Unfortunately I don't play any instrument, but it must be really nice to meet a friend and play music while sitting in the grass on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Let's start the weekend with some music! I saw this duo some weeks ago in Stadtpark. They performed popular contemporary songs and had a lot of fun...
Yesterday evening I passed by a Hang player in a passage and only some minutes later I saw another one in the pedestrian zone in the city center. While the first one was more or less ignored by the passers-by, the one in the photo was surrounded by quite an audience. I just found out that the Hang was created by a Swiss company in 2000 and that the name "Hang" comes from the Bernese German word for "hand". I like the sound of this instrument...
Every six years Austria votes a new President. The last elections took place in April and May 2016. Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) won the first round, but was narrowly defeated by the Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen in the run-off. After an appeal by the Freedom Party's leader the results were invalidated by the Constitutional Court due to formal irregularities (several counting centres had begun to process postal votes on the eve of the election rather than on the day after, as Austrian electoral law requires) only one week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office. The revote will take place on October 2, and the election campaign has just restarted... Yesterday there were several concerts in different locations, a rally and an after party (under the title "presidential rave 2.0") organised by the supporters of Van der Bellen. I happened to pass by one of the concerts in Stephansplatz.
We had a lot of events last weekend, one of them was the Brass Band Festival on Saturday. 15 brass bands from all over Austria took part in this event. The bands from the provinces performed on several squares in the city center before all the participants did a joint concert in front of the City Hall in the afternoon.
Yesterday started the 18th edition of the "Voicemania", an international a cappella festival. To kick off the event, in the afternoon some of the participating artists performed on balconies and in churches in the city center. The festival runs through December 6.
Well, the music really goes on in Vienna... On Sunday afternoon these two percussionists enthralled their audience and the passersby in the city center.
Last Friday I was a little angry because I left the office later than intended, but then I saw this band who was playing soft music, stopped and listened for some minutes... and my mood changed... By the way, it was not the first time that I saw this band, they seem to be regulars in Kärntnerstraße, as you can see here.
The other Friday I left the office earlier than usually, and in Kärntnerstraße I came across these musicians. They were just playing some soft music, a very nice start into the weekend.
One of the music acts of last weekend's "Buskers Festival".
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the MUMOK the "Musikarbeiterinnenkapelle", a brass band established with the aim to overcome our collective brass bands trauma, played cover versions of current hits, workers’ songs and techno compositions. Click here for a short video.
"The Morning Line" pavilion attracts the attention of the passers-by and is a very popular subject for photos, but - of course - not everybody likes it (I heard an Italian tourist say to his son that he doesn´t even want to know what this thing is). I´m a big fan of art in public space and think it revitalizes the terrible concrete desert of Schwarzenbergplatz. Click here for a video of the pavilion.
"The Morning Line", a public art structure (8m high, 20m long, built of 20 tons of coated aluminium and conceived by the British artist Matthew Ritchie), is a platform for contemporary music and composition and will reside on Schwarzenbergplatz for six months. The sonic pavilion has already been to Seville and Istanbul and has now been assembled in a completely new form developed especially for Vienna. It uses an interactive ambi-sonic sound system comprising 47 speakers to broadcast a series of stimulating new works by some of the world´s greatest sonic artists. In the background you can see the Heroes´ Monument of the Red Army which commemorates the 17.000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle for Vienna of World War II.
