Royal Chapel Choir to bring sound of Scandinavia to Hanoi today

      The Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir will dazzle the Ha Noi Opera House audience on Monday with several Danish folk songs from the 19th century.
The 45 choir members will present some of the most beautiful pieces from the choir’s history.
The programme will begin with a Danish evening song about reigning peace in the country and town called Evening, by composer Niels La Cour. The choir and the Viet Nam National Academy of Music Choir will also jointly present Trong Com, a Vietnamese folk song.
The production will range from Scandinavian songs and folk tunes for spring and summer to pieces developed by Denmark’s most famous composers such as Carl Nielsen and Niels W Gade, as well as contemporary Danish composer Michael Bojesen.
A famous piece by great musician Joseph Haydn will be dedicated to the memory of Haydn’s death 200 years ago. Another portion of the performance will feature the choir and a full orchestra collaborating on a piece composed in 1728 by great German musician Georg Frideric Handel.
This is the second time Vietnamese audiences will have the chance to enjoy one of Europe’s strongest choir traditions, following the Vienna Boys Choir last year.
The Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir was founded in 1924 and has become one of the strongest choirs in Europe and is Scandinavia’s only representative of this art form.
Its duties include performing at state occasions and during royal visits abroad under the Patronage of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort of Denmark.
Ebbe Munk has been the choir’s chief conductor since 1991. After graduating from the University of Copenhagen, he continued his studies as a conductor in Dresden, Munich, Budapest and in the US.
He has toured much of the world with the choir, holding concerts at leading international festivals as well as in famous concert halls such as the Sydney Opera House, the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Beijing Concert Hall.
In 2002, Munk received a Danish Music Awards Grammy for the Buxtehude’s Cantatas recording with his Chapel choir.
During the visit to Viet Nam, Munk will rehearse several repertoires with singers from the Viet Nam National Academy of Music, including pieces by Mendelssohn and Handel, and the renaissance piece Ave Maria by Spanish Tomas da Victoria.
"The performance will be an excellent opportunity for exchanges between Viet Nam and Denmark with regard to choir tradition and practices in particular, and cultural exchanges in general," said Danish Ambassador Peter Lysholt Hansen.
The concert starts at 8pm on May 11 at the Ha Noi Opera House. Free tickets are available at the Embassy of Denmark.