UlaanBaatar Ballet

Hi all

A message today to tell you about my experience last week when I was able to play with the orchestra of the Opera house of Mongolia for the Ballet “Giselle”. 

Giselle and Albrect during rehearsal

It is one of the only 2 professional orchestras of Mongolia. Jindong Cai from Stanford was coming to conduct, and he proposed me to play. Many thanks Jindong for that.

The orchestra which will celebrate its 50 years next season is playing usually twice a week, Opera on Saturdays (in Mongolian) and ballet on Sunday. 

This musical heritage comes from the soviet times. We are now one full generation after, but in the old times, all musicians and dancers would have studied in Russia.

I would say that all what I have seen looks like the orchestra pictured in the recent movie “Le Concert”, it was a Russian Orchestra.

The performance is held in an old Opera house,

and is attended by around 400, locals and tourists for a pretty decent price (between 4 and 10 euros). The outside, the room, and the decors are quite good looking,

but the back-stage has been abandoned for a long time.

The orchestra is professional but paid at the average wage: not enough to leave in the city center. Their instruments are mostly locally made but in very bad shape. You can hear it at the global sound. However the dancers are really good. I am not really a ballet specialist, but their figures were really impressive.

More generally you can feel that money is missing, but they really do their best to guaranty the performance. The scores are written by hand and dated back 50 years ago; some instruments are replaced by others. But you have still a performance at the end, and that is the principal.

It is still very prestigious in Mongolia to have your children playing music. But it is also very competitive to get in the school of Music, difficult to go studying abroad, and then difficult to have high career perspectives. Culture is not really a current priority for the government, so the number of professional musicians is decreasing. Let’s hope that this long heritage will not disappear soon.

This week is Nadaam festival, a kind of national week, where several customs and traditions happen. I will for sure tell you about that next time