What a ride, Longital + String Quartet, thank you for letting me a part of it!
It all began with an invitation by Daniel Salontay, not much unlike this one:
It was to a one-off concert collaboration during the renowned Slovak classical music festival Konvergencie, with its director Jozef Lupták playing the cello as a one part of a string quartet, with the string section arranged and composed by Slavo Solovic, an old friend of Longital and Slnko records, now also famous for his work with Korben Dallas (Symphony + Sen), Sendreiovci (Le Orchestroha) and others.
It all started in 2005, when Longital won the Tatrabanka Prize for Art and Slavo Solovic was asked to compose and conduct a full orchestra rendition of one of Longital's song Zlatá (My dear). The performance was amazing, but too grandiose to repeat elsewhere, the band had decided. See for yourselves:
For me, the invitation was not only to the concert but also to the rehearsal, where I made a lot of shots of the suita rehearsing together in a lovely, sun lit space on top of the city theatre. This led to another photo invitation, this time in a video form, using animoto:
I was also lucky enough to be a part of the general rehearsal, where I had enough space to take close ups off the performers, and other shots I would not be able to take later at the concert.
And continued later in a day with the evening performance itself, where my wife Nadja, having a birthday that day tested a new Sony A7 camera (to a great result, as you can see from the first pictures in the slideshow, which are hers:
I would have lied if I said there were no other photographers - in fact two, plus a camera crew. But it is the video made by one of them, Martina Mlcuchova, that I want to share with you, for its raw energy: