The One Who Dances With the Violin: Münster, First Stop of the Summer
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The concert itself was not only a tour opener. The Halle Münsterland is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, and this performance doubled as part of the anniversary celebrations — a fitting stage for a tour that begins with a heartbeat.
The review captures the opening moment with lovely precision. The seated hall falling dark. A visualization of a heartbeat on screen. Boom, boom… growing louder. A deep voice from the dark: “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Millennium Symphony tour…” The Seven Nation Army riff emerging from the red smoke. And then, the silhouette.
What Otman names plainly, with admirable honesty, is the tension that lives inside any Garrett opening night: a seated hall, an audience that is part dedicated fan and part invited birthday guest, a man on stage whose approachability has never been the point. For the first songs, the room holds its breath rather than catches it.
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Then: Avicii. The review calls it straight — at Wake Me Up, the audience rises, collectively, to its feet. And when the announcement of Rammstein’s Mein Herz brennt sweeps the rows, a loud murmur follows. That’s the turning point. The loudest applause of the evening, still before the break.
After the interval, everything accelerates. Shape of You. Blinding Lights. Survivor. Russian Roulette, dramatically reshaped for a single violin. Smooth Criminal at dizzying speed. A rock version of Beethoven’s Fifth — and, as photographs of a four-year-old Garrett appear on the big screen, something shifts.
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The encore, though, is what no review sees coming. Coldplay’s Viva la vida closes the show. And then Garrett speaks — “Eigentlich mache ich sowas nie…” (“I normally never do something like this…”) — and plays Happy Birthday for the walls of a hall turning a hundred this year. A small, generous gesture in a night otherwise committed to only one thing.
That mission carried the entire evening. But the encore — that little song for a building’s birthday — is where the other thing we keep coming back to lives. The detail that makes it personal, and real, and ours to remember.
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The full review, with photographs by Thomas Hölscher, is available (in German) on Alles Münster. Go read it. It’s beautifully written.