Concert: Music of the German Masters

The Ho Chi Minh City Ballet, Symphony Orchestra and Opera (HBSO) will present an evening of "Music of the German Masters" on Sunday, June 2nd 2019, in the Saigon Opera House.

The masters concerned are Mendelssohn, Bruch and Brahms, but the chosen works are not the well-known violin concertos that all three composed. Instead, they are works that will be new to many in the Saigon audience.

To add to the evening's attraction, several foreign musicians will appear as guest artists and a famous Vietnam violinist, Chuong Vu, working aboard in the US, will return as Guest Concertmaster and the solo pianist will be Tran Trong Tuyen.

Chuong Vu

After the intermission, we'll hear Max Bruch's Concerto for Violin and Viola.

Two guest instrumentalists will feature in this work. Playing the violin will be Martha Walvoord, while on viola will be Juan-Miguel Hernandez.

Martha Walvoord

Walvoord is associate professor of violin at the University of Texas at Arlington, and is the sole recipient of the TexASTA 2010 Marjorie Keller Young Teacher of the Year Award. She performs on a violin made by Francois Pique in Paris in 1800.

Hernandez, who was born in Canada, was in 2016 appointed as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He combines extensive international viola performance with a continuing interest, and participation, in jazz.

Hernandez

Bruch’s double concerto was originally composed for clarinet and viola (in 1911) because Bruch had a son who played the clarinet. It is often performed with violin and viola, however, and that is how we will hear it in the Saigon Opera House on Sunday.

Last will come six of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. Brahms lived and worked in Vienna (in present day Austria), but Hungary was nearby and was considered the source of exotic, lively, and gypsy-influenced music. Brahms’s Hungarian dances fall into this category.

Brahms wrote 21 of these dances, orchestrating only some of them. The rest have been orchestrated by other hands, and today they are among Brahms’s most popular compositions.

The dances to be heard in this Saigon concert are numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, 10 and 14, though not in that order.

The whole evening will be conducted by the Polish conductor Wojciech Czepiel, closely associated with the Warsaw Sinfonietta and the Krakow Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra. Vietnam is fortunate to be able to welcome him as the conductor of this celebrity-filled concert.

Wojciech Czepiel

DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THIS EVENT

Time: 20h00 on June 2nd 2019

Venue: Saigon Opera House, 07 Cong Truong Lam Son, Ben Nghe ward, district 1, Ho Chi Minh city

Ticket price: From 300.000 VND to 650.000 VND, with a special price of 80.000 VND for students