Thousandapologies

Last Tuesday, again there was a performance of Opera Zuyd in the Heerlen Theatre, performing the Russian Opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov. Again Stephan was singing in the choir and was so friendly to arrange some tickets for us. Originally the Opera is performed in Russian, but for the occasion was translated into Dutch. In the beginning of the Opera, three sisters tell what they would do for the Tsar, if he would marry them. The first would make him a great meal, the second would make everyone new clothes, and the third and youngest would bear his hero son. The Tsar hears their talk, and marries the youngest one, much to jealousy of the other sisters. Just after the youngest girl gets pregnant, the Tsar has to leave for war. This creates the opportunity for her sisters to falsify the message when the child is born, and hence the Tsar gets a message that his wife bore him a monster. Upon reading the message theTsar decides the mother and child should be put into a barrel and put to sea. Miraculously the son grows up fast and is an adult when they reach a foreign shore. The fairy tale of course continues and as always has a happy ending, which I will not spoil for those that haven’t seen the story yet.

The music of the Opera was quite heavy in the beginning and different from what I’ve seen in previous ones. Also I needed to get used to hearing the Opera in my native language; still I like Italian and French better for singing, but that might be personal. The costumes were beautifully made, and part of the opera was narrated. Luckily, all was done with a lot of humour which made it a very nice Opera. However, there’s still a minor point of critique, in comparison with other productions I think the main vocals were a little disappointing, only the two main female voices I really liked; especially, the soprano singing the swan part had a beautiful voice. Still, I had the feeling that sometimes the choir outperformed the lead vocals. All in all, it was a beautiful night out, not in the least because of my lovely company, who made it a worthwhile evening.  Also because she was still showing up while she was not feeling well at all, but still being so charming, I really appreciated that !

Yesterday, I went to the Opera La Fille du Régiment, performed by Opera Zuyd in the Theatre in Heerlen. The Opera was one of the nicest ones I’ve seen so far, beautiful music, and a nice story. The story deals with a young orphan girl, Marie, being raised by a company of soldiers, and her love for the man who saved her from falling into the abyss on a mountain trip. Her wedding plans get disrupted when she is found by her mother, a rich duchess, which first portrays herself as the girl’s aunt.  Marie is forced to leave the soldiers and her mother tries to make a good lady out of her. All in all, a very entertaining story, beautifully portrayed by the singers of Opera Zuyd. Also this time, my good friend Stephan was part of the choir and this time was quite visible on stage; right in the beginning already as a minor role as a soldier leaving home, but after that also as prominent part of the Choir. So let’s hope there’s a solo performance next time.

Yesterday, two cds of Iron & Wine arrived with the post; beautiful music, full of atmosphere, really fitting the Winder Wonderland our small country is these days. Check out the video below for an impression!

The third day of Pinkpop, was unfortunately the least; some of the artists I really lived up to seeing couldn’t bring the performance I expected, and because of the sunny weather my hayfever was really acting up badly; you could see me wandering the festival terrain with a constantly running nose and tearing eyes. I may sound a bit too negative about the last day, but that’s not how I really feel about it; it still was a good day, only in comparison with the previous ones it was the least.

The first band that day was Fiction Plane, featuring Sting’s son, quite allright, although most of the music reminded us of the Police. That’s why I also feel the day was really kicked of by the second band we saw: The Wombats; a great party alltogether, starting with a brilliant a capella about boys and girls and marciupials. Gavin DeGraw was the follow-up on the main stage, but it’s not really worth mentioning more about him… We continued to the tent where Kate Nash would start of her gig….which was quite terrible…Tally, Mark and I were already joking that she screamed louder than the Cavalera Conspiracy which was playing at the other stage. This had a lot of people immediately turning around, just terrible

Luckily, because we left early, we were able to get some good places in front of the stage for Racoon, the next band, to see what would become the best gig of the day, really good and brought with a flair of humour here and there. The Hives did the complete opposite of the Foo Fighters; talking too much and really these blokes are just the most arrogant bastards around, quite irritating Back to the tent again for Saybia, quite nice, but a lot of the same, and again the bad sound quality…Queens of the Stone Age was also ok, but it felt like one constant flow of music without any recognisable parts. One nice part of the Queens performance was that the security guards, who seemed a little bit overprotective and too active, we scolded by the lead singer common guys this is a fuckin’ Queens of the Stone age concert, we can have some fun without hurting each other! Unfortunately, the best Queens song, their only hit, came at the end of the set.

The next band was actually one of my favourites, the Counting Crows, and the more disappointing it was that also they could not really convince; we already left earlier for Roisin Murphy who was playing at the other stage. Surprisingly, her performance was quite good, I would have wanted to see a little bit more of it, but we needed to move to have a good place at the Rage Against the Machine gig which was next. The crowd just when crazy during that performance, and I think I was the only one really not appreciating it; too much anger, too many politics, and more importantly political statements I couldn’t disagree more with.

Still, Pinkpop has been an awesome experience, the wombats and racoon made up for what the other bands failed to bring. Also, I’m sure I’ll try to get tickets again next year, the atmosphere was just so amazing and friendly. More than 60000 people visiting every day and as far as I know no fights at all, just everyone enjoying the sun, the music, the food & beer, and each other’s company…you only wish that could happen more often in everyday life

The second day of the festival, the Saturday, we started really relaxed with Air Traffic, a typical English band (if there’s piano in it, it’s English by definition). Also, Dirk really proved him really being a German by starting with a beer already at noon; you all must know that real Germans start with beer at breakfast . The day continued with Moke, a Dutch band from Amsterdam, with a British sound to it and also piano in it, and because Amsterdam is pretty close to England, my definition still holds…I think… Moke was a pleasant surprise; over the last year they’ve become more and more popular in the Netherlands, and I think that’s well deserved…I really enjoyed their gig! Still we skipped their last songs to head for Voicst.

Voicst, also Dutch, was playing at the GM Next stage, which is located inside a tent (previously known as the 3fm tent), and therefore the sound was just miserable…not because of the band, but mostly because of the bad acoustics of the tent…Dirk and I already soon decided it was time for an early lunch (+beer to keep up German traditions), mostly because a) it wasn’t really our music, b) you couldn’t see squat inside the tent, and c) we were hungry and thirsty According to Tally and Mark we missed one of the most interesting gigs, with really cool crowd interaction, a shame, but at least we were not hungry anymore, the others were. So again our roads parted and had Dirk and me visiting KT Tunstall and the Eagles of Death Metal, while the others were looking for a bite to eat.

KT Tunstall on the main stage was unfortunately not really convincing. The music that was played was quite good, and I really admire KT as a musician, not so much as performer though… The interaction with the crowd was minimal, and also the music is not really something that evokes a reaction of the crowd. I think the tent would be a lot better place for an artist like her. Mostly, because of the intimate atmosphere of that tent, if only the sound was better….

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I wanted to blog about this already for quite some time, but somehow all the time something interfered…

It’s now already I think about 10 years ago that I’ve started to play guitar. If I remember correctly it was somewhere during November 1997, that after a admiring the beautiful instrument and especially some friends playing it, Pieter, an old-time friend of mine, taught me to play my first two rifs ever: the intros of one and fade to black, both songs of Metallica. After that, followed a period of enormous addiction which lasted until this day. I also still remember the days of struggling in the first couple of years; trying to teach myself to play the notes without buzzing, open chords, and finally the general-pain-in-the-arse of barre chords which took me something like a year to master. While I’ve come a long way already on my own, sometimes my enthousiasm was really lacking, just because there was no one around that could help me further with some of the techniques, and I had to figure it all out by myself. Partially, this of course was my own fault, because I’m too damn stubborn to go for music classes and prefer to teach myself. Now, finally, I’ve found some resources which, I feel, are really helping me further as a guitarist, and more importantly, have really sparked an even greater enthousiasm for playing that beautiful instrument.

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This week has been a bunch of adjacent holidays, and therefore I decided to take a small vacation: mainly because it would only cost me about two days of leave to get an entire week . As some of you might know, yesterday, the 30th of April was a National Holiday in the Netherlands, called Koninginnendag (literally Queensday). For me and the Namesake, this was a reason to visit our beloved Aachen again, also because the Namesake needed some translations of German documents for his soon to be departure to the States. Therefore, I met him already in Aachen and we went for the usual coffee at Glasskubus and of course it was again absolutely necessary to at least have a couple of German beers afterwards It was a lot of fun indeed, also because the Namesake was introducing me to some new pubs and restaurants along the way through Aachen. Because it was our Queensday, we also heard a lot of Dutch in Aachen.

A rather weird thing we found out during our visit is that one way of avoiding those (mostly annoying) Amnesty International recruitment people is to just have a coloured person in your company; when sitting on the terrace we saw them only addressing white people, totally ignoring the more exotic looking people. This really surprised us, as you don’t expect these people to be totally narrow-minded too (and maybe even xenophobic). Therefore, we decided to carry out a little experiment, so the namesake and I paraded alongside their Human Rights booth for a couple of times…what we noticed is that all around us people were asked to join the recruitment guy or girl to the booth, but not me nor my friend from Indieland. Kinda shocking, but also a bit ironic, seeing those world-rescuers having similar prejudices as the ones they are trying to get rid of in the first place. This had the namesake and me continuing our way through Aachen with a big smile on our faces, rather enjoying this irony. After a couple of small interludes, a brass band playing Bach, a jazz-band on the Hexenhof, and a nice student pub, we decided it was time for dinner, pizza at Pallas. Our day ended in the usual way having a nice coffee at the Mölkerei, a place really living up to its name

In the evening I joined Olivia and Stephan (and Dirk) for a gig in a local pub called Bluff. The first band was a jazzy trio; drums, bass and trumpet, and though the players were quite good, too much of trumpet is just that, too much…our ears started hurting Next, a second more pop-like band started, also quite good, but rather boring. Another band was planned was after that, but we didn’t stay there to see it, it was just too smokey and warm in that pub; our eyes started to tear and our throats were getting sore, so we finished our evening at our Stammkneipe Erin’s Isle. All in all, the evening was still a nice one, catching up with Olivia and Stephan, because I didn’t see them in a while, mostly because of my travels last month. Let’s hope that next time only the music will be a wee bit better!

A different end to a second Easter Holiday this time, not the normal I’m so stuffed I cannot do anything else then watch LOTR for the one millionth and second time because nothing else is broadcasted on telly anywayz, but this time a better one. Yesterday, we went to see the Levellers in what has now become our local pop-stage: de Nieuwe Nor in Heerlen. Already, in November or December Anke told me to get tickets, and I almost immediately did, knowing their work. First of all, by their good A Weapon called the Word album I got ages ago from my friend Christian, and of course by covering already some of their work ourselves (see the movie two posts down ).

Needless to say, I lived up to this gig with quite a lot of anticipation; would the Levellers surprise us, with their reputation of ultimate live band ever, or would they just be what we thought of them before, a band which makes nice music, but when covered mostly outperformed. The result was more the latter than the former, although I must confess I had a great time, most probably because I was in good company, and the combination of live music and nice cold beer is one of my favourites. The music was quite good and luckily they played a lot of their old stuff, which was familiar to us, I even remember singing along with a couple of songs. Also, the musicians were enthusiastic and played their songs with verve (the basist was jumping all over the stage as if he was a recently freed muppet on steroids), even that well that the frail voice of the lead singer wasn’t that apparent.

However (you knew this was coming didn’t you), something was lacking, it was a fine evening and all, but after one hour the band already left the stage for the first time. They did come back for two more extra sessions, but that just couldn’t wash away my idea that for them this gig was a short -compulsory- in between to make some extra money, and apparantly I was not the only one. Especially, with the high ticket price of twenty euros for this kind of venue in mind, this was at least a little disappointing. For example, when I compare this to the Wir sind Helden gig I saw earlier, their enthusiasm and engagement with the crowd, I needn’t think twice about spending my euros next time. All in all, it was still a good evening, but more made by the people than by the band.

This week is designated as a classics week at the Dutch radio station I’m mostly listening to, 3fm. Therefore, all week they’re playing music and requests that are made before the year 2000, and the music is just plain awesome. I’m really enjoying the music and listening to the radio all day. Probably heard me ranting about this before, but it seems nothing with real impact has been made after 2000. Already at the end of the 90s I had the idea that musical quality was degrading, but where are the bands that have major impact like for example Oasis, Nirvana, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, Queen…name me one band after 2000 that has? Don’t get me wrong, there’s still some good music being produced but most of it just doesn’t seem to touch me, as if all emotion has been erased of it and it has to adhere to a general standards of boringness. Maybe that’s also why I’m recently going more into the direction of alternative kinds of music, countryish, folkish, electronic music, indie music…even some classical music. Especially independent music seems not to bother too much about the general public, but it’s again about the fun of making music, getting together and recording…Maybe that’s it…lack of fun?

when browsing my old backup cds…I found some recordings of the illustrious wanna-be band named Shagwell (named after the Austin Powers character Felicity Shagwell)…recorded in a local pub De Nor in the spring of 2004. For me, memories of an amazing time, playing music, drinking beer, just relaxing… I’ve got a couple more of them left, but I think I’ll spare you the experience…at least I’m not in a mean mood right now, anyway, here we go….