Europe Concert Tour 2007
Jennifer Chou
In September 2007, Joseph and I went to England and Italy to give concerts, the tour was successful and all four performances went well. My recent excessive work as a part-time telesales made me very tired and much behind with practicing, so I decided to escape Australia completely 10 days before my first concert in order to practice and to get myself in shape for the performances. It proved to be a wise strategy as I was able to relax and rest in London, caught up with practice, and still had time out in the National Gallery where I visited three times! Meanwhile I also decided to quit the telesales job as it has become apparent that my physical well-being and performance standard are both under threat because of it.
The first concert was my solo organ recital on Sunday 2nd September in the Westminster Abbey before the 6.30pm Evening Prayer. It was such an experience to perform there, the organ there is a wonderful instrument and very comfortable to play. Playing in that space, one’s spirit seems to have been transcended upward. I tried to feel the heavens from where the organ is while the audience downstairs was enjoying the roaring sound of the organ bouncing against the stones walls. As the venue is so popular and constantly packed with tourists, there was no lack of audience and I was very pleased to play for hundreds of people.
The following day Joseph and I went to Pirbright in Surrey (England) to give the first of our three organ and trombone duo concerts. The Pirbright parish church is a small stone building of many hundreds of years old. The organ (Kenneth Jones, 2000) sits in the gallery upstairs with a little over a dozen of stops, a big contrast to where I was and what I played the day before. Here we performed a one-and-a-half hour program and the church was packed with over 120 people. It was good to see some familiar faces and to catch up with them after the concert. Brett the Vicar had just been installed there and she was overjoyed to see so many people filled the church up completely. At her speech, she even asked the audience where they were on Sunday mornings! How true!
We then had a day off to relax before going to Italy. On Wednesday 5 September, we flew to Milan. The same evening Joseph’s computer sensed wireless broadband connection in our hotel room and we found out that the great singer Pavarotti had died that day and the whole country was mourning. The Italian TV was broadcasting Pavarotti’s past performances. We were able to relax for a day before heading to our concert destination, so we visited the lacey look Cathedral of Milan in the morning. It is just magnificent. We spent the afternoon along Lake Como, an hour north of Milan, rambled uphill and sat outside the Cathedral for a cup of wicked hot chocolate!
Friday 7 September we took the train from Milan Central to Borgosesia where we were picked up by Mario the director of the organ festival in which we were to perform. He drove us to Coggiola where our hotel room is 3 minutes walk from the church. What was so cool in this short journey was that we saw Mario’s wife coming in her car from opposite direction at a round about and then they both stopped their cars on the spot so that she can say hi to us at a roundabout, as if it’s so normal to stop the car anytime anywhere you like! Coggiola is a small town over 400M above sea level, it is surrounded by hills, with stunning landscape. Italian churches are often highly decorated inside, with fresco and statues everywhere. The acoustics in this church was perfect for the pipe organ. Since Joseph is more used to concert hall acoustics, he found it such a treat to play in that space. The pedalboards of Italian organs are somewhat different from the rest of the world and it took me a while to get used to it. I took 2 hour sleeps slots in between rehearsals to trick my brain to believe that I have been there for days and that pedalboard is just one of those that I am used to. It worked as I didn’t hit any wrong pedal notes in the concert (8 September), of course with extra concentration! We performed a program with music from baroque to modern days and the audience loved it.
The very next day (9 September) we were driven to Romagnano for our next and last concert. Romagnano is small town about 30 minutes from Coggiola, we were able to see the Alps from a distance, and the snow on top of the mountain. The organ in Romagnano has only one manual, so I simplified some of my registrations to make things easier to manipulate. The pedalboard was the same type as the day before, by then I was at ease with it. There we performed a mostly baroque program with two non-baroque pieces.
Audience in Italy is perceptive, they love music and they enjoy going to concerts. Concerts tend to start late, punctuality is merely a cultural thing, the advertised starting time 9pm wasn’t real as we have learnt in this trip. People started coming before 9pm, and more come at 9pm and shortly after. By quarter past, most people were there and somebody would say some welcome words for a few minutes, followed by a longer speech by a different person important to the happening of the concert, and after that longer speech, yet a different person (in our case it was Mario) gave verbal introduction to each piece in the program during which we went to our places and got ready to play. By the time we actually played the first note, it was almost 9.30pm! Since we went to an orchestra concert the evening before our own concert in Coggiola, we learnt the pattern there and anticipated the same procedures on the two evenings of our own performances.
After both evening concerts (i.e. around 11pm), we were treated to delicious Italian dinner until midnight before heading back to the hotel. Delicious Italian food is to my liking because it is simple and plain and not oily, when coupled with a glass of red or white wine it was just supreme.
Because of our busy schedules, we needed to rush back to Melbourne the very next day after our last concert to catch up with work we both have left behind.
