Summer

Written by: niklas | Posted on: 08-14-2004

Nik is back in Denmark. My trip was good. The weather has been good, my book (Peter Bastian's “Inn i Musikken”) is still interesting, my <div alt=”Nomad Jukebox 3 MP3 player>Nomad

is still filled with good music (now listening to Chominciamento di gioia – Ensemble Unicorn Vienna) and the weather has been fabulous. No turbulence (although I think the pilots were having fun flying slalom every now and then

), and the correspondance with my train was just great. Straight from the plane to the train without having to hurry or wait for ages.

I haven't been blogging much this summer more than commenting on what others have been writing. So, here goes: we ,the youth choir of the Cathedral of Oslo (Oslo Domkirkes Ungdomskor), went to the choir olympics in Bremen, Germany. There we came in 8th of 27 (which logically enough gave us a silver medal. Olympics where everyone get medals ) in the category for mixed youthchoirs. I am amazed at how great the judges were. We weren't too well prepared, so we deserved no more, but with how well our performance went, we deserved no less either.

We went by boat to Hirsthals and had a bus from there, and stopped at a farm in Ringsted where the aunt of one in the choir had an art gallery where we held a concert. Attendence was good and the concert sounded quite good, and the party afterwards (including lots of champagne and small fortune-stones) was swell. The parties in Bremen were quite magnificent as well (the mexican place at the corner of the street with our hotel will never be the same, but we were by a couple of really nice pubs too), and being a tourist in Bremen was nice, with a great lunch at the windmill, interesting churches, a shop selling really tasty chocolate and a super public transport system that was quite reliable and didn't cost us much because of the olympics.

A couple of weeks later I went to Sund folkehøgskole for the Ringve Summer Course where lots of recorder-, traverso-, harpsichord-, gamba-, violin&viola-, baroque guitar, lute- and theorboe-players as well as our singers and dancers. All <div alt=”renaissance and baroque for those of you new to this”>early music

for an entire week. We were only two recorder players this year, whereas we've always been the largest class. The ten harpsichordists must have been the largest class this year, and qiute frankly: it's was great! I got to play in more ensembles than I've done in the two previous courses combined, and only thing was that it was quite tiring so when I the last day wasn't playing in an ensemble, I must admit I didn't mind.