Over the Alps to the azure sea – Liechtenstein
SCHELLENBERG – The MV-Cäcilia-Schellenberg-Musikanten conjured up a decent piece of summer longing on Saturday evening with their “Bella Italia” concert in the packed community hall.
As always with the passive concerts of the Schellenberger brass band at the end of January, the creative compact part of the show was reserved for the second part of the evening. After the brisk start with youth music, which, with pieces like “Mambo No. 5” or “Greek Wine” alongside a “Star Wars” excursion into the depths of space, already made you want to travel south to summer beaches, the MV went on -Cäcilia-Musikanten under the proven and gestural elegant direction of conductor Matthias Seewald namely first in the majestic realms of the alpine high mountains.
Impasto painted mountain pictures
Mysterious, mighty and romantic, the Swiss mountains presented themselves at the beginning with the “Alpina Fanfare” by the Ticino composer Franco Cesarini – a work of longing, which the productive wind music composer, conductor and flautist Cesarini wrote in 1996 for his radio colleague Kurt Brogli and his well-known Swiss Loss Band wrote. Elegant and mysterious and with an excitingly sustained drum rhythm reminiscent of Ravel’s Bolero, the slow concert march “Orion” by the Belgian Jan van der Roost came across the stage before the Cäcilia musicians reached the climax of the first part of the concert with Armin Kofler’s programmatic glacier panorama “Melting giants” opened the big symphonic paint pots to conjure up a cinemascope-wide tone painting of climate change from the melting of the eternal ice of the Alps threatened into the hall.
Because although the painful melancholy about the current disappearance of the majestic glaciers is clearly audible, the play ends with the optimistic prospect that future generations could get climate change under control. The first part of the concert then ended in a relaxed manner with the hearty folkloric “Augenblicke” polka by the young Tyrolean drummer and brass band conductor Martin Scharnagl. In the “Medici” march by Dutch march king Johan Wichers, which was played in honor of no fewer than nine brass band jubilarians, those honored had to play along before the break, otherwise there would have been too few instruments on stage.
From bel canto to pop
It has become a fine tradition at the January passive concerts by MV Cäcilia Schellenberg that the second part of the concert is always a compact and creative music show with a different motto. This time the part of the show was themed «Bella Italia», and it opened full, but with a dash of irony, with the Italian national anthem. A number of young musicians were grouped at the front of the stage with an Italian flag, a large Italian flag and the secret national symbol of the southern neighbor stretched out in the air – guess: with a football – while the Cecilia musicians played the brisk “Inno Nazionale» by Michele Novaro.
This battle song, which has been popular with freedom fighters in Northern Italy since 1847, took 100 years through numerous political upheavals before it was able to establish itself as the official “Canto degli Italiani” in the Italian Republic after the Second World War. During the Italian unification struggles in the second half of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi’s prisoner’s chorus (“Va pensiero”) from his opera “Nabucco” was at least as popular a secret battle hymn. And this choral song was also part of the beautiful-sounding medley “Vivo Belcanto” by the Dutchman Kees Vlaak alias Alfred Bösendorfer in the concert, in which the Cäcilia musicians were allowed to indulge in the famous tenor arias by Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, Aida and La Traviata as well as instrumentally in the folkloric and romantic “Schönklang” sector of classics such as “Santa Lucia” or “Funiculi Funicula”.
At least as fast, elegant and entertaining was a medley of “Italo Pop Classics” such as “Gloria” or “Azzurro” in the arrangement by Erwin Jahreis, before Andrea Bocelli’s melting love song “Vivo per lei” was once again very romantic in the hall would.
The musical lectures were combined with a small music quiz in the audience, in which the respective songs had to be guessed after the first bars of Verdi’s “Va pensiero” and Adriano Celentano’s “Azzurro”. Andrea Bocelli’s most famous song with the most YouTube clicks was not “Vivo per lei”, but – you guessed it – his farewell anthem “Con te partirò”, which became famous a second time in a duet with Sarah Brightman. ), with which Bocelli topped the charts in 1995. Finally, on the return journey from “Bella Italia”, the MV Cecilia musicians touched on the Tuscan capital of Florence with Julius Fučik’s famous “Florentiner March” (and the quiz question as to which ingredients belong in “Florentiner Chrömle”). Johann Strauss’ “Radetzky March” and a reprise of the trio of the Florentine March were heard just as quickly and at the end with enthusiastic applause from the audience.