music festival
Location: Usine a Gaz, Rue César Soulié 1
Link out: http://http://www.usineagaz.ch/
Start date: 9 Feb 2012
Start time: 20:00
End date: 12 Feb 2012
Concert, Geneva Chamber Orchestra: Rousseau, Pygmalion
Beethoven, L’ouverture de Coriolan
Mozart, Symphonie “Paris”
Hector Berlioz, La mort de Cléopâtre
Location: Bâtiment des Forces Motrices
Link out: http://www.bfm.ch/programme/index.php?mois=2�…
Date: 21 Feb 2012
Start time: 20:30
NYON, SWITZERLAND – The six-day passes, just 2,000 of them that the Paleo Music Festival sells in advance online, are now on sale.
Fans, move fast!
Some artists would like to see tougher Swiss laws covering music downloads; others say musicians need to make it easier for fans to have some free music
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Federal Council has ruled that the country’s laws concerning illegal downloads are adequate and additional legislation is not needed. The decision follows requests by artists’ groups for further protection. France in recent years has tightened its legislation and in some cases people who have illegally downloaded music, for example, have been banned from using the Internet.
Switzerland’s IP (intellectual property) laws allow Internet downloading for private consumption, but not for sharing. Anyone who uses popular download systems that essentially re-share is acting illegally; fines in Switzerland can run to CHF600, reports TSR (Fr).
Paleo Concert-goers alert: 1-16 December you can buy six-day passes for next summer’s shows.
Aurélian Farina shows his typographical design that features on the 2012 Paleo Music Festival poster
NYON, SWITZERLAND – The Paleo music festival in Nyon has unveiled its 2012 poster, a colourful visual game that is a twin to musical fun.
This year’s poster is by 27-year-old Aurélien Farina from Geneva’s University of Applied Science – Art & Design (HEAD, HES-SO), who won the poster contest sponsored by the school with Paleo.
The festival, one of Europe’s largest open-air music festivals, runs from 22 to 26 July 2012.
It runs for six days and nighs and pulls in 230,000 people for 210 concerts, with folk music at the centre of it.
Farina, who is French, earlier studied political science.
He says of his inspiration: “Music is at the heart of his inspiration, and is an essential component for Aurélien Farina.
“Music is the basis of my work. To get tangled up, to move through different levels, to be organised, in harmony, this is all about music. Each layer of the poster could be seen as a musical component, a frequency or an instrument. The Paléo red rounds it all off, it’s a bit like the melody.”
He is keen to pull the viewer in, to make the poster an active rather than passive visual experience.
Paleo Music Festival 2012 poster released 24 November in Nyon
“I like conceiving complex, intriguing and playful projects, ones that rely on the intelligence of the public. It’s a sort of game of ping-pong between the eye and the mind and this dimension is very important to me: the poster is conceived in its relationship with the viewer, and invites those who look at it to participate.”
The geometric, systematic design solutoin he was seeking came “fairly naturally by playing around with pencils and a sheet of squared paper,” he says.
“As for the colours, I didn’t really have much choice in the end. In order for it to work, I was confronted by a number of constraints similar to those that you meet when you’re drawing a map, plans or road signs: the need to easily recognise different levels of information. Either fortuitously or unconsciously, I came up with something that looks a bit like a map of the Tube.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) ended its 180-day 2011 proton run programme on the LHC (Large Hadron Collidor), Sunday evening 30 October. The proton-proton collisions have been providing data for research programmes.
The Geneva-based organization is now preparing the LHC for four weeks of lead-ion running, “but in a new development this year, the world’s largest particle accelerator will also attempt to demonstrate that large can also be agile by colliding protons with lead ions in two dedicated periods of machine development. If successful, these tests will lead to a new strand of LHC operation, using protons to probe the internal structure of the much more massive lead ions,” Cern says in a statement.
“This is important for the lead-ion programme, whose goal is to study quark-gluon plasma, the primordial soup of particles from which the ordinary matter of today’s visible universe evolved.
“‘Smashing lead ions together allows us to produce and study tiny pieces of primordial soup,’”said ALICE Spokesperson Paolo Giubellino, ‘but as any good cook will tell you, to understand a recipe fully, it’s vital to understand the ingredients, and in the case of quark-gluon plasma, this is what proton-lead ion collisions could bring.’”
The objective for the LHC at the start of 2011 was “to deliver a quantity of data known to physicists as one inverse femtobarn during the course of 2011.
The first inverse femtobarn came on 17 June, setting the experiments up well for the major physics conferences of the summer and requiring the 2011 data objective to be revised upwards to five inverse femtobarns. That milestone was passed by 18 October, with the grand total for the year being almost six inverse femtobarns delivered to each of the two general-purpose experiments Atlas and CMS.”
Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology, says, “The present data production rate is a factor of 4 million higher than in the first run in 2010 and a factor of 30 higher than at the beginning of 2011.”
Cern triggered a heated and ongoing scientific debate when it announced in September that its Opera project had measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, a finding that if confirmed upsets one of the tenets of physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Ed. note: Irish musicians who sang for US President Barack Obama at his inauguration in 2008 are now releasing a new song, taking the mickey out of Albert Einstein and Cern. Ger Corrigan, the band’s lead singer, says “for the moment we are backing Albert and his theory, I’m no Einstein but he was.”
Rich cultural, international mix of songs
Location: Patinoire du Littoral, Neuchatel
Link out: http://www.livemusic.ch/concerts/bernard-lavill…
Date: 4 Nov 2011
Start time: 20:30
St Prex Grand Rue will host the new Festival Off starting 17 August
ST PREX, SWITZERLAND – The St Prex Classics Festival, which opens 16 August, will have a little brother, the Festival Off.
The free festival will offer two concerts, at 18:30 and 19:30 on the following dates: 17, 19, 20, 23 and 24 August, on the main street of the medieval Vieux Bourg (old town) of Saint Prex.
The musicians include students from Swiss university music schools – look for violins, flutes, clarinets, accordeon music, trumps, Irish music, jazz and more.
Tents along the main street will serve as food and drink stalls, notably selling regional products.
St Prex Classics Festival highlights
St Prex festival concert in old church, 2010
The St Prex Classics festival has grown in importance in its six years and the 2011 programme, accompanied by the festival’s new name (formerly St Prex Festival), shows a new strength.
This year’s festival is varied; two events that are likely to hold special appeal for the international population in the region are:
- the “Trois pour Quatre” show 23-24 August, a Gershwin piano quartet featuring dancer/choreographer Julio Arozarena of the Béjart Ballets
- the “extraordinary encounter” 25 and 26 August between violinist Nigel Kennedy with the Kroke Trio and star dancers from Paris Opera, including Aurélie Dupont, star dancer.
Kennedy and the Kroke trio will be playing traditional Klezmer music that incorporates elements of jazz with Oriental and Eastern musical traditions. Festival founder Hazeline Van Swaay told GenevaLunch that the music “is absolutely beautiful and has greatly inspired the Paris Opera stars to create a unique music and dance event.”
Programme details for the St Prex Classics Festival
Ticket information and sales, Ticketcorner
Parking contingency plan in place with heavy rains forecast
French singer Zaz kicks off Paleo's main stage concerts Tuesday night (photo, ©2011 Laurent Clément)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – It’s music season at the southwestern tip of Lake Geneva, with Paleo opening today, 19 July, and the Fêtes de Genève 21 July.
Paleo is welcoming its fans on the first day with cool (highs of 16C), soggy weather, but that’s unlikely to keep the crowds away: some 230,000 music fans are expected during the six-day festival. Paleo features 195 concerts on six stages and more than 200 stalls. The always popular Village du Monde features the Caribbean this year.
The festival has kept aside 1,500 tickets that will be sold every day: they are available, maximum two per person, online and at Ticket Corner.
There are no ticket sales at the festival itself.
Paleo has been encouraging festival-goers to use public transport, but the advice takes on a practical note Tuesday, with a contingency parking plan in effect due to the forecast for heavy rain. Some of the parking lots near the festival will be closed and cars will be sent to Nyon’s city centre. Extra shuttle buses are planned.
Geneva brings 60 bands to the Jardin Anglais starting Thursday
Geneva warms up to its 10-day lakefront Geneva Festival (Fêtes de Genève) that runs from 4-14 August with the preliminary part of the festival, 21 July to 3 August at the Scène des Clubs, which takes over the Jardin Anglais area. The stage is home to 60 concerts with pop, disco, rock, salsa and reggae. Artists expected include: Gérard Lenorman, The Seatsniffers, Palatimba, the Gibsons Brothers, Patchwork, Jean-Luc Lahaye, Titanic and Kamini.
The big 10-day festival, which pulls in thousands of visitors to Geneva, extends from Baby Plage to the Quai Wilson, with the fireworks in the harbour 13 August as a major attraction, but the fun includes fair rides, concerts and scores of food stalls.
The special guest for 2011 is India.
Tickets for the fireworks are still available; details on the festival web site.
Source: Paleo, ©2011 Paleo / Kiyoungmi Kim
NYON, SWITZERLAND – The Paleo Festival in Nyon is taking Amy Winehouse’s cancellation in stride as it looks for a last-minute star fill-in to replace the singer who signed on, to much fanfare, 11 April. Winehouse’s comeback European tour, after a long fight with drugs and alcohol, was off to a painful start this week in Belgrade, Serbia, and within a day the entire tour had been cancelled.
Winehouse was booed and jeered at the Belgrade concert where, according to a number of media reports backed up by film footage, she appeared to be too drunk to perform, despite strict post-rehab instructions not to touch alcohol. Her staff reportedly has instructions to get rid of any alcohol it finds.
The BBC reports that “many had paid up to €45 (£40) to see her in a country in which wages are some of the lowest in Europe, and their anger was clear.” The Daily Mail reported 21 June that her management says the singer will not ask to be paid for the Belgrade show.
The announcement that the tour was cancelled was gentler, and Paleo as well as some of her other concert venues has picked up the tone, noting that “Amy Winehouse is withdrawing from all scheduled performances. Everyone involved wishes to do everything they can to help her return to her best and she will be given as long as it takes for this to happen. Paléo addresses this talented artist their best wishes.”
The tickets for her Nyon gig will not be refunded, as per Paleo policy. The festival says it will announce her replacement as soon as one is found.
In Annemasse.
Location: Annemasse, France
Link out: http://www.chateau-rouge.net/site/saison-2010/i…
Date: 27 May 2011
Old and loved coming to Montreux: BB King, Jimmy Cliff, Santana, Ricky Martin, George Benson and more
Montreux, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The web site of the Montreux Jazz Festival was hacked Tuesday 12 April and the programme, a closely guarded secret, was published online two days ahead of the official announcement. The festival office has hired a company to find the leak.
Officially, we won’t know until Thursday 14 April at 10:00 what the complete lineup is, but unofficially, most of it is already out there, the MJF office said Tuesday.
The festival office has produced the official if incomplete programme. Check back Thursday for more news.
Amy Winehouse, at Paleo 23 July, in Nyon
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Amy Winehouse is Paleo’s “surprise guest”, the top billing for the July music festival in Nyon, the organization announced Mondayy 11 April.
Soul queen Winehouse, who was until recently out of the limelight for several months recovering from health problems and drug addiction, will be doing a European tour this summer.
She’ll appear Sunday 23 July at Paleo. The festival’s excitement at adding her to the billing was tangible in its press release: “Amy Winehouse: an extraordinary voice, a true charisma and powerful, emotion-laden melodies. In the company of a deliciously vintage backing group, this rare artist can be discovered live on stage this summer at the Festival!”
Tickets for Paleo go on sale Wednesday 13 April, online and in outlets listed on the festival site.
http://www.dailymotion.com/videox3jtjiMad rush for tickets: Tuesday 13 April
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s largest open-air music festival promises another 5 days of hot music 19-24 July 2011, as it has done every summer for the past 35 years,
The lineup has now been announced and includes: Jack Johnson, James Blunt, The Chemical Brothers, The Strokes, Robert Plant, Portishead, PJ Harvey, Eddy Mitchell, Jamel, Jean-Louis Aubert, Cali, Katerine, Patrice and The National.
The guest of honour this year is the Caribbean for the Village du Monde, so expect some warm beats, with a range of flavours from the region.
The detailed music lineup is now on the Paleo site. Tickets can be purchased online or at outlets listed on the site, but plan ahead to queue for the tickets, which disappear very rapidly every year.
The 2011 poster competition was wone by Kyoungmi Kim, a graphic artist and third-year student at the Geneva High School for Art and Design (Head).
The competition is organized jointly by Paléo and the University of Applied Science of Western Switzerland (HES-SO).
Kim said of her winning design, “I didn’t want to go the way of over-serious abstract graphics. It seemed important to highlight the festive dimension of the event.”
An Irish Evening at the Arene de Geneve.
Location: Geneva
Link out: http://www.geneva-arena.ch/event_details.php?ei…
Date: 19 Apr 2011
Bob Dylan, Azkena Rock Festival 2010 (photo, Alberto Cabello/wikipedia)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Legendary American folk singer-songwriter Bob Dylan is coming to Switzerland for a one-day concert: the Summer Sound Sursee Festival in canton Lucerne.
Dylan, 69, will perform on 24 June in Switzerland as part of his worldwide tour.
Tickets are on sale now through Ticketcorner.
Geneva and Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Shakira will show again why her hips don’t lie in Geneva and Zurich. The Colombian singer announced she is, once again, visiting Switzerland as part of her The Sun Comes Out tour.
Shakira will perform 7 June 2011 at the Arena de Geneve and 8 June at Zurich’s Hallenstadion, the same stadiums where she performed in 2010 and which sold out in a couple of hours.
Tickets go on sale Friday 11 March through Ticketcorner and FNAC.
Sting at an Abbey Road rehearsal for the Symphonicity tour, part of Montreux Jazz Festival 2011
Montreux, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Sting will play at Montreux 11 July, the Montreux Jazz Festival announced Monday morning, with tickets to go on sale Wednesday 9 March at 10:00.
The announcement about his Symphonicity tour concert comes well ahead of the programme announcement for the rest of the festival. Sting will perform with a symphony orchestra and band, conducted by Sarah Hicks, at the Auditorium Stravinski.
The jazz festival statement notes that: “Sting’s most celebrated songs have been re-interpreted especially for this tour and will include fan-favorites such as The Police hits “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”, “Roxanne”, “Next To You” and “Every Breath You Take,” to notable songs from Sting’s enduring solo career – “Englishman in New York,” “Fragile,” “Russians,” “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” “Fields Of Gold,” and “Desert Rose.” Sting will also be joined by a group of accomplished musicians, comprised of Dominic Miller (Sting’s longtime guitarist), Rhani Krija (Sting’s longtime multi-genre percussionist), Jo Lawry (v! ocalist) and Ira Coleman (bassist).”
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Musician Elton John won’t be appearing at the Arena in Geneva Thursday evening: the singer has the flu. The concert, where he was to appear with Ray Cooper, is postponed to 26 May, Opus One announced Thursday afternoon. An earlier concert, in December, was postponed until today due to sickness.
Tickets for December or 3 February are valid for May, says the organizer, but if ticket-holders are unable to attend they have until 3 March to be reimbursed.
Asmara All Stars, band behind "Eritrea's Got Soul"
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Eritrea’s new album, “Eritrea’s Got Soul”, is one of the world’s best holiday gifts, for the power of the unlikely recordings to tell a story from a small African nation.
Three international albums in 50 years for a population of five million people with nine languages who have their own musical heritage but who have known little besides war led to French musician Bruno Blum working with Eritrean authorities to create a band called Asmara All Stars and to convince German company Out Here to produce the 13 tracks.
Government authorities, particularly authoritarian ones, are not often part of a popular new music album. Many of the musicians in the band are civil servants, regularly called on to play for the army, according to Radio France International’s (RFI) David Brown.
Blum insisted that he be given free rein, including bringing in a few musicians who are not civil servants.
Eritrea (photo: Out Here, Germany)
Brown writes that “French blues guitarist, songwriter, producer, music author, painter and cartoonist Bruno Blum was invited in 2006 by the official Eritrean Cultural Affairs Office to create a modern yet traditional sound from a country that has faced a cultural and economic blockade for the past decade.”
Five thousand European-based Eritreans in February 2010 gathered in front of the United Nations in Geneva, with other protesters marching in the US and Australia against what the groups labelled US-led UN sanctions against Eritrea.
The UN Security Council in December 2009 had voted an arms embargo and other sanctions, including a ban on travel by senior Eritrean officials, for destabilizing neighbouring Somalia.
World attention was drawn to Eritrea in June 2010 when a group of boat people from the country were dramatically rescued, with Geneva-based refugee organization UNHCR highly critical “of rescue operations in the region, where Italy, Malta and Libya have disputed who is responsible for picking up boat people in distress,” GenevaLunch reported.
RFI’s Brown recounts the tale of how the 14-member band put together the music and recorded it, despite many odds, from bureaucratic fights to marrying quarreling music styles.
Blum will be known to many English-speaking music fans for his version of Bob Marley’s “War”, featuring Haile Selassie’s original speech and the Wailers.
Eritrea’s history is a long and rich saga linked to its mineral resources, closeness to Egypt during the time of the pharoahs and its 1,600km of Red Sea coastline. It became an Italian colony in 1890, 21 years after the opening of the Suez Canal, then part of Italian East Africa in 1936, along with Ethiopia and Sudan.
It was ruled by the British under a UN mandate from 1941 to 1951, and, shortly after independence as a federation with its larger neighbour Ethiopia, was annexed as a province of the latter in 1952. “Lack of regard for the Eritrean population led to the formation of an independence movement in the early 1960s (1961), which erupted into a 30-year war against successive Ethiopian governments that ended in 1991,” according to Wikipedia. “Following a UN-supervised referendum in Eritrea in which the Eritrean people overwhelmingly voted for independence, Eritrea declared its independence and gained international recognition in 1993.”
The two nations fought again in 1998, a two-year border dispute that remains unresolved since UN forces pulled out, and Eritrea also went to war with Yemen. It has spent much of the past decade trying to feed its population and rebuild the economy, but with an unusually high proportion of workers in the civil service.
The country’s reputation internationally has suffered from a lack of information, with Reporters without Borders saying there is not a single foreign correspondent, and giving it a lower media rating even than North Korea. Travellers, including diplomats, have trouble obtaining permission to travel outside the capital of Asmara.
Eritrea’s single-party government continues in power despite a constitution that calls for a multi-party government.
Links to reviews of “Eritrea’s Got Soul”:
Deanne Sole / Pop Matters, Richie Troughton / The Quietus
Album (sample tracks, for-pay downloads)
Read full review of Eritrea’s Got Soul – Asmara All Stars on Boomkat.com ©
Teena Marie, one of the great voices of R&B music, and the rare white woman to make it big in the field, has died of “natural causes” according to CNN, while Rolling Stone reports that she died in her sleep of unknown causes, age 54. She was found by family members 26 December.
She was born Mary Christine Brockert in California and entered show business as a tap dancing child on the TV show “Beverly Hillbillies” but when she was 19 she was signed to a music contract. Rick James, often described as a funk legend, was a close friend and collaborator before his death in 2004. Teena Marie was briefly hospitalized in November after a grand mal seizure and she was planning to return to the stage soon in what would have been her first performance after the seizure.
Teena Marie’s first major hit, “Lover Girl” shot her to fame in 1984:
EPFL’s new media centre has exclusive research, educational use rights to make digital record of musical treasure
Ray Parker Jr.'s smooth vocals - Photo ©Montreux Jazz Festival
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Ten thousand recording tapes will now become the Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF) library, “the largest testimony of live music recorded at the same place (more than 4,000 bands played in Montreux), both in audio and video, for the past 40 years resulting in 10,000 recording tapes,” EPFL and the Montreux festival enthused when the project was announced in 2008, as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the MJF.
The global economic crisis hit soon after.
It has taken two years to find the funds, one person close to the project told GenevaLunch, but it has a home as of December 2010, at the MetaMedia centre for new media announced 9 December at EPFL.
The importance of the project has repercussions for the entire music world: back in 2008 the joint announcement by the Lausanne polytechnic university and the festival noted that “Despite the use of the best state of the art technologies at the time of each recording, there is urgency for their safeguard.” The physical deterioration and technological obsolescence of the audio-visual media, says EPFL today, “of which there are no backup copies—has prompted the Montreux Jazz Festival to find a solution to manage these media in the long term.” Great 20th century recordings of music by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Phil Collins and David Bowie risked being lost.
Audemars Piguet, the Swiss watchmaking company, Montreux Sounds (owned by MJF founder Claude Nobs), Kudelski in Lausanne and EPFL have joined forces to make the digital record of 5,000 hours of music, representing some 4,000 artists. The group calls the collection of music “a unique treasure and without a doubt one of the greatest musical documents of the past 40 years”.
Includes free and paying concerts.
Location: Annecy, France
Link out: http://www.annecy.fr/index.php?idtf=620#par1650
Start date: 4 Dec 2010
End date: 19 Dec 2010
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The digital audio broadcasting (DAB) offer in Switzerland is slowly but surely growing. Three new licenses have been granted for the French-speaking area. They go to Radio Rhône SA, Radio Fribourg/Freiburg SA and Soprodi Sàrl. Rhone/Vertical will carry music with sports and in particular mountain sports programes, Fribourg plans to offer music with cultural and educational programmes, while Soprodi will focus on French language music with programmes on sustainable development.
Seven other applicants were either refused or withdrew during the application period, which opened in 2008, for not meeting the criteria set by Ofcom, the federal communications office.
St Gottard Pass, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Lead singer Steve Lee of the Swiss rock group Gotthard was mourned Saturday 16 October by his family, close friends and a crowd of an estimated 3,000 fans, at the Gotthard Pass. Lee died 5 October in a freak biking accident near Las Vegas, in the US.
The mourners made the trek to the pass, at just over 2,100 metres, despite inhospitable weather, with wind and rain and snow.
Link to article in swissinfo.
Video, TSR television
At the Holy Trinity Church, in Geneva.
The Choral Group intends to give the entire retiring collection to ESCA – the English-Speaking Cancer Association.
Location: 14 rue du Mont Blanc, Geneva
Link out: https://rhawking.web.cern.ch/rhawking/htcweb/
Date: 16 Oct 2010
Start time: 20:00
Music, second-hand clothing, coctails and more. Read all details in Geneva Living.
Location: Place des Volontaires 2, Geneva
Link out: http://genevalunch.com/geneva-living/2010/10/05…
Date: 8 Oct 2010
By the Geneva chamber music orchestra in favor of the Vaud Red Cross.
Information: +41 (0) 844 677 677.
Location: Morges, Vaud
Link out: http://mailto:beausobre@morges.ch
Date: 8 Oct 2010
First-ever principal guest conductor
8 October: Neeme Jaervi named music, artistic director
Kazuki Yamada (photo, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande / Yves Petit)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Kazuki Yamada, young star on the international orchetral concert circuit, has been named the first-ever principal guest conductor with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR) since the orchestra was created in 1918. He has signed a three-year contract to lead the orchestra for 10 concerts a year, a minimum of five weeks, starting in September 2012.
The maestro was approached by the orchestra’s foundation in June 2010 to take on the role of music director, but, the OSR said Wednesday 22 September, “After a thorough reflection on the various requirements of this position, the OSR Foundation, together with Maestro Kazuki Yamada, have mutually agreed on a collaboration” with the 31-year-old conductor as principal guest conductor.
Yamada makes his debut with several major international orchestras during the 2010-2011 season: in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at Barbican Hall, in Paris debut with the Orchestre de Paris and in Berlin with Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin.
The foundation also announced Wednesday that it is proposing Neeme Jaervi as artistic and music director. The orchesta’s musicians will vote on the proposal at a meeting 8 October. (update 8 October: the nomination was accepted and Jaervi will lead the orchestra starting January 2011.
If approved, Jaervi would also start a three-year contract in September 2012. Jaervi, born in Estonia, is just starting a new contract in September 2010 as music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. He has been a guest conductor in major orchestras around the world and has appeared several times with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Stimmreise at the Chateau de Chillon, Switzerland, September 2010
(videos) Montreux, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A revolution is taking place in the Swiss Alps and it’s anything but quiet, as the Stimmreise band/quartet showed Thursday night 9 September at the Chateau de Chillon near Montreux. The foursome, created earlier in 2010 in its present form, played an astonishing repertoire of music that defies classification, starting with the odd variety of instruments: bass, guitar, clarinet and yodeller. Nadja Raess is a yodeller who is also a classically trained singer from the Zurich Conservatory, and while she sometimes performs and sings traditional yodel music, this was billed as an evening of classic wordless yodels with modern variations for yodel as an instrument, her specialty.
The show is only two weeks old and there was a sense as the audience left that we were lucky to be there at the start of something very special. Their first CD will be out in November 2010. It didn’t hurt to have the performance at the Chillon Castle as the sun set over Lake Geneva, one of a series of concerts there.
Stimmreise in concert, Chillon Castle, Switzerland, September 2010
The result was breathtaking in every sense. Raess has a beautiful pure voice with impressive power that easily makes it the dominant instrument when she opts for that. At times it was difficult for the ear to separate clarinet from yodel, with exquisite harmonies. Equally impressive was the variety of music, ranging from a handful of traditional yodel songs, which some in the audience were clearly expecting, to disonant jazzy pieces as well as melodic, well-crafted quartet music closer to Brahm’s lullabies than mountain hullabaloo stuff. There was a bit of that, too, foot-stomping and all, with singer Raess tossing off her very high heels to romp barefoot on the stage for the rest of the show.
Stimmreise is a group of seriously professional performers who, without saying a word all evening, not even hello, held the audience in the palm of its hand. The band alternately enchanted with its music and its antics, from the moment they came out looking like somber extras from The Blues Brothers to the sketch where Raess, looking bored while the boys suddenly have a madcap jam session, puts her fingers in her mouth and lets rip a piercing whistle that would make any 11-year-old lad jealous. The others in the group: Dani Haeusler, clarinet, Marc Scheidegger, guitar, and Richard Hugener, e-bass.
