Swabian festival kick-off & Franconian cordiality - after two sold-out concerts in front of a great & very dedicated audience, we return to the Gendarmenmarkt in the best of moods. We're now looking forward to playing our tour programme in three concerts at home.

A festival - especially one with a long tradition - can bring a city together. We clearly felt this around our opening concert at the Ludwigsburg Palace Festival and were delighted that the idea of unifying classical music is alive here, too.
One of our “living traditions” is that on tour, the chief conductor invites to dinner after one of the concerts - in Swabia, of course, that meant an opulent „Maultaschen“ buffet.

Herrieden in Middle Franconia, the smallest and last of our guest venues, especially impressed us. Not only with its magnificent baroque collegiate basilica of St. Vitus and Deocar and the surreal number of stork nests, but also with its enormous commitment. With a population of just over 8,000, our concert (part of „Fränkischer Sommer“) was sold out within 36 hours. Volunteers provided us with coffee and homemade cakes and a lot was done to support us, from the hotel to the inn with extended opening hours after the concert to the bus company. “Everything for the music,” a friendly helper modestly replied to our praise. We were really touched by this and the great enthusiasm after the concert. Great class, Herrieden!

We have experienced time and again on our tour that every hall sounds different. Trumpeter Stephan Stadtfeld and trombonist Vladimir Vereš demonstrated to our social media manager Eleonora Gelmetti up at the organ and down in the aisle how a duo of two brass instruments sounds in the basilica - listen to it on our Insta channel.  

“In a church, we always have to take the reverberation into account when we play. In a brass ensemble, it can be very beautiful - for example, when we play together with the organ and can sit on top of its sound with our playing. That is more brass-friendly than a dry acoustic,” explains Stephan. “But when we play with a symphony orchestra, as we do here, we have to be very careful not to cover up the strings and accentuate the accords extra precise. Listening to different halls is a matter of experience. I already had my first opportunities to practise this in the youth orchestra when we were on the road. You then pass that on yourself.”

(And once again many thanks to clarinettist Norbert Möller for his support by taking all those photos that capture the atmosphere of our trip outside of the concerts (he plays then) so marvelously. Here are four of them in Ludwigsburg and Herrieden: Bassoonist Franziska Haussig, some good-humored string players backstage, cellist Alexander Kahl and the wonderful woodwind line-up of our tour: Prof. Ralf Forster, Luka Mitev, Kihoon Hong, Michaela Kuntz, Yuan Yu, Antje Schurrock, Franziska Haussig and Norbert Möller).