KVT – Bouquets to Song Hong

KVT with chamber music @ Nha Hat Lon

Sunday March 16

The side seats of the second floor horseshoe at the Hanoi Opera House are not places for lovers of good music to find themselves. Apart from the fact that too often the seats slope forwards and your knees start to be jammed against the balustrade, or the fact that you’re bound to get a crick in your neck or a bit of a back strain from having to turn side on to get a good look at the performers….the worst thing nowadays is the universal use of ipads and iphones which owners of turn on at the first hint of boredom and scroll through emails, facebook friendships, download aps, and all of those other things that multi taskers are all thumbs with. So when you sit in those side seats, a glare of lit up screens often appears below you like a multi faceted electronic carpet. Gorgeous really but bloody disconcerting when you are attempting to appreciate the finer notes as played by the Song Hong Chamber Music Ensemble.

But when you want to see your favorite Vietnamese classical music ensemble play and you fly back to Hanoi on the same day as their performance, well, beggars can’t be choosers….and so it was to the side seats we were escorted and our knees began to get a bit jammed up and we older ones started to do neck exercises.

Song Hong is off to the US shortly, invited to play in Los Angeles and attend master classes…which shows just how excellent they’ve become. They are a versatile group and last Sunday played as a piano trio, a string quartet and a piano quintet.

As a piano trio they tackled Rachmaninoff’s very beautiful Trio Elegiaque which Rach composed when he was 19 and which has a brilliant piano part mainly because the composer debuted the piece with himself at the keyboard in January 1892. He was so sure of himself that he got all the notes down in three days and though the 15 minute long piece (more of a sonata really) highlights the piano, after a dynamic burst, the violin and especially the Cello sing forth in beautiful but ultimately mournful voices, as they did last Sunday

Here’s a clip of the work with Lang Lang a modern virtuoso pianist doing the honors. When the cello takes over the tune from the piano at the beginning, goose bumps start to creep all over my skin and the violin then makes the hair on the back of my neck rise as it did when Song Hong got into it so deliciously.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfiFfqdP5rE [/youtube]

Song Hong gave such a nice interpretation of the piece that the ipads and iphones were only occasionally active though you’d have had to be a bit moronic if you weren’t lifted up by it all.

Even the trio of beautifully dressed ladies two seats up from me paused for at least 12 minutes in their scrolling to take in the beauty of it all that can have you almost tearful as it concludes.

After a short break for chairs to be arranged the two violins, a viola and a cello of the ensemble launched into Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet.

This is an intense 40 minute piece in four movements and throughout you can’t but be aware of death’s shadow stalking Schubert who was at low ebb of his life when he wrote it….and it is often referred to as a masterpiece of string quartets. It takes its name from a song he wrote in which a maiden pleads with death to spare her, to no avail as death persuades her to sleep in his arms. The song is refrained throughout the work.

Song Hong, to use bit of youthspeak ‘NAILED IT’. By the last movement every single glowing cell in the carpet downstairs was extinguished and the applause was very deserved.

This was Song Hong at their best!

Just when they needed to take a 15 minute break to get their breaths back and their fingers stretched, the came back in stage immediately, thankfully with a pianist who’d had time to recuperate, and launched into another chamber music masterpiece that needed total concentration, Schumann’s Piano Quintet and although they gave it their best, it was obvious that they needed to have had a time to regroup

A good friend of mine dislikes Shubert’s piano quintet ‘The Trout’ and every time it comes up on the radio station we invariably tune into, she feels as though she wants to break every trout fishing pole to pieces and burn every trout fly. It’s to do with listening to too many performances when she was learning to play the piano.

For me it’s a bit the same if I hear Schumann’s piece played anyhow but brilliantly. I start to feel a bit bumpetty bumpetty.

Song Hong were a trifle bumpetty at times and did themselves a disservice because it’s also a composition that they could have ‘nailed’ as if they were expert carpenters …But for the most part on Sunday they tacked Schumann down beautifully.

The downstairs glowing carpet probably interfered with my listening appreciation skills and I was really glad that when the last exciting movement got under way it began to switch off until by the climax all as dark as it should be…that is except for the lit up screens of those three immaculate fashion plates near me.

I wish Song Hong all the best for their musical adventure in the states and I will definitely be the first person to book a seat when they return to Hanoi…albeit in one of the first seven rows downstairs on the left so that I can see the pianist’s nimble fingers working their keyboard magic.

And Song Hong, when you get back amongst us I dare you to play a contemporary piece I heard during my last overseas sojourn….it’s a quartet,’ Black Angels’ by George Crumb and drew its inspiration from the American/Vietnamese war.

I think that you’d be able to nail that too