To celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, why not come and see a free 25-minute classical music concert in a most unusual and beautiful setting?!

Annouced just a week before the event, Monday 9th November will see a most unusual event happening at the Place de la Concorde in Paris:

– 27 European cellists will play works by Fauré, Bach and Alfred Schnittke, standing on giant stones meant to symbolise fragments of the Berlin Wall,

– They will be accompanied by the French Army choir,

– Images will be projected onto the walls surrounding the Place, in order to make them look a little more like the graffiti-covered remnants of the Wall(!),

– The concert will symbolise “the wind of freedom that blew across Europe in 1989”,

And the event will be shown on both French and German TV.

Th concert is a reference to Mstislav Rostropovitch (who died in 2007), a Russian musician who defected to come and live in Paris in 1974. Images of his spontaneous performance with a Stradivarius in front of Checkpoint Charlie two days after the fall of the Wall were shown around the world.

The show is costing 795,000 € before tax ($1,173,000/£719,000) to set up, but the French government assures us that nothing will be paid by the taxpayer. Instead, 11 French companies are footing the bill (Total, Areva, Air France, EDF, Generali, LVMH, Orange, PSA, Sanofi Aventis and EADS, as well as the Foundation for French-German relations). For this extraordinary gesture, they can flash their logos at the end of the show and all over the VIP area!

The free concert and light show is at the Place de la Concorde (here) on 9th November 2009 at 7pm.