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28.07.2009: July 2009, Central European tour

July 2009, Central European tour

After a couple of weeks of summer vacation in our lovely Finland, it was time to pack again and head for Central Europe for a change. We flew to Stuttgart and took a train to Mutterstadt, where we had a very nice concert at a youth choir festival. The audience was very enthousiastic and we had a lot of fun on stage. It's amazing how good a longer pause in singing does for us! Next day we hopped on a train again and travelled to Eltville, where we had a concert in a beautiful church. The first part of the concert consisted of our sacred music repertoire and the second of our secular stuff. It was no doubt one of the best acoustic concerts we’ve had all year. The acoustic tour we did in Finland this spring has made that part of our work better, for sure. After the concert we had a nice meal in a nearby garden restaurant that also Sean Connery had visited while shooting the 80’s movie The Name of the Rose. We saw his signature that proved this true – and wrote ours in the same book!

The next day the train took us over the border to Holland, for the first time ever! We had been invited to perform and work as clinicians at the Europa Cantat choral festival in Utrecht. It was quite hard to get any information from the festival on many practical matters beforehand, so we didn’t know exactly what to expect from it. To make matters even more complicated, I found out – on the train on our way to Utrecht – that we were supposed to sing a part in a mass choir song (Shine by Take That) in the opening gala the next day! We had only a score of the piece, but luckily Ahti had the original recording on his laptop, which made trying to learn the piece a bit easier... so we spent that evening doing that. In the gala concert we sang our Kivinen tie and it went really well. Somehow we managed to get through Shine too!

Our own concert on Wednesday went really well too, and it was nice to see many familiar faces in the audience cheering for us. I think we made a few new fans there as well...

We had four groups to coach: Halbacht (SUI/GER), aSounding (NED), Sekstet Komplet (SLO) and Wishful Singing (NED), that were all quite different from each other and easy to work with. This was the first time ever for us to coach groups for such a long period – seven days in all. We divided ourselves in groups and worked with all the groups individially too, which was a good idea; that way all the groups would get feedback from all of us. The week concluded with two concerts in a church on Saturday with all the five groups (us included). We were really proud of the groups – we felt that they had taken big leaps in many ways during the week, and the audience seemed to appreciate their hard work. We were so happy with the way this masterclass worked out that we decided to award our groups with a surprise boatride on the lovely canals of Utrecht after the concerts. It was fun (and quite loud)!

Now it's time for some more vacationing – we’ll see you again in August in Vancouver and Tokyo!

Cheers!

Jussi