it’s past 22:00, dorothee and i have been in erlangen’s markgrafentheater for a bit over two hours now — the plan was to enjoy a bit of good baroque music. the concert, titled “about baroque” was scheduled to start at 20:00…well, we are still waiting for the music to start.

so far we’ve had the musicians from the “freiburger barockorchester” carry out an ambitious, well-orchestrated, and technically no doubt very demanding attack on their various instruments. the strings have taken most of the beating so far with their, well, strings, being severly plugged, pulled and jerked every which way (alas, i have to say that their hearts don’t appear to be in it: they don’t manage to break any of the strings). the flutes and winds have been treated much better, none of that let’s-beat-the-flute-over-the-organist’s-head — though, that might be due to the fact that the organist has been replaced by a couple of mini-paperweights that are every so often taken from one key and put onto another — resulting in really long drawn out tunes and, as dorothee so aptly remarks, also resulting in the creeping conviction that we suffer from a sudden collective case of tinnitus.

the program lists

• benjamin schweitzer’s flekkicht,
• nadir vassena’s bagatelli trascendentali,
• michel van der aa’s imprint,
• juliane klein’s …und folge mir nach, and
• rebecca saunders’s rubricare

schweitzer’s piece made it rather clear, that this is anything but baroque music…the only way this could remotely be considered baroque is the way that everything appears to be programmed: think a bunch of robots trying to play instruments (that is, first generation robots with all the inherent flaws). when vassena’s bagatelli came on, people started to leave in droves — rather disappointed it seems, one man even left the theatre banging the doors. michel van der aa’s imprint was the only piece that was approaching music — but, as the old saying goes, “close, but no cigar.” after the break (“to go or not to go! that is the question to be solved. whether to go and perchance to have a beer?” to paraphrase william s.) julianne klein’s folge mir nach and rebecca saunder’s rubricare did little to improve matters: carefully arranged noise, avoiding the logical grand finale of the musicians smashing their kit on the floor…but music? no, not even close: my downstairs neighbour has a rather shy tom cat that often looses out to the cats of the neighbourhood; a couple of days ago the cats were having another go at it in the middle of the night — that was more melodic than “about baroque”…

p.s.: the critic from kulturradio was a bit more polite