Plushmusic’s coverage of the Song Competition

Following our sleepless coverage of Plushmusic’s Cologne festival in February, our producer Matt Jolly and I made a solemn promise to each other: our next live blogging of a musical event would be seamless, rehearsed, and calm. Some hope.

After a day tripping over ethernet cables, power cables, cameras, video cameras and each other, we are beginning to realise that life - at least, the musical life - is never going to be that predictable. Loins are being girded (I have never been entirely sure what that means…) Tomorrow we join forces with Wigmore Hall to greet and interview 34 competitors arriving for the 2009 Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation Song Competition. Half of them are going to be jet-lagged and the other half will have much better German than English.

Then they start singing. Literally hundreds of works are being performed over the next six days, as the world’s best young singers vie for a place in the final on Thursday 10 September. You can watch a live stream of that event on www.plushmusic.tv.

But why wait? Join us now, and be part of the competition as it unfolds. Follow this blog and our Twitter and Facebook feeds. We’ll have live commentary, pictures, videos and audio interviews from the competition, and we’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions, and experiences of this vital, yet rarely celebrated music. Take us to your Lieder.

Simon Ings