Christine wittenbauer seemed at a loss: "is this a classical concert??" the host city archivist’s perplexity at the audience funeral in the former synagogue about what the nurnberger feuerbach quartet is about to do was nicely played. But somehow it was classical, as rock classics were put into the guise of a classical string quartet. A friday evening not soon to be forgotten.
Donovan’s hurdy-gurdy man
Lukas kroczek was a prize winner in the "jugend musiziert" competition. Then a young student at the richard strauss conservatory in munich. Now he’s a philharmonic. That doesn’t stop him from putting his cello over his knee and using it as a guitar. To this end, he sings solo donovan’s "hurdy gurdy man" from 1968. A little later, max eisinger does something similarly colorful when he uses a kind of children’s keyboard to create the signature song of the world hit "take on me from aha plays. With the gestures of a rock star and in childlike joy, the second violinist stands there, also a multiple prize winner and philharmonic musician, just like violinist jamila musayeva or violist eugen hubert.
Musicians, all of them exceptional talents, found each other in the franconian metropolis. Together, they indulged their love of rock, of rough melodies between the beatles and led zeppelin. This was well received and even before the concert began, the audience was already feeling a kind of tense anticipation.
Real joy of playing
Then it started and soon it became clear that this was not some rondo-veneziano-kitsch-verschnitt, but real joy of playing and really good music. Because how else do you catch the swing at "sultans of swing"? From the dire straits, jazzes it up over the strings and then heads orgiastically for what every rock fan is looking forward to: the famous question-and-answer solo towards the end of the classic, for which mark knopfler is always celebrated.
But apart from the fact that the quartet proved how high quality many popular music melodies were and are, there were also many entertaining spoken moments. Then, when eisinger told the audience about an incident in which he stumbled "on his face" before a performance and a school class in the audience couldn’t stop bawling about it. Moments like this are "allmechd moments", of which there are three categories, but from which there is always inspiration and ultimately laughter. It’s not that you can’t hear how good musicians are technically by listening to rock music. The tonal colorations they gave songs like "bittersweet symphony" additions, sometimes love brahms suspect, proved fingering technique. And it also became romantic when eisinger and musayeva joined forces on "more than words" the playful innocent looks over the strings, only to increase the tempo later. "When it’s at its best, you should stop, and I can tell you one thing: it never gets any better", at the end of the program, eisinger whimsically addressed the audience. But that was to be followed by the rock song of all rock songs: led zeppelin’s "stairway to heaven. How the quartet took up the essence of this classic, the slow increase up to the ecstatic outbreak of – in the original – jimmy page’s fantastic guitar solo, was the proof of bernstein’s word, according to which there is no u- and e-music, but only good and bad music.