Tran Vuong Thach conducts a concert at HCMC Opera House, 7 Lam Son Square in HCMC’s District 1 - Photo: Courtesy of HBSO

Chamber music is not popular indeed since it requires artists to excel in opera singing, choreography, musical instrument playing and stage performance while audiences should a good sense of listening to music and adequate knowledge of music, culture and history.

Several years ago, HBSO began an endeavor to bring chamber music to university students in the city in a bid to raise their awareness of this genre of music as students are considered potential listeners in the future. However, chamber music cannot be performed in any other places than opera theaters. HBSO failed in its first attempt.

Over the past three years, enthusiasts of such music, especially youngsters, have shown up at the free concert ‘Young Melodies’ which is held at 8 p.m. in the 29th night each month at the city’s Opera House. “Young Melodies is always full of audiences, sometimes 800-900 guests a night compared to the theater’s seating capacity of about 500. Sometimes they even sit on the floor to enjoy repertoires, and get basic knowledge of chamber music and musical instruments from conductors and artists,” said Nguyen Minh Tan from the Arts Performing Department of HBSO.

Moreover, local audiences were first educated to listen to plain concerts featuring symphonies and concertos of famous composers like Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. In recent years, the orchestra has held more attractive performances to further reach out to the public by staging plays, oratorios like Messiah, Dido and Aenas, The Creation, The Magic Flute, Carmen and Giselle, and ballets like Cinderella, The Nutcracker, Coppelia and contemporary dances like Touching the Past.

In July, a concert featuring ‘Excerpts from Broadway Musicals’ with songs from famous musicals such as Les Misérables, the Phantom of the Opera, Notre Dame de Paris and Oklahoma was organized for the general public. “Even though that was our pilot project, it was successful beyond expectations,” Tan said. “Certainly, it was not comparable with a Broadway show in the U.S. but we believe that chamber music is no longer strange to local audiences.”

The most recently held concerts include the Brazil Night with conductor Jean Reis, French music concert with conductor Nicolas Chalvin and contemporary dance ‘Out of Context – for Pina’ by the Les ballets Ce de la B from Belgium.

“The important thing is to help the public develop a habit of listening to chamber music and this effort should start with children. Therefore, the orchestra is asking for cooperation from the HCMC Department of Education and Training to bring students to concert rehearsals,” said conductor Tran Vuong Thach, director of HBSO.

Thach, answering a question at a news briefing last month about the possibility of inviting pop singers to the concerts to increase their publicity, said, “Staging a program does not aim to make it easy to reach the public, but to produce a high-quality and interesting concert… Organizers often develop a program with pieces familiar to audiences but I think the audiences prefer to enjoy truly authentic chamber music.

Thach shares that an artist of chamber music needs 11 to 14 years to be trained; therefore, it is hard to invite artists of other genres like pop or ballad singers to concerts. He said tickets for students are always much cheaper than normal.

Along with special events and festivals, HBSO often has three concerts a month, usually on the ninth, nineteenth and twenty-ninth of month. Admission costs VND400,000, VND350,000 and VND200,000 per person while students just pay VND80,000 for a ticket.