Germany: Leaving Hildesheim and finding Dresden

Guten tag!

I was glancing over the earlier posts and realized I had left out a crucial event in our campaign thus far: we swept the choral competition in Sopot. Won or tied for 1st rank in each category. Took the grand prize. Won €2000. It was rather significant. I thought the Columbians were going to win, their group was excellent. So... yeah. We won the competition.

FFWD to two days ago. Our street singing Tuesday afternoon yielded a great crowd at our joint concert with Hildesheim's gospel choir Gospel Voices, a bunch of White Germans who do gospel music like Southern Baptists. The concert was very long, and we were well-received by the audience. A number of people who came were there only because they heard us singing in the town's pedestrian zone. Among them were Christian and Bernice, a young couple who liked what they heard very much. They did not attend church, but liked us so much that they came to a singalong at the Gemeinde Christ (Hildesheim church of Christ) the following night. They gave several of us their addresses and want to keep in touch, so it looks like I've got some postcards to send later in the trip.

In addition to the church singalong, Wednesday was packed with sight-seeing. We drove out to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank and many others perished at a Concentration Camp. The buildings had all been burned down after the war due to infestation, but the area had been kept up and landscaped as a memorial to the tens of thousands that died there. From there we made a quick visit to Celle, which is a very old town. Then it was back to Hildesheim for a tour of the many churches in the city.

Today we drove to Dresden, where we arrived just minutes before our first concert at the Dresden Music Festival. What we expected to be a fifteen minute show turned out to be a full-fledged concert. After that, we waited in line at a Bratwurst stand for too long, then decided to head to McDonald's because of time constraints. McDonald's was way too crowded for 3:00pm. I ended up sharing a table with Dr. Ganus and two German women who didn't speak much English.

Randy asked about the languages of the songs we are singing, so here we go:

• Holy Radiant Light - English
• The lamb - English (setting of the poem by William Blake)
• Ich bin das brot des lebens - German ("I am the bread of life")
• So far ich hin - German ("So I depart. I sleep, and no man can awaken me but Jesus Christ, God's son, who will open Heaven's door and lead me to eternal life")
• Was it a morning like this? - English
• In the first light - English
• Trois chansons d'Orleans - French (three songs from Orleans by Debussy)
• A whole slew of spirituals in English - I couldn't hear nobody pray, My soul's been anchored in the Lord, My God is a rock in a weary land, O happy day.
• Cluck 'ol hen - American Folksong - southern english
• Tambur - a hungarian folk tune with english text ("Sweetheart, come and dance with me to the music so entrancing. [jennie]Gay and lively melodies that will set your feet a-dancing")
• Three Irish folk songs - Hugamer fein an Saralindh, Dulaman, Rosin Dubh - Gaelic
• Flight of the Bumblebee - gibberish

So our concert program is mostly English, but our audiences understand it pretty well. English is a part of the school curicculum here in Germany, so most everybody can follow it pretty well.

Tonight, we sing Mahler's 2nd symphony with a bunch of German singers and the Japanese Philharmonic. Today is Ascension day in Germany, the day which Christ rose back into Heaven. Mahler's 2nd is called the "Resurrection" symphony, with its religous text and overtones. This is unusual because Mahler was not a religious man - in fact, many historians believe this piece was simply Mahler trying to get published.

Some obersavations about trucks: All of the highway trucks here are cabovers - that is, the engine is up under the cab of the truck and not in front. I guess this fits in with the rest of the European mindset, in which smaller is better. I have seen Volvos, but no Macks. There is a truck make called Man with the same lettering on the grille and a dog symbol under it (no hood means no bulldog hood ornament). Perhaps someone connected to the trucking industry could enlighten me if Man is the European arm of Mack trucks?

Time to get ready for some serious Mahler action.

Coming up: Dresden Music Festival, and whatever else we do here!