The New York Philharmonic hopes to make “many return visits” to Hanoi, music director Alan Gilbert said at a press conference Wednesday, after arriving in the capital of the Southeast Asian nation.

“Coming to Vietnam is something that we’ve been talking about for some time,” New York Philharmonic President Zarin Mehta told journalists Wednesday in Hanoi in a mirror-studded reception room at the 590-seat opera house in central Hanoi, which is nearly a century old.

The New York Philharmonic visit comes amid deepening economic ties between Vietnam and the US, now the Asian country’s biggest export market. The former wartime enemies forged diplomatic relations in 1995, and a tariff-cutting trade agreement took effect in 2001.

The visit is a way of “opening up relations on a cultural basis,” Mehta said.

On Thursday, the 106-member orchestra will visit the Vietnam National Academy of Music, which was founded in 1956, where Gilbert will conduct what the New York Philharmonic describes as a “master class.”

National anthems

The agenda for the two concerts at the French-colonial-era Hanoi Opera House Friday and Oct. 17 includes works by Beethoven and Brahms, as well as the US and Vietnamese national anthems. Gilbert is leading the New York Philharmonic on his first tour since becoming director last month, arriving in Vietnam after stops in Japan and South Korea.

Tokyo and Seoul “are places that the orchestra has played many times,” Gilbert said. “This will be a new audience. It’s a different dimension.”

After the Vietnam trip, which is sponsored in part by Credit Suisse Group AG, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, the New York Philharmonic will conclude its tour with concerts in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. A previous plan to visit Cuba has yet to be rescheduled, according to Mehta.

“We have postponed the trip until regulatory permissions are obtained from the U.S. Treasury Department,” he said Wednesday in Hanoi.

Source: Bloomberg