Yesterday, we all drove down to the Flemish capital, Antwerp. The reason was Lisa Gerrard’s concert at the Koningin Elisabethzaal. We’d rented two hotel rooms for the night, one for us and one for Sarah’s folks, who would be performing babysitting duties during the concert.
Unfortunately, the rain had set in by the time we arrived and, apart from a couple of dry spells, it pretty much continued throughout the afternoon.
Even more unfortunately, I somehow managed to leave our concert tickets on my desk in Amsterdam. Don’t ask me how, because I’d laid out a pile of things, including the tickets, the night before; precisely so that no essentials would be forgotten the next morning. Somehow, I managed to bring all but the tickets: no minor detail.
Luckily for us, I’d bought the tickets directly from the venue with a credit card, so after calling them in a rather panicked state, I was relieved to discover that they would be reissued to us at the door. Phew.
We spent the afternoon walking around Antwerp, stopping for delicious friet and later hot chocolate. Dinner was at some Catalan place, after a couple of others we tried turned out to be closed. That turned out to be a good decision, as they had delicious tapas and some nice colouring materials to keep Eloïse happy.
And then to Lisa.
What can I say? Of the three times I’ve seen her this year, this was the best; and that wasn’t just thanks to the front row tickets I had managed to score from the box office, although they definitely did help.
‘Dreams Made Flesh’ was positively stunning and Lisa imbued the piece with more emotion than I can remember seeing from her in many, many years. The set was completely rearranged from the order of performance at Rotterdam a couple of weeks ago; to its credit, I might add. If I’m not much mistaken, a new piece had been inserted and one other new piece removed.
Very unusually, Lisa spoke to the audience during the encore about the sad state of the planet’s environment. She urged us all to do what we can to improve the situation and invited us to pray with her during ‘Host Of The Seraphim’, which closed the show.
I was left with a warm glow by the performance. Lisa had seemed completely at ease on stage, her efforts to gain poise at the microphone stand notwithstanding. Having Sarah with me to see Lisa for the first time was nice, too. She enjoyed herself, but it wasn’t the near-religious experience that it always is for me.
Outside, it was no longer raining. We walked back to our hotel, pausing to look through the windows of the numerous antique shops and art galleries in the Wolstraat.
Back at the hotel, Eloïse had refused to go to sleep for Oma and Opa. We ushered her back to our own room and went to bed soon afterwards.
All in all, this was a very successful overnight trip to Belgium.