and those we liked to listen to even before Corona

"Classic meets Gypsy"

Before the actual music took place on Sunday evening at the cloudy open-cast mine edge, Mayor Andreas Heller made the effort of the city of Elsdorf and its cultural team clear once again: "We want to hear these artists again after Corona." That is why the city launched the concert series "Music with a View" on "Terra Nova", found sponsors for it and was able to pay full fees.

piano tuner?

Later, the pianist of the evening Marcus Schinkel told us that a bass ist he knew had already sold his instrument and preferred to work as a piano stimmer.After all, there would be enough of them in German living rooms.

Based on this idea, Schinkel is by no means one of those who also want to become piano stimmers, but rather an initiative of Bonn musicians who make use of the private piano and offer private concerts for the owners of these pianos in those living rooms, if necessary for one person.

Info here: https://www.privatissimo.org/marcus-schinkel

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But back to the concert: if you want to play the guitar, there are often two camps that played with a lot of "emotional expression", the others excelled with "skilled technique", thinks Dieter Kirchenbauer, self-proven guitarist and musical director of the concert series, loudly. In Joscho Stephan he introduced the audience on the penultimate evening of the concert series, which effortlessly combines both disciplines with "Spielwitz", in short: "He is the best guitarist I know personally".

Here's a look at another ensemble in which Joscho Stephan gives the soloist: Absinto Orkestra in the Jazzkeller Hürth

"He nails away everything I put in front of him," said Stephan's playing partner and, more importantly for the evening, the arranger of countless jazz adaptations of classical music compositions, the pianist Marcus Schinkel.And in the spirit of the album "Classic Meets Gypsy", which was recorded together, Joscho Stephan also nailed away everything Marcus Schinkel put in front of him on notes, the listeners were able to convince themselves of this.

"He nails away everything I put in front of him."

Marcus Schinkel on Joscho Stephan

Due to the typical way of playing the guitar, he provided everything with his fingerprint.These included fast Beethoven rondos: "The Fury of the Lost Penny" or the third movement from the "Sonate Pathetique".

Or they played music by another musical superstar of his time, to whom the admirers stole the cigar stumps from the ashtray, cut a curl out of his hair or stole one of his liqueur glasses, and of these he needed many, namely Franz Liszt". Then Stephan made an easier-to-digest version with pulled strings, blue notes and plenty of swing from the sultry dream, until Schinkel put the drab romance back in the foreground on the electric piano.

The Düsseldorf champagne friend Robert Schumann, at the side of his charming wife Clara, also resurrected the two in their own way in the song "Nachklänge aus dem Theater".

Stephan found a masterful companion in the daring pianist to his own songs such as the "Ballade pour Django" and the "Bossa Dorado". Stephan also played "Can't buy me Love" from his last album, a Beatles tribute album.

In part only with his elbow, Schinkel played Claude Debussy's "Reverie" on the ghostly-sounding Theremin, the instrument of a Russian who used a magnetic field to produce sound. For the final blues with Dieter Kirchenbauer as a guest on the electric guitar, Schinkel exchanged his piano for a mouth-blown harmonium.

Despite the rain, the audience stayed until the end and gave a lot of applause.