zidouta.com

‘There was an assignment in my class in which we were to give a short presentation on pretty much any subject. I decided to make a music video. (…) I got an A++ on it, a 26/25′ (YouTube)

Forbidden Ensemble - Porno Soundtracks:

“What happens if you put three professional musicians in a recording studio and … have them watch porn movies?

While you probably begin imagining strange situations, these guys made it a creative venture. They created a new soundtrack to the 70ties adult movies they were watching - turning off the sound and just letting their instincts come up with vivid musical imaginations. And it worked.

This music sounds like a combination of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and the Emanuelle sequels of adult movies. Feisty and furious with a sugarcoat of sensuality.

This is the first volume of their ventures, played on real instruments and treated to have the authentic sleazy sound of the 70’s.”

Sean Flynn on GQ Blog, Papa:

“”You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)”

Roisin Murphy in The Culture Show’s versie van ‘The reasonably priced car’: ‘The busking challenge’. (YouTube)

Muxtape, a simple way to create and share mixtapes. (via)

Muxtape / zidouta

In de media. (Kát’a Kabanová eerder.)

Electro, Eclectro Electo 2007 - de uitslag:

“Na dik 100.000 stemmen, uitgebracht door bijna 20.000 stemmers uit 17 landen, is de eindstand bekend van Eclectro Electo 2007. De uitslag leert door zijn eerlijke stemmethode, hoge aantal stemmen en internationale achtergrond veel over de voorkeuren van de wereldwijde dancescene. En de winnaar is…”

Steve Reich “Piano Phase” Pt.1/2. Choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Michele Anne De Mey. (YouTube)

Rosas, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, (2002). (Deel 2 na de klik.)
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Klaus Nomi - The Cold Song (Henry Purcell, King Arthur)

Wired, David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music:

“Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song “Radio Head” from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.”

Leoš Janáček: Kát’a Kabanová. Opera in three acts. (Composed 1919-21. Premiered: Brno, 23/11/1921.) De Nederlandse Opera, première 3 maart 2008.

Wikipedia:

“Káťa Kabanová is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by Vincenc Cervinka, based on The Storm, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. The opera was also largely inspired by Janáček’s love for Kamila Stösslová. This is often considered his first “mature” opera, despite the fact that he was 67 when it was premiered. Káťa Kabanová is a clear response to Janáček’s feelings for Kamila, and the work is dedicated to her. The first performance was in Brno on 23 November 1921.”

leosjanacek.com:

“Although Kát’a Kabanová marks the beginning of Janáček’s final decade of mature operatic compositions, it equally shows a return to a more traditional ‘operatic’ territory and that of his predecessors (particularly Tchaikovsky). Its downtrodden heroine, the storm and confession scenes (as with Jenůfa) all take us away from the experimental style found in Osud and Brouček. Unlike Jenůfa and his predecessors’ work, Kát’a Kabanová has a more brutally direct style, which is more emotionally pungent and realistic. The opera marks the first opera written after the greatest affection of Janáček’s own life, Kamila Stösslová.”

Max Brod:

“The libretto is based on Ostrovsky’s drama The Thunderstorm - a Russian Madame Bovary. As in Flaubert’s masterpiece, the entire plot hinges on the adultery of a romantically inclined woman no longer able to bear the pressures of a repugnant and constricting environment.

Several characteristic differences emerge between the French and the Russian versions of this theme, tempting us to trace them back to differences in national character, or between East and West. Madame Bovary’s vein of romanticism is primarily poetic and hedonistic, Kát’a Kabanová’s more religious and introspective - which is not to deny Emma Bovary’s very real religious traits. The winning quality of both figures is an artless nobility. By their very existence they protest against the narrowness of their surroundings, against provincialism and small-mindedness. In Madame Bovary’s case these surroundings are marked by boredom, philistinism and imposture. Kát’a bears the greater burden, for she is enslaved - what is worse, enslaved to her own family. Her husband is a weak man, whose mother, the sinister Kabanicha, is the true driving force behind the drama. She rules with the conventions of so-called ‘good breeding’ - in reality nothing more than traditional mores. Her absolute tyranny within her family mirrors in miniature the ruthless power wielded by the tsars to keep the whole of Russia in bondage. From above came oppression by government, officialdom, a superstitious clergy; at home an entire household stood in thrall to the eldest family member. The aged Kabanicha is more than that time-honoured harridan, the ‘wicked mother-in-law’; she stands symbolically for tsarist Russia, with its morality of blind obedience to arbitrary command.”

Opnames van Janáček Káta: Amazon (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1998) en iTunes Store (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1977).

LCD Soundsystem - “All My Friends” (YouTube)

Pitchfork: Top 100 Tracks of 2007.

Pitchfork: Top 50 Albums of 2007.

NY Times Magazine, A New Kind of Diva:

“Anna Netrebko is a gifted opera singer who at 36 has already mastered many of the roles — Mimi, Violetta, Lucia, Manon — that used to go to the queenly, temperamental sopranos of the old school, with their furs, their atomizers, their entourages. She is also a media-savvy entertainer from the new school, with the knockout looks, the fans, the celebrity of a pop star. Her “Traviata” at Salzburg two years ago was such a hot ticket that scalpers were reportedly charging $7,000 a seat, and her records regularly top the charts in Europe. In the summer of 2006 she was part of a concert in Berlin that filled a stadium.”

Radio 4:

“Dus: geen duistere transacties in achteraf-steegjes achter het Concertgebouw meer. U kunt terecht op www.skelper.nl”

Skelper: Koop & Verkoop toegangskaarten voor klassieke evenementen.

TechCrunch: DRM-Free Classical Music: Deutsche Grammophon Launches Online MP3 Store:

“Apparently Universal Music Group - which has been dipping its toes into DRM-free waters this year - is none too worried about music pirates getting into classical music. Deutsche Grammophon, a German classical music company founded in 1898 and owned by Universal, will be launching on Wednesday an online store for MP3s called DG Web Shop.”

Cecilia Bartoli

Rupert Christiansen, Cecilia Bartoli’s magnificent obsession:

“Even when she’s bad - and there are times when I want to smack her - she is absolutely 100 per cent Bartoli, and for that alone, in an age in which phoney over-packaged mediocrity regularly passes as artistry, I love and salute her.”

Maria Maleban

Maria Malibran - Museo Mobile:

“From autumn 2007 onwards the Cecilia Bartoli – Music Foundation presents a travelling exhibition of rare objects, letters and music manuscripts from the Italian Romantic and Belcanto period in eight European countries. The focus of this exhibition is the world famous singer Maria Malibran, whose 200th birthday anniversary will be celebrated in 2008.

All objects stem from Cecilia Bartoli’s private collection.

The travelling exhibition will visit all the cities where Cecilia Bartoli sings and will be open to the public – for free – outside or near the major concert venues of each city.”

Afbeelding uit de Groag-collection. (Beit Theresienstadt)

Norman Lebrecht, Tales of the recording angel:

“She has just released an album of songs from the Terezin concentration camp, both the formal Lieder that were put on to fool Red Cross visitors, and the consoling lullabies that a nurse, Ilse Weber, wrote for the children she sang to sleep until she and they were shipped to Auschwitz. Although raised among Swedish nobility on the diplomatic circuit and feted these days from Salzburg to Gstaad, Anne-Sofie von Otter is rooted in the chronicle of genocide, and all because of a man called Gerstein.

Her tragic tale begins on a train, as so many war stories do. Anne-Sofie’s father, Baron Göran von Otter, was a Swedish diplomat in wartime Germany, adjutant to the ambassador. On the night of 20-21 August 1942, travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he became an involuntary witness to the Holocaust.

Standing in the corridor because he could not get a sleeper, the diplomat saw an SS officer glancing in his direction. When the train stopped at a station, both men got off for fresh air. On the pitch-dark platform, the SS man asked for a light for his cigarette. Von Otter produced a pack of matches with a Swedish crest. ‘I must talk to you,’ said Kurt Gerstein.”

Opnames zijn op website van Von Otter te beluisteren.

Trailer for GVSU New Music Ensemble CD, “Music for 18 Musicians”, YouTube

GVSU New Music Ensemble: Steve Reich Project.