At 60, one of Vietnam's best-known musicians has decided the smartest move is to go smaller. Nguyễn Quốc Trung — composer, producer and founder of Monsoon Music, the country's biggest international music festival — has staged Lối (Path), a concert that looks back on four decades of work and, by his own account, marks a new chapter of making music that is simpler, steadier and deeper.
Lối is built as a multisensory experience rather than a straight concert. Music sits in dialogue with lighting, visuals and stage movement, and Trung deliberately avoids any narration or storyline. He wants audiences to wander through the sound and find their own way in — his hope, he says, is that people leave feeling they met an old friend who still has a surprise or two.
The material draws on Vietnamese folk traditions, filtered through electronic, minimalist and polyrhythmic arrangements. That pairing has defined much of Trung's career: he has long pushed to carry Vietnamese music onto international stages, often with large-scale, experimental productions. Lối is the pared-back counterpoint. He has shelved several bigger projects to concentrate on it, and spent six continuous months developing the show — hard work, he notes, made easier because he was working entirely on his own terms.
One of the most interesting threads in the project is the cast. It spans generations, from veteran traditional musicians to younger artists such as Kiều Anh and marzuz. Trung sees a clear divide: young performers tend to ask how tradition can be adapted and applied, while the older ones dedicate themselves completely to showing how beautiful the art they love already is.
What happens next is telling for anyone who loves live music in Vietnam. Trung insists Lối is a beginning, not a one-off. The show has been conceived to flex — it can be restaged at different scales and in different venues, with funding the main constraint. For travellers, that means a genuinely distinctive Vietnamese production blending folk and contemporary electronics may be turning up in more places than one. It also hints at where Vietnam's live music scene is heading: a growing crop of homegrown productions where traditional instruments, regional melodies and modern staging meet, well beyond the tourist-show clichés.
For visitors to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City with an evening to spare, events like Lối are a far richer night out than a standard dinner-and-a-show package — and a chance to hear a major artist work out, in public, what a lifetime of music is really for. — Vietnam News Life
