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USA Tour

2005

On 23rd April we started our third US-Tour. Two years ago, we had had to fly from the Great Lakes to the West Coast and back and last year we had our New York debut. This time we just stayed in the Midwest. For the first four days we were guests of the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra. Paul Ruppa is the leader of this group, and we already met him during our first tour. So, we were very happy about this collaboration. The concert with the orchestra was set for 1st May, and part of it was to be the premiere of Jan Truhlar's Bad Haller Romanze for mandolin, guitar and plucked orchestra. So, almost every night we rehearsed together with the ensemble. And it was a nice experience after a long time to play with a plucked orchestra again. Most concertos are written for strings or chamber orchestra. And it was great fun to be part time members of the MMO, too. The Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra is a medium sized group, and the members play different brands of flatback mandolins, as it is typical for the US. But the big difference compared to a German plucked orchestra is the fact that they have mandocellos, too. They make a great addition, and it's a pity they are so rarely used over here. On Tuesday evening Daniel offered a workshop, too. Everyone who was interested could participate and work on technical and musical matters, or just watch, and many orchestra members took the chance.

On Wednesday 27th April we left for Peoria by train, for our first recital. Jeffrey Hoover, composer and Associate Dean of Central Community College was already waiting there to pick us up. We had been in touch by e-mail for easily four years already, and he had written a duo for us a while ago, but due to the distance we had never met in person. So, it was all the more great to finally meet him in person. And we still had a whole day before the recital, which meant enough time to rehearse and to spend time with Jeffrey and his familiy and also have lots of great food, too. For the recital at the Community College the next day we had a pretty big audience. The program contained a.o. American Tango by Jeffrey Hoover and some works that had never been performed in the U.S. before: Erg by Jeffrey Harrington, Nowhere left to go by Chris Rupert and Den lille Havfrue by Tyler Kaiser.

The next morning we returned to Milwaukee for the final rehearsal for Sunday. For this concert on 1st May at North Shore Presbyterian Church in Milwaukee we had an almost sold out hall. First we performed some duo music from our latest CD "Nowhere left to go" and then finished the first half of the concert, accompanied by "Vintage Frets", a smaller ensemble of members of the MMO, with the premiere of the double concerto by Jan Truhlar. The whole orchestra then played music from the early 20th century for the second part of the concert. It was so much fun to be part time members of the orchestra for this.

The last town before we left was Chicago. Chicago Composers Consortium had invited us there for a very interesting project. In April already, the members of this group had sent us their music they had written for this occasion. These were works by Tiffany Sevilla, Andre Marquetti, Elizabeth Start, Timothy Dwight Edwards, Laura Elise Schwendinger, Julia Miller and Lawrence Axelrod. With one exception all this music was new for us and were to be premiered in Chicago. Mandala by Larry Axelrod we had already played several times in Germany and recorded it in 2002. For the concert we added Jeffrey Harringtons Erg to the program. On Tuesday 3rd May our schedule was very special. We rehearsed all new pieces with the composers at the University of Illinois Chicago building. Also this was our first chance of meeting all composers in person. The concerts were planned for Thursday and Saturday, and as an extra advertisement for these, we went live on air on WFMT-Chicago radio with a short interview and the pre-premieres of Pale Cliffs by Elizabeth Start and Dreamscapes II by Tiffany Sevilla. The first recital in this project was on Thursday in Evanston/Chicago, in a former churchhall, providing very nice acoustics for our instruments. This performance was very special for us. We had never played six premieres in one program before.

On Friday morning we got a surprising and very welcome additional invitation. Tim Edwards asked us if we might like to play his piece Strange Attractor for his composition class have a little talk with his students. We loved this idea, and it turned out to be great fun for everyone. While we were in Chicago, we also took the chance to visit Newberry Library. They have some interesting scores for lute, for guitar and for mandolin there. The recital on Saturday took place in a more unusual setting. It was part of the somnambulist-concerts, a series for contemporary and often also electronic music. The organizers main idea is to bring contemporary music right to the audience, and so the atmosphere is very intimate and relaxed. The audience was very mixed, and there even were children around. And Robert Lombardo and his spouse Kathleen were there, too. We had had the pleasure to finally meet them in person and spend a wonderful evening with them earlier that week already. Robert's piece Sudden Departures is on our "Chilli con Tango" recording we did in 2000.

The day after this recital was our one and only free day. We had no dates, and we didn't have to practise. It was one of the warmest and nicest days of the whole tour, and unfortunately it also was the last one. We spent the morning together with Larry, Tim and his family at Shedd Aquarium, and the rest of the day we explored the town. Although these two weeks meant a lot of work for us, we really absolutely enjoyed our stay - not at last because everyone we met was so nice. We'd like to thank everyone who supported us in planning this tour or invited us to stay with them, and all the many people with whom we had a great time!