Music

The Montreux Jazz Café in the arrival hall of Geneva’s international airport seems like a pretty cool idea. Open a chic café designed to highlight the Montreux JazzFestival, and while customers sip that extravagantly priced cappuccino, waiting for the arrival of the routinely delayed Air France flight from Paris, they can watch a video of the jazz performance that they missed while stalled on the Montreux exit of the autoroute last year. The question of quality, as William Dowell, one of our Essential Edge editors discovered to his acoustic dismay, is is a much different matter.

The world-renowned Welsh Morriston Orpheus is coming to Geneva on 11 October 2008. This is the first time that a professional Welsh male choir will have ever performed in Geneva. Headed by British pianist Joy Amman Davies with Catrin Aur Davies as accompanying soloist, the 100-strong male choir is on Swiss tour as part of its support for Eclat, an association for handicapped people. This is an opportunity not to be missed to see a choir that has performed to wide acclaim from the Sydney Opera House in Australia to Carnegie Hall in New York. Its repertoire ranges from traditional Welsh ballads to Broadway classics. Tickets (45-125 CHF) are available at www.concert-morriston-orpheus.1s.fr or Tel. 41-79-507-2153.

Middle age is known to produce extreme reactions. Marriages dissolve. Children become victims. Plastic surgeons become confidantes. And – it seems - punk rock groups are born. That was the way it was for the Gex Pistols, the self-proclaimed ‘middle aged and angry’ rock band from the Pays de Gex, who came together four years ago, as a motley bunch of expats in their 40’s with a wide-range of musical interests. The band also represents one of the  more unusual musical phenonema that only the Lake Geneva Region's highly international mix of communities could produce.

If challenged to hum, whistle or sing 12 Beatles songs in the space of five minutes I could offer Hey Jude, Fool on the Hill, Obladi Oblada, Eleanor Rigby, Yesterday, Something in the Way she Moves, She Loves You, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Lovely Rita Meter-Maid, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Lady Madonna. And for a baker's dozen I'll chuck in Lennon's Imagine. That actually took two minutes and I could give you another dozen within the remaining three minutes. These and a great many of the others – Wikipedia lists 258 of them – are so familiar that at any time you can hear and recognise them on ring-tones, through a random scan of your radio channels, on the annoying musak of supermarkets or in music shops from Kyoto to Quito and from Hobart to Harlem.