The day before our concert we met and rehearsed with Hans and Ingrid – we hadn‘t played our Winter Journey for some time and hadn‘t seen each other over the summer. Oh how wonderful it was to meet and play again : )...right after our rehearsal we had our „Listening Party“ of „The Schumann Songbook“, meaning that we all sat down together opened a bottle of wine, beer and/or Prosecco : ) and listened to our whole album all together for the very first time. I enjoyed every momen

One more night with the big.mdw.band!!!Thank you to Bert Müller for taking these wonderful pictures and thank you once more to aaall the musicians, Markus Geiselhart und mathias rüegg for making this collaboration possible!!!It was a pleasure to work with you!!! Let's do it again sooooooon, yours Lia! P.S.: sometimes conducting a Big Band feels like dancing : )!!! #BigBand #rüegg #Pale #mdw

THE SCHUMANN SONGBOOK DAY 1 We started with "Erstes Grün" - and we were lucky..."first green" - "first take"!!!Followed by "Ich hab im Traum geweinet" also known as the "Udu-Song" as the one and only Ingrid O is featuring the magic instrument "Udu". On "Herbstlied", our bass suite, Mister Hans Strasser played an incredible solo filled with a thousand stories and melodies. "Ich grolle nicht" - one of the biiiig ballads of Mister Schumann arranged by rüegg...and once more we pl

I went to mathias‘ place round noon to pack everything I might need, my flute, notes and my Schumann Songbook : ) ...and just when we were getting ready to print our setlist, mathias noticed that the train we were supposed to take had already left one hour ago without us : ). You might know that mathias loves trains and he always books the train tickets long time in advance to make sure he gets his favourite seats, so you can imagine how surprised I was that missing a train d

OH my, I think I am still out of breath from my morning sprint on that day : )...I forgot my passport and I had to run from trainstation St.Marx back to my place in the 6th district, back to the airport in 70 min!!!I couldn‘t believe it!!! Luckily our flight was 20 min delayed and this was exactly the time I needed to be back for boarding!!!I was so exhausted and relieved and I‘m thinking about getting an ID that fits in my wallet : )! Other than that we had a comfortable jou

Canzoni per Roberto...and you probably think that we mean Robert Schumann : ) but actually a very different Robert was the reason for our concert in Firenze at the Accademia della Crusca. It was all because of Mister Robert Rüegg. That‘s right! mathias‘ father finished his dissertation about Italian dialects in 1956. And now all these years later, his visionary works were translated and published in Italy: Sulla geografia linguistica dell' italiano parlato/ Franco Cesati Edit

It was the day after our premiere at the Porgy, the second time we played our Schumann Songbook in front of an audience and it was the second time we were invited to play in Waidhofen an der Ybbs. It is a beautiful town in Lower Austria with a magnificent castle in the middle of town „Schloss Rothschild“. Thomas Bieber is the artistic director and responsible for the wonderful program they have every year. We were honoured to have the chance to play our Schumann Songbook in t

Playing new material for the very first time always brings me to my limits and although there is this is feeling that I can‘t wait to share these new songs and that they feel like secrets, that I cannot hold back any longer, I am more nervous than usual, feeling even more vulnerable and scared. The last few days right before a premiere are so special in many ways : ) rehearsals are incredibly intense and in between you try your best to explain during interviews what it is tha

DAY 1 It probably was the most challenging week I‘ve experienced so far...everything seemed to happen at once...after our concert at Semmering it continued non stop...from our final recording session of Schubert‘s Winter Journey to rehearsals with the incredible Soloists leading up to these two concerts at the Porgy & Bess. I got to the Porgy at around 5:30 pm and I had no idea that I was about to walk down into a steamy hot hot Porgy, „we‘re having a heat wave, a tropical he

We were part of this year‘s „Kultur.Sommer.Semmering“ and I was very much looking forward to playing Schubert‘s Winter Journey within this wonderful festival directed by Florian Krumpöck and Nina Sengstschmid. You know how much mathias loves trains and so as soon as he has the chance to travel by train, that‘s what he does and I kept him company : ). It takes a little bit longer than an hour to get from Vienna to „Semmering“ and while driving through this incredible landscape