UNESCO Ca tru club

Yesterday morning I went to a performance with one of the newer Ca tru clubs in Hanoi, the UNESCO Ca tru club. As the name implies this group started as a part of the process of getting UNESCO to put Ca tru on its urgent safeguarding list of World Intangible cultural heritage. The performance took place in one of the old Viet houses on the grounds of the Hanoi Museum of Ethnology. The crowd was very small (2-15 people) at times the only audience consisted of myself and one elderly man. I have not met anyone in this group before, but knew that the day player Tùng was a student of Van Khue in the Thai ha ca tru club. Judging from the singing of the two woman singers in the performance I would guess that they also learned from Thai ha, but I will have to look in to that a bit more. When I arrived I was immediately approached by a jolly elderly man called Phạm Lãm. He spoke a bit of English and played the drum in the club. When the performance started it also turned out that he also was a rather skilled dan bau player. The first half of the performance was not Ca tru but Ngam tho, sung poetry accompanied by mr. Lam on dan bau. The woman who sang most of the poems, Madame Nguyen Tuong Lan, turned out to be the daughter of Quach Thi Ho. QTH was one of the most famous ca tru artists of the 20th century. After the poetry singing the ca tu group entered the stage. Together with Tùng there were two singers, Vương Tú Ngọc and Đô Phương Thao. It was apparent that Ngoc had studied longer than Thao but it was nice too see two young singers perform. Everyone on stage seemed heavily affected by the heat and I got the feeling that this might not have been their best performance. This was the first time I heard the UNESCO club and one of the few times I have heard a live performance by any other group than the Thang long ca tru club.The UNESCO club perform the last Sunday of every month at 9 am and If I have the opportunity I will listen to their next performance as well.