Join us as ROCO’s Connections Series returns to Asia Society Texas Center on March 29th, and enjoy an evening spotlighting music by Asian artists and composers, exploring the experiences of Vietnamese immigrants.

Tenor Nicholas Phan features in the world premiere of Season 20 Composer-In-Residence Viet Cuong’s song cycle, telling the story of his family’s escape from Saigon, plus Vivian Fung’s elegaic Lamenting Earth, complimented by Viet Cuong’s driving septet Pulse Train.

Emmy Award-winning composer and traditional musician Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ joins, performing on instruments such as the đàn bầu (Vietnamese monochord), 16-string đàn tranh (zither), đàn t’rung (bamboo xylophone), and trống (traditional drums), creating music that blends the wonderfully unique sounds of Vietnamese instruments with other genres, fusing deeply rooted musical traditions with fresh new structures.

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Vivian Fung is collaborating with the Jasper String Quartet, tenor Nicholas Phan, and pianist Myra Huang, on the creation of a new song cycle, Lamenting Earth. The project is a half-evening length song cycle, approximately 30 minutes, for tenor, string quartet, and piano. The work centers around poet Claire Wahmanholm’s prize-winning poem “O,” which took second place at the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. The poem is described by the judges as “an original and powerful evocation, using a single letter of the alphabet to name the wonders that are at risk of being no more…The voice is prophetic and unrelenting: a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call to action!”

Learn more about the project

TIckets to the performance>>>