When I was in Haiphong, I noticed an ad for a performance in Ho Chi Minh City by the Prague Chamber Orchestra. I didn’t think of going, as I had been planning to go out of town, but as I still had a lingering cold, I stayed in HCMC and decided to treat myself to a ticket for the concert.
What a great Plan B that turned out to be! It was a great concert and a wonderful evening.
First of all, 3 others wanted to go to the concert, so I was looking for 4 tickets. When I went to the ticket booth, there was someone picking up tickets. When it was my turn, I walked up to the counter and the vendor picked up his water bottle and walked away ... saying something in Vietnamese, which of course I couldn’t understand. But I got the sense that what he was saying wasn’t good news. However, feeling quite determined, I stayed around for 5 minutes or so and when he came back he waggled his hand, which is to indicate “I don’t want or I don’t have”. Sort of like the Queen’s wave sort of motion. When I held up 4 fingers he really waggled. So I put up 2 and then 1. At any rate, he eventually got out the seating chart and it looked like there were 6 or 7 tickets left in the whole hall ... but he did find two together on the far left side of Row J. So I took them. There were no other tickets together and the tickets were 700,000 VND, which is about $42CDN (aka extremely expensive for HCMC!), so I got tickets for Jane and me, but didn’t get tickets for Barbara or Bronwyn. I really wasn’t sure if they would want to spend hundreds of thousands on poor seats and since I only had 1.5 million VND with me and no MasterCard machine that I could see, I looked after myself and Jane. She had invited me to a concert a few weeks ago, so my loyalty was squarely with her.
At any rate, after a lovely dinner at a French restaurant called le Jardin, which is on the grounds of Institute of Cultural Exchange with France (Idecaf), we hailed a taxi to the Opera House. It is really only a 10 minute walk, but our profiteroles were late coming (oh, no ... not tardy profiteroles!) and we were concerned about time. When we arrived at the Opera House, there were fancy schhmancy cars letting quite elegant people out of their luxury automobiles, cameras videotaping the luminaries in attendance, and people wanting to interview patrons of the arts, such as ourselves. We felt severely underdressed. We needn’t have worried about our timing. The performance was delayed for a few minutes. At 8 pm, the concert hall looked about 25% full. It reminded me of Qatar, where huge blocks of tickets would be bought by companies and then not used, so I was feeling very badly for Barbara and Bronwyn. However, the program eventually started and people continued to be seated throughout the rest of the performance. In the end, there were just a few seats unoccupied, but not many ... certainly enough for Barbara and Bronwyn, however. As I have mentioned before, the Opera House is an architectural jewel ... a beautiful French colonial building nestled near the 5 star hotels, swish restaurants and cafes, and an upscale shopping district. The seats are nice and red and plush, but not too plush.
However, the building was designed and constructed before the debut of the motorbike and motorcar, and so the sound-proofing from the street is not great and we could hear the added texture of traffic from time to time. The person who was playing a sports event on his mini TV prior to the performance and during the intermission mercifully turned it off during the concert.
The concert was really wonderful. It was full and quite long, and so interesting. I had consumed a cafe glace at le Jardin in case I got sleepy, but no need. The program included Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Beethoven, Bartok, and of course, Dvořák. There were two soprano soloists, a beautiful Vietnamese singer named Nguyen Bich Thuy, and a lovely Czech singer named Marie Fajtová. The conductor was a Canadian, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, who seemed like a very capable, charismatic, and charming man. In fact, the Kymlickas met him when they were in the Czech Republic two years ago, and they concur on his charm. Such a small world, no? I have to say my favourite pieces were the Romanian Folk Dances for Small Orchestra by Bartok and Song to the Moon and the Czech Suite in D major, Op. 39 by Dvořák. I really am a Philistine when it comes to music, but they were wonderfully played and just lovely. The concert proper was followed by three encores ending with a wonderful gypsy-inspired tango, led by the concert master that sent us off into the warm Saigon evening with smiles on our faces and lightness in our steps. A taxi was just waiting at the bottom of the steps to transport us back to Phu My Hung, so it was another lovely evening.
What a great Plan B that turned out to be! It was a great concert and a wonderful evening.
First of all, 3 others wanted to go to the concert, so I was looking for 4 tickets. When I went to the ticket booth, there was someone picking up tickets. When it was my turn, I walked up to the counter and the vendor picked up his water bottle and walked away ... saying something in Vietnamese, which of course I couldn’t understand. But I got the sense that what he was saying wasn’t good news. However, feeling quite determined, I stayed around for 5 minutes or so and when he came back he waggled his hand, which is to indicate “I don’t want or I don’t have”. Sort of like the Queen’s wave sort of motion. When I held up 4 fingers he really waggled. So I put up 2 and then 1. At any rate, he eventually got out the seating chart and it looked like there were 6 or 7 tickets left in the whole hall ... but he did find two together on the far left side of Row J. So I took them. There were no other tickets together and the tickets were 700,000 VND, which is about $42CDN (aka extremely expensive for HCMC!), so I got tickets for Jane and me, but didn’t get tickets for Barbara or Bronwyn. I really wasn’t sure if they would want to spend hundreds of thousands on poor seats and since I only had 1.5 million VND with me and no MasterCard machine that I could see, I looked after myself and Jane. She had invited me to a concert a few weeks ago, so my loyalty was squarely with her.
At any rate, after a lovely dinner at a French restaurant called le Jardin, which is on the grounds of Institute of Cultural Exchange with France (Idecaf), we hailed a taxi to the Opera House. It is really only a 10 minute walk, but our profiteroles were late coming (oh, no ... not tardy profiteroles!) and we were concerned about time. When we arrived at the Opera House, there were fancy schhmancy cars letting quite elegant people out of their luxury automobiles, cameras videotaping the luminaries in attendance, and people wanting to interview patrons of the arts, such as ourselves. We felt severely underdressed. We needn’t have worried about our timing. The performance was delayed for a few minutes. At 8 pm, the concert hall looked about 25% full. It reminded me of Qatar, where huge blocks of tickets would be bought by companies and then not used, so I was feeling very badly for Barbara and Bronwyn. However, the program eventually started and people continued to be seated throughout the rest of the performance. In the end, there were just a few seats unoccupied, but not many ... certainly enough for Barbara and Bronwyn, however. As I have mentioned before, the Opera House is an architectural jewel ... a beautiful French colonial building nestled near the 5 star hotels, swish restaurants and cafes, and an upscale shopping district. The seats are nice and red and plush, but not too plush.
However, the building was designed and constructed before the debut of the motorbike and motorcar, and so the sound-proofing from the street is not great and we could hear the added texture of traffic from time to time. The person who was playing a sports event on his mini TV prior to the performance and during the intermission mercifully turned it off during the concert.The concert was really wonderful. It was full and quite long, and so interesting. I had consumed a cafe glace at le Jardin in case I got sleepy, but no need. The program included Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Beethoven, Bartok, and of course, Dvořák. There were two soprano soloists, a beautiful Vietnamese singer named Nguyen Bich Thuy, and a lovely Czech singer named Marie Fajtová. The conductor was a Canadian, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, who seemed like a very capable, charismatic, and charming man. In fact, the Kymlickas met him when they were in the Czech Republic two years ago, and they concur on his charm. Such a small world, no? I have to say my favourite pieces were the Romanian Folk Dances for Small Orchestra by Bartok and Song to the Moon and the Czech Suite in D major, Op. 39 by Dvořák. I really am a Philistine when it comes to music, but they were wonderfully played and just lovely. The concert proper was followed by three encores ending with a wonderful gypsy-inspired tango, led by the concert master that sent us off into the warm Saigon evening with smiles on our faces and lightness in our steps. A taxi was just waiting at the bottom of the steps to transport us back to Phu My Hung, so it was another lovely evening.
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