Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

In the summer of 1964, Bob Dylan released his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which includes the track “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Go ’way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed,” it begins. “I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need.”

That fall, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a variation on the same tune in a public statement explaining why, despite having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would not accept it. “The writer,” he insisted, must “refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.” Mr. Dylan was talking to an imaginary lover, Sartre to an actual Swedish Academy, but the message was similar: If you love me for what I am, don’t make me be what I am not.

We don’t know whether Mr. Dylan was paying attention to l’affaire Sartre that fall 52 years ago. But now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seems to be following in Sartre’s footsteps. Indeed, Mr. Dylan has done the philosopher one better: Instead of declining the prize, he has simply declined to acknowledge its existence. He hasn’t issued a statement or even returned the Swedish Academy’s phone calls. A reference to the award briefly popped up on the official Bob Dylan website and then was deleted — at his instruction or not, nobody knows. And the Swedes, who are used to a lot more gratitude from their laureates, appear to be losing their patience: One member of the Academy has called Mr. Dylan’s behavior “impolite and arrogant.”

There is a good deal of poetic justice in this turn of events. For almost a quarter of a century, ever since Toni Morrison won the Nobel in 1993, the Nobel committee acted as if American literature did not exist — and now an American is acting as if the Nobel committee doesn’t exist. Giving the award to Mr. Dylan was an insult to all the great American novelists and poets who are frequently proposed as candidates for the prize. The all-but-explicit message was that American literature, as traditionally defined, was simply not good enough. This is an absurd notion, but one that the Swedes have embraced: In 2008, the Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, declared that American writers “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” and are limited by that “ignorance.”

Continue reading in The New York Times

La organización pone a disposición del público un total de quinientas cincuenta invitaciones gratuitas en el Centro de Recepción de Visitantes para todas aquellas personas que quieran asistir a este acontecimiento único en Segovia

El Aula Magna del campus de IE University en Segovia acogerá el viernes 8 de mayo, a las 20,00 horas, la retransmisión en directo de la ópera La Traviata de Giuseppe Verdi  (1813-1901), coproducción del Teatro Real con el Gran Teatre del Liceu de Barcelona, la Scottish Opera de Glasgow y la Welsh National Opera de Cardiff, teatros donde este montaje ya se ha presentado. La emisión de la ópera de Verdi es fruto de las excelentes relaciones institucionales entre la universidad privada y El Teatro Real.

IE University ha puesto a disposición de todas aquellas personas que quieran asistir a este acontecimiento único en Segovia un total de quinientas cincuenta invitaciones gratuitas que se podrán recoger en el Centro de Recepción de Visitantes, ubicado junto al Acueducto.

“La Traviata” es la estrella de las actividades de la Semana de la Ópera del Teatro Real y podrá ser seguida en directo en la pantalla instalada en la Plaza de Oriente y en los auditorios de algunas de las instituciones culturales y artísticas más señeras de España: Museo Nacional del Prado, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Matadero (Casa del Lector),  Fundación Canal, Fundación Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Instituto Italiano de Cultura de Madrid y Aula Magna de IE University.

La función del 8 de mayo llegará a muchos auditorios y espacios, siempre con acceso gratuito, con la complicidad de teatros, ayuntamientos y universidades que se suman a esta retransmisión mundial. Además de Segovia, la ópera podrá disfrutarse en Sevilla, Granada, Pamplona y Vitoria, entre otros municipios. Read more…

Gerard Mortier, a visionary opera company leader whose bold theatricality and updating of the canon helped define the art form’s modern history, died on Saturday at his home in Brussels. He was 70.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Simon Bauwens, his personal assistant at Teatro Real in Madrid.

Mr. Mortier was that company’s artistic director from 2009 until last year, when his title was changed to artistic adviser in a tussle with the Spanish government over his successor after he announced in September that he was being treated for cancer.

It was a characteristic dispute for a man who always relished a battle during a four-decade career at the helm of some of the world’s most important opera companies, including the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera.

Sometimes the grounds were artistic, as in the furor over his farewell production after 10 years in Salzburg: a 2001 “Die Fledermaus” taking aim at the Austrian government and featuring drugs and Nazi thugs.

Sometimes they were financial, as when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, which he led from 1981 to 1991, went into debt over his lavish renovation of the opera house, complete with a floor by the American Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt.

And sometimes they related to Mr. Mortier himself, as when he and New York City Opera parted ways in 2008, a scant year and a half into his tenure and before he had even arrived to take up the post full time.

These clashes were less tantrums than expressions of his bracing, intellectually charged vision of opera and his disdain for the decorous irrelevance often associated with it. In the summer of 2011, reflecting in an interview on a raucous Madrid production of Karol Szymanowski’s “King Roger” the previous fall, he said with a smile: “It was an enormous scandal, and it became an enormous success. On opening night, I said:‘ Now we are really international. People aren’t sleeping at the end.’ ”

Gerard Alfons August Mortier was born on Nov. 25, 1943, in Ghent, Belgium, where his parents owned a bakery in a working-class neighborhood. His mother and grandmother took him to the opera as a child, and at home he would stage Mozart’s “Magic Flute” in a puppet theater.

He said he had acquired his taste for controversy at a boarding school run by the Jesuits, who had him and his classmates read iconoclastic writers like Marx, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Sartre. In 1968, as students protested throughout Europe, Mr. Mortier formed a group of young opera fans that loudly jeered productions it judged overly conservative.

Continue reading in The New York Times

Paco de Lucía, the brilliant guitarist who pioneered the fusion of flamenco and jazz, has died suddenly of what preliminary reports suggest might be a heart attack. He was 66.

The native of Algeciras (Cádiz) was playing at the beach with his children in the Mexican resort of Cancún, where he owns a home, when he suddenly felt ill, according to his close friend Victoriano Mera. He died on his way to hospital.

The city of Algeciras has decreed three days of mourning and will assist the family in bringing the body home.

De Lucía was a globally admired artist who won the 2004 Prince of Asturias Award for his tireless exploration of the possibilities of flamenco. He will also be remembered for his association with the late flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla during the 1960s and 70s.

The musician had been living in Palma de Mallorca for several years, although he also spent periods in Cuba and the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. Those who knew him back in Mallorca say he had been less keen about playing the guitar of late. De Lucía preferred to spend time with regular people rather than join intellectual and artistic circles. He also devoted a lot of his time to his two young children.

Born Francisco Sánchez Gómez in 1947, De Lucía, shunned his own legend. Fame came early, in 1975, with his by-now famous rumba Entre dos aguas. It was the last track on the album of the same name that made its way into hundreds of thousands of Spanish homes as society was beginning to shake off the dark dust of the Franco dictatorship.

His association with Camarón alone – the pair released over 10 albums of traditional flamenco together as well as a flamenco-pop-rock fusion record – would have been enough to make De Lucía famous. But there was a lot more to come. His flirtation with jazz earned him accusations of bastardizing flamenco, but he kept on pushing the limits of his music and by the mid-1970s he had formed a sextet that included his two brothers, Pepe de Lucía and Ramón de Algeciras, as well as Jorge Pardo, Carles Benavent and Rubem Dantas. This musical group introduced the Peruvian cajón, a percussion instrument comprising a tall wooden box, into flamenco. Since then, it has become a staple of the genre.

De Lucía also incorporated blues, Indian music, salsa, bossa nova and Arabic music into his own sound. His performances at the Teatro Real opera house in Madrid helped blur the border between high-brow and popular music.

“Everything that can be expressed with the six strings of the guitar is there in his hands,” said the jury that handed him the Prince of Asturias award.

As published in El Pais (26/II/2014)