Viet Nam News
HCM CITY — American conductor Christopher Zimmerman, music director of Fairfax Symphony Orchestra in the US, will lead a Scheherazade concert at the HCM City Opera House on October 19.
The concert will feature Scheherazade, op 35, a symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888.
The four-movement work was inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and Indian tales told by the sultan Scheherazade.
Scheherazade was first performed in Saint Petersburg in November 1988. It is considered Rimsky-Korsakov’s most popular work.
In 1910, the Ballets Russes premiered a ballet adaptation of Scheherazade at the Opera Garnier in Paris in 1910. The Russian choreographer Michel Fokine was the choreographer, and the libretto by Fokine and Leon Bakst of Russia.
Vietnamese-American violist Vu Viet Chuong will perform along with musicians from the HCM City Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera (HBSO).
Chuong earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin performance from the University of Houston, and a doctorate at the University of North Texas.
He has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in the US and Viet Nam such as the San Angelo Symphony, Odysseus Chamber Orchestra, the Richardson Symphony Orchestra, Ha Noi Symphony Orchestra and HBSO.
He has also performed at international music festivals in the US, UK and Brazil.
He is co-founder of the Vietnam Connection Music Festival, which attracts leading classical artists in Viet Nam and the world.
Internationally acclaimed Vietnamese-British pianist Tra Nguyen will give a solo performance of Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra, a composition by American composer and pianist George Gershwin.
The work, written in 1925, contains elements of blues, ragtime, and Charleston music. All are new to the classical form.
It was first performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra in 1925, with Gershwin as a soloist.
Tra Nguyen, who studied at Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia and at the Royal Academy of Music in the UK, gave her first performance at the Ha Noi Opera House when she was ten years old.
She has performed at other prestigious venues, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Cadogan Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Tokyo Opera.
She has issued a number of CDs for piano and orchestra.
The concert will also include English composer Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings, op 47.
The work was written in 1905 and performed in an all-Elgar concert by the newly formed London Symphony Orchestra.
The composition will feature a string quartet, including violinists Tang Thanh Nam and Le Minh Hien, violist Pham Vu Thien Bao, and Meritorious Artist and cellist Nguyen Tan Anh.
Conductor Zimmerman graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music, and received his Master’s degree from the University of Michigan.
He has worked with numerous orchestras, such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra of the UK, Prague Symphony Orchestra, and National Orchestra of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Zimmerman was formerly the music director of the Symphony of Southeast Texas, the Bangor Symphony Orchestra and the City of London Chamber Orchestra.
Since 2009, he has been music director of the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra, which was the 2013 winner of the Best Classical Orchestra Ensemble given by the Washington DC Area Musical Awards.
The Scheherazade Concert will begin at 8 pm at 7 Lam Son Square in District 1. Tickets are available at the venue and www.ticketbox.vn. – VNS