And that completes escgo’s live coverage of today’s rehearsals! Tomorrow, all 16 songs in the first semi-final will be rehearsed for the second time – and we’ll be here to tell you what’s changed and try and give you an impression of who’s qualifying, and who might be getting the first flight home.

The fan-press are also allowed into the arena for the first time, so our busy photographer Felix will be providing you with loads of lovely photos of the rehearsals in our dedicated galleries. Until then, take a look around our other content, and do pop into our chat and say hello!

POLAND
The backdrop for Poland is soft floaty pink sheets and blossom-clad trees on a lilac background. It’s like an advert for fabric softener.

The song starts with a shot of the very proper-looking pianist at his white piano, before panning across to the upper half of Monika’s body for the first verse. For a brief moment we wonder whether they’re trying to recreate the “reveal” of the music video by playing the disability card at the very end of the song, but no – once the first chorus starts, the camera pulls back to reveal Monika sat in her wheelchair, elegantly draped in more sheets (white, this time – apparently they’re advertising washing powder too).

If you’re irritated by bad English accents, this isn’t the performance for you. “Let’s beeeld a breeedge”, we’re told, while the song’s title appears to have mutated into “in the name of lu-huff”.

Three backing singers round off the stage act, and all in all it’s a very conventional staging of a very conventional song. Not that we were expecting dancing beavers juggling fire. Monika has yet to entirely convince me with her vocals (again, though: rehearsal), but it’s a friendly and appealing performance and she blows us all a lovely kiss at the end, so that’s nice.

image copyright: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

SLOVENIA
There’s no way of making this sound exciting as a blogger, so let’s get straight down to it: There’s nothing new here. Headphones? Check! Old-fashioned white lacy dress? Check! Air violinist? Check! Wind machine? Check! Raay sitting at the piano, clicking his fingers like a man tasked with manually masturbating caged animals for artificial insemination? Check!

With that being the case, what can we really say about Slovenia? Actually, there is one thing. Marjetka’s headphones have been a source of great fan discussion all season long, and it’s only when you’re watching 40 sets of rehearsals more or less back-to-back that you realise the problem with them: They make it look like she’s still in a rehearsal. It’s not that they act as a block to interaction with the viewer – she works the cameras perfectly well – it just makes it feel like she’s forgotten this isn’t actually a run-through. (Which, of course, it is. Today. Man, this is confusing.)

There’s warm yellow lighting to accentuate Marjetka’s “updated Katja Ebstein” retro look, and the thing barrels along nicely enough, but (and there had to be a “but”)… well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the choreography, maybe it’s the way the performers act around the cameras, maybe it’s just the slight whiff of cheapness that permeates the whole thing, but there’s something about this that feels like a song presentation from a small country. Not quite Andorra small, but still. It’s not a trap you want to fall into in a Eurovision context.

Still, we need to lift the curse of the ChatVote after last year, so hopefully it’s just over-familiarity leading me to be excessively critical and this’ll still come across as nice and fresh to the viewer encountering it for the first time.

image copyright: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

CYPRUS
This one starts in actual black-and-white before slowly turning to colour for the first chorus. Not that you’d really notice, since John is in a dark suit with a white shirt (and a casually not-quite-tied tie) anyway. For a horrible moment it looks as if the stage is going to be blue, but it actually ends up being a more eye-pleasing combination of twinkly magentas, blues and yellows on an elegant dark background – think Ivan Mikulić in 2004 and the lovely oasis of calm that his performance ended up being. On later run-throughs, they’ve been playing with fading to monochrome and soft focus at the end of the song too, but we’ll see whether they stick with that on Saturday.

The four “I should have been there for you” lines are accompanied by firework explosions on the video backdrop, which makes me wonder if the one thing John should have done is “warn you to take care when lighting that Catherine wheel”.

Nice, comfortable vocals from John throughout. They’re not overplaying the geek thing, but neither are they hiding it – he looks a bit like a college student dressed up for an end-of-year dinner dance, but definitely one you could introduce to your Mum while you’re waiting for the taxi.

The new orchestral flourishes on the backing track risk smoothing the edges of the performance somewhat – this definitely isn’t ByeAlex-esque subversion any more, it’s something more calculated and actively Eurovision-y, but maybe the underlying composition isn’t substantial enough to stand on its own merits alone. It’s still a borderliner for qualification as far as I’m concerned, but that’s not what we’re talking about here (…yet!). In terms of what we’ve seen today, this has a distinct visual identity and comes across nicely at this point in the running order, so we’ll call that a good day’s work.

image copyright: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

SWITZERLAND
In a shocking turn of events, it’s a girl in black singing on a blue stage.

Except she doesn’t stay that way for long. The “Croatian strip” has fallen out of fashion a little at recent Eurovisions, but after the first chorus rolls around, Mélanie pulls back the top part of her dress and turns it into a cloak, revealing the slinky silvery number underneath. It’s cheesy, but hey, at least it’s something different.

Speaking of something different (or not), after Ireland’s pastoral scene and the Azerbaijan horror eclipse, this is yet another entry with a woodland backdrop (which has prompted us to rename her Mélanie de Forest). This time round, the trees come in deep blue, white and purple variants. Oh well, at least it’s not a spinning globe.

I just wrote an entire paragraph about artificial tree colours. This is what the press centre does to you.

The backing singers are playing drums (drama is a Swiss word), while Mélanie stands on a transparent podium. She’s in pretty solid form throughout – vocals are decent, personality is perhaps a bit lacking, but she’s trying to play the cool rock chick so I suppose smiling doesn’t come with the territory (granted, she’s more your “safe neighbourly Mel C” than “scary snake-wielding Nina Sublatti”). The backing vocals sound exposed and horrible at the end, but the sound balance on the first run-throughs has been consistently dubious – again, that’s the point of rehearsals. Then again, they’re not sounding much better on the third run…

Competent stuff from the Swiss, then, backing vocals aside. This is less in-your-face objectionable than Malta in the “strong young woman with actual opinions and stuff” department, which might be enough to edge them towards qualification. There must be some delegations seriously regretting their choice of stage colours now, though.

image copyright: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

SWEDEN
So yes, of course, there was a delay in getting the projection screen set up and aligned properly. The rehearsal time was suspended and there’ll inevitably be a fanboy or two complaining about Sweden getting special treatment – all very Saade in Düsseldorf, in other words.

What do we see when things finally get going? Well, firstly, the copyright-infringing stick figure has been tweaked slightly and now looks a bit like Augustus Gloop in lederhosen – you get the idea. Not exactly a huge change, though, and indeed (and as expected) there’s no great change in what the projections actually do. Måns is slightly off in terms of both placement and timing on the first run-through, leading to some very minor tweaks that we’re being shown on the press centre feed, so all will be well soon. Once the projection stuff is over and done with, the last minute of the song is accompanied by pulsing red lighting on a black background.

Vocally Måns is obviously fine, holding back a bit but otherwise delivering as expected. The wall-of-sound backing vocals from the studio version are being replicated well enough; unlike with Azerbaijan, you do find yourself missing the sheer bigness of the original sound a bit (probably because Måns doubled up his own vocals there, and you can’t exactly replicate that unless you’ve invented a Måns Cloning Machine, in which case I know some Eurovision fans who would like to arrange a business meeting with you), but it’s fine.

The one thing of note is that the Vienna stage is smaller and differently shaped to its Melodifestivalen counterpart, and that does limit Måns in his movements during the chorus. Or if you prefer, it’s going to force him to think about about how exactly he executes his spontaneous-but-not-so-spontaneous movements. But again, that’s the kind of minute detail that only us hardcore fans would notice anyway, so hey.

Very solid first day for Sweden. Did we expect anything less?

image copyright: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

Introduction
Welcome back to the Stadthalle in Vienna for the “afternoon” session of today’s rehearsals! Things will be getting going very soon with Sweden, although we don’t expect to see many run-throughs of that one because (like with Belgium and Estonia on Monday) there’ll be a lot of technical things to get right first. Stay tuned for all the details, though, followed by the first rehearsals from Switzerland, Cyprus, Slovenia and finally Poland!