Milky Chance and the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra

This was an FM4 Radio session with Milky Chance and the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra. You can also watch the video here!

Written by Susi Ondrushová

FM4 Radio Session with Milky chance and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Exceptionally, the band shares the stage with a 55-piece orchestra, three background singers and a conductor. Goose meat!

“We usually never do anything like this,” are the first words uttered by singer and guitarist Clemens Rauhbein after the FM4 Radio Session’s opening number: “Sync.” The four-piece band, its three background singers, and the RSO under the direction of Gottfried Rappel had two days to rehearse and rehearse these newly arranged songs together for orchestra.

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The lead time needed to conduct an FM4 radio session is enormous. International band as well as orchestra schedules are busy. Gottfried Rappel, who has conducted radio sessions with Nada Cerf and Kari Kari in the past, really likes the musical diversity that such a project brings to the orchestra. One day he’s Mozart, another he’s performing contemporary pieces at WienModern and then encounters a band like Milky Chance.

Three months before the FM4 radio session, Milky Chance performed at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. The magic word for which sessions with RSO can ever be achieved is: results. Together with musician Florian Spess, the band rearranged sixteen songs from their four albums and reworked them for orchestra. Gottfried Rappel says after the first rehearsal the day before the performance: “It takes a lot of time to write a big orchestral piece. The arranger Florian Spess did it in a very short time. That’s why these radio sessions don’t happen very often. You have to have an ensemble that is open to playing with the orchestra, because suddenly you have to play at the exact tempo; According to the leader or click!

Whether they play violin, trumpet or clarinet, the musicians are particularly fond of the harp: “When we founded the band, we said after 10 years we want to do it with the harp! Here we are!”, laughs Philipp during the interview. In addition to the brass, woodwind and woodwind instruments, the two also admired the “sequenced instrument” from the orchestra. “The chain is at the top of the percussion mechanism. It is folded like this and there is a chaining noise. It sounds like a dungeon chain from a castle!” It is not easily visible to the audience from the rows of seats in the Radiokulturhaus, but it is certainly unmistakable, for example at the end of “Don’t Let Me Down”.

200 FM4 listeners sat in the large broadcast hall for the FM4 radio session in the hall. A few fans are seeing Milky Chance live for the first time and in an unusual, intimate setting, with the band typically playing in halls ten times larger. With the three words: “Golden. Brilliant. Brilliant,” says one FM4 listener, describing the concert. Others talk about the ecstasy of the orchestra’s musicians (hello, cellists in the front row!) and about the remarkable interest of the audience, which listened with great concentration, but also got up and started By dancing in energetic moments. It was like “falling in love again” because many of the songs they had heard many times and known by heart were given a new sheen with new instruments and sometimes with a different tempo.

“Emotions that may already be hidden in some songs are ‘lifted’ (amplified) by the orchestra.”“We have to be a little careful about what happens when the orchestra disappears again when we play again,” Clemens said in the interview and Philippe had to think a little nervously about the phantom pain the next day. So, pit after rush!” What’s the one word that comes to mind immediately after an FM4 radio session that best sums up the evening? Goose meat. Even.

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