Odense Flower Festival 2015

Odense Flower Festival took place on 13-16 August 2015 and this year it marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the local composer Carl Nielsen with the theme “Carl Nielsen’s Universe”.

Last year I promised myself that I would boycott this year’s Odense Flower Festival. The annual festival started eleven years ago in my hometown Odense, where the city centre was turned into a flower fairyland with imaginative floral sculptures everywhere. For the past six years, the flower art and sculptures have been replaced by nursing schools selling their flowers and because of this, the magic has gone.

I stayed true to my promise, so I didn’t go to the festival as such, but I couldn’t help seeing some of the displays anyway, mainly because I still wanted to see the band “Tankens Bager” (Baker of Thoughts) in concert. My friend Claus is the singer, songwriter and guitarist in the band and they play at the festival each year. This year their two concerts had been moved from the town square to the more prestigious amphi-stage by Brandt’s cultural centre. I met up with Claus’ sister, who is my old school friend, and we had a good evening. The music was great, but unfortunately, the flowers on display were rather boring.

The day after, my daughter and I went to town. As some of you know, I had a partial knee replacement seven weeks ago, so I am still on crutches and I have to go to check-ups, rehabilitation training and, of course, the chemist for painkillers and that was what we were doing that day. On our way we passed the town square, so we took a look at the flower displays. They were - quite frankly - rather boring and the most interesting were some wood and melon carvings! Not much to do with flowers, in my opinion.

As for the Carl Nielsen theme, the town square had some huge banners with funny photos of the composer as a young man and then some black silhouettes placed among flowers as references to Nielsen’s 1906 opera “Masquerade”. Again, it didn’t have that much to do with flowers.

On the town square, you could have your picture taken as participants in the masquerade, so of course my daughter and did that. It was probably the highlight of the festival and that is a little sad, as I would rather have been blown away by amazing flower sculptures.

Be sure that I am going to boycott the festival again next year. I pity the tourists who had travelled from near and far to visit the festival, as it was plainly not worth it.

© Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 2015

Dear friends and readers

I’m sorry to tell you that I won’t be able to write about the first ever Tindebox Festival after all, even though it is going to take place in my backyard, so to speak. The Tinderbox music festival is the first of its kind here in my hometown Odense, Denmark, where 50+ Danish and international artist such as Robbie Williams, James Blake, Ellie Goulding, The Prodigy and The Cardigans are going to play during the weekend to an audience of 25,000 people. Alas, I won’t be able to go.

As some of you know, I’ve been fairly ill for ages, as I have slipped discs and Modic 1 in my spine. For the past two years, I’ve struggled with ostheoarthritis in both knees as well. Since November 2013, I haven’t been able to walk without the aid of crutches or a rollator walker, and now I’ve lost the struggle altogether, so I’m going to hospital later this week to have knee replacement surgery in my left knee. Keep your fingers crossed!

I don’t know when I’ll be able to blog again, but I WILL get back to it and in the meantime, you’ll hopefully be able to learn more about Tinderbox Festival elsewhere.

XX

Lise

Into the Woods

The PG rated musical film “Into the Woods” directed by Rob Marshall is based on a 1986 stage musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. The story is funny and quite interesting, mixing different fairy tales such as “Cinderella”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” and creating a new storyline. Some of the actors are very entertaining like Chris Pine (Cinderella’s Prince), Daniel Huttlestone (Jack), Tracy Ullman (Jack’s mother) and Johnny Depp (the wolf who disappointingly is only in two scenes at the beginning of the film), others like Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) and Lilla Crawford (Little Red Riding Hood) are not. They are just annoying. Most characters like the witch (Meryl Streep), the childless baker (James Corden), his wife (Emily Blunt) and Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) are quite indifferent, though, no matter how good they are at singing. You never get to identify with them, as the musical creates an ironic distance between characters and audience, so you don’t really bother about them. I can live with that, but I can’t stand the music, which is rather unfortunate for a musical.

To make it perfectly clear, I’m not a Stephen Sondheim fan. I’ve always had a problem with his music, as no matter which musical it is, it sounds the same, and I suspect Sondheim of being incapable of writing anything but the same tune. I know that fans call it “stream-of-consciousness” and hail its repetitious patterns, but frankly, it is numbingly boring and it puts a stop to the plot action more than once. In fact, in the cinema where I watched the musical, the audience got so very bored, that whenever a song started, they all turned on their mobiles or headed for the toilets. Only the princes’ song “Agony” sung by Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen is remotely funny, but that is because of the actors, not the music.

Because of the music, “Into the Woods” seems unnecessarily long (it’s 125 minutes, which is at least 35 minutes too long!) and in the end, you just want to go home. Still, I’ll give it 3 out of 5 stars, as the plot, the lyrics and actors like Tracy Ullman, Chris Pine and Johnny Depp are okay: ***