What are my personal impressions you might ask...

Well, first i have to say that after hearing the european choir of estonians in Bonn, i had really high expectation for this song festival, imagine those feelings and power multiplied by 1000!! On the other side, i saw the dance celebration as just a side event to just use the popularity of the song celebration.

And it turns out that i was completely wrong: first, the dance celebration was really impressive with 7500 dancers where everybody was important and had his place in an excellent choreography at the level, or even above, of an olympic games opening, but 2 hours long. Really amazing.

But then, the first day of song celebration, everything was perfect during the march, but then the big disappointment:

First, almost 2 hours delay, which for an event focused on the family, where thousand of children were present, it is not really acceptable. Then once started, the applauses were spare and everybody seemed to be more interested in grabbing some trash-food than to 'breathe as one'.

Also, the loudspeakers were completely destroying the feeling of the event, at the end you could not tell the difference between a 10 head choir and this 25000 head choir, not at all, very disappointing!

Then having already the 25000 singers gathered, they only sang 2 or 3 songs together and then they were splitted, that was taking lot of time generating several breaks of up to 30 mins just moving singers around, which i can not really understand: if you have already the 25000 singers together, use them!! and organize another concert with 1000 singers later which is much easier to manage, and from the 5 hours programme at the end the singers were singing maximum only 3 hours! What a waste of resources!

And the cherry on the cake: despite estonians love their country and their traditions, and they should also know their weather, but after some rain everybody was leaving!! yes, leaving their 25000 singers singing in the rain for no audience, this is really disrespectful and a shame!

Thanks god there was a second day of song celebration which gave me hope. There was more audience and more interest in the show, even somehow you could really hear the singers not only through the loudspeakers, and despite that at the beginning the concert was being the same than the day before, the last 1 hour was it all worth: all singers on stage, singing popular songs that the audience was singing with, even repeating songs and improvising, really great performance and i can now really tell that Estonia was at the end breathing as one!

Filed under  Michael, Customs