Three dreams come true!

“We’ve sweated a few times this year,” says Muriel Zeiter, 38. “But in the end it all ended with a happy ending.” She sits with her husband, Fabian Bloch, 36, in the bright living room of the house the two of them built in Wisen, near Olten in Solothurn. Zeiter gives the bottle to their daughter Jael (7 months old).

The father missed the birth of his first child. When Jael was born, he had just returned to Switzerland from Manchester (England), where he had been booked for a few concerts. This was on May 7 and a week before the expected delivery date. He and his wife are self-employed musicians and she couldn’t afford to have Bloch call off all their engagements as a precaution. She came straight from the airport to the hospital and was still wearing the same suit she wore while performing in England.

The house should have been finished just before the birth.

Jael listens intently as the parents play a virtuoso piece – mother on piano, father on euphonium, a kind of tuba. An acoustician made the living space look like a concert hall. The house should have been ready before he was born, but it wasn’t enough. “We lived in a rented flat next door, and we should have moved out in time,” Zeiter says. Fortunately, the next tenants were asleep.

For musicians, the two live in luxury. Bloch, who grew up in Wisen, says the land on which the two-story house with the large windows is located was given to him as a gift from a relative. “We couldn’t have built it without this luck.” For professional reasons, the two’s home must be spacious and presentable because it serves as a venue for public events where guests enjoy a menu prepared by a professional chef. Between courses, Zeiter and Bloch appear. The duo call themselves Giovivo.

They got together because a pianist dropped out of school

The two first met in 2014 while studying at the University of the Arts in Bern. Zeiter comes from Fiesch in Valais. Both were in relationships with other partners at the time and only knew each other for a short time. Bloch remembered his former classmate a few years later when he had to perform at a wedding and the pianist soon dropped out of school. He jumped in. Bloch and Zeiter became a couple. They performed together as a duo for the first time in December 2019. Then Corona came.

As musicians, Zeiter says they are existentially threatened by the pandemic. Classes at the conservatory in Bern, where the two of them worked, had to be done online. Suddenly they are no longer able to perform. The idea of ​​giving living room concerts comes from a time when fewer and fewer people were allowed to attend the events.

Happy coincidences rule their lives

Long-planned recordings for Giovivo’s first joint album recorded in Leipzig (Germany) also had to wait due to Corona. On February 4 of this year, “Serendipity” was finally released by the famous German classical music company Genuin. It includes tracks from classical to jazz to folklore. The title track is by an English composer. “Serendipity” means happy coincidence. “It fits our lives perfectly,” Zeiter says.

They each retain their own surnames despite being married, as they each have a reputation on the international music scene. Bloch: “By the way, this year too!”