Rick Wakeman plays piano concert for 150 rescued moon bears in Vietnam

Rick Wakeman sat down at a Yamaha grand piano in the middle of a Vietnamese bear sanctuary and played to an audience of 150 animals he had never performed for before. The former Yes keyboardist, now in his seventh decade with a prolific solo catalog behind him, had composed new pieces specifically for this moment—melodic, gentle work he hoped would draw the rescued moon bears to the perimeter of their enclosure to listen. It was September in Tam Dao national park, and the heat was punishing. Wakeman joked beforehand that it was double what England's worst heatwave had been, and that a fan would only circulate more hot air around his hands and the keys.

The concert was an act of advocacy. Wakeman has been sponsoring rescued bears since 2016, and he recently adopted a new one—a twenty-month-old male who stood on his hind legs and stared at him when they met. But the sanctuary's 150 bears represent only part of the crisis. In Vietnam, where the extraction of bear bile for traditional Chinese medicine was only recently banned, 125 bears remain trapped in the old farms where they were kept. Four die each month. Some have spent ten or twenty years in cages so small they could not turn around. The bile is drawn directly from their gall bladders with a needle, a process that leaves them in chronic pain and poor health. Across Asia, the Asiatic black bear population has declined by nearly a third in just three decades, making bile farming the fourth-largest illegal wildlife trade market in the region.

Wakeman arrived at the sanctuary this week to witness what rehabilitation looks like. He watched bears that had never felt grass beneath their feet learn to walk on it. He saw two of them playing in a bubble bath, jumping and romping like animals experiencing joy for the first time. "If you see these bears it is hard to put into words," he said. "They are almost human the way they look at you." He spent hours watching them, moved by what he called their capacity to reclaim a life they had never known. The bears at the sanctuary are safe and happy, he said—not tame, but thriving in a way that the caged animals never could.

Wakeman is an animal welfare advocate in his personal life. He keeps rescue dogs and cats at his home in Suffolk, and he plays piano for them regularly. One cat would jump onto his grand piano and, if he stopped playing, would paw at the strings until he resumed. His dogs and cats have preferences: they like melody, he said, but they reject metal, grunge, and rap. He believed the same principle would apply to the bears—that animals respond to gentle, melodic music, and that his compositions might offer them something like comfort or engagement.

Dr. Jill Robinson, founder and CEO of Animals Asia, which runs the sanctuary, called Wakeman's support immeasurable. His love for the bears, she said, could be heard in the music he had written for them. The performance in the open air of Tam Dao national park represented something larger than a concert: it was a statement about what these animals deserve, and a call to action for the Vietnamese government to release the remaining 125 bears from the farms where they are dying.

Wakeman's hope was simple. "I hope they lay down and have a listen," he said. "That would make my day. I would have a big grin on my face." The concert was not just for the bears in the sanctuary, but for the ones still in cages—a reminder that their suffering is not inevitable, that rescue and recovery are possible, and that the world is watching to see whether Vietnam will act.