Brian Dickie

Sunny Saturday

We have hit a lovely spell of weather this week in Gütersloh.  This evening we have the finals and some of us have had the opportunity to get out to enjoy the sunshine in this very pretty place.  A quick walk in the park was as much as I could manage today - but I am refreshed and ready to make the fateful decisions this evening!  And I hope you will be watching on Medicitv live streaming - 12 noon US central time

Otherwise come back here after midnight German time for the results

Gütersloh Stadtpark 4 pm October 22 2011

Our jury duties

We have had a pretty good time together this week.  And here above you see this group of people who really care a lot about what we do.  So you might want to see us looking happy.

We are: Nicholas Payne, Anja Silja, Evamaria Wieser, Gustav Kuhn, Dominique Meyer, Jurgen Kestling, Liz Mohn (not on the jury but just our boss!), Siegfried Jerusalem, Francisco Araiza, and moi!

Today has been a so called day off!  Well I have had meetings at 9 am , 11 am, 12:00 noon, 1.:15, 3:00 and 5:00.  So I am not sure that this really counts - and I am now ready for sleep after a horribly late night yesterday.  (Yes, ok my fault!)

We have been participating in future planning and the vision of the Bertelsmann Foundation.  And the future is bright as we do all we can to make the competition more effective.  Meanwhile we are looking forward to a fabulous final tomorrow evening.

I am now off for an early night after yesterday's excesses!

The finalists

And we finished around 11pm - the finalists are:

Olga Bezsmertna - Soprano from Ukraine, aged 28

Maria Celengova - Soprano, Slovakia, 23

Xiahou Jinxu - Tenor - China, 20

Nadeshda Karyazina - Mezzosoprano, Russia, 25

Jongmin Park - Bass, Korea, 24

Cristina Antoaneta Pasaroiu - Soprano, Romania, 25

There will be these three sopranos fighting it out........you can watch it live on Medici tv on Saturday evening. 

Here they are with Jury Chairman Dominique Meyer and Liz Mohn

The many charms of Gütersloh

This is a delightful place with excellent bakers (one of the many great attractions of Germany is the wonderful bread), butchers, many small shops with good stuff in them, no big super markets or department stores to dominate the retail business.  Here is an exaple on the way from the theater back to the hotel.  And this is particularly nice for all our delightful Asian participants!

We had another couple of hours of feedback to the singers this morning, then the jury lunch, and an afternoon in the hotel catching up with business back home in Chicago.  But it is almost time to go to the Stadthalle for the semi-final concert.  I will report on the result late tonight Germany time, near 5pm in Chicago!

Not a day off!

This morning we had a later start and an earlier finish - but it was not a day off!  We assembled at the Stadthalle at 10:45 for the 11 am press conference that always follows the opening round.  It is an opportunity for the press to meet the jury and ask that question that they have always wanted to ask.  Following that I had an interview about the selection process and my crazy travel schedule.  Who knows what will come out of that!

Lunch was followed by 150 minutes of interviews with the singers that did not make it through, one on one.  There will be another series tomorrow.  And of course the semi final concert is at 7pm. 

This year the process has been really difficult since the level is higher.  In previous years there appeared to be a miraculous natural space between the top dozen or so and the rest of the field.  This year it seems to be nearer 25 that stand out, and this has caused us some grief.  Each of the jury may have a couple of singers they feel ought to have made the grade.  There may be a total of ten different ones........this has never happened before.

But there it is - it is a good problem to have!

Gütersloh is very much en fête during this Neue Stimmen week.  The red branding color is everywhere, in shop windows and on street banners.  The whole population can rejoice at this event which catches so much publicity here.  And it will catch much attention worldwide on Saturday.  You can watch the final concert live streaming on the internet if you go to Medici TV.  We start at 7pm German time which translates into 12 noon in Chicago, 1 pm in New York, and 6pm in London.  Make your calculations and watch until the dramatic end!

It has been a partly cloudy, partly sunny, partly rainy day.  But we have had no time either to enjoy or suffer these vagaries.  But here below is the picture in the town square as I walked back from the Stadthalle to the hotel around 4:45 this afternoon.  And you can see the nice red street banners too!!

From Händel to Kálmán........

So we have a lovely group of semi finalists and a spectacular program on Thursday evening, beginning with Händel (an aria from Julius Caesar) and ending with Kálmán - an aria from Gräfin Mariza. And there is a wonderful varied program of other good things in between.  You can get tickets by going to www.eventim.de

We ended up not being able to reduce to 12 and added a further three.  But, had there been the time, we could have chosen at least half a dozen worthy semi-finalists.  The standard really was as I had predicted - higher and deeper than any year in the last 12.

So the lucky and brilliant 15 are:

Guadalupe Barrientos - Mezzosoprano from Argentina aged 24

Olga Bezsmertna - Soprano, Ukraine, 28

Maria Celengova - Soprano, Slovakia, 23

Paulina Gonzales Melgarejo - Soprano, Chile, 26

Victor Hernandez - Tenor - Mexico, 29

Xiahou Jinxu - Tenor - China, 20

Nadeshda Karyazina - Mezzosoprano, Russia, 25

Alexey Lavrov - Baritone, Russia, 26

Jaquelina Livieri - Soprano, Argentina, 25

Jongmin Park - Bass, Korea, 24

Cristina Antoaneta Pasaroiu - Soprano, Romania, 25

Daniel Raschinsky - Baritone, Germany, 28

Eleazar Rodriguez - Tenor, Mexico, 27

Faith Sherman - Mezzosoprano, USA, 30

Illya Silchukov - Baritone, Belarus, 29

And below you have them with Chairman of the Jury Dominique Meyer on the stage of the Stadthalle after the announcement this afternoon.  One (Jongmin Park) appears to have gone missing and is not in the picture. 

Thumbs up to Opera!!

Here are all the finalists with the Bertelsmann Foundation's leader Liz Mohn!  By the end of this afternoon there will be a dozen semi-finalists chosen - and if you are here in Germany and want to come to the semi-final concert on Thursday evening there are still a few tickets available at 20.70 €

The Semi-finals start on Thursday at 7.p.m. local time in the „Stadthalle“, Gütersloh.  The finals will be held on Saturday -  the finals are sold out......

More later - around 6pm local time here I should have the list of semi-finalists up on this blog.

Day 1

We completed the first part of the first round of the Neue Stimmen finals today. We heard 27 of the 41 finalists.

It is going to be really hard with such an array of talent.  But the cruel fact is that we have to eliminate all but a dozen of the candidates by the time we finish tomorrow.  Meanwhile we try to remain cheerful - and above you see some of our jury with Liz Mohn of the Bertelsmann Foundation which provides the energy for this great enterprise.  They are  - Anja Silja, Francisco Araiza, Evamaria Wieser, and Dominique Meyer.

Tomorrow we complete the first round - more then!

Gütersloh Sunday afternoon

This gorgeous day has brought out the crowds to the festive market here in Gütersloh.  Beer and bacon, a band and a balloon.  What more could one ask for?

Well you can have Bach as well - if you look carefully there is a banner announcing a concert by the Gütersloh Bach Choir in the Martin Luther Church at 6pm today.

It occurs to me that the Republican Party should now give up hope of government and recognize that they are just, like the folks above, an Entertainment Group - excellent fodder for Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Saturday Night Live.

There is this very gemütlich windmill from which large quanties of German holy water, aka beer were supplied to the shoppers in the town square.  I am not sure that this would be allowed in the US but hey this is Germany.  Maybe in Milwaukee?  I wonder........

The delicious aroma coming from this stand was tempting me to get a bacon sandwich - but I had had lunch.  Shame!

And you can then bring your beer and bacon and listen to cheerful, friendly, cosy (in a word gemütlich) music and song performed by this splendid group, with the audience all joining in.  Excellent!

And then of course there were Bikes - hundreds of them.  But I am not sure that with all that beer a bike would be the best way to get home.........I walked back to the hotel anyway, down this charming alley below, less than 50 yards from the noisy bustle of the town square.

Good morning Gütersloh!

How wonderful to wake at 10 am after a ten hour sleep to a gorgeous morning and a day to recover from the somewhat wearing 24 hour trip from Chicago.  Above is the view revealed as I thrust open the curtains!  I am moving a little slowly, feeling fragile but I will get myself together and enjoy the sunshine this afternoon.

I laded at Heathrow yesterday at 9 am and, after a little coffee and a slight clean up made my way to London to meet up with the family for a couple of hours before getting back for my flight to Düsseldorf.  This was all straightforward.  But then the train journey to Gütersloh!  That was another story.......

The Germans, like the British, the Argentinians, indeed like the people of 100s of courtries around the world are nuts about football - that is to say soccer as distinct from the NFL variety.  And yesterday seems to have been an important day for the fans of Borussia Mönchengladbach.  Yesterday they tied 2-2 with Bayer Leverkusen and you can get all past and future news in English on their website!

And the fans were on the train.  And they were singing and were drunk - mostly in a fairly genial way.  It was standing room only but I managed to grab a seat when a few got off the train at Essen.  One young man collapsed on the other seat next to me, beer can in hand, and passed out.  He remained that way for the next hour until he finally slipped to the floor and dragged himself upright again.  So you get the flavor!

I do all this in a spirit of economy.  Why demand a limo when the excellent train service is there?  I booked on line in Chicago, all very easy.  And of course, after years of training at Glyndebourne, booked 2nd class.  The result of which was that I got a unique cultural experience.  I would not have missed it for anything!

In due course I arrived in one piece at Gütersloh Hbf at 10 pm and walked the three hundred yards to the superb Park Hotel where I will be for the next week.  The excellent Bellini was open and I had a delicious linguine with pesto and grilled shrimp - I was famished. And so to sleep around midnight......

I am looking forward to seeing my fellow jury members this evening when we will get ar marching orders from the project director Ines Koring and our chairman Dominique Meyer. And tomorrow will begin the cruel process of reducing the 42 finalists to the final 6 winners.  There will be daily bulletins here of course.