Free water bottles for our audience, fans and damp towels for heat-stricken choir members, bare feet on cool stone tiles: anything goes to make this performance on the hottest day of the year as comfortable as possible for everyone. With outside temperatures hovering around 40 degrees, the old Kaiser-Friedrich-Kirche in the Golm district of Potsdam offered bearable conditions – and a wonderful setting for our big nature concert featuring songs about plants, animals, the seasons and – the weather! So, once again, a heartfelt thank you to the parish and, in particular, to Hanna Löhmannsröben for her fantastic support.
Opening the concert with Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s ‘Spring Song’ went down well with the audience and almost made us forget the heat outside. The programme continued with a Romani piece and works from various European countries, the USA and Brazil: we sang of sad lily-of-the-valley flowers and swaying fields of rye, mountain thyme and elderflower, of languishing crickets and buzzing bumblebees, of the wind, the stars and the Northern Lights.
In between the songs, soprano Antje explained how we came to choose the theme of nature: during a choir trip to Terschelling. The Dutch island impressed us with its seemingly endless sandy beaches and its flora and fauna; we felt and enjoyed the force of the wind whilst singing outdoors. This awareness for the natural world brought home to us once again the twin crises of global warming and the loss of biodiversity – and so we had the idea to make our singing a statement in support of nature, which faces so many threats, and its protection.
Without horse chestnuts, lilies of the valley, bees and butterflies, hedgehogs or cuckoos, the world would not only be silent and monotonous; humanity as a whole would be threatened. With our current selection of songs – true to our name – we also highlight the world’s diverse cultures. These cultures, too, are under threat in many ways, some very directly through the overexploitation and destruction of nature. This applies, for example, to the indigenous Kraó people of Brazil’s rainforest, whom we honoured with the brilliant piece ‘Tres Cantos Nativos’ by Marcos Leite. Half of the generous donations from the concert will go to the Kraó, whilst the other half, in light of recent events, will go to the victims of the earthquake in Venezuela.
Apart from the heat – which is part of nature, yet not naturally occurring at such intensity here – there was another notable aspect of the performance: for the very first time, we sang all 15 songs in a mixed line-up – soprano alongside bass, tenor alongside alto – a very relaxed and casual arrangement. This made our musical homage to nature even more colourful and lively. We, as singers, thoroughly enjoyed it – both the audience and the choir itself gets a much better impression of the overall timbres this way, beyond the vocal ranges. Our conductor Eugen has been preparing us for such a
successful mixed line-up with great patience and energy!
After the performance, we chatted with guests, friends and relatives, and then sat outside the church for a while longer, enjoying the breeze that was gradually picking up. We watched the towering clouds, which gave us hope for a cooling down. And indeed, just as with our previous ‘nature concerts’, the musical rain-making charm worked its magic again, albeit with a slight delay: Later that evening, a thunderstorm broke over Potsdam. It beautifully demonstrated once again the power of nature.
