I am sitting in the breakfeast room of the Mirabeau hotel, enjoying a nice croissant with a café au lait, not yet ready for Haydn…Well, I still have 2 hours, but it is not easy for me to play at 11 in the morning, needs some mental preparation, since I like it dark outside when I have to perform 🙂 But I am looking very much forward to this, because the conductor Walter Weller is an old friend of mine, wonderful person to be around, full of anecdotes (yesterday he told me that he met Richard Strauss when he was 6 years old) and great stories from old Vienna.
And the hall will be the Opera Garnier of Monte Carlo (yes, the same guy who built the opera in Paris), absolutely gorgeous, smaller than the Paris one, no Chagall paintings on the ceilings, but plenty of gold and other glittering stuff. The Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo is the former orchestra of one of Germany’s great conductors, Marek Janowski, and I had the pleasure at several occasions to work with him.
Actually, we did a Beethoven Triple, Jolivet Concerto, Schumann and Brahms Double together, and it was fascinating to see this orchestra grow and grow over the years.