Gönül Sen-Menzel Paints the Bayer Wind Orchestra Live on Ten Meters of Canvas

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“Music like this gets under your skin!” The voice at the next table spoke for many.

Around a thousand listeners reveled in the snappy or lilting tunes of the Bayer Wind Orchestra, which held its traditional Pentecost concert on Whit Monday for the first time in the terrace hall of the Forum. The music came with visual art: the Turkish painter Gönül Sen created a monumental painting of the orchestra.

Chairman Klemens Henn explained why the orchestra did not play at the Erholungshaus, its home venue. Theater performances shortly before and after the festival would have required the elaborate conversion of the stalls twice. The Forum can also accommodate more guests; 1,192 chairs had been set up, most of them at tables. That suited families with children, since experience shows that the little ones need room to run around.

“Off to the Start” was the first number. It was also the signal for the artist, who had set up a ten-meter-wide canvas on the gallery. While Betin Günes conducted, his compatriot wielded the brush or set accents with spray cans. For three years, the Cologne-based artist has been painting musicians and dancers in strong colors to musical performances. “Music inspires me,” she said. It was her idea to immortalize the Bayer wind players in acrylic.

Günes, musical director of the wind orchestra since 1989 and principally conductor of the Cologne Symphony Orchestra, has worked with Gönül Sen in this way several times. During the orchestra’s finale, the Radetzky March, she added the final strokes while the audience filed past the expansive artwork. She has no clear idea yet of what it will be used for. She wants to leave that to the organizer.

Sitting in the audience with a glass of Kölsch was 80-year-old Heinz Merrem, an active violinist with the Bayer Philharmonic. Now and then he indulges his secret love, brass music, and goes to the “competition” – competition in quotation marks, of course. The wind section of the Philharmonic, which he chaired for years, is looking for young players with good lungs. The youth orchestra is not much better off. A little slim, but in splendid shape, it performed modern pieces after the break, of which “Springtime in Florida” left the most lasting impression.

Children, children everywhere, especially in the seats at the front of the stage. Anna Lena, for example, already in early musical education at five, would like to play the accordion like her mom one day; first she has to learn the recorder. Her father, Uwe Bigalke, never had such a chance. That is why he wants to fulfill a long-cherished wish and take saxophone lessons. Albert and Irmgard Klein are experiencing the Bayer wind players for the first time. Their daughter Claudia and her boyfriend Carsten Potrz, who have not missed a single autumn or Pentecost concert of the orchestra since 1988, had brought them along. “We all love brass music,” they enthused.

Original caption: The Bayer Wind Orchestra, conducted by Betin Günes, delighted an audience of a thousand with snappy and lilting tunes. For organizational reasons, the traditional Pentecost concert took place for the first time not in the Erholungshaus but in the terrace hall of the Forum.