Sunday evening Sandra and Flo arrived in Vienna for half a week with the main event: Madonna's first ever Vienna concert during her "Sticky and Sweet"-Tour on the Donauinsel. While we had to work both Monday and Tuesday, our guests had two fine days, whereas Sandra used Monday to fight an oncoming flu. She suceeded and was on top form on Tuesday.
In order to have enough energy for the concert, Flo made on Tuesday evening a fantastic pizza which was eaten away pretty fast before we got on our way. Having arrived at the venue we tried to find a decent spot close to the stage where we also had a chance to see the stage, but arriving at 1915 was obviously too late as many of the 45000 people where already there and so we were rather in the back, so only Markus did have a good view.
At 2040 the Queen of Pop, Madonna Louise Ciccone, came on stage and opened the concert with "Candy Shop", one of the tracks from her current album, "Hard Candy". The stage itself was full of technology, glamour, screens and in that respect impressive. Unfortunately it was not very high and therefore one did not see too much. The screens revealed to a certain extent how agile and fit the 50 year old still is. No way we could see details, which might have provided us of more age-evidence.
What was striking was that both older tracks as well as new ones have been performed in re-mixed versions, newly interpreted and they were not immediately recognized. This meant that the crowd had difficulties to get going and the atmosphere was rather cool, whereas the weather was ok - only 10 degrees, but dry. Only a rather genuine version of "Like a prayer" got motion into the crowd, but a humble attempt to integrate the crowd more with a 'sing-a-long' of one of her songs failed as unfortunately no-one recognized this song and so it was pretty much embarassing for both Vienna as well as Madonna and she seemed to be pissed off by that. What should we say? In a final attempt to make everyone happy the rather dancefloor-type of track "Hung up" has been performed in a heavy metal way that Rammstein or Metallica could be proud of.
Somehow expectation and performance did not match
Maybe the expectations were too high, maybe the way the gig was set up would have suited rather for an indoor performance with less people or maybe it just was not our day, but Madonna clearly did not impress us much and - before the gig we would not have bet a cent on us saying that after the concert - if we would not have been to the concert, we had not missed much. Let's stick to the albums which are great, but a Madonna live concert in a large arena: No, thank you! For impressions of the concert (actually mainly the stage) take a look at the our Picasa webalbum in the picture links.
Kerstin & Markus
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