Bi-Monthly editorial
	September and October 2007 [2007-11-05] Vacation is over where did it go? After one month I was not looking forward to being back in airports and literally in the hands of airport security staff. However, the beginning of the season was rather painless. My first stop was Lodz which has a slash in the middle of the L and is pronounced Wuch. Lodz is the birthplace of the great Artur Rubinstein and a trip to the Rubenstein museum was a must. Love and I had a wonderful experience with the attentive audience in their new Artur Rubenstein Hall. I was then off to do a jazz concert in the French Basque country in St Jean de Luz, in the birthplace of Ravel. The first time that I performed in this festival was more than 25 years ago and I have been back on many occasions since. I was accompanied by Mattias Algottson and Magnus Lindgren ,not the full quartet. We enjoyed this smaller chamber grouping very much. We are perfecting this Blues Bille Holiday program and the more that I know it the more it feels as if it is improvized . Ulf Englund is our lightning designer and he has the genius to be able to make a large impersonal venue into an intimate setting that focuses all the attention on the stage and underlines the changing moods of the music. In Laval, France I meet up with Love again and returned to the recital program that we had performed in Poland. It was Schumann, Fauré, Mahler, Poulenc, Weill and Schönberg. We performed in the newly renovated Theatre de Laval and inaugurated the Barbara Hendricks Salle de Concert. I unveiled the plaque in the presence of the mayor of the city after my concert. I went to the beautiful city of Sibiu in Rumania for the meeting of the European Cultural Parliament Conference. The goal of this Parliament is to strengthen the role of cultural and artistic ideas and initiatives in Europe. www.kulturparlament.com The following declarations were made including a declaration that I have written about the monks in Burma demonstrating for democracy. I first wrote an article in French that was published in Le Soir de Belgique and Le Temps de Genéve. I later wrote an English version that is not quite the same. I find it hard to translate my writing literally. I was able to give a copy to Desmond Tutu who was in Gothenburg for the annual Book Fair that I love to attend. He called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in order to pressure China to put pressure on the Military Junta to free Aung Sa Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners and to return the country to a Democracy. I went from Sibiu to Potsdam in Germany to attend the opening of the Nobel Symposium for Global Sustainability with Nobel Laureats organized by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research. http://www.pik-potsdam.de http://www.nobel-cause.de John Schellnuber who I had met in Tällberg in July invited me to come and sing a small concert and to stay to listen to the speakers. On the first day Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureat for Peace 2004 Wangara Maathai were among the speakers, as was Rajendra Pachauri Chairman, Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change who since has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 that the IPCC shared with Al Gore.I could only stay one day and was back to concerts with the quartet in St Etienne in France and then to Ljubliana, Slovenia. My husband and I arrived with two days earlier than the quartet and we had time to discover this very beautiful city. We had great late summer weather and we walked for hours through the street of the old city and ate slow food in restaurants inspired by the Italian influence from the past. I hope to return very soon. The audience was very warm and we took away wonderful memories of the concert, the city and its inhabitants. The south of Sweden was in full autumnal splendor and Love and I enjoyed the landscape as we traveled between Malmö and our concerts venues in Ystad, Kristianstad and back to Palladium in Malmö. After the concert in Malmö I traveled to the north of Sweden to Piteå for the inaugaral celebrations of Studio Acusticum, http://www.studioacusticum.com, a concert hall which has a vision to be a meeting place for music, media and sound technique. The program was Mozart arias from Le Nozze di Figaro and Berlioz Les nuits d’été. I was very happy to work again with Okko Kamu, an excellent Finnish conductor who was conducting the Stockholm Symphonietta Orchestra. It is great to work with a musical partner that listens, hears and feels the music. I was very happy with the concert, the hall and the audience. I am planning to go back soon to collaborate on some interesting projects. I ended the month in Switzerland and the Festival de Jura singing Mozart arias from Idomeneo and Benjamin Britten’s Les Illumniations. I spent some precious down time with my son, Sebastian as well. ARTE VERUM I am completing recordings of Beethoven and Poulenc songs with Love Derwinger and Brahms songs with Roland Pöntinen in my favorite hall Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm. Our third release, Purcell and Handel arias and songs has arrived in Sweden. We now have distribution in Sweden, CDA and I am very pleased since so many of my musical partners are Swedish. Best regards BH
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