VietNamNet Bridge – At the end of the Scandinavia Asian Music Alliance concert at Hanoi-based Tuoi Tre Theatre on February 15, the more than 600 audience members gave the artists a standing ovation.

VietNamNet Bridge – At the end of the Scandinavia Asian Music Alliance concert at Hanoi-based Tuoi Tre Theatre on February 15, the more than 600 audience members gave the artists a standing ovation.

Before the show, some artists compared the concert to a miscellaneous music ‘soup’. The mixture of nine musical instruments-nine artists and Vietnamese and Danish music created a strange and unique ‘flavour’.

In the opening item, “Silent Images”, Vu Nhat Tan and Nicolai Abrahamsen played seven ditties, or seven ways of feeling about quietness.

Their experimental music was warmly applauded by the audience. Listeners enjoyed being seated on a plane, and travelling down noisy Hanoian streets to the sound of Hanoi’s daily life coming from Vu Nhat Tan’s ‘noise machine’: sounds of motorbike horns, markets, and even the “Vietnam champion” shout of football fans.

While the applause for Vu Nhat Tan and Anders Banke was yet to break off, soft sounds made by Quoc Trung-Nicolai Abrahamsen began to resound.

Taking advantage of world music, sounds played by traditional and modern musical instruments like dan tranh (16-chord zither), dan bau (monochord), drum, cello, piano, guitar had clearer melodies than in the first work.

The two final music pieces were Untimely Fragments and Pictures of Tiger by Quoc Trung and Michael Moller. Untimely Fragments was unlimited pieces of time, space and music. Michael Moller mixed verses in Danish about Vietnam with music and Vu Nhat Tan’s street noise to make a special work.

Pictures of Tiger was a meaningful song about fear of the extinction of tigers and that one day people might only be able to know about tigers through pictures.

Michael Moller’s voice was accompanied by Quoc Trung and Ho Hoai Anh and the music played by nine types of musical instruments came to a fine end.

The concert, held by the Vietnam-Denmark Cultural Exchange and Development Foundation, opened more plentiful cooperation in music and helped bring Vietnamese traditional music to the world.

VietNamNet/TP