CASA - the contemporary a cappella society - Aarhus Vocal Festival: Day 1

Aarhus Vocal Festival: Day 1

Written by Bill Hare

Friday, 12 May 2006

This week, CASA's Bill Hare is attending the Aarhus Vocal Festival in Aarhus, Denmark from May 11-14, 2006. The festival includes concerts from groups: The Real Group, Rajaton, baSix, Vocal Line, Touche, VoxNorth and Vocappella. There will also be workshops, coachings, competitions, and lectures. Bill will be sending back daily reports to us here at CASA.org. So join us for the next few days as we bring you the 2006 Aarhus Vocal Festival!

I arrived in Aarhus a couple days before the beginning of the festival just in time to attend a record release party for the Danish group Vocal Line, coming directly from the airport after a 17 hour trip! Songs from the album were mixed in the USA by Freddie Feldman, Dave Sperandio, and myself, as well as Danish engineer Henrik Birk Aaboe. Here, their leader Jens Johansen makes a speech. Jens is the Artistic director as well for the upcoming festival, which was coordinated by Henrik, mentioned above.
Jens introduces a short performance by Vocal Line, and you can see a short video clip here.
I am staying in the home of my friend John Kjøller of the group baSix from right here in Aarhus. This is his cat, Farlig.
A novel concept for concert engineering - here in baSix' studio, thier live soundman, Ben, gets settings on a new song to be performed in Friday's concert by using recorded practice tracks. baSix will of course sing all of the parts live, but all of the effects and levels of the song will be already programmed into the mixing console!
Speaking of consoles, here's the board in the "small" performance space - can't wait to see what they use in the "medium" and "large" rooms!
Jens Johansen opens the festival Thursday night for the early birds who are already here in town. The full program starts tomorrow, but we had a more "intimate" party for around 500 people tonight! By tomorrow there will be over 650 singers in attendance for workshops, and many more for the concerts Friday and Saturday nights!
Two large Danish Mixed groups sang for us tonight - first up was Touché, from Copenhagen. (video clip)
Next up was Vox North, who performed improvisational works with a lot of depth and power. They were joined on stage for a time by Roger Treece of New York, Bobby McFerrin's producer. (video clip)
Each group performed for over an hour!
Roger Treece improvises with Vox North. At 11PM, the opening concert ended,and everyone is looking forward to tomorrow!