Andre Rieu played a set of home-town concerts, like the past year. I was in my home-town Maastricht on Saturday evening and was truly amazed on the scale of this event. When we entered the city, fairly late, but he played from 2000 to 0030 (!) we saw a pretty silent cheerful crowd watching the event in the complete city. Just imagine there is the match Netherlands – Country X finale and every single soul in the city is watching it, quite a wow feeling for an otherwise quite other saturday night.

This year, the complete Vrijthof (one of the main squares) was sealed. So this includes all the pubs and restaurants around the Vrijthof also. I’ve never seen any event in Maastricht in which the complete area was sealed. The bars and pubs in the surroundings did not play music and as I have understood served champagne. I missed his explanation for it, but I heard he said he wanted to have a complete perfect concert and went by all pubs himself to arrange it.  So this year there was no interference at all from traffic around the square or music from around the concert. Massive! Truly Massive. He even paid off the McDonalds and other tents in what they would normally earn during such a weekend just to have them closed during the event!

In a wider circle around the vrijthof video screens were put up. And before the video screens there were massive crowds standing or sitting on terraces watching the performance with no music played in the bars (which were complete empty). The general atmosphere was great. I think most people experienced “A mestreechteneer” performing for them somehow micro compressing the essense of the Maastricht in his songs. Of course he presented it in the local dialect and played songs which are “classics” in Maastricht to add to the “incrowd” feeling and pleasing Mestreechteneers that their city is truly the center of reality as all people from Maastricht know because chauvinism is one of the core values To not make this statement too bold: there is a strong sense of chauvinism but with a strong wink. People are proud of their city and they are proud to be living there but at the same time are often much more open and friendly than in the rest of the country. To be chauvinistic is something to say in an ironic sense. Of  course Maastricht is the center of the universe but at the same time I hope you understand the humor in that expression. It’s the humor of Rieu and Maastricht.

To understand this, and the concert, you have to understand, probably, Maastricht. It’s a city very unlikely all the other cities in the Netherlands. It resides in the hillside and has many french and some german influences. It is much more “southern / laid back”, in terms of “culture”. There is much more emphasis on clothing and looking tip-tip (which you notice by seeing the many boutiques in the ancient Roman founded city). There is a specific dialect which somehow is different than the surrounding dialects, it’s a dialect which is song a-like but also is mixed with a lot of swearing People wear typical names and carnaval is high-time, since many people from Maastricht celebrate Carnaval it is deeply mixed with the culture. So ofcourse when Rieu plays songs which have been classics for decades everyone in Maastricht sings along in the local dialect as if they were one big family.

Maastricht is also a city which is in essense still somehow a little village. There are these networks of people and in the end, everyone knows everyone. When you walk through the town you meet people you know on every corner, so going out on a saturday night  is as much a social event as just having some beers on the local terraces. Either rich or poor the social network relationships between people makes everyone unconsciously realize that they are all of the same village. Sometimes this is harder for outsiders who speak plainly hard dutch and who try to intermix. It takes some time to really enter that network but a introduction always helps.

When we walked through the city we settled on the Amors Plein with the brother of my sister and his wife. During the evening he mentioned the Amors Plein and remarked that this is the only square in the world which was named after “the love” one of his themes. The camera’s got active so maybe we are in the picture.

He played a lot of songs which you may have heard from previous performances. Every song was a unique performance on their own with many guests. In the end I think he generate a very good positive vibe throughout the city as he always does with his music. The complete city was applauding after each song, amazing, it was as if the complete city was one big experience. Actually I felt homesick a couple of times, sitting there, and hearing these typical Maastricht songs, sitting on a square on which I recognized some of the bartenders as being exact the same persons as 15 years ago. Luckily nothing changes there ever and Rieu only strengthened that feeling.

It was a wonderful experience which made me homesick but the positive energy he creates within so many people is just amazing. Everyone left with a big smile on their face.

Some songs on YouTube (he probably doesn’t like that these songs are there, then again, it’s the only way to explain his performances). These are the ones I found: