Flyers and a Birthday Party

Friday April 25th.

Tonight, as usual, I went to listen to the Tampere Phil. The programme was:

Eugene Tzigane, conductor

Ismo Eskelinen, guitar

Ravel: Spanish Rhapsody

Fagerlund: Transit, guitar concerto

Debussy: Images

After the concert I at once hurried out so that I would be outside in time to hand out flyers for my concert while people were leaving the Tampere Hall. The conductor unexpectedly did an extra number (which isn’t too common to do with a whole orchestra), which I ended up missing, but at least I was at the door in time.

I managed (with a little help from some friends) to hand out around 300 flyers tonight! I was pleasantly surprised about how positive the attitude of the audience was towards flyers! My hands were quite through frozen (it was about 8 degrees Celsius outside) so I sometimes had a hard time separating the flyers from each other and people would stop and wait so that they got their own flyer! Some would read aloud in a surprised voice name of the concert, which is in Swedish ‘Landet som icke är’, translated to ‘The Land Which Is Not’, and some turned back and asked me “So what is this?” and I would reply “This is my own composition concert coming up in May, with an orchestra, a choir and ensembles and it’s completely free!” on which people usually reacted “Oh your own concert? That is so nice! Thanks for the invitation!” After the audience had stopped flowing out I went to Tampere Hall’s café and said hello to my friends from the Tampere Phil and also gave them an invitation. I also had the very inconvenient task of trying to persuade a few viola players to come and play in my orchestra, for free, because we don’t have enough viola players in our school… I’m not quite sure if I managed yet, we will see.

Tonight I was invited to two parties. I started off with my pianist friend Lotta Penttilä’s birthday party. By the time I was going to go to my composer friend Henri Sokka’s moving out party, they had already gone to a bar, so I joined them. We went to Ruby & Fellas, which is at a very pretty location down by the river in Tampere city centre. It’s quite large, and they have one part for live music and a more regular and quiet room (with a billiard table) but most peculiar (and funny) of all: a small karaoke room in glass with a door that you can close so you don’t hear anything out from the room. I thought this was very practical, as the people who enjoy singing karaoke can occasionally drop in to the room, while people who don’t like karaoke can happily sit outside without suffering.