It was a really nice show (and a overall extremely good weekend, thanx to meeting up with a bunch of great people) but I agree that some of the arrangements could've been done in a different way. I spoke a lot about it to Chris after the show and he was completely overwhelmed of the whole experience. Jonne Valtonen, the main arranger, was completely beat after the whole experience, but felt happy about how it turned out as well. It wasn't easy to arrange these tracks for sure and he has spent a LOT of time with it. The orchestra had 3-hour sessions throughout the whole week (apart from having the Friday off) and there has been recordings made throughout the whole of the process. Thomas Böcker, the producer of the whole concert (and the previous Play!-concerts amongst other), said that the most probable release time of the CD will be around the end of November. Basically, it's all up to the audio guys to bring out the best of the recordings and compile and mix it into a CD. Arnie Roth, the conductor, was a bit tired of the simple fact that the orchestra was a bit TOO classically trained and had a hard time to realize that a track such as Shades is really a regular rock track and went a bit too traditional when performing it, but overall he was very pleased with the whole performance. The people in the actual production line (like Chris, Roth, Valtonen, Böcker, Koshiro, Mitsuyoshi and Barrak) all basically agreed that they think the CD version will be really good due to the fact that they have quite a lot of data to use for it since there were ups and downs of both of the concerts and they also had a lot of things recorded during rehearsals, so I'm really looking forward to it. They all felt that the audience was a bit more involved in the second concert, though, so we must've done a good job then.
Overall it was a splendid weekend, starting with having the pleasure of visiting Thomas Detert in his studio (thanx again, Tom!) and rounding it off at the after party in the Ice Bar at Hilton (where Chris basically fell asleep, completely overwhelmed and beat by the whole experience) hearing more about it from the people involved. ...and yes, I could've made some interviews and things at that point, but didn't want to pressure them any more, since the speed they had been going the whole week was finally quieting down...
It was also a very surreal feeling to actually get people coming up to me, asking if I was the guy in the documentary. That's not what I'm used to for sure. *S*
Btw, I started discussing with Böcker that he should redo the show up here in Stockholm since I know that both Barrak and Chris liked it here and that there are a LOT of Huelsbeck fans in Sweden and he was actually quite interested in looking into it, so with a bit of luck we can get to enjoy it live more times.
// Ziph
