Eisenstadt (AT), Festival Herbstgold
The day before our concert we met and rehearsed with Hans and Ingrid – we hadn‘t played our Winter Journey for some time and hadn‘t seen each other over the summer. Oh how wonderful it was to meet and play again : )...right after our rehearsal we had our „Listening Party“ of „The Schumann Songbook“, meaning that we all sat down together opened a bottle of wine, beer and/or Prosecco : ) and listened to our whole album all together for the very first time. I enjoyed every moment of this evening, and I can‘t wait for all of you to hear it too: release date 8.12.2017
But back to our concert : ) It was the very first time for us to play with Joris Roelofs, an incredible musician from Amsterdam, he plays the clarinet & bass clarinet and has the most wonderful sound on bass clarinet you can imagine. Since he was stuck in Amsterdam due to strong wind, we only had one short rehearsal in the afternoon on the day of our concert. Joris was already familiar with our Winter’s Journey and had played an amazing solo for „The grey old man“ on our album „A Winter‘s Journey“. We had a short but intense rehearsal, packed our bags and waited for Mr T (our master of sound) picking up the band and everything that comes with it : )! I drove mathias and myself to Eisenstadt by car, with my Saab. The next morning I drove straight to Italy to my family, because it was my dad‘s 70th birthday!!! We had plenty of time or that‘s what mathias and I thought. With our soloist being stuck at the airport in Amsterdam - we completely forgot about the talk we should have joined at 18:00 – again we are really, really sorry about that. Our concert was suppose to start at around 22:00 and we got to „Festival Herbstgold“ in Eisenstadt around 18:30. Ian Bostridge was the head liner of the day, yesss it‘s true, right before us, he was singing the original Winterreise and so the ones who came to our Late Night Winter Journey had just heard the original. We started a little earlier and our sound check had to be just in time. I was a little bit stressed out but the band‘s support was calming me down and so we started after Mister Andreas Richter (the organizer & artistic director of the Festival) had introduced us to our brave late night audience, our set, as always : ) with „Gute Nacht“ .We had a great time playing from the very start - enjoying every song with our new soloist Joris! What an energy in „Wasserflut“ and my personal favourites of the night were „Wegweiser“ and the „Linden Tree“.Thank you to Ingrid, Hans, mathias, Joris and Thomas for this night!!!AND thank you to the wonderful audience who opened up their ears & hearts for our version of „Winterreise“ (Estzer, I can‘t believe you came all the way from Budapest!!!, so great to see you again). I hope to see some of you again in December : )! Before we packed our bags, we sat down, enjoyed a glass of wine or beer while Joris played some Wagner : ) on the Boesendorfer and mathias watched & listened closely : )…
Hans, Ingrid, T and Joris got back to Vienna the same night. And I tried to catch enough sleep for my road trip to Italy the next morning : ) (it was my Dad‘s 70th birthday!!!and I had to get to the Birthday party in time : ) - you know what they say: “To Travel Is To Live“ H.C. Andersen
Yours Lia
