30 May - 1 June
As usual, click on the image to view it at a larger size (30-50K)
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Poster for the concert we flew down to Luxembourg to see - the European premiere of Jon Lord's new piece, Boom of the Tingling Strings, performed by the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Paul Mann, and the Australian pianist Michael Kieran Harvey. Also in the programme were Britten's
Four Seas Interludes and Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5. If you are interested in reading about the concert, our friend Catrin has posted her review to the Highway Star forum, to which I have added a few more lines, and then Paul Mann, the conductor, wrote some more details. |
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(Sorry, not our photo but a postcard):
the Grand Duke & Duchess of Luxembourg, as well as the former Grand Duke (the father of
the present one, we believe), were sitting with the composer, two rows behind us,
and the Army General in the row behind them, all surrounded by a bunch of bodyguards.
We all had to stand up as the entourage entered/left the auditorium, while the orchestra
onstage played the national anthem.
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Actually, my scanner (or the scanning software) is often very temperamental, and this was the
first scan of the postcard image I got!
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Next day, we had a whole afternoon to kill before our flight back home, so we had a walk around town centre...
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The Big Band Memory onstage at the town's main square, Place d'Arms. It looked like anyone could
go up and sing a song - perhaps not, but this woman's rendition of "Ave Maria" sounded pretty
bad, and we had assumed that.
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Place Guillaume II: this is where Deep Purple & the Rumanian Orchestra played "Concerto for
Group and Orchestra"
in 2000 (God knows how 30,000 people could have squeezed in here!)
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Outside the Grand Ducal Palace.
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A kind German tourist offers to hold Usako & Kousa for me, as I try to photograph them
outside the Palace gate...
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The bars around the corner: The Tube and the Art Scene :-)
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Further down the road, the St. Michael's church we didn't go into but stopped outside to listen to
the nice organ music for a few minutes.
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Further down still, there is an old bridge, well known for the lovely view over the town on
both sides, but which we don't know the name of(!). This is the view looking towards North
from the bridge. The red bridge in the photo, Pont
Joséphine Charlotte (better known as Pont Rouge), is a famous suicide spot -
I saw a very funny
documentary film about it at the Berlin Film Festival over 10 years ago,
but since then they have erected a fence on both sides of the bridge to stop people throwing
themselves off it.
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After walking around in the glaring sun (and it's very humid too - we know, because
Kousa's ears have been very soft all weekend), then having a lunch of seafood salad,
we're all in a zombie state as we write this, sitting at an outside table
in the shades at the hotel restaurant and drinking gallons of water and champagne - no, no,
not gallons of champagne but gallons of water with a couple of glasses of champagne! (The problem
with drinking champagne in this weather is that you have to drink it very quickly before it gets
warm...)
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BTW, Luxemburgisch is a very strange language. Some words are distinctively German, the rest sound like a strange mixture of Dutch/French/German. Most people here seem to speak both this language and French, plus very good German and passable English. | |
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