Long nights of the museums in Ludwigshafen

The long night of the museums

The long night of the museum on Saturday evening was supposed to be one of the highlights of the trip. And it was!

The concept of the evening was, that with one ticket you can enter more than one hundred different museums, art galleries and exhibitions in the Rhein-Neckar Region. At the same time, the ticket enables the holder to use all means of public transportation.

Based on the program booklet, we selected the events that we were most interested in, but we still left some room for acting spontaneously.

So for our first destination we went to see a dress rehearsal of the "Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz" in Ludwigshafen. The conductor of the orchestra is a Finn, Ari Rasilainen. Eventually we met him at the hall way and exchanged a couple of words. Ludwigshafen seems to have be an attractive place for Finnish conductors, as one of Ari predecessors was Leif Segerstam.

We attended two of their performances. First some people from the audience were given the opportunity to conduct the symphony orchestra. The "amateur conducting" displayed clearly how much influence and impact on the tempo a conductor actually can have.

Surprisingly, Ari Rasilainen even spoke Finnish during his moderation, which was of course well appreciated from some parts of the audience, namely us.



The second part of their performance was a a public dress rehearsal of Sergei Prokoviev's Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100. As a special arrangement for the long night of the museums, the guest conductor Jac van Steen invited the audience to place their chairs within the orchestra, so the idea was that the listener could experience the play from a different perspective.



After the concert we went to the Wilhelm-Hack Art Museum. Three different video art works were displayed in this exhibition. One of them was especially inspiring. The video art work showed laughing people with different ethnic back ground. The laughter infected us and after a while we were laughing too. Still, the atmosphere in the museum, its black walls and the dim lights made this experience somewhat bizarre.




As our last station in Ludwigshafen we went to see a gig of a local R'n'B artist in the town museum. We listened to the performance for a while. On the upper floor of the museum an area of participation invited to perform all kinds of brain teasers activating spatial imagination, training sleight of hand or testing the knowledge of physical basics.