My gentle readers may or may not be aware that I am not one for going to gigs. But last week I broke with curmudgeonly tradition and went to one performed by Urusen. Who? I hear you ask. Well, don’t ask me…just google them and find their “myspace” site and listen to them on line. [...]
Filed under: Culture, Music on December 2nd, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A few years ago, some friends and I used to watch the Eurovision Song Contest for a bit of fun. We would each score the entries on dress sense, or lack of it, quality of the song, the “dancing”, where we would place the song in the final and try to second guess the order [...]
Filed under: Life, Music, Translation on May 26th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
…at least I thought it was thunder and lightning at first… until I realised that it was the firework show heralding the end of the “party in the city” which celebrates the music festival which starts today. Friends invited me to go along but sadly I am slaving away on page 43*.
I couldn’t quite work [...]
Filed under: Music, Translation on May 23rd, 2008 | Comments Off
Continuing my musical theme: my choir’s next concert is going to be an afternoon of highlights from Verdi’s operas. We have had three rehearsals so far (seven to go) and they are proving to be enormous fun. We have engaged a couple of soloists for the arias and we, the choir, are being [...]
Filed under: Music on May 18th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
About 10 days ago, the new conductor of our choir, GC, gave a concert in a local church. The title of the concert was Dichterliebe, the poet’s love.
GC has a very fine baritone voice and he sang three cycles of Lieder accompanied by a pianist. The first cycle was poems by Heinrich Heine, a poet [...]
Filed under: Germany, Music on May 18th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I found myself in the midst of three bizarre conversations in connection with the concert.
Conversation no.1 took place at the post-concert party.
Fellow soprano to her distinguished looking male guest: Do you know, [Name], that Kerensa is a German translator and SHE says that it didn’t help at all knowing German when singing the Russian, didn’t [...]
Filed under: Music on April 27th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The concert of Russian Choral Masterpieces took place last night in the Abbey and was very well received. The applause went on for ages and, for a British audience, was really quite enthusiastic.
We made a few little mistakes – but I hope these were not too obvious. There is one place in my [...]
Filed under: Music on April 27th, 2008 | Comments Off
You may have noticed a distinct lack of pronouncements concerning my New Year’s Resolutions. It’s not that I don’t make them exactly, it’s just that sometimes the year for a new project does not start on January 1st. An embryonic project began whilst Christmas shopping on December 15. I was in a slightly different [...]
Filed under: Music on January 13th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
One of the advantages of working in solitary confinement is that you can listen to music while working. I often listen to the same few albums which fit my criteria of being instrumental, non-intrusive but, at the same time, good company. For today’s translation on perfumes, I thought the soundtrack to the film “Ladies [...]
Filed under: Music, Translation, Words on August 29th, 2007 | Comments Off