Los Angeles, CA - Grammy Award-winning Southwest Chamber Music's Summer Festival at The Huntington continues its pairings of French music and French food on Saturday and Sunday, August 11 & 12 at 7:30 p.m
August 11 and 12 dan bau virtuoso Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ and the Southwest players perform Ascending Dragon by the Vietnamese composer Pham Minh Thành, conducted by Southwest's artistic director, Jeff von der Schmidt. Thành's piece is followed by traditional Vietnamese folksongs which Võ plays on the dan bau.
Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ devotes her life-long passion and mastery of the dan bau and dan tranh zither to the creation of distinctive music for these unique Vietnamese instruments. Among her accomplishments are the 2009 Emmy® Award-winning soundtrack for the documentary "Bolinao 52", which she co-composed and recorded, and the soundtrack for the Sundance best documentary and 2003 Academy Awards® nominee "Daughter from Danang". Van Anh also co-composed and recorded for the recent documentary "A Village Called Versailles", winner of the New Orleans Film Festival Audience Award. Van-Anh graduated with distinction from and taught at the Vietnam Academy of Music. In 1995, she won the Vietnam National Dan Tranh Competition. She has since performed in 14 countries and recorded in many broadcast programs inside and outside of Vietnam. She lives and teaches Vietnamese traditional instruments in Fremont, California.
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Composer Pham Minh Thanh
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Phạm Minh Thành was born in 1978 in Hanoi. He studied piano and composition at the Vietnam National Academy of Music under the tutelage of composer Do Hong Quan. From 2000-2006, Minh Thành studied composition at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Professor Konstantin Batashov. His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout Vietnam, as well as in Moscow. He is currently teaching composition at the Musicology/ Composition/ Conducting Department at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. He participated in Southwest Chamber Music's Ascending Dragon Festival, a cultural exchange project in the spring of 2010 between the US and Vietnam sponsored and funded by the US State Department.
Filling out the program August 11 & 12, flutist Lisa Edelstein, violist Luke Maurer, and harpist Alison Bjorkedal perform Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola & Harp, and the Southwest string quartet performs Ravel's Quartet in F major.
Acknowledging famous cookbook author Julia Child's centenary, Southwest and The Huntington are offering a menu of Child-inspired, 3-course dinners, or concert-goers may bring their own picnics on the lawn. The dinners in The Huntington Tea Room are available only by pre-order on the Southwest website, www.swmusic.org or (800) 726-7147 when ordering concert tickets. To view the menus, click here.
The full summer season is listed here. For musicians' bios, click here. A preview of the program book is linked here .
