KVT – The Wheel of Fortune Spins Through Hanoi

KVT at the Opera House with Orff and Geir

Into Geir first:

Norwegian, Geir Johnson, who has been doing wonderful work with music institutions in Vietnam and is well regarded in his home country, composed a work for a string orchestra. He called it SILENT SPRING, and it was premiered by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra.

The work has immense import for Vietnam as Geir took his inspiration from environmentalist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring’ which focused on the danger of uncontrolled use of pesticides and the dangers posed to the balance of nature and is still a relevant book 50 years on.

When the American Government began spreading Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals over the Vietnamese countryside during the American War (which became the greatest chemical war that the world has ever seen) Carson’s book became a focus for the development of the international environmental movement

Geir took the following Carson quote to hang his work upon…Man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself

It’s a totally involving composition and, to me, sometimes reminiscent of music by composer Phillip Glass. The cyclical tension that is built up as the piece progresses beautifully and grabs you with its urgency.

Excellent playing by the VNSO strings!

Hopefully the work will become an integral part of the VNSO’s repertoire

AND NOW FOR A CHEEKY DIP INTO THE MIDDLE AGES….as into history not as into people over 40.

Most of the audience (which was about 50% into their middle age) was there for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (Carmina = songs in Latin , Burana= the Bavarian Benedictine monastery that housed the poetic manuscripts) and for the first time in a long while Westerners predominated which may have been due to the presence of family and friends of members of the Hanoi International Choir which joined forces with the Hanoi Freude Choir and the youthful enthusiasm of Vietnamese voices from the choirs from the National University and the Vietnam National Opera and Ballet.

All in all it was an enthusiastic rendition of the Cantata and the hairs on the back of your neck couldn’t help but stand up and shiver as FORTUNA, velut luna statu variablis smashed its way across the auditorium in a loud, prolonged moan

Carmina Burana was first sung and played to an important Third Reich audience in Frankfurt in 1937. It’s all in old Latin with a smattering of Germanic and French dialects and, luckily for Orff, that meant that the Reich masters really couldn’t understand what it was all about and probably were carried away with what they perceived to be Aryan triumphalism A few critics disparagingly called it ‘nigger music’ which had Orff on tenterhooks for awhile living in the midst of all those white supremacists with their Kristallnacht tendencies and with recent memories still rankling of Jesse Owen’s victory in the presence of Hitler at the ‘36 Olympics.

It’s part of a trilogy of scenic concerts and once you hear the other lesser works you wonder just why they aren’t on the same footing as Carmina Burana. Perhaps it’s to do with the sexiness and irreverence that impregnates the latter that makes it one of those musical compositions that is being performed every day, some where in the world.

The young 13th century wandering scholars and monks who composed the couple of hundred poems that Orff used as a basis for his work were mainly concerned with enjoying themselves in a frank and uninhibited manner as they wandered Europe in search of education and lots of fun. They lived during an ephemeral period in history before the Church realized things were getting out of their control and put a stop to all that licentious and carousing youthful behavior (but hasn’t that always been the case when religion or authority thinks its losing its grip?) It was a time, so they say, when an amoral attitude to sex was common to the peer group and there was a healthy appreciation of fecund nature. They had a lovely disrespect for authority and were not too afraid to satirically attack authority or institutions that they thought ridiculous (an attitude that could have them in deep poo in a lot of places in today’s world that have, or are voting in, right wing governments).

Some liberal modern commentators say that if these gaudy, bawdy young men were around today we might label them Emo. As it was they were termed the Orda Vagorum, which nowadays, those with an authoritarian bias, would translate as vagrants.

A good translation of the poems used by Orff doesn’t disguise their sexuality and innuendo but it’s usually too difficult for all of this to come across to an audience of the cantata, -especially in the confines of a classical music venue where we usually expect sober propriety to reign supreme – but the headiness of Orff’s tympani can sometimes get your juices bubbling and racing (and, as Orff probably intended, your mind and body in a state of fervid excitement) as the five percussionists bang and clang and chime and smatteringly chatter. The translation we got in our Hanoi programs was a little bit too tame even though it’s been used in auspicious places such as Carnegie Hall.

The poems take us from the lament of fortune wasted due to gambling and carousing to a sylvan springtime when boys were lusty boys and red cheeked country girls were always there for their pleasuring …and just dying to get into all that amorous fore playing, and rolling in the hay or heady meadow flowers ….no gender equality in the deepest Middle Ages!

Next scene has the young men are in a tavern, complete with serving wenches, getting drunk and giddily amorous and being sung to by a swan basting on a spit accompanied by farting trombones, and addressed in maudlin drunkenness by the dissolute Abbot of Sugarcake.

Finally they are all in the court of love where, though everything sounds chaste, the sexual undertones are enormous. A parody of a hymn to the Virgin is all about requited sexual pleasures and the soprano, in her final song, promises to surrender her all with a mouth watering word play about Venus triumphant over virtue….and Orff wanted a chorus of innocent looking boy sopranos to do a great backing bit to add to the naughtiness.
Then we end with that grand and gloriously thundering lament about gambling and having bad luck and losing your shirt and woe is me which grabs us all again in its potent grip….just as it does when it underscores adverts about aftershave, surf wear, insurance, sugary cola drinks- and movies that range from the days of King Arthur to a hunt for a Russian submarine and the joys of being natural born killers

Anonymous
Wheel of Fortune with Christ Enthroned in Judgement Instead of the Goddess Fortuna
12th-13th century

On Thursday night the grand old opry house was aflood with enthusiasm from musicians and singers and that enthusiasm was enough to carry us all along on a cloud that wasn’t too bawdy but certainly alive with assorted tympanic fabulousness.

The soloists were not daunted with their efforts to get into some of the hardest pieces in any singers’ repertoires and my heart was in my mouth when the tenor swan had to push into falsetto as he roasted on the spit and also when the soprano’s stratospheric most sweet one I give my all to you had to be attempted using a Maria Callas coloratura range. The baritone rising to tenor heights was amazing.

Conductor Honna ‘I dips my lid to you’ (being Cockney slang that mean’s you’re amazing) for getting it all together

A good night was definitely had by all.

For those as fascinated by Carl Orff as I am (mainly due to my early years banging a glockenspiel and tapping a tambourine in a school that taught music using the Orff method…Schulwerk) a good documentary about him, his four wives, and his life and times in and out of Nazi Germany follows:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uva51350C8o[/youtube]

And here are two excellent You Tube clips of the whole glorious cantata for those of us who like to get into the fun and frolic beyond O Fortuna with my favorite being the second one in which, somehow, everyone knows the words by heart.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjy55Y6hWU[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-DgS75lfmw[/youtube]