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May. 29th, 2006 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olorielThis Sunday saw the staging of the LOTR Symphony in the Kölnarena, which is, naturally, the reason for my "absence" from LJ. (If three days' silence counts as absence, that is.)
Not because Cologne is far away from my home - as we know, it isn't - but because I had guests from further-away Stuttgart.
Melanie and Frank arrived Saturday evening. We arranged some last details with the Freiburgians whom we'd meet on Sunday, printed our choir music, made Chili and then invaded the Tom Bombadil, our local pub, which I had never visited yet (yes, in spite of the charming name - I neglect my fannish duties, I know). It's a lovely little old Bergian-style house, dark but hung with random little lamps all over and decorated with all sorts of funny random stuff. Lots of wood, too. And very cozy. We didn't stay too long, though; after all, we had to be more or less in shape for the concert...
We got up at 9 in the morning - Frank complained that it was much too early, but with a Hobbit breakfast and lengthy getting-into-garb and the drive to Cologne, it was 12:20 until we were at the Kölnarena. We were to meet up with Arwen and Cye at 12:45. So we circled around the arena, looking for the main entrance where we meant to meet them, learned that there was no main entrance, decided that the West entrance was the main one (For Gondor!) and circled the arena some more. We met Círdan preparing the pre-show party, and Olwë trying to help the musicians find the artists's entrance, and some random journalist who asked us whether we were going to sing that night. (On the stage? YOU DON'T WANT US TO DO THAT.) We took some photos of Mel's and my Éowyn-inspired dresses being whipped around by the very ambientic gusts of wind, and then Arwen and Cye showed up. We went to a little Turkish bar-and-grill where we had lunch (specialties from Far Harad!) and when we were done eating, it was almost time for the party. By now, there were many people in garb up there, and we saw many familiar faces (you know most people in the fandom after a while, at least by sight), including![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nefantoiel, tzaaihta, Varda, Nim and Bilbo, Ench and Pala, and, of course, a good part of last Ring*Con's Elven choir.
When we were finally allowed in, we first gravitated towards the stall of the German Tolkien Society to get our helping at the traditional evil quiz. We broke the tradition by not winning anything this time, but they broke the tradition of handing the prizes out buffet-wise, too. (On Tolkien days, there's a big table of prizes, and all quiz participants get something - but of course, more questions answered correctly will get you an earlier pick, so you can take something really nifty. But then, there were around 6000 people expected for the evening, so you can't have prizes for everybody...) There was an Irish folk band who tried to fight the drab stadium atmosphere with their music. All the dressed-up fans helped a lot with that. Apparently, the Express newspaper's resident superman-wannabe, Zik (with the sort of ridiculously sharpy-painted backpack that High School freshmen think "cool"), thought so as well. He expected us to strike poses so he could take a stupid photo. Well, we are no Trekkers, idiot, we don't have one big symbolic hand signal. Sod off.
I managed to drag some more people (Pala,nefantoiel and our token orc (or token drow, depending on the day) tzaaihta) along to the Elven choir meeting (hey, we have a token Haradan, too). It began with all of us playing pearl-divers because one of the many pearl-strings on the dress of a girl beautifully dressed up as Elwing tore and send tiny pearls spinning all over the floor.
We practiced Twilight and Shadow, the Drinking Song and the Rohan canon they'd invented for this spring's Tolkienfest (with an additional stanza, because the Rohan group's Théoden look-alike, Herugrim, was born on May 28th - guess what day it was!). There were many annoying gapers. They probably thought we were the "real" choir.
When the Irish folk band had finished, Círdan announced us, the Green Hell Elven Choir... I'm afraid one didn't hear all that much of Twilight and Shadow, as it's very slow and quiet and probably got lost somewhere in the staircase, but the Rohan song went better, and for the Drinking Song, people were clapping along happily. We were also filmed for the ARD Morgenmagazin (the early morning program of Germany's "respectable" TV channelsthat still think that Trekkies are fans of Star Wars, bloody idiots). (Eventually, we weren't shown in the two-minute bit they screened about the concert at 5:45 this morning, anyway.)
We were invited to an Elvish harvest festival LARP in October. I'm very tempted to go.
Oh, and we got better seats! We had bought tickets for the second-cheapest category, but when we arrived at the party, we were told to go to the sale desk after 4 pm to get new tickets - and so we ended up in the € 53,60 category even though we'd "only" paid 33,30. Hah! The atmosphere of the Kölnarena for an almost classical concert is, of course, horrible. It was not improved by the random guys running around to sell popcorn, ice cream and programs. I know these guys need to earn money, but can they please not do that when the choir is already marching in?
Although it took about ten minutes until all the little Ainur had finally risen up - I mean, marched in - and another two until the conductor saw fit to appear on stage as well. To make up for his belated appearance, he seemed to rush through the whole symphony a bit - everything was played a lot quicker than you know it from the soundtrack CDs. Also, it was noticeable that the people who had studied the whole thing with the respective choirs didn't know too much about the subject matter. (Avaru, Círdan's girlfriend, who actually sang in the choir, told us about all the things that went wrong even in the very last week...) They mangled the poor Elvish. Especially the bass (!) singing Aragorn's lines in The Return of the King was horrible. "teru Umbra-meyta"? I don't know where you learned reading, but that's not how "tenn' Ambar-metta" should be pronounced. Seriously. And the sound-mixing was horrible in places, although it got better towards the end.
All in all, it was still very nice, but it wasn't nearly as excellent as last year's symphony in Neumünster was. Alas. The conductor they had there had worked with the actual soundtrack recordings, though, so he was a lot closer to the whole thing...
At first we had pondered watching the "Creating the LOTR Symphony" DVD back home (it was only 9:30 pm), but then we decided that it probably wouln't benefit the evening's experience, so we decided for the RingStars instead. Good choice; we had a lot of fun. For those who don't know the RingStars: A bunch of wonderful crazy fans created a LOTR movies parody musical, with modern music chosen to fit the scenes of the three movies. BTW, I only noticed yesterday that Boromir somehow ended up with all his songs being by Queen. Coincidence?
Today, we went to Cologne again. First we went to the Schatzkammer, a LARP store, where I bought mead for the coming weekend; afterwards, we had lunch and then went window-shopping, although we couldn't resist the lure of Lush...
And now I'm home to type this before taking off to the airport to pick upmalicedl, who is returning from her teaching assistant year in England. Yay!
Not because Cologne is far away from my home - as we know, it isn't - but because I had guests from further-away Stuttgart.
Melanie and Frank arrived Saturday evening. We arranged some last details with the Freiburgians whom we'd meet on Sunday, printed our choir music, made Chili and then invaded the Tom Bombadil, our local pub, which I had never visited yet (yes, in spite of the charming name - I neglect my fannish duties, I know). It's a lovely little old Bergian-style house, dark but hung with random little lamps all over and decorated with all sorts of funny random stuff. Lots of wood, too. And very cozy. We didn't stay too long, though; after all, we had to be more or less in shape for the concert...
We got up at 9 in the morning - Frank complained that it was much too early, but with a Hobbit breakfast and lengthy getting-into-garb and the drive to Cologne, it was 12:20 until we were at the Kölnarena. We were to meet up with Arwen and Cye at 12:45. So we circled around the arena, looking for the main entrance where we meant to meet them, learned that there was no main entrance, decided that the West entrance was the main one (For Gondor!) and circled the arena some more. We met Círdan preparing the pre-show party, and Olwë trying to help the musicians find the artists's entrance, and some random journalist who asked us whether we were going to sing that night. (On the stage? YOU DON'T WANT US TO DO THAT.) We took some photos of Mel's and my Éowyn-inspired dresses being whipped around by the very ambientic gusts of wind, and then Arwen and Cye showed up. We went to a little Turkish bar-and-grill where we had lunch (specialties from Far Harad!) and when we were done eating, it was almost time for the party. By now, there were many people in garb up there, and we saw many familiar faces (you know most people in the fandom after a while, at least by sight), including
nefantoiel, tzaaihta, Varda, Nim and Bilbo, Ench and Pala, and, of course, a good part of last Ring*Con's Elven choir. When we were finally allowed in, we first gravitated towards the stall of the German Tolkien Society to get our helping at the traditional evil quiz. We broke the tradition by not winning anything this time, but they broke the tradition of handing the prizes out buffet-wise, too. (On Tolkien days, there's a big table of prizes, and all quiz participants get something - but of course, more questions answered correctly will get you an earlier pick, so you can take something really nifty. But then, there were around 6000 people expected for the evening, so you can't have prizes for everybody...) There was an Irish folk band who tried to fight the drab stadium atmosphere with their music. All the dressed-up fans helped a lot with that. Apparently, the Express newspaper's resident superman-wannabe, Zik (with the sort of ridiculously sharpy-painted backpack that High School freshmen think "cool"), thought so as well. He expected us to strike poses so he could take a stupid photo. Well, we are no Trekkers, idiot, we don't have one big symbolic hand signal. Sod off.
I managed to drag some more people (Pala,
nefantoiel and our token orc (or token drow, depending on the day) tzaaihta) along to the Elven choir meeting (hey, we have a token Haradan, too). It began with all of us playing pearl-divers because one of the many pearl-strings on the dress of a girl beautifully dressed up as Elwing tore and send tiny pearls spinning all over the floor. We practiced Twilight and Shadow, the Drinking Song and the Rohan canon they'd invented for this spring's Tolkienfest (with an additional stanza, because the Rohan group's Théoden look-alike, Herugrim, was born on May 28th - guess what day it was!). There were many annoying gapers. They probably thought we were the "real" choir.
When the Irish folk band had finished, Círdan announced us, the Green Hell Elven Choir... I'm afraid one didn't hear all that much of Twilight and Shadow, as it's very slow and quiet and probably got lost somewhere in the staircase, but the Rohan song went better, and for the Drinking Song, people were clapping along happily. We were also filmed for the ARD Morgenmagazin (the early morning program of Germany's "respectable" TV channels
We were invited to an Elvish harvest festival LARP in October. I'm very tempted to go.
Oh, and we got better seats! We had bought tickets for the second-cheapest category, but when we arrived at the party, we were told to go to the sale desk after 4 pm to get new tickets - and so we ended up in the € 53,60 category even though we'd "only" paid 33,30. Hah! The atmosphere of the Kölnarena for an almost classical concert is, of course, horrible. It was not improved by the random guys running around to sell popcorn, ice cream and programs. I know these guys need to earn money, but can they please not do that when the choir is already marching in?
Although it took about ten minutes until all the little Ainur had finally risen up - I mean, marched in - and another two until the conductor saw fit to appear on stage as well. To make up for his belated appearance, he seemed to rush through the whole symphony a bit - everything was played a lot quicker than you know it from the soundtrack CDs. Also, it was noticeable that the people who had studied the whole thing with the respective choirs didn't know too much about the subject matter. (Avaru, Círdan's girlfriend, who actually sang in the choir, told us about all the things that went wrong even in the very last week...) They mangled the poor Elvish. Especially the bass (!) singing Aragorn's lines in The Return of the King was horrible. "teru Umbra-meyta"? I don't know where you learned reading, but that's not how "tenn' Ambar-metta" should be pronounced. Seriously. And the sound-mixing was horrible in places, although it got better towards the end.
All in all, it was still very nice, but it wasn't nearly as excellent as last year's symphony in Neumünster was. Alas. The conductor they had there had worked with the actual soundtrack recordings, though, so he was a lot closer to the whole thing...
At first we had pondered watching the "Creating the LOTR Symphony" DVD back home (it was only 9:30 pm), but then we decided that it probably wouln't benefit the evening's experience, so we decided for the RingStars instead. Good choice; we had a lot of fun. For those who don't know the RingStars: A bunch of wonderful crazy fans created a LOTR movies parody musical, with modern music chosen to fit the scenes of the three movies. BTW, I only noticed yesterday that Boromir somehow ended up with all his songs being by Queen. Coincidence?
Today, we went to Cologne again. First we went to the Schatzkammer, a LARP store, where I bought mead for the coming weekend; afterwards, we had lunch and then went window-shopping, although we couldn't resist the lure of Lush...
And now I'm home to type this before taking off to the airport to pick up
malicedl, who is returning from her teaching assistant year in England. Yay!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 11:30 pm (UTC)Klingt nach einem suuuuper Abend!
hmmm.. RingStars.. wo kriegt man das her?
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 06:45 am (UTC)Öh... die RingStars DVD gab's mal im Hobbitshop (http://www.hobbitshop.de), aber ich weiß nicht, ob die immer noch da ist, die haben nur eine begrenzte Anzahl gepresst...