Friday, November 24, 2006
Off to the Airport
After three years of planning, Southwest Chamber Music left on Monday for our Cultural Exchange trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. Our group is 21 persons, including musicians, conductor, composer, spouses, and friends. In addition to our group, there is another group of eight Board members and donors who will travel alongside the musicians, enjoying the sites and attending our events.
Guitarist and KPFK radio host John Schneider will travel as our media correspondent, and will be posting to the blog once we arrive in Cambodia.
We are all meeting at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday evening to check in for our flight on Singapore Airlines. We stop briefly in Taipei, continue on to Singapore, and arrive in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Wednesday afternoon. The longest flight is 20 hours, and we won't count how many actual hours it will take us to fly from Los Angeles to Cambodia. Our check-in involves our instruments plus the extensive percussion instruments, in special cases, needed for the compositions by Chinary Ung.
We have been helped greatly by Global Spectrum, travel specialists for Southeast Asia. They have designed the special tour for the Board and Donor group, and also helped us arrange our airline tickets for the entire trip. Marcia and Susan at Global Spectrum have been invaluable, navigating our needs in loading all of the instruments and troubleshooting weight and size restrictions.
Helping us overseas are people in each city where we will be staying:
Amrita Performing Arts in Phnom Penh is presenting our concert on December 1st at the Chenla Theater, and arranging our Master Classes with students from the Royal University of Fine Arts. Fred Frumberg, director, and Rith, his assistant, have been our liason with the University, procured extra instruments needed, publicized the events, and taken care of our hotel and transportation arrangements.
The World Culture Expo in Siem Reap will present our concert at the Main Expo Site on December 3. We have communicated with many people at the Expo, and currently our contact is Suon Sovann. He has made all of the concert arrangements, provided for our hotel, meals and transportation, and will help us tour the Temples of Angkor on our free days after the concert.
And, traveling with us in Cambodia will be Chinary Ung's sister Helen Ung, who will make certain that everyone else does a good job on our behalf!
The Hanoi National Conservatory has so many people helping us that it is impossible to thank everyone here. Ms. Thu Nga Dan of Southwest Chamber Music has facilitated our Master Classes, rehearsals with the Vietnamese musicians, hotel, transportation, and concerts at the Conservatory and Hanoi Opera House. She has arrived early to meet with press and media, and finalize all of the arrangements.
All of the people described, and many more, above have helped make this trip possible, and we thank them!
The bags are packed with our concert clothes, the instruments are in hand, and it is time to go - Southwest goes Southeast!
Friday, November 10, 2006
Vietnam-Cambodia Cultural Exchange Residencies
The historic Vietnam-Cambodia Cultural Exchange Residencies that Southwest Chamber Music initiated in 2004 in Vietnam and Cambodia have finally come to fruition as Southwest Chamber Music celebrates its 20th Anniversary this year.
In December, Southwest Chamber Music, a two-time Grammy® Award-winning ensemble, was the first American ensemble to begin long-term residency and cultural exchange programs with the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music in Vietnam.
The two-week residencies in Cambodia and Vietnam initiated the first year of a three-year project. Subsequent seasons will bring music of Vietnamese and Cambodian composers to Southwest Chamber Music concerts and educational events in Southern California.
Southwest Chamber Music performed concerts and master classes at the Hanoi National Conservatory as part of their 50th anniversary celebration, and capped the trip with a performance at the Hanoi Opera House on December 11th. Additional performances and master classes were held at the Chenla Theater in Phnom Penh, and a special performance on December 5 as part of the World Culture Expo 2006, co-produced by Cambodia and South Korea.
Concerts featured the music of Cambodian-American, Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Chinary Ung. This is the first time Dr. Ung's music was brought home by an American group, with the first professional performances of his music in Cambodia. Dr. Ung, who grew up in Cambodia and is the most prestigious Southeast Asian composer, is the catalyst for Southwest Chamber Music's trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. His music and his presence represent the symbolic healing of the past and look forward to a future with peace and harmony. Concerts also included music of Mozart, Barber, Harrison, Cage, Takemitsu and Mendelssohn, and included side-by-side performances with Vietnamese musicians. A work by Vietnamese composer Phuc Linh was also performed by Southwest musicians in Hanoi. Southwest Chamber Music's players participated in master classes in both cities, providing an educational component to this historic trip, as the first American ensemble-in-residence in both countries since the Khmer Rouge era and Vietnam War.
Funding for the American portion of this project comes from a generous grant from the James Irvine Foundation. The overseas portion of the Cultural Exchange Project has been funded through the generosity of private donors. For more information, please visit Southwest Chamber Music or contact us at 1-800-726-7147.
*Pictures from left to right: 1. Composer Chinary Ung and Conductor Jeff von der Schmidt in Cambodia, 2004; 2. Executive Director Jan Karlin and Artistic Director and Conductor Jeff vonder Schmidt on an elephant ride in Cambodia, 2004; 3. Director of the Hanoi National Conservatory Thu Ha Tran and Conductor Jeff von der Schmidt in Hanoi, 2004.