Os Justi video reaches 20,000 views!

Thank you to everyone who has been watching and sharing our most popular video, Bruckner’s Os Justi, recorded in October, 2008 in Spain. Please visit our YouTube page to view all our videos, including several from our recent tour to France and a World Premiere performance of Matthew Brown’s (though love be a day).

~Antioch

Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep” in the Vaison Cathedral

Safely home

We are all safely back in the US. Thank you for following us and keep an eye out for pictures and videos later this week.

Antioch

Coming Home

We have just put our luggage on the bus after a massive weigh-in using Martha’s luggage scale.  50 pounds is so light when returning home!  Here are a couple of pictures from our last concert at the Carpentras Cathedral.  We’ll be stateside around 9:30pm tonight.  A bien tôt!

Antioch’s Top Ten Lists

We have had an amazing two and a half weeks in France.  Intended for humorous purposes only, here are our top ten lists of things we will miss about France and things we have missed about the US.

Antioch’s Top Ten Things We Will Miss About France

10. The amazing weather
9. Ice cream and sorbets
8. Large audiences
7. The incredible acoustics at every venue
6. Wine at every meal
5. Crepes
4. The Mistral
3. The architecture and history
2. Happy Mother Ray
1. The fresh, FRESH and amazingly prepared food everywhere!

Antioch’s Top Ten Things We Have Missed About the US

10. Peanut butter
9. Air conditioning
8. Ice cubes
7. Screens
6. Sweet tea
5. Dunkin Donuts
4. Fast internet
3. Tacos and Chipotle
2. Our families!
1. EZ Pass

Ray rocks the blog – The Mistral Wind

All the hours on the watch,
I wait for that breeze to move me
And blow me back to that place,
That magic space all through me.
And I cry your name across the empty water –
You made a crazy dreamer out of me…

If you were conscious in the 1980s, the music of Ann and Nancy Wilson was practically inescapable. I first heard Ann in a duet with Mike Reno (lead singer of Loverboy — remember “Working for the Weekend”?) called “Almost Paradise”, the “love theme” from the film Footloose in 1984. “What About Love”, “Never”, “These Dreams”, and “Alone” were all massive hits and are indelible parts of the soundtrack of my childhood. Before their eponymous album made Heart massive pop stars, though, the Wilson sisters were the Queens of Rock & Roll, the engineers of sexy and soulful top-40 rockers “Crazy on You”, “Magic Man”, “Barracuda”, “Heartless”, “Straight On”, “Dog & Butterfly”, and “Even It Up” between 1976 and 1979.

By now, you must be thinking there’s been some internet error, so let me reassure you: Yes, this is still the Antioch Chamber Ensemble blog. You’re just getting a pop music history lesson because…Well, if you’ve read all of our bios, you can guess that this is Ray Bailey writing. And yes, I’m going to get to the point soon. The point is a strange and lengthy song on Heart’s album Dog & Butterfly, which I quoted above. It’s called “Mistral Wind”, and I first heard it in its Greatest Hits/Live manifestation when I was about twelve years old. Its narrator is apparently a sailor in the northern reaches of the Mediterranean who falls in love with the Mistral Wind, and the song’s commentary on love and inspiration and art and insanity (as well as its construction, harmonic progressions, shifting rhythms, and massive instrumentation) immediately entranced me. I wanted to know more about this Mistral Wind, which my research revealed had figured in the inspiration of so many artists.

And now, I do. We arrived in Provence (We’re staying at an unspeakably beautiful place called La Magnanerie, just outside Villedieu, next to Vaison-la-Romaine.) on a beautifully sunny, yet surprisingly windy day. This strong and nearly constant wind minimized the effects of what would otherwise have been stifling heat, clearing and drying the atmosphere, laying bare the light and the vivid colors which obsessed Gauguin and Van Gogh, among others. The wind which I found pleasant (frankly, seductive), however, is apparently a cruel mistress; its long-windedness (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the warmer seasons can lead to serious wildfires, and during the cold seasons, it is known for its miserable severity. It damages crops, and bends the region’s trees permanently southward. While the wind is thought to bring good health, as it eliminates pools of stagnant water and generally cleans the air, it has been known to wreck many a tourist’s vacation on the coast, blowing the warm coastal waters out to sea and replacing them from the frigid depths. The Mistral is also thought to bring headaches, distraction, restlessness, and depression, among humans of all ages and wild animals alike, though it’s doubtless brought equivalent amounts of creative fire to artistic types of every bent.

To over-simplify, the atmospheric phenomenon which causes this cool, dry, ferocious wind is the build-up of cool air coming down from the north of France, and settling, like a dammed-up river, among the Alps, where it builds until it overflows the top of the mountains and rushes down through the Rhône valley toward the sea, where it turns eastward, tearing most viciously through Marseille and St. Tropez. The wind can blow ceaselessly for literally weeks at a time and reach near hurricane force, as well as unusually high (It’s even quite strong at the summit of Mont Ventoux — the appropriately-named “Windy Mountain”) atmospheric height, as it charges toward the Mediterranean; it can affect weather patterns as far away as Africa.

While the Mistral we’re experiencing here (the name comes from a word in the local dialect — derived from Latin, of course — which means “master”) is more of a local weather phenomenon than I described above, I’d like to credit it with some of the inspiration I’ve had here (more on that later, perhaps), and I hope it keeps blowing, as its cooling effects have certainly been appreciated…And for anyone who’s interested, here’s the link to my favorite performance of Heart’s “Mistral Wind” that I’ve seen online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH3qTkhinqM. (If you like your rocking’ a little harder, here’s another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAd9u2h_pRA.) ‘Til next time…

R

Vaison Cathedral Concert

Last night we performed at the Cathedral in Vaison-la-Romaine. It was a fantastic concert and great audience. Here are some photos:

Look for a blog entry about the mysterious French weather phenomenon, The Mistral, by Ray Bailey, later today.

We have two concerts remaining: tonight in Valreas and, finally, at the Cathedral in Carpentras on Sunday. We return home on Monday evening. Thank you for following… and stay tuned!

Antioch

New Antioch Group Photos

With the help of Becky’s camera, Christine behind the lens, and a beautiful setting at the Vaison Cathedral Cloisters, we are proud to unveil a three new group photos.

Greetings from the Artistic Director

Yesterday we departed early for our concert in St. Jean du Muzols. All of us were sort of dreading the long drive ahead of us, but were pleasantly surprised when we arrived early in the town of Tain-l’Hermitage. For you chocolate lovers out there, this town happens to have the Valrhona Chocolate factory within its bounds – NIRVANA! I nearly cried as I ran from display to display, stuffing my basket with all of the delicious confections, sampling Valrhona dark chocolate ice cream and snarfing so many free chocolate samples that I was practically ill. After we purchased boat loads of chocolate, the cashiers stuffed even more free samples into our bags! We then decided to make a quick stop at the town of Tournon-on-Rhône for about an hour to sample the winding roads of this lively city right on the river. I had to find a drug store that carried some aloe for my severe sunburn. After we left the town, Molly was treated to an unexpected fetid tomato juice shower on the bus followed by some peach rain which required a change of clothes and a purging of shoes (someone had unfortunately forgotten to remove these perishable items from the overhead compartment above Molly’s seat).

The church in St. Jean du Muzols had a wonderful acoustic (probably the best on this trip thus far) which afforded us a magnificent sound check and concert. I am very excited to see what we get on our video recording. We did a particularly amazing rendition of Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep.” The audience was extremely appreciative and called us back for two encores! (We could have done three, but we needed to save our voices for our Cathedral concert in Vaison today) After the concert we were treated to a wine reception with MORE FREE VALRHONA CHOCOLATE. Antioch got on the bus at 11pm for what we hoped would be an uneventful two-hour trip home… until we got stuck at the tollbooth for 30 minutes after our driver Marcel’s toll-card got eaten by the machine. We got home around 1:45am. More about our big Vaison Cathedral concert to follow.

Mercy Buckets,
Josh

A day in Vaison-la-Romaine

We traveled to the town of Vaison-la-Romaine yesterday for a day of sight-seeing and shopping. We went into the medieval portion of the town and climbed to the top of the hill where we ate lunch in the shadow of a castle overlooking the city below. We then visited the Roman ruins in town and did some shopping. It felt great to be a “real” tourist! Today we travel to St. Jean de Muzols, a rather lengthy drive, for a concert at 9pm.

Pictures here: