Concert date: 10/12/99 Rotterdam, Netherlands

Review of the show:
I arrived at about 8.30pm. Amanda Marshall was just about concluding her set. I was there with 4 other people, 3 of us were real die-hard fans and the other 2 were kinda tagging along.

They started bang on at 9pm, which was a really nice surprise since Ms. Houston is not known for her punctuality! It was a huge crowd...totally full so I'd say about 8000 people. I was pretty psyched since I'd been reading the reviews posted by other fans and in total they had really good things to say about the concerts. However, tonight's was not bad but it wasn't the Whitney that we fans know and crave for.

She started off with Get It Back. I have to say that a large part of the disappointment of the evening was the appaling sound!!! Everything but Whitney was too loud and even the mix on her voice was horrible... made all her top notes tinny sounding and took away any richness on the bottom range. Considering a lot of the new stuff is pitched lower, I was not impressed with the sound desgners and engineers. There was a huge amount of effcting on her voice. I also felt that she didn't really sell the song and combined with the fact that the song has not been released as a single, it made for a pretty weak opener. She went on to do Heartbreak Hotel next. Again, none of the bottom could be heard and it just made the song seem extremely long, altho' I did like the arrangement at the end when it went up tempo. She went on to do If I Told You That. Same problem, could barely hear her and considering that I was in the 8th row! that's really bad. She basically popped these three songs off back to back without hardly any talking in between. It was also apparent that she was having vocal problems as she kept going back to squirt somthing in her throat. I'm not quite sure what she did next....but it was something from the new album.

She broke to say a few words...again nothing very earth shattering and fairly perfunctory....just a bad segue in to the next song which was the start of the slow set..Saving All My Love, Until You Come Back and I Learned From The Best. With the band brought down and the back up singers ( who by the way were Chirpping Divas!!!!) quiet, we could finally hear Whitney. And she was great.... she for the most part had the notes but what I am always most impressed with her is that her musicianship and knowledge of her instrument is consumate that she can find any and all the alternate notes in a chord and make it seem like this was totally how the song was meant to be!!!! That to me is the GENIUS of La Houston.I think she went on to do Step By Step. This finally started the audience going.... in fact she actually commented on the fact that the Rotterdam audiences weren't usually so quiet! I really have to say that the sound or lack thereof was a major contributor. This concluded the first half. She wore a sequinned jacket and trousers with a hipster kind of band, also sequinned. She looked like she may be in the early stages of pregnancy and the trousers were a little big.. she kept pulling them up!

She started the second half with My Love Is Your Love and then went on to the dance medley, I Wanna Dance and How Will I Know. She sounded good on all of these songs but again the band was overpowering. Her voice was obviously warming up. She did the gospel stuff after this, I Love The Lord. Very nicely sung especially the choral work from the background with Whitney conducting them. It was however, again too long and self indulgent...especially when she started to almost preach on stage... for me it was just that one step de trop! I Go To The Rock was next and she as she usually does took her time introducing the band. The song didn't have the power or the fire with which I have seen her do it. So when the introductions took too long... I wasn't the only one getting restless. They brought out a chair for her and she was going to do the movie medley when she I guess remembered that All At Once had been a huge hit in Holland. She commented on that and started to sing what sounded like an improvised version since she couldn't quite remember the words and the band wasn't quite sure where to go. However, having said that she kicked ass on this no.!!!! It sounded like it wwas in a higher key than what she sings in these days and so she was really going for it... and it had that edge that I love about her voice. Honestly, the most exciting song of the evening for me! Again there was some cursory chat about the movies she'd made and she launched in to I Believe In You And Me, Why Does It Hurt So Bad, the Aretha Franklin no. from Waiting To Exhale and I Will Always Love You. None of these songs had the magic that she has given them before. IWALY in particular was annoying more than anything else since she takes it so slow and of course everyone is singing along... just too long and indulgent. In the second half, she loked great wearing a maroon leather dress with a yellow fur short jacket off one shoulder. She changed in to the first outfit she had on when she modelled the stuff on Oprah, to do the encore It's Not Right.

All in all not the most exciting concert I've seen. As a real fan, it is a little sad b'cos I know that she is capable of so much more. Breaking off at a tangent, I want to say that three nights before I saw Donna Summer at a club in London...Granted that she wasn't on tour and she only sang 4 songs, Donna sounded so absolutely fabulous especially given her age. Her audience interaction was so far beyond Whitney's which is such a shame since that whole audience was there for the sole purpose of seeing Whitney Houston. I ask myself why is it then that Whitney is so inconsistent? She's done this long enough to know what she can and cannot do.... and by all accounts she's not a woman who does anything she doesn't really want to! Nowadays, Whitney seems to have flashes of brilliance as opposed to being great all the time. Still, I have faith that I will see her in concert one day and see all the things that make her Whitney Houston.