This is a musical week for me; on monday, I saw Edita Gruberova in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, and yesterday, it was Tina Turner. Who was awesome. Her voice is as strong and good as it ever was, and as I had my Aged Parents with me, I could see my father's chin drop in awe when she moved in perfect sync with her decades younger back-up dancers, all of them in stiletto heels which are murder for me to walk or stand for ten minutes in - dancing would be impossible!

The concert was sold out - I had given the APs the tickets on their wedding anniversary last summer - thoug at one point soon after it started, we saw the mayor (of Munich, that is), Christian Ude, come in belatedly and take his place two rows ahead of us, red scarf around his neck and apologetic grin on his face. I don't think anyone else noticed, given how much Tina Turner rocked. Literally. Mostly it was a "best of" collection of hits, but she also did two Beatles songs that aren't on the album for the tour, Get Back right at the beginning, as her opening song, and in the second half of the programm, Help, but as a slow blues song. I had never heard it that way before. In the original version, you have this contrast between the cheerful upbeat tune and the rather desperate lyrics, which as John Lennon later said really were autobiographical and a cry for help. Help sung slowly of course draws much more attention to the sadness:but now my life has changed in oh so many ways/ my independence seems to vanish in the haze, in Tina Turner's voice, slowly, gets you through and through.

Mostly it was rock, though, and whether it was What's Love Got To Do With It or We don't need another hero, the audience went crazy. (Some guy not too far from where we were sitting yelled "TINAAA" in the silence after a song had finished, and she just very wryly said "yes", which had everyone in stitches.) There was one Obama shout-out (when she encouraged the audience to go repeat the refrain of What's love got to do with it, she first asked the women to, and then the men, and when the men did it, she said "now fellows, you can do better. Just tell yourself "Yes we can"") which caused both laughter and great applause, too. And nobody but nobody did the patronizing "not bad for a woman of 70" thing - thirty-years-olds would be lucky to be so good. (And she really took very little breaks, just for costume changes, for a show that started at 8 pm and ended at 11, and hat her sitting only through three slow numbers, like the above mentioned Help, otherwise it was standing and dancing while singing, all the time.

I made some photos, but they didn't turn out that well. Still, they give an impression, so here you go:

( Under the cut )

In conclusion: as our local critic said, "simply the best" isn't hype in this case.