KVT – Musical Magic @ Manzi

KVT is oboe obsessed

Sunday night, just before the welcome rain, Manzi hosted a delicious musical soiree which turned out to be a perfect entrée for the classical music feast that descends on us this week…..The Poles presented the truly amazing violinist Alicia Smietana and her trio at the Youth Theater last night. At the Opera House-also last night but tonight night as well for people like me who want to catch both shows- the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra will soar through Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and then give us the glory of Mahler’s ‘Titan’. Also on the 29th is a concert of experimental music at Manzi which makes me mad as hell because I’m already booked for Mahler.

All the Manzi music (apart from accompanying piano and cello) was played on the family of double reeded woodwinds that make up the oboe family….with an excellent clip about them here

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMpeoh3xv8[/youtube]

American oboe-ist Keri McCarthy is well known in our part of Asia as the following points out….Dr. McCarthy has been active as a performer and researcher throughout Southeast Asia. In 2013 she helped to found the Light through Music project, bringing double reed instruments (oboe and bassoon) and instruction to music centers in Myanmar. In 2011, she completed a Fulbright award in Bangkok, Thailand, researching connections between Thai traditional and contemporary musics, and commissioning Thai and Malaysian composers, and performing new works with professional oboists in the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. She also completed a 2008 solo tour of Southeast Asia, premiering works by composers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

McCarthy is a Professor of Music at Washington State University and is in Hanoi doing important music work with students and staff at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. She teamed up with oboe-istically talented musicians from various Hanoi orchestras and the National Academy for our standing room only recital.

She played three solos including haunting sections from Britten’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and an incredibly riveting work by Malaysian composer Yii Kah Hoe.

Laotian, Bachelor of Music student, Sitthi Son played a Schumann work so nicely that it made us all sit up and realize that we were in for a really special night’s music, and Piazzola’s ‘Oblivion’ was a winner played by Nguyen Xuan Son.

Phan Viet Cuong gave us a Teleman sonata to prick up any baroque famished ears and Hoang Manh Lam’s interpretation of romantic composer Hummel’s ‘Introduction, Themes and Variations for Oboe’ was a sit up and take notice performance that I’d love to hear him repeat in front of the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra.

The brightest star of the night…shining just a teeny more radiantly than the oboe-ists, the cellist and pianists was composer Do Kien Cuong.

Cuong had two of his works played culminating in the show stopping ‘Rice Field’, a four movement work that was as period romantic as it was refreshingly contemporary?

Adapted for and played by an ensemble of about 10 oboes of varying types, piano and cello, it was truly magical…especially when, at its conclusion, we walked out of Manzi into the first drops of an oven cooling thunder storm.