Sad Hotel No. 5

I haven't been singing much in public lately, but have
been pretty busy nonetheless. I've been preparing for my
upcoming trip to the USA and for the concert I have
immediately following that in March. But more about
those later.

Barbara W., Jens and I performed "Sad Hotel" - the Anne
Sexton project - again end of January. This time in the
Ruhrgebiet, a highly industrialized, densely populated
area of Germany north-west of Frankfurt. The town we
played in is called Moers and is just west of Duisburg.
They boast that with its 100,000 inhabitants it is either the
smallest city or the largest town in Germany. They have
a State Theater there, which is a bit odd, but it is suitably
small considering the importance, or lack thereof, of the
city. We performed in a little hall which held about 40
audience members and we sold it out!

It had a very strange acustic which swallowed all the bass
frequencies so we decided to amplify both me and
Barbara (instead of just Barbara) and to add some reverb
to round out the sound. That helped a little bit. However,
Jens said afterwards, that he was bothered by it since it
seemed to fade in and out. Oh well.

The weather was extremely cold and they'd been heating
like mad all day, which unfortunately played havoc with
the baby grand piano's tuning. They had just had it tuned
and in the couldn't hold it because of the change in
temperature. We had intended to record the program the
next day, but decided against it because of the tuning
problem. An out of tune piano (if it's not too bad) is OK
for a concert, but inacceptable for a recording unless it's
intentional. Sigh. Hopefully, we'll get it recorded
sometime.

We were well taken care of. These were colleagues of
Barbara's and she does other projects there as well. I
just heard from her today that they'd like us to do a
repeat performance sometime soon. They suggested
March 12 but I already have a concert on that weekend
and have rehearsal all day on the 12th. Oh well, another
time, hopefully in April.

More on upcoming events later!