New Video of Vân-Ánh Võ at Bing Concert Hall

Vân-Ánh Võ playing the đàn t'rưng in the video being discussed (from a Stanford Live Web page)

Yesterday morning Stanford Live released the latest film in its digital season. Like the Kronos Quartet performance of its Testimony concert, the recording was made in the Bing Concert Hall on the Stanford University Campus. The new video features Vietnamese composer Vân-Ánh Võ, who has worked with Kronos as both composer and performer, appearing in the latter capacity as part of KRONOS FESTIVAL 2018.

Võ specializes in the sixteen-string đàn tranh, a Vietnamese plucked zither similar in nature to other Asian instruments, such as the guzheng (China), koto (Japan), and gayageum (Korea). For this performance she also played the monochord đàn bầu and the bamboo xylophone đàn t'rưng, indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. She led a trio, which I first knew as the VA’V trio but now seems to be called the Blood Moon Orchestra. Her colleagues are Gari Hegedus, alternating between the Azerbaijani tar and the Arabic oud (both related to the lute), and percussionist Jimi Nakagawa, who specializes in taiko drumming.

The program consisted primarily of Viet folk sources arranged and developed by Võ. However, her opening arrangement was “Lullaby For A Country,” composed by her countryman Phan Thanh Nho. The program also included one Turkish folk song, “Sultan’s Door,” which was arranged and developed for the Blood Moon Orchestra by Hegedus.

All this made for a highly engaging listening experience. I should offer the disclaimer that I am particularly partial to the đàn bầu because I was given an introductory lesson in playing it when I visited Hanoi in the late Nineties. Performance has as much to do with vibrato as with pitch, and Võ’s command of vibrato provided jaw-dropping evidence of how much more I had to learn about this instrument!

Less impressive was the overall production of the film itself. There were too many situations in which Director Elena Park failed to provide visual support for what the viewer was hearing. Indeed, when the sounds of Nakagawa’s percussion instruments involved soft dynamics, they seemed to elude microphone pickup almost entirely. Nevertheless, the attentive viewer will probably be able to “fill in the blanks” when it comes to associating different sonorities with each of the three performers; so it is best to attend to the assets of this account of the concert, rather than its liabilities.

The video itself has been uploaded to the Films & Screenings Web page on the Stanford Live Web site. Unfortunately, only Stanford students can view the offerings on this Web page at no charge. All others can only gain access by becoming a Stanford Live member at the level of $100 or more. That membership will provide not only complimentary access but also twelve months of benefits.