Germany trip

So, I'm back from Germany!

This 9-day trip was fun with the Sirius Quartet, it was an intense schedule. But don't get me wrong --- it was not a tour, we stationed in the Ochsenhausen Monastery and never left the place.

I flew in to Stuttgart from Amsterdam with our violist and founder, Ron. The flight was crazy because when we got into Stuttgart from New York, we only had around 20 minutes to run over to next gate for departure. And in between that, we had a big airport to deal with, a long line at the customs, and a security checkpoint.

When we finally got to Stuttgart, of course, you can imagine, our luggage was not there. We made it, but our luggage did not.

It was cool though, the Stuttgart Airport apologised to us (damn, when have you seen that in New York or KL?!) and gave us each a pack of toiletry for the night's use. They promised to deliver us our luggage bags to where we stayed, Ochsenhausen, which is a village in the middle of nowhere, basically. When I opened the pack in my room, I found a white t-shirt, a pair of socks (the kind which you can only use once), toothbrush and toothpaste, shaver and shaving cream. Gregor, our 2nd violinist, and Mike, our cellist, came to pick us up and drove to Ochsenhausen, which is a very quiet and tiny place, probably 30 KM outside from Biberach.

The second day was an intense rehearsal day with the student string orchestra with the first batch of improvisation students in the Landesacademie, which we didn't teach. The Landesacademie is an academy that runs different workshops the whole year, there are educational workshops, music workshops, art workshops and many many more. The monastery is basically turned into this academy, except their main church building, which is built baroque cum gothic style, during those respective periods. The interior was gorgeously painted with biblical stories on the high ceilings, sculptures and a beautiful organ. Too bad I didn't get to take pictures of these.

We finished our rehearsals at night, around 8.30pm, totally exhausted. But of course, the next thing I knew was.... BEER TIME! How can you not have beer in Germany? Each bottle of beer you buy from the machine costs 1.50 Euros. Among the string orchestra, I found my friend from Mancini, Katarzyna. She was serving as faculty in the workshop, we're so happy to see each other again. It was so random, you get to meet an old friend in a place you least expected.

The third day was our recording day (!!). Yes, already. One day of rehearsal, and then recording. It was very intense, of course. We started off recording Gregor's Cuban Impressions. That was almost a concerto for string quartet and orchestra, beautifully written, so complicated rhythmically, in the first movement. We got our ass kicked REALLY HARD to get the rhythm right. But hell, we got it right finally.

We continued our recording on the fourth day, which we finished up Cuban Impressions and went on to record Gregor's cello concerto written for Mike, with materials from Mike's own compositions. That was a tour-De-force for Mike and he played his ass off, it was so perfectly done on his part. Good job dude!

That night, we started our own album's recording. We did one movement and called it a night. We wrapped up on the next day by finishing the entire piece of Gregor's String Quartet No.3 a.k.a. New York Suite. The thing that we least expected was that we spent so much time on the second movement, 125th Street. It almost drove us crazy because we usually treated it like a jam piece without caring much, but our engineer, Johannes, pointed out so many things that we never took note of. Good on us for having such a great recording engineer --- in fact, the greatest in Germany! He's the engineer of Keith Jarrett's trio albums and many many other ECM and European recordings. This guy would read the full score while we record and would give us so many great musical suggestions which are 99% of the time accurate. You will spend half as much the time with him as you spent with other engineers. He is that great.

The string orchestra was gone since the wrapping of Mike's concerto. But the new batch of students came in the day we finished our quartet piece (we decided to do the rest of the album in NY). We met up and gave the students a brief orientation, playing 2 movements from Gregor's piece and Mike taught them a fiddle tune called "Shove The Pig's Foot Further into the Fire". Them kids (and adults) loved it and could never stop playing the tune since.

The rest of the days were all individual and group classes. On Day 7 and early Day 8, we did 2 short and messy rehearsals of the concerti with Mike and Gregor. I guess the students weren't confident enough with all the crazy cross rhythms and stuff, plus, further confused by the conductor. We had a nice concert in the afternoon of Day 8 though, playing our quartet pieces --- which included a new tune I wrote in Germany, This Could Be A Ballad. Gregor's 2 movements from his concerto was pretty messy, orchestral speaking, but Mike's concerto was great on both sides.

Sirius had a nice German dinner in the town area (that was the first time I've seen the town, honest), and had a long talk about future plans. We all agreed that this is a very exciting line-up and we need to do something to push our name to a wider popularity. Let's hope it will happen.

We woke up the next day at 6.30am, all looking like zombies, because we needed to check out at 7am. Gregor drove all of us to the airport. Poor Mike, he didn't even need to get to the airport so early, for his flight was around 2.30pm. But I heard he had a great time dining in the city of Stuttgart, good for him! As for us 3, we had our toughest time waiting for both planes in Stuttgart and Amsterdam. The Stuttfart-Amsterdam plane was delayed for an hour or something, which we thought was not so cool. But little did we know that the Amsterdam plane also had mechanical problems they had to change a plane that was flying in from Shanghai! And that delayed our Stuttgart-New York flight for 5 hours. Luckily KLM issued us vouchers to have lunch, call home, and 50 Euros worth of discount for our next KLM flight.

When I finally landed in New York, it was 7.40pm. Got home by subway around 9pm, had my dinner at 11pm. And my housemates went to play pool and ping pong till 1.22am. I didn't know how that can happen to me, for I should've been crashing. But I guess that's because I had a great time there, not travelling like mad, though busy, no phone calls, limited internet access...

Yeah, I can use another 9 days in Ochsenhausen... :)