Published:  00:00 Monday - December 14, 2009

The annual European Music Festival is anticipated not only by Vietnamese artists, specialists and audiences but also by European people, who are living and working in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Over time, music has become a goodwill ambassador, transcending language and culture barriers and bringing people closer together.

At this year’s festival, leading artists from Belgium, France, Austria, Italy, Germany, Holland and Spain will perform different genres of music including jazz, classical, world music and pop.

Origin of the European Music Festival

The European Jazz Festival was introduced by the Belgian Wallonie-Bruxelles delegation in 2000. The head representative of the delegation in Vietnam invited 2 jazz artists from Belgium and the Czech Republic to perform in a tour across the country. The tour succeeded beyond all expectations. After that, the embassies in Vietnam discussed with the Wallonie-Bruxelles delegation and the European Union committee the possibility of organizing the festival annually. The festival is heartly supported by the Vietnamese government and jointly held by Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the European Union.

Charles Loos with jazz artist Quyen Thien Dac

The famed Belgian pianist will perform with Vietnamese saxophonist Quyen Thien Dac and vocalist Tran Mai Hanh to open this year’s Festival. Both Dac and Loos studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Born in Bruxelles, Belgium, Loos studied classical music. His works include Antigone, No wall no wall and California 1991, inspired by classical, folk and contemporary jazz in a unique style that no one can imitate even when he plays solo or in duos with famous artists like Steve Houben, Jean Pierre Catoul, Weber Iago or in trios or in collaboration with a whole orchestra. He likes to perform solo and record his singles himself.

He said that he had been worried and skeptic about the style of Vietnamese artists not being familiar with it before he arrived in Vietnam. His grandmother once heard him playing with a saxophonist and told him not to do it ever again. That was why he hesitated about playing with Quyen Thien Dac at the Fetival.

However, such initial hesitation was finally gone when Quyen Thien Dac could easily follow Loos’s fingers flying on the piano’s keys.

Impressed by the saxophonist’s talent, Loos said that he wants to bring Dac with him to perform in any of his shows.

Loos said that the most important thing needed to entrance an audience is not what the music can bring to them but the deep emotion conveyed by the artists.

When the ‘crystal voice of Vietnam’ vocalist Tran Mai Hanh sang in French Loos’ piano, the whole chamber fell silent. Her emotionally poignant performance soon won the hearts of the entire audience.

Jazz in the sound of Vietnamese musical instruments

On the second night of the festival, the Dutch pianist, Mike Del Ferro, was accompanied by traditional drums, dan tranh (Vietnamese plucked zither) and dan bau (Vietnamese monochord) played by the Bac Ha group.

The music hall was filled with applause for the music which brought forth visions of endless fields of tulips in Holland, then raced back to Vietnam’s Red River Delta and finally scaled to the mountains with the sound of khen (pipe tube) and flute. The sound of Jazz was heard in the drums, the Vietnamese monochord, and the Vietnamese plucked zither. Many among the audience had never heard such a burst of jazz from traditional Vietnamese music instruments.

Not just music

Asja Valcic and Klaus Paier, the two Austrian Artists, seemed to have greater ambitions. They brought with the classical music from their homeland by the world’s most talented artist Mozart, performed on accordion and cello. The two instruments have much in common and can be played with the same height and length of notes at the same time.

Asja Valcic and Klaus Paier

The two artists amazed and surprised audiences with the French Musset, an Argentinian tango full of emotion and the warmth of the Balkan dance called Seven4 as well as the rock song Purple Haze and jazz. Each piece is above all a genuine Paierish musical invention, intricate and marked by gravity, precision and intensity.

As been said by the Austrian Ambassador to Vietnam George Heindl before the performance, only with your own ears, can you feel what unite Europe. The combination of the two musical instruments is rarely heard by other artists in Austria. This is why it is extremely attractive to music lovers.

“Paier’s ballads make people want to cry,” said an Austrian audience.

“Images and colours are full in their music, the flock of birds flying from the sound of the cello….lonely, bare and trembling feet in a forest covered in snow…I have never been to Europe before, but I can feel it very close to me thanks to their music,” said Mai Phuong, a Vietnamese fan.

Together Paier and Valcic have brought into life a full intimately passionate and percussive musical cosmos with formalism that still somehow manages to leave room for improvisation. Paier's eclectic compositions carry expressive titles like "La Pirouette," "Singing Bird," or "Histoire d' amour." These are chamber music dialogues - tender and gripping, passionate and cool, playful and strange - that draw on diverse musical forms and traditions while remaining free from pathos. The pieces are carried off with passion and a lighthearted ease by the composers’ musical soul mates Klaus Paier and Asja Valcic.