There are some music ‘firsts’ that Bonn would gladly do without. The very first Rockpalast live concert in an empty hall. Such a shame, as the performance by French Bluesrocker Laura Cox deserved the sold-out audience it would surely have got this evening at Bonn Harmonie. The Corona Virus though had other plans. The show must go on though it seems and so it did via livestream. Hopefully not for too long like this though!
Restrictions caused by the Corona Virus are sadly starting to bite into Bonn’s live music scene.
Yasmin Levy‘s eagerly anticipated Over The Border concert on 21 March at the Telekom Forum has had to be moved to 29 August. Current travel restrictions from her home in Israel would mean immediate two week quarantine afterwards. All tickets already purchased are good for the re-scheduled show.
Manuel Banha of 2gether Concerts warns that other scheduled events from the Festival are also at risk.
Don’t panic if you wanted to catch the Rockpalast Crossroads Festival this week but trains, planes, automobiles (or viruses) don’t allow it.
The entire festival is being broadcast via livestream from Bonn Harmonie. Copy this link to get there: https://bit.ly/2W99hKH
Programme:
12 March Wallis Bird, WellBad,
13 March Laura Cox, MaidaVale,
14 March Di-rect und False Heads
All shows 7:15 – 10:30 pm
John Lee Hooker Jr‘s concert at Bonn Harmonie on 24 March has been cancelled due to travel restrictions caused by the Corona Virus.
Hooker, the son of Blues legend John Lee who died in 2001, announced that the decision was made on advice from United Airlines and with regard to his age (68) putting him especially at risk.
The full text of Hooker Jr’s message follows
Seventeen years?! The bright neon logo hanging behind the band says ‘Est. 2003’ so it must be true, but even so it’s hard to believe, with the smiles and energy coming from the men onstage, that Thorbjørn Risager & the Black Tornado can have been around for 17 years. The band has certainly made a lot of friends in those years with it’s catchy party style live presentation. The result is that a good-sized crowd is at Bonn Harmonie this evening despite the Corona virus concerns. It’s just reward for a 6 am drive down from Copenhagen this morning, and the smile on Thorbjørn Risager’s face says he’s glad to be out of that van and standing before us this evening.
Special gusts at Bonn Folk Club in Dottendorf on Friday will be London Folk Duo Stables who will also be performing at major festivals this year including Glastonbury and Cambridge Folk.
As always, start is 7 pm. You can also catch the duo in Bonn at Rheinbuhne on the 5th and ELPI’s CoWiCO on 7th March.
Check the band’s website HERE for more details.
Also on the bill at Bonn Folk Club on Friday will be Steve Crawford & Sabrina Palm to showcase their new CD ‘Two’ which has already been allocated as „Album of the Week“ on BBC Radio nan Gàidheal in Scotland.
The new release by popular Bonn Crossover musician Marcus Schinkel and his Voyager IV Band is an audacious musical spectacle in the best traditions of Progressive Classical Rock. ELP and Tangerine Dream have both taken a shot at Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ – now Schinkel takes a fresh look at those pictures – and in typical Marcus Schinkel style – he gives it a magnificent eye and ear-catching 21st Century new coat of paint.
Can there really be a genre known as ‘Progressive Rock’ in 2020? Quite simply, Rock has progressed. It’s split into microcosms of Punk-Rock, Techno-Rock. Folk-Rock, Grunge etc etc and so forth. It was all rather different in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Deep Purple sitting down with the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969 was really going one step beyond. By 1973 Rock with Classical overtones had become such a money-spinner that Mike Oldfield sold a million top of the range HiFi turntables when he released his Tubular Bells.
In between these two events Keith Emerson had taken time out to pick up on a somewhat obscure piano concerto by the equally obscure (to British Rockers anyway) Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Emerson Lake and Palmer’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ was recorded at the normally hard rock promoting Newcastle City Hall in March 1971 and found its way from Geordie Land to many a mystified Rock fans ears, and rather like the fictional game Jumanji, it disappeared once again to fascinate a new ‘owner’ many years later.
Marcus Schinkel brings Mussorgsky and the Moog synthesizer into the 21st Century
Marcus Schinkel will be a familiar name to Bonn music lovers, He is one of that rare breed of musician who easily straddles Classical, Jazz and Rock. Fittingly for a Bonn local, Schinkel has most famously lent these talents to new interpretations of the City’s most famous son – with 2004’s ‘News from Beethoven’ and most recently, 2015’s ‘Crossover Beethoven’. it’s one thing to interpret Classical pieces themselves, but quite another though to interpret an interpretation – Or is this an interpretation of the original? Typically for Marcus Schinkel though, his band Voyager IV’s interpretation of the erstwhile piano concerto is an entity with nods to both Mussorgsky and ELP but ultimately with a life and style all its own.
Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures’ was a freeflow musical rendering inspired by individual paintings by Russian painter Viktor Hartmann. Baba Yaga, Promenade, The Bogatyr (Gates of Kiev) are all to be found in the artwork of Hartmann, the concerto of Mussorgsky, the concert of ELP and the CD of Voyager IV. Whether Schinkel takes his inspiration from the artwork, from the concerto or from the concert it’s difficult to tell for sure. A mixture of the original score given wings by the Rockstar flurry of ELP’s whirling Hammond sound and the mesmerizing vocals of Johannes Kuchta. There are nods to the ELP version in musical style for sure but just in case you miss the connection there is an excellent take of ‘Lucky Man’ which wasn’t actually on the Pictures disc but was released a couple of years previously with Greg Lake’s song containing one of the first recorded (literally) appearances of a Moog-synthesizer solo. I’m sure that fact wasn’t lost on Mr Schinkel, a mean synths man himself.
Johannes Kuchta brings a unique vocal texture to the project with his carefully measured vocal style
I love some of the oddball stuff on offer here. Bydlo was skipped over by ELP but Mussorgsky’s cattle cart inspired piece is turned into an entertaining infomatic-style speakover called ‘The Bullock Cart’ courtesy of messrs Schinkel and Kuchta. I had suspected that with a superb cover design by Lieve Vanderschaeve depicting Space and astronauts there was a theme decided on to pin the disparate artistic parts together but how can you really pull that off for an entire disc when you are following pieces devoted to catacombs and Bullock Carts? ‘The Great Gates of Kiev’ skirts the problem by taking the basic piano melody from Mussorgsky and adding lyrics telling the famous tale of an early adventure into the heavens with the sub-title ‘Daedelus Calling’. I love the mix of old and new which, for me anyway, is the whole discs highpoint – utilizing old composition with modern sound and production.
My advice is to stop trying to make sense of it all and just sit back and enjoy Marcus Schinkel and his marvellous band (Johannes Kuchta vocals, Wim de Fries drums and Fritz Roppel bass guitars). If you are lucky enough to be reading this locally in Germany then try and get to a live version of this. I’ve already caught it open-air at the Stadtgarten and can vouch that Schinkel and his colleagues are at the top of their game delivering a spectacle for eyes and ears with this one.
Rollover Beethoven! The great Rocker himself takes a legendary crowd-surf off the stage in Stern-Strasse. It’s a little known fact that the young Ludwig was a huge fan of Lemmy, and his deafness at a young age was actually attributed to playing ‘Ace of Spades’ for hours on end. Eventually, his parents bought him a piano – and the end of a career in heavy metal became the start of something quite different…
