Team-BHP - Yanni Live! - Experience of a lifetime
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As luck would have it, the radio was on. Radio?? What the heck!!

Yes, thats my latest craze. While commuting from my home to office, I nowadays listen to the radio, specially FM 90.5 - NPR (National Public Radio) - Greenville.

So, the radio was on as I was driving home from office on Monday (20th Apr). The radio was belting out some soft rock with small announcements in between. It was then that something caught my ears. Did they say Yanni? Did they say Greenville? Before I realized what I was hearing, the ad ended. The last portion that I could hear was, ticketmaster.com.

I could not wait to return home and probably broke a few traffic rules as I started rushing and weaving in and out of the traffic, on the interstate. There was not much time in hand and I have to get a ticket. I must.

Parked my car and ran inside, booted the laptop and into ticketmaster.com. Yes!!, there is a live Yanni show at Greenville, tomorrow - 21st Apr. Will I get tickets??

Logged on to the site and viola, there were tickets available. I could not believe my eyes. It was a dream come true for me. As many others, I am a huge Yanni fan and seeing the legend perform live is something that I always wanted.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you Yanni Voices!! Yanni is doing an US tour and stopping at Greenville on 21st Apr. The show was at the downtown Bi-Lo center, with a capacity of 16000. I was hoping the show would be sold out, but Greenville is a very small city and it was quite surprizing that the legend was stopping there, on his way from Atlanta to Nashville.

The D-day appeared. The show was to start from 7:30pm. I was looking at my watch constantly. Looks like its moving particularly slowly that day. Finally left office at 6pm and decided to go to the venue directly, in order to avoid the usual parking woes. Got myself seated inside the auditorium at 7pm. Still 30mins to go. I was checking out the surroundings, the sound systems, the elaborate lightings, etc.

A little background of the show. This US tour is of 3 months, ending in June. Unlike other shows, this tour concentrates mostly on vocals, hence the name Voices. Along with Yanni, this tour showcases the extremely talented vocalists like Nathan Pacheco, Chloe, Ender Thomas and Leslie Mills. All of them are hugely talented and have a god gifted voice. Among all of them, Chloe was the one who stole the show with her clear, evocative voice and her dance moves.

The curtains lifted at 7:30pm and the stage was awashed in blue light and there he was, standing the middle, Yanni. This time in an all black attire, unlike the familiar white dress.

There were not many hands on stage, a total of 16 hands. Yanni himself was surrounded by 9 keyboards. The show opened with a vocal by Nathan Pacheco, who set the right tempo for the show. Gradually, one by one, some of the compositions of Yanni were being played interpersed with the vocals by the above artists. I later counted that there were a total of 24 keyboards and a grand piano on the stage.

We were also presented with the spellbounding duels on violin by Samvel Yervinyan and Sayaka Katsuki. Samvel is one of the best violinist I have ever heard. He also played for us the famous composition, called "Storm".

We were transported into a whole new world and almost each song was received with a standing ovation from the audience. The stunning audio and visuals were world class, perfectly coordinated and with clock work precision. We reluctantly came out of the Yanni trance after 2.5hrs.

It was strictly no-camera event, so no pictures here. You may however, like to check out the site, Yanni.com - The Official Yanni website for Yanni and Yanni Voices.

This tour is still continuing and will be visiting a lot of other US cities. Those of you who like his music, make it a point to see it for yourself, if you are in the US. You can find the tour dates from the link above.


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