Gynt Suites’  which I must admit I usually shy away from due to over exposure in high school music appreciation classes….but as soon as the first notes of ‘Morning Mood’ whisper out I’m back at some dawning in early summer, creeping out through tent flaps to gaze into clear skies, ready to take flight across a sandy beach and plunge into water as crisp and cold  as freshly poured champagne

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDVKcqr9w34[/youtube]

‘ The Death of Ase’ would have to be the best funeral music anyone could ever wish for as their casket disappears from  mourners’ view  to be enveloped in symbolic crematorium flames….and the VNSO did it all gorgeously as they did with my least favorite of Griegs’s compositions, ‘Anitra’s Dance’

It’s’ In the Hall of the Mountain King’ where so many listeners go all Hobbitty. It’s been adpted for so many purposes that you’d think it would get really stale but perhaps it’s its short length and build up of speed and drama as the tune is played faster and faster that gets our primal blood boiling and we feel like raising our fists in triumph when it’s all over…even minus the vocals of the trolls

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

Any good night’s music has to end up with a finale that makes us either want to swoon or cheer, or both, and four pieces by Duke Ellington did just that in excellent big band mood…perfect big band mode that had the conductor jumping all over the podium and the faces of the musicians smiling with pleasure (that is if their mouths weren’t covering an instrument’s mouthpiece)…..Made you want to quickstep and foxtrot, and at to have Fred and Ginger up there prancing in front of the orchestra…plus Ella Fitzgerald giving a bluesy version of ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’

Brilliant stuff that if any of the various CHAMS around the city got to hear they’d hire the whole VNSO to play at one of their charity balls.

My next date with the VNSO is with the whole lovely mob under the baton of maestro Tetsuji Honna on 16 or 17 May in Apotheosis dance mode.