Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, we have to accept the cancellation of all the remaining performances of this season. We played a concert on the 10th of March 2020 in Klagenfurt Musikverein, which was literally one of the last music events in Austria before the lockdown. We could never imagine it will be our last live performance of the season.
We are particularly disappointed because the second part of the 2019/20 season was supposed to be the best period of our career so far. Something we and our management have been working on for a long time. We were looking so much forward to play at some of the most important events including Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, Grafenegg Festival, Brandenburgische Sommer, Kissinger Sommer, MiTo SettembreMusica, Zurich International Saxfest, Wege durch das Land and such venues as: Berlin Konzerthaus, Residenz München, Kloster Speinshart and remeining part of our 2019/20 Jeunesse Tour including long-awaited Austrian premiere of our version of Goldberg Variations.
Obviously the regret is huge but it will not kill our spirit and our motivation to go on working harder than ever. In fact during these two months in lock-down, we’ve experimented with rehearsing, recording and streaming online using Soundjack – a low-latency software developed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexander Carôt from the University of Halle/Wittenberg. It allowed us to continue playing together even if separated. As a result we got few inquires to record real-time concerts from such entities as Karajan Institute and Magenta TV.
We’ve also created a tutorial of how to use Soundjack, which can be very helpful to all the musicians affected by the COVID-19 restrictions.
After seeing our recordings created with help of the Soundjack, its creator – Prof. Carôt has written:
“(…) most players using Soundjack are either rock, pop or jazz musicians. Classical music did not have such an important impact. With Duo Aliada this totally changes and from my point of view, I’d compare it to our past collaboration with Jamie Cullum – really awesome job – congratulations!”
And we would like to say many thanks to Prof. Carôt for creating the Soundjack. It allowed us to continue our work through this very dark times!
Now, after nearly two months of the lockdown, the life in Austria starts to go back to normal. We are one of the first countries which seem to have won the bottle with the virus. This unfortunately doesn’t change the situation for musicians. The concerts remain cancelled and we still don’t know when it will be allowed to play for live audiences again.
The positive outcome of this horrible situation is that it really makes you understand what is the most important thing in your life. And for us is to play music. We love it, we miss it and we can’t wait to be on stage again. Not even one note will be played in the same way as before. We will cherish every little musical moment and we will be even more grateful for being lucky to call ourselves – musicians.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” – Friedrich Nietzsche