This is Andrea Moore, Camerata's Director of Community Relations. I'l be posting here regularly over the next 10 days, along with bassoonist John Steinmetz, and possibly some other musicians or tour guests.
We've just arrived in Washington, DC, where we'll start the tour with a concert at the Library of Congress tomorrow night. It's always exciting to come to this city and see those landmarks that sometimes seems to only exist on CNN: the White House, Washington Monument, etc.
Last night we launched the tour with a gala and a free concert at the LA Cathedral. For those of us working as performers or presenters, the rule of thumb about giving away free tickets is that you have to assume about 40% no-show rate.
No one told that to our Cathedral guests! We had about 1300 reservations, in addition to our 200 Gala guests; an audience of 800 would have been fantastic. Instead, the Cathedral was packed. We're estimating about 2000 people were there to hear Ani play Bach, and Catherine and ensemble play Ian Wilson's "Messenger" Concerto - the piece around which this whole tour was built.
It was crazy. For one thing, we think of chamber music as being, well, music for a chamber, ie, a small space. But the music Adrian chose worked beautifully in the huge Cathedral. For another, we build our concert series around intimate spaces and we tend to build our audience one person at a time. But this audience was amazing. Based on the phone calls we got reserving tickets, I don't think everyone who was there is a regular classical music attendee (though I could be wrong about that). But the attention this audience gave to the music was just incredible. Maybe we'll start building audiences by the hundreds. This audience stayed, and was absolutely attentive, from beginning to end. For those of us who've been working like mad to put this all together, it was immensely gratifying, and the gala dinner following the concert was a great wrap up to the evening.
All in all, it was a great way to start, and in spite of a late night and early morning, I'm feeling excited - we're off!, optimistic - last night's events were fantastic!, and, though it's 5 PM in LA, just about ready for bed. Stay tuned.
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Our blog is now up and running! Check back in the next few days as we will be posting interviews, photos and behind the scene highlights regarding how the 2008 European tour is going!
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