Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Fireworks

508 words on

Currently there's the, apparently internationally acclaimed, annual Händel festival in Göttingen. With Göttingen not being a bastion of culture, this is most probably the highlight of a year's cultural offerings. As my dad came over for some work, I got tickets for the open air performance of Händel's Music for the Royal Fireworks which was accompanied by... fireworks.

This open air-cum-fireworks event had happened before and my flatmate Christine recommended it to me. It took place at the Kiessee and according to this mornings paper about 10000 people attended. We went there deliberately late as there were 'popular' bits scheduled before dusk and the proper concert. Unfortunately we weren't late enough and thus had to witness some of the Bach meets Beatles programme and, much much worse, Göttingen's youth orchestra accompanying two wankers going by the name of Classic Busters and trying to mutilate some of the more well known bits of old music by playing them on silly instruments and having a 'comedy' routine to go with it. Sickening. When the revolution comes, people doing what passes as 'comedy' these days and those playing accordeons should be among the first...

After sitting through that ordeal, which even the kids only seemed to find mildly amusing, the Barocktrompeten Ensemble Berlin came on, mostly a brass and bass drums. I am not a big fan of brass instruments but still they were proper musicians and you could tell by the sound. They played a couple of pieces and after a another lengthy intermission with a 'fire artist' finally starte the Music for the Royal Fireworks, along with the fireworks.

The fireworks displayed weren't excessive but they were nicely done and probably quite impressive for a small place like Göttingen. They were almost made to go along with the music but that only worked at the beginning of the movements. Probably co-ordinating and orchestra to play along with fireworks is quite hard and rather impossible to do if the orchestra and the fireworks are from different places and couldn't really practice beforehand.

The performance was quite enjoyable and predictably led to lots of applause. It gave quite a different angle on so-called serious music. Here it was 'only' used to accompany fireworks and that's exactly what it was intended for in the first place. No art-snobbery, just light entertainment. Quite the opposite of what this kind of music is mostly seen as theses days. And probably a good way to popularise music other than what's on the radio.

I wonder how the musicians feel about that. On the one hand they played through speakers and imperfect acoustics, knowing that many of the people only came for the fireworks display and their music only set a background for that. On the other hand, they received enormous applause and some people may have started liking their music.

Last night I missed all the fireworks
I must be working too hard
Must wear linen dye
Must be 75
I've no idea
No idea

Idlewild, Last Night I missed all the Fireworks

May 31, 2003, 12:27

Tagged as music.

Comments

Comment by Kaleigh Miller: User icon

I like fireworks i think they are prettya dn fun to watch well i think they should made prettier ones so that people can actually awww and owww lol well that is all i have to say right now okay bye bye l8ter….

-KaleighDanielle-

July 12, 2005, 23:08

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