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My Songs by Gladys Knight

I discovered Gladys Knight around 2005 on a free soul CD that came with a Sunday paper. It was Midnight Train to Georgia which I loved for the intensity, the powerful vocals, and the rather unusual male background singers. A few years later I also found a recording of a Christmas carol she made that I previously posted on the blog, but am going to repeat now, too.

More posts in Music.

My Songs By Dionne Warwick

Annie Lennox posted on her Facebook page a video of Dionne Warwick’s song Walk On By, composed by Burt Bacharach. As she says,

I’ve always been drawn to the alchemy of Bert Bacharach’s music. Dionne Warwick must have been his perfect vocal muse, with the most amazing voice to express and interpret his songs. I think it would be hard to find another singer who could do them justice apart from Dusty Springfield.

I’ve discovered Dionne Warwick, when already in the UK, but as a singer of Heartbreaker that Bee Gees wrote for her. I like Barry Gibb’s version of this song, too, but Dionne Warwick has infused it with a pure female emotion. When back in England I sometimes sang to karaoke and recorded it, Heartbreaker in Warwick’s interpretation was one of the songs I tried to master more times than any other one.

And since we mentioned Bee Gees, here’s their version, too.

One Night In… Riga

Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013
Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013
Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013
Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013Riga at night 2013

Riga 2013, a set on Flickr.

I went to Elton John concert in Tallinn last year. I chose to fly with AirBaltic that took me to Estonia’s capital via Riga, the capital of Latvia. On my way back I chose not to spend a night at a deserted airport but that rather have a wander around Riga’s city centre. I took a passenger van there, got dropped off opposite the National Opera, popped into McDonald’s for a quick bite to eat (as it was nearing midnight and I had no idea where to best go for a meal, plus I had a bag and a small suitcase, which wasn’t quite accommodating for visiting any eatery). While there, I diligently studied a map and then wandered off to look for the Black Cat’s building. Bearing in mind it was already dark I would probably never find, had it not been for a helpful Latvian guy who quickly pointed me in the right direction.

I sampled a bit of the city’s glam and history, although I long to return there in broad daylight (if only to finally take a decent pic of that famous cat!)

I managed to catch a bit of a peformance of Bee Bop a Lula at one of the outdoor restaurants. But all the while I was loitering around Riga’s city centre I was humming the melody of a famous Noktirne (Nocturno) by A. Kublinsky and J. Brejgis. It narrates the story of a person walking in Riga at night, waiting for his beloved.

Le Sacre Du Printemps By Igor Stravinsky Celebrates 100th Anniversary

The legend has it that Igor Stravinsky received an idea for his famous ballet in his sleep. Whether or not this is true, the potency of his imagination and the ability to bring it to the material world of music and dance has never ceased to astonish the audience. It could be a huge disappointment, like that at the ballet’s first night in Paris on May 29, 1913 – or it could be a genuine amazement that subsequently engulfed the public. So much did it amaze people that a street in Montreuil where Stravinsky lived and composed Le Sacre du Printemps was renamed after the ballet. There is no Romeo and Juliet Street anywhere, is there?

Nicholai Roerich, The Rite of Spring (Wikimedia Commons)

This was probably the peak of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes time in Paris. Despite the public reaction, Dyaghilev himself was convinced that in reality the spectators had already understood the cultural value of the ballet, and time would let them acknowledge it fully. As it happens, he was correct although the immediate impact was far from favourable, including Nizhinsky’s breakdown.

Stravinsky co-wrote the libretto with one of the most original artists of the period, Nicholai Roerich, who also created stage decorations and costumes for the ballet. Today the sketches and costumes are exhibited at theatre museums.

The ballet’s 100th anniversary is celebrated worldwide today, with the autograph of the first page of the score being shared on the Internet. An excellent article in The Guardian by George Benjamin studies the intricancies of the score and how they reflected the great age of scientific, industrial, and cultural advances, about to collapse in the fire of the World War One.

The Riotous Premiere is fully dedicated to the Parisian first night, while also allowing to explore the score in depth. However, the growing popularity and the number of renditions somewhat justify the fear of The Guardian’s author that the performance that used to be a Titanic labour even to Stravinsky is now becoming more and more accessible and routine.

Perhaps, not everything is lost for the ballet itself: Sasha Waltz, a renowned German choreographer whose exploits also rage the public from time to time staged the anniversary performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, on air today at TV Kultura channel in Russia. Waltz’s version is characterised by almost unstoppable movement, without well-known classical pas, and the music is punctuated by the moments of silence, as if to better expose the beauty of this fantastic score. Waltz withstood a temptation to undress her dancers; instead she covered the stage with soil, to better reflect the dynamics of the Russian pagan dances. In her own words, Waltz had to search for suitable images to reflect the impetuous music that changes its rhythm, colour, and quality all the time. “For me this was a challenge“, she explained.

The orchestra at tonight’s Russian premiere is led by Valery Gergiev.

Igor Stravinsky, An Autograph of the First Page of the Score
to The Rite of Spring (courtesy of the Paul Sacher Stiftung
via Igor Stravinsky Facebook Page)

 

 

Yury Bashmet: First Sixty Years In Music

At the end of January I attended the last concert in a series of three dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of one of the world’s finest violists and certainly Russia’s greatest viola talent, Yury Bashmet. The concerts took place at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire in Bolshaya Nikitskaya St. The conservatoire holds a special place in my heart as I was once admitted there as a pupil. I was to study Composition at the Practice Sector in 1987 but couldn’t start due to poor health and certain family reasons. So I channelled my composing talent into Literature instead of Music, but I could very well have seen the Maestro, as Bashmet has been teaching at the Conservatoire since 1978.

Doubtless, Bashmet’s most significant contribution to music has been in making a viola a solo instrument. I discovered his art in 1990s when I obtained two audio cassettes with recordings of masterpieces of classical music in rock arrangements. Bashmet recorded these with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Louis Clark as a conductor as part of Hooked on Classics series.

To mark the 60th anniversary, Bashmet invited Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin, Germany), Michel Portal (clarinet, France), Oleg Maisenberg (piano, Austria), and Giovanni Sollima (cello, Italy). I had the chance to listen to the last two, and what was particularly noticeable and inspiring was Maisenberg’s playing by memory. I keep seeing musicians and performers playing off the list, so it is certainly a mark of dedication and talent to play by memory. Giovanni Sollima, on the other hand, is a cello virtuoso who pushes the boundaries of what can be performed on this music instrument. He also blends music and literature, introducing extracts from the works by Giacomo Casanova.

The audience’s reaction was uniformily ecstatic, Bashmet’s playing solo and also conducting his own string orchestra, The Soloists of Moscow with whom he’d won a Grammy a few years ago. In the video you can see Yury Bashmet entering the stage for the first time during the final concert on January 27.

 

The Soloists of Moscow were performing on the Stradivarius, Gvarneri, and Amati instruments from the State Collection of Rare Musical Instruments. These have been specially lent to Bashmet and his orchestra on the occasion of his jubilee.

And finally some Soundcloud recordings from the concert on January 27.

The Oistrakh Quartet At the Tarusa Winter Festival, 2013

The town and vicinity of Tarusa are well-known for the love that great Russian artists, musicians, and writers had for it. I mentioned previously that Marina Tsvetaeva, Konstantin Paustovsky, Viktor Borisov-Musatov, and Nikolai Zabolotsky all lived in Tarusa at one or another period of their lives. However, there was one man-of-arts who acknowledged the salubrity of Tarussian air and the glory of its nature, and built himself a dacha in some distance from Tarusa town centre. This was Svyatoslav Richter, one of the outstanding pianists of the 20th c.

Richter founded several annual musical events, some of them specifically targeted at young audiences and musicians. The Svyatoslav Richter Foundation regularly organises the Tarusa musical festival, and this year there was a special event in early January, called “Tarusa Winter Festival”, that lasted from 5 to 7 of January, 2013. I attended it on January 6, 2013 – and was lucky to listen to the David Oistrakh string quartet perform  Edvard Grieg, Maurice Ravel, and Dmitry Shostakovich.
The David Oistrakh Quartet: Andrey Baranov, Sergei Pischugin,
Fedor Belugin, and Alexey Zhilin (courtesy of the official website)
The quartet consists of Andrey Baranov, the first violinist, who symbolically won the first prize at the Queen Elizabeth International Violin Competition 75 years after it had been won by David Oistrakh himself. Just as Richter is considered one of the best pianists of the 20th c., so is Oistrakh the best violinist. His legacy lives in the second violinist of the quartet, Sergei Pischugin, who was Oistrakh’s student. Over the course of his career Pischugin played in the Glinka and subsequently the Shostakovich Quartets. With the latter he recorded virtually all string quartet repertoire existing. The violist Fedor Belugin played with Pischugin in the Shostakovich Quartet and has been successful at combining teaching activities at the Moscow Conservatoire and the Gnesin Music School with both quartet and solo performances. Finally, the cellist Alexey Zhilin is considered one of the best Russian cellists of his generation. He often performs as a soloist with chamber and symphonic orchestras in Russia and abroad.
In 2012 the family of David Oistrakh donned the famous violinist’s name to the quartet.
So, on January 6, 2013 the David Oistrakh Quartet performed Edvard Grieg’s Quartet no. 1, Op. 27, G-moll and Maurice Ravel’s Quartet F-dur. As it happens, however, the public was so fond of the performances, the quartet had to play a bonus piece… and that was Polka by Dmitry Shostakovich. The videos below are Ravel’s Quartet F-Dur, Allegro moderato, tres doux; and Shostakovich. I also included a recording of Shostakovich’s Polka by the Rasumowsky Quartet.
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