KVT – Song Hong Still Flows along Beautifully, Vigorously

KVT really enjoys Song Hong, Tchaikovsky, Greig and Dvorak…with one reservation

…those blasted kids…..

So Song Hong is on notice….

The next time I go to one of their excellent concerts only to have my attention and listening pleasure thrown to the winds due to the plethora of noise making kids in the audience then it’ll be the last I get to. Surely all the yummy Mummies and Daddies can leave their talkative, bored brats home. Surely only willfully silly or willfully stupid adults take their offspring to a serious and very long classical music evening if they know that the little darlings are not going to be fully engaged with the music(and not only with the ubiquitous mobile phone games a lot are handed in the vain hope that they’ll shut their gobs). When I see Japanese adults with their offspring at similar concerts I generally know that my money hasn’t been mis-spent as a lot of Japanese kids seem have a nicely honed ethos of attending to the stuff on stage.

Well that’s off my chest so ON WITH THE SONG HONG CONCERT that without the brats and silly parents would have been one of THE musical events of the year!

The Song Hongs must have had a remarkably productive sojourn in the US last summer and they’ve come home with a new vibe and repertoire.

Saturday’s outing at L’Espace had three interesting and difficult compositions to get our juices flowing (even with those wriggling, jiggling kiddies attempting to spoil the fun)

The first was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio Op. 50 which calls for exceptionally skilled performers on piano, violin and cello. It’s one of the longest piano trios in the repertoire and calls for virtuosic piano playing and the pianist has all the best bits and often has grand solos to get their concentration around. The work could be mistaken for a piano concerto. With only a few mistakes in some fast and furious places our pianist, Pham Quynh Trang, was extra good…a bit heavy at times but mostly spot on.

The violinist, Phan Thi To Trinh, and cellist, Dao Tuyet Trinh, had to work hard so as not to be subsumed and they too were pretty magnificent.

The piece was dedicated by Tchaikovsky to a great friend and piano player Nikolay Rubenstein and it is an elegiac work in two movements. The first tells the story of a magnificent pianist. The second is a glorious series of eleven variations on a folk theme that moves on to a finale that is pure, dark grief and is almost symphonic.

The trio got it all almost perfect…the sorrow at the beginning, so beautifully intoned by the strings, the spritzig and nostalgia in the middle and that final funeral march that is almost too emotional.

Without the kids it could have been standing ovation stuff indeed.

The pianist left the stage for a welcome break and violinist Pham Truong Son and viola player Tra My joined the remaining strings on stage for Greig’s String Quartet in G minor which the composer intended to make sure was not an easy piece for players to get their fingers around….not small meat at all, he announced. It requires vigor, full imagination and a fullness of tone for the four instruments.

The composition is supposed to come across as fresh and rhythmically vital making you want to get up and dance along with the Norwegian folk songs and dance tunes that Greig commandeers. To keep this vitality up and moving for four movements and forty minutes is no easy task for any quartet and Song Hong almost got it nailed tight. I think that the next time they present it to an audience (minus the brats) we’ll be tapping our toes, imagining ourselves at times in a whirling waltz, frolicking under a midsummer moon, and finishing the whole thing metaphorically leaping and prancing in slightly inebriated happiness

It was worth a few bravos at its conclusion on Saturday and I hope that the piece becomes a permanent addition to the Song Hong repertoire.

The complete Song Hong got together for Dvorak’s Piano Quintet Op 8 which begins with a cello theme to die for and when the melody is taken up later by the violin you just sort of melt and as one critic stated… ‘the first movement bubbles up fresh springs of melody in pools, fountains and waterfalls’ and these subside back into that first silken theme.

Dvorak’s Quintet is usually put up there amongst the 3 the top chamber music compositions and often called the most sublime of all and as I’m still stuck on how beautifully Song Hong played that first movement I’m going to leave it there with the fervent hope that they definitely play it again ….sans enfants.

Here’s a you tube clip of that first movement that’s still got me humming 3 days later

[youtube width=”600″ height=”337″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm5ZS1WNGlY[/youtube]

After a strenuous evening’s playing the Song Hong gave us an encore of the third, Scherzo movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet Op 57 that has become their signature piece. The complete quintet shot them into neon light prominence when the original group performed it at L’Espace in 2013…. It’s performed here by another excellent groupm and with Song Hong’s 35 minute version of the complete quintet below.

[youtube width=”600″ height=”337″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwoFHGkYN8w[/youtube]

[youtube width=”600″ height=”337″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IWN5s683QM[/youtube]

Please note, of course, that images of Song Hong in this opinion piece were obviously not shot last Saturday

And the kids….here’s one place you could put them