December 20, 2017

Perugia, Italy

We've reached our final day of this tour (and indeed the term) and so we're all rather excited to be getting home to loved ones tomorrow! The concert tonight is at the Basilica di San Pietro, located in the centre of the beautiful hill-top town of Perugia, which I happened to have visited shortly before I joined the KS with an exciting early-music group called La Nuova Musica, performing Bach's St John Passion, just two-to-a-part with step-out solos! A very memorable occasion...This has been my first ever Christmas tour of Italy, and I'm delighted to report that it has been a real success! Not only are our remarkably young Italian audiences as passionate and friendly as always, but also Italy just seems to get Advent right with a wonderful and unfiltered excitement towards Christmas itself, yet with a refined and rather classy - perhaps more simply, a traditional feel. Christmas lights stylishly covering trees in town and city centres, for example, but without Christmas jazz music oppressively filling the air on loudspeakers with commercialist undertones. It does seem a little odd that we're eating pizza and pasta every day during mid-December whilst friends at home are doubtless living off Pret Christmas turkey sandwiches and warm, meaty stews...Can't wait to get home and get stuck into all the Christmas festivities. That first glass of mulled wine and a minced pie will taste amazing, I'm sure!