When this year’s Roskilde Festival kicks off on June 29, nearly 70,000 people will gather for four days to enjoy what has slowly become one of Europe’s most famous, annual, outdoors music festivals. This year, Vietnam will be represented on the impressive bill of performers, which includes various famous singers and music bands from around the world, such as Guns ‘n’ Roses, Kanya West, Kaiser Chiefs, Scissor Sisters, Rufus Wainwright, Goldfrapp, and Deftones.
The Vietnamese music show, which according to the online news-site Viet Nam News is expected to arouse the interest of the Danish fans, is entitled ”Vong Nguyet” (or Wishing Upon to the Moon). The show is a combination of Vietnamese traditional music and contemporary world music and is a product of Vietnamese composer Quoc Trung and the famous Danish-Vietnamese jazz musician and composer Niels Lan Doky, who has been involved in several art and music projects in Vietnam over the past few years.
The programme’s opening segment features Trung’s world music compositions, which are comprised of ethnic elements inspired by various Vietnamese traditional music forms, including cheo (traditional opera) and quan ho (love duet from the northern Bac Ninh province).
Almost all of these compositions have already been performed in his show called ”Duong Xa Van Dam” (or The Road to Infinity) in Hanoi, HCM City and Tokyo last year, where the show attracted international attention. Vietnamese diva Thanh Lam and singer Tung Duong will perform songs by Trung and Niels Lan Doky as well as by other Vietnamese composers in the second part of the show.
Vietnam-based Danes will have an opportunity to hear the show – without having to go to Denmark to take part in the Roskilde Festival – when it is presented at the Youth Theatre in Hanoi on Sunday, and at the Ben Thanh Theatre in HCM City next Tuesday.
