"Music for me was like
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Fans - Mike's PageMike >Review - Royal Albert Hall Concert 2007Royal Albert Hall in London’s KensingtonThe Royal Albert Hall was originally to have been called The Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but the name was changed by Queen Victoria when laying the foundation stone. It forms the practical part of a national memorial to the Prince Consort (Prince Albert) the decorative part is the Albert Memorial directly to the north in Kensington Gardens. What a fitting place for the farewell concert of Nana Mouskouri. Monday 29th October 2007, will be a date to remember by all her adoring fans here in the United kingdom, this being the date when Nana performed one of her three final farewell performance in the UK, and no one could deny her a well deserved retirement after a life time of entertaining at the top of the business .How many artists today could get a standing ovation before they have even started their performance. It was a pleasure and an honour for me personally to be present at this, her last ever performance in London. She opened the concert with Amazing Grace and proved her versatility by singing in several different languages throughout her performance, which seemed fitting as there were people from many different countries at the concert. The stage was full of floral gifts for the star with other gifts passed to her during her performance, there were White Roses, and there is no need to ask why White Roses as the White Rose of Athens has over the years become her signature tune. All the songs that over the past four decades have made her famous were performed and a lot was crammed into the concert which lasted nearly three hours. There was a section of the show where Nana and Yannick sat side by side and performed what for me was a magic set of songs, Yannick was faultless on his guitar, as were all the musician on their various instruments. The second half of the concert was started with that great old favourite of mine, Try To Remember, and that is now what we all must do, try to remember one of the greatest singers that this world has ever seen, but for a slight slip when Nana missed a few words of the song My Way, this was a great concert, and it just proves that Nana is only human after all. So to the stage door where a group of about 50 stood in the cold London October evening waiting for their idol for about 90 minutes, It was to be a quick appearance as signed photographs were handed out long before the star came out, we were told that she would not be signing anything outside. I found this to be strange as there were a lot of people who wanted her to sign their copies of her autobiography and would probably not get another chance to get her to do that, for me something should have been arranged to deal with that. I think the star must have forgotten that she will not be returning to London again and about just how much money people had to part with to get to see her in concert, there were people from New Zealand and America wanting her to sign their books, but they were not given the chance The only down side of the whole evening for me was the price of the programmes, the last concert I went to the programmes were about £6 which is about right, but this was only a five years ago, the mark up on these programmes at the price of £15 was far to high for me and I did not buy one. So to sum up, the concert was great but to just appear for a couple of minutes at the stage door and disappear in a car was not very good, I know people will say the night was very cold and she is in her seventies, but her fans did put themselves out to be there, it would have been nice if 30 minutes could have been put by, inside the building, to show her appreciation of the support her fans have given her over the years. Mike Rustici. |