We went to the 10:30 am mass at the Cathedral St Pierre and learned there was sort of international festival with groups in native costume from Kenya, Malaysia, Japan and Paraguay. Outside of the Mozart piece the organist played as the prelude, the rest of the service had music performed by young people from these countries.

Our 1pm concert featured two Bach cantatas for alto, sung by Damien Guillon, another world-class performance. He sounds very much like Andreas Scholl and has a beautiful tone.

The concert at 8pm though, was something else! Calling it “avant garde” is much too tame. Don’t get me wrong — this was a superb choral group of 32 singers who sang some extremely difficult music, but it contained lots of tonal clusters and unusual sounds (like tongue clicks). Carl says the LCH choir has nothing to complain about!

When the choir first came out I noticed that there was no pitch given and I thought, surely not everyone in this group has perfect pitch! Later I saw that each singer had an iPod earbud so they must have gotten the pitch electronically.