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Vietnamese-French violinist Stephane Tran Ngoc will take to the stage at Ho Chi Minh City Opera House on July 13. (Photo courtesy of Ho Chi Minh City Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera)

 

 

He will play five pieces, all by French composers, beginning with Saint-Saens’s Havanaise, a piece written in 1887 for a Cuban violinist and based on the rhythm of the ‘habanera’.

Next will be Thais by Jules Massenet, a piece for violin and orchestra written to be played between the acts of the composer’s 1894 opera of the same name.

The first half of the concert ends with Poeme by Ernest Chausson. After the interval the audience will hear Darius Milhaud’s Cinema-Fantasie sur “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” (cinema-fantasy on “The Ox on the Roof”).

Originally written for violin and piano, Ravel’s Tzigane, the last piece in the formal part of the program, was premiered in its violin-and-orchestra form in 1924.

Stephane Tran Ngoc astonished his audience in HCM City in July 2017 when he played as an encore a Paganini caprice, an enormously difficult piece written to display the violin’s technical possibilities.

The Paris-born violinist graduated in violin and chamber music at the Paris National Superior Conservatory of Music when he was 15 years old.

He later received a master’s degree at Brooklyn College’s Conservatory of Music and a Doctorate of Musical Art from The Juilliard School in the US.

He has won top prizes at several international competitions, such as the Lipizer Competition and the Long-Thibaud 1990 International Competition.

Ngoc has performed as a soloist in over 30 countries with orchestras, including the Radio-France Philharmonic, the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, the Danish Chamber Players and the Shinsei Symphony Orchestra.

He lives in Europe and plays on a violin made in 1709 by one of Venice’s greatest violin-makers, Francesco Gobetti. –VNA