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2 episodes with mahagonny
2 episodes with mahagonny
2 episodes with mahagonny
3 episodes with mahagonny
2 episodes with mahagonny
In ons land verschijnen jaarlijks 300 tot 400 biografieën. Relatief weinig vergeleken met andere Europese landen (vergelijk: in Engeland verschijnen er 10 x zoveel).Nico Keuning heeft een tiental biografieën over Nederlandse schrijvers op zijn naam staan. De laatste verscheen vorig jaar: 'Groots en onbekommerd. Leven en werk van Belcampo'. Keuning: ‘Het schrijven van een biografie is eigenlijk een ontdekkingsreis.'Hoe gaat dat in zijn werk, het schrijven van een biografie? Keuning: 'Ik voer onder andere tientallen gesprekken met familie, vrienden, collega's en kennissen'.Wat komt er verder allemaal bij kijken? En hoe lang werkt hij aan een biografie?TIJDSCHEMA00:48 Hoe word je biograaf?01:15 Eerste biografie over Max de Jong04:44 Fascinatie voor literaire plekken07:00 Werkroutine (deel 1)12:19 Aan welke biografie met meeste plezier gewerkt?14:15 Fietsen langs schrijversplekken17:03 'Het verloren huis'22:25 'Het grote gebeuren' - tv-bewerking27:08 Keuze (titels) biografieën30:35 Werkroutine (deel 2)33:21 Aantal gesprekken voor biografie36:08 Bewonderde biografie41:39 Favoriete boek43:57 MuziekvoorkeurSHOWNOTES 'Groots en onbekommerd. Leven en werk van Belcampo' (Querido, 2024)'Een ongeneeslijk heimwee. Leven en werk van Willem Brakman' (Querido, 2020)'Het geheim van de Ventoux', Nico Keuning (Walburg Pers, 2021)'Het grote gebeuren' - tv-bewerking van Belcampo's apocalyptische verhaal, uitgezonden op oudejaarsavond 1975Favoriete muziek: 'Mahagonny' - opera Kurt WeillFavoriete boek: 'De kapellekensbaan' van Louis Paul Boon
Two people come together for a podcast recording to discuss a Los Angeles Opera performance of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Things get tense. Both people are mad at Jon's neighbors.Colden's Social -Instagram: @coldenlambWebsite: www.coldenlamb.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ColdenLambA Marc Blitzstein Archive YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BlitzsteinArchivePodcast Socials -Email: butasongpod@gmail.comFacebook: @butasongpodInstagram: @butasongpodThreads: @butasongpodNext episode: My Little Pony: The Movie (2017)!
Welcome to NYC in the late '80s! Jon and Battles take a hit of nostalgia to discuss Disney's version of Oliver Twist but with singing anthropomorphized animals. And Billy Joel.Battles' Instagram: @embattzOur Bar Instagram: @ourbarnycCharms 4 Less Instagram/TikTok: @charms4lessseriesPodcast Socials -Email: butasongpod@gmail.comFacebook: @butasongpodInstagram: @butasongpodThreads: @butasongpodNext episode: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny!
Wielkimi krokami zbliża się premiera "Mahagonny - Ein Songspiel" w Teatrze Studio. To spektakl w nowym gatunku teatru muzycznego. Muzyka opowie o dwóch rzeczywistościach - mieście ludzkich pragnień i rzeczywistości.
Bertolt Brechts und Kurt Weills Oper „Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny“ handelt von dem Experiment, eine Stadt im Nirgendwo zu errichten, die dann aber von den Widrigkeiten der Geldherrschaft in den Abgrund gestürzt wird. Nur eine Todsünde gibt es in diesem Mahagonny: die Zahlungsunfähigkeit. Die Staatsoper Stuttgart hat das Stück auf die Gegenwart befragt.
Avec Beck, Doors, Tom Waits et Dave Matthews Band. Sur son album "Mutations" en 1998, le groupe Beck publie "Bottle of Blues". "Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)" des Doors, Jim Morrison n'est pas l'auteur du titre, c'est Bertold Brecht qui avait écrit ce morceau en allemand en 1925, mis en musique par Kurt Weill pour le spectacle "Le Petit Mahagonny" en 1927, puis réutilisée dans l'opéra "Grandeur et Décadence" de la ville de Mahagonny en 1930 chanté par Lotte Lenya, épouse de Kurt Weill. 1975, Tom Waits sort un album ambitieux "Nighthawks at the Diner", il y décrit l'ambiance des diners américains au creux de la nuit. Et pour servir dans un bar, il faut un barman ou une barwoman, titre du Dave Matthews Band "Bartender" en 2002. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.
Patti LuPone es una actriz de cine, teatro, ópera y musicales. Vamos una actriz todo terreno. Ha ganado dos Grammys, dos Tony de los ocho a los que ha sido nominada, dos Olivier y cuatro Drama Desk, entre otros premios. Debutó en Broadway en 1973 con “Las tres hermanas” de Chejov. Estrenó “Evita” en Broadway, ganando su primer Tony en 1980 y en 1985 creó el personaje de Fantine en “Los Miserables” de Londres. Pero es que Patti es mucho más que una ACTRIZ con mayúsculas. Es una de las favoritas de David Mammet y ha estrenado muchas de sus obras. Ha interpretado con Audra McDonald óperas como “Ascenso y caída de la ciudad de Mahagonny” de Kurt Weill, operetas con Kristin Chenoweth como “Candide” de Leonard Bernstein y desde 2001 ha podido interpretar casi todos los papeles protagonistas en musicales de Stephen Sondheim. Últimamente se ha hecho muy popular por sus enfrentamientos con el público, expulsando a un espectador que le había hecho una foto con flash en mitad de uno de sus números. En otra ocasión bajó del escenario para quitarle el móvil a un espectador que estaba grabando la obra y se lo devolvió al final y en 2022 llamó la atención a un espectador que no llevaba la mascarilla obligatoria por el covid. Patti detesta ver a la gente en el teatro comiendo, durmiendo o encendiendo los móviles durante la función. Todo un personaje y toda una gran actriz y cantante. Te dejamos con una muestra de sus trabajos en el musical, alguno de los cuales han sido grabados desde el público, ya que no hay grabación oficial. Esperamos que Patti nos perdone, ya que no tenemos otra intención que hacer llegar su valía al mayor número de público posible. Terminamos el recorrido con alguna de sus grabaciones de temas pop que van de Randy Newman a Lennon & McCartney o Albert Hammond y es que ya lo hemos dicho antes, Patti es una mujer todo terreno. 00h 00’00” There’s no business like show business 00h 01’28” Presentación 00h 04’58” Cabecera 00h 05’48” 1973 THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM 00h 05’48” Sleepy man – con Kevin Kline 00h 09’10” 1976 THE BAKER’S WIFE 00h 09’10” Meadowlark 00h 13’26” 1979 EVITA 00h 13’26” Don’t cry for me, Argentina 00h 18’20” Waltz for Eva and Che – con Mandi Patinkin 00h 22’03” 1984 OLIVER 00h 22’03” As long as he needs me 00h 25’20” 1985 LES MISERABLES 00h 25’20” I dreamed a dream 00h 29’41” 1987 ANYTHING GOES 00h 29’41” Anything goes 00h 33’43” You’re the top 00h 37’51” 1993 SUNSET BOULEVARD 00h 37’51” With one look 00h 41’28” As if we never said goodbye 00h 48’19” The perfect year 00h 51’27” 1995 PAL JOEY 00h 51’27” What is a man? 00h 53’53” Bewitched, bothered and bewildered 00h 58’38” Den of iniquity – con Peter Gallagher 01h 01’53” 1998 ANNIE GET YOUR GUN 01h 01’53” An old fashioned wedding – con Peter Gallagher 01h 04’23” Anything do I can do better – con Patrick Cassidy 01h 08’21” 2000 - 2005 SWEENEY TODD 01h 08’21” Poor thing 01h 11’31” By the sea 01h 15’29” 2002 A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC 01h 15’29” Send in the clowns 01h 18’59” 2003 PASSION 01h 18’59” Loving you – con Michael Cerveris 01h 21’30” 2004 CAN CAN 01h 21’30” I love Paris 01h 24’31” C’est magnifique – con Michael Nouri 01h 27’03” 2004 CANDIDE 01h 27’03” I am easily assimilated 01h 30’25” We are women – con Kristin Chenoweth 01h 33’50” 2005 ANYONE CAN WHISTLE 01h 33’50” Me and my town 01h 38’10” 2008 GYPSY 01h 38’10” Everything’s coming up roses 01h 40’56” Some people 01h 44’55” Rose’s turn 01h 48’15” 2010 WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN 01h 48’15” Time stood still 01h 51’32” Invisible 01h 56’19” 2011 & 2018 COMPANY 01h 56’19” The little things you do together 01h 58’47” The ladies who lunch 02h 02’53” 2017 WAR PAINT 02h 02’53” Now you know 02h 06’06” Face to face – con Christine Ebersole 02h 10’33” Real emotional girl (Randy Newman) 02h 12’19” It’s for you (Lennon & McCartney) 02h 13’50” The air that I breath (Albert Hammond) 02h 17’48” Calling you (Bob Telson) 02h 21’12” Get happy / Happy days are here again – con Audra McDonald
Struck-Schloen, Michaelwww.deutschlandfunk.de, Kultur heuteDirekter Link zur Audiodatei
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) oli runoilija, kirjailija ja teatteriohjaaja, joka tunnetaan teatterin uudistajana erityisesti pyrkimyksestään saada katsoja kokemaan itsensä aktiivisesti osalliseksi esityksessä ja ympäröivässä yhteiskunnassa. Jakson vieraina ovat kirjailija Sirpa Kähkönen sekä oopperalaulaja ja Helsingin oopperakesän taiteellinen johtaja Reetta Ristimäki, jotka yhdessä ohjaaja Taru Mäkelän kanssa ovat valmistelemassa Musiikkiteatteri Kapsäkissä 29.9. ensi-iltaan tulevaa Brechtiä jokanaiselle -näytelmää. Se sijoittuu 1940-luvun alkuun, jolloin Brecht seurueineen eli maanpaossa Suomessa. Muun muassa Hella Wuolijoen Marlebäckin tilalla asuneeseen joukkoon kuuluivat Brechtin ja hänen puolisonsa Helene Weigelin ja heidän lastensa ohella Brechtin avustaja ja rakastaja Grete Steffin sekä hänen uusi rakkautensa Ruth Berlau. Keskustelussa pohditaan brechtiläisyyden perintöä ja sitä, miten tässä ajassa pitäisi suhtautua hänen osaltaansa pönkittämään miesneromyyttiin. Lisäksi käsitellään myös Brechtin 1920- ja 1930-luvulla kirjoittamia musiikkinäytelmiä Mahagonny ja Seitsemän kuolemansyntiä, joista nähdään uudet sovitukset lokakuun lopulla Ville Saikkosen ohjaamana Aleksanterin teatterissa.
Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Bertolt Brecht, orig. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, (born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin, E.Ger.), was a German playwright and poet. He studied medicine at Munich (1917–21) before writing his first plays, including Baal (1922). Other plays followed, including A Man's a Man (1926), as well as a considerable body of poetry. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical musicals The Threepenny Opera (1928; film, 1931), which gained him a wide audience, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). In these years he became a Marxist and developed his theory of epic theatre. With the rise of the Nazis he went into exile, first in Scandinavia (1933–41), then in the U.S., where he wrote his major essays and the plays Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Woman of Sichuan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Harassed for his politics, in 1949 he returned to East Germany, where he established the Berliner Ensemble theatre troupe and staged his own plays, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1957). He outlined his theory of drama in A Little Organum for the Theatre (1949).From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Bertolt-Brecht. For more information about Bertolt Brecht:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:George Prochnik about Brecht, at 18:25: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-162-george-prochnikKwame Dawes about Brecht, at 14:55: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-037-kwame-dawes“Bertolt Brecht”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bertolt-brecht“Singing About the Dark Times: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht”: http://www.theliberal.co.uk/issue_9/poetry/hofmann_9.html“Bertolt Brecht in Dark Times”: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/red-library-brecht
Theatre First Episode 329Stream podcast episodes on demand from www.bitesz.com (mobile friendly).The Rise and Fall of the City Of Mahagonny – Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, Australia Presented by IOpera and Melbourne Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a satirical opera which premiered in Germany in 1930. A modern-day parable and an attack on excess, the eclectic score also draws inspiration from operetta and the jazz-infused popular music of the roaring ‘20's.For more information https://www.melbourneopera.com/project/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-city-of-mahagonny/ For more Theatre reviews from Alex, visit https://www.bitesz.com/show/theatre-first/ Subscribe, rate and review Theatre First at all good podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, CastBox.FM, Podbean, Spreaker etc.If you're enjoying Theatre First podcast, please share and tell your friends. Your support would be appreciated...thank you.Theatre First RSS feed: https://www.spreaker.com/show/4988589/episodes/feed For more podcasts visit our HQ at https://bitesz.com #theatre #stage #reviews #melbourne #australia #melbourneopera #iopera
Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound. The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album, India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career. Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over. Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song. Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them
One evening in 1930, a revolutionary piece of political satire premiered in Leipzig, Germany. Some took it as a shot at the troubles of Weimar Republic, other thought it was aimed at the excesses of early 20th century American society. Either way it's themes of political corruption, sin and economic crisis saw it banned by the Nazis and it disappeared until the 1960s. Now, in our globalised world, with the rise of autocrats and the subjugation of migrant workers' rights, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Berholt Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill, still feels contemporary. In the Drawing Room, director Suzanne Chaundy talks about her take on the work.
One evening in 1930, a revolutionary piece of political satire premiered in Leipzig, Germany. Some took it as a shot at the troubles of Weimar Republic, other thought it was aimed at the excesses of early 20th century American society. Either way it's themes of political corruption, sin and economic crisis saw it banned by the Nazis and it disappeared until the 1960s. Now, in our globalised world, with the rise of autocrats and the subjugation of migrant workers' rights, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Berholt Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill, still feels contemporary. In the Drawing Room, director Suzanne Chaundy talks about her take on the work.
Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Bertolt Brecht, orig. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, (born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin, E.Ger.), was a German playwright and poet. He studied medicine at Munich (1917–21) before writing his first plays, including Baal (1922). Other plays followed, including A Man's a Man (1926), as well as a considerable body of poetry. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical musicals The Threepenny Opera (1928; film, 1931), which gained him a wide audience, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). In these years he became a Marxist and developed his theory of epic theatre. With the rise of the Nazis he went into exile, first in Scandinavia (1933–41), then in the U.S., where he wrote his major essays and the plays Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Woman of Sichuan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Harassed for his politics, in 1949 he returned to East Germany, where he established the Berliner Ensemble theatre troupe and staged his own plays, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1957). He outlined his theory of drama in A Little Organum for the Theatre (1949).From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Bertolt-Brecht. For more information about Bertolt Brecht:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:George Prochnik about Brecht, at 18:25: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-162-george-prochnikKwame Dawes about Brecht, at 14:55: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-037-kwame-dawes“Bertolt Brecht”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bertolt-brecht“The Poet of Ill Tidings”: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-poet-of-ill-tidings/“Brecht Was a Revolutionary”: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/bertolt-brecht-marxist-culture-politics-estrangement
Synopsis On today's date in 1706, the German composer and organist Johann Pachelbel was buried in Nuremberg, the town where he was born some 53 years earlier. In his day, Pachelbel was regarded as an innovative composer of Protestant church music and works for harpsichord and organ. Pachelbel was acquainted with the Bach family, and was, in fact, the teacher of the teacher of J.S. Bach, and served as godfather to one J.S. Bach's older relations. Johann Pachelbel would be pretty much forgotten by most music lovers until late in the 20th century, when an orchestral arrangement of a little Canon he had written would suddenly become one of the best-known classical themes of our time. In 1979, the American composer George Rochberg, even included variations on Pachelbel's famous Canon as the 3rd movement of his own String Quartet No. 6. Like Bach, some of Johann Pachelbel's children also became composers, and one of them, Karl Teodorus Pachelbel, emigrated from Germany to the British colonies of North America. As “Charles Theodore Pachelbel,” he became an important figure in the musical life of early 18th century Boston and Charleston, and died there in 1750, the same year as J.S. Bach. Music Played in Today's Program George Rochberg (b. 1918) — Variations on the Pachelbel Canon (Concord String Quartet) RCA/BMG 60712 On This Day Births 1737 - Bohemian composer Josef Mysliveczek, in Ober-Sarka; He was a friend and colleague of Mozart; 1839 - Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (Gregorian date: Mar. 21); 1910 - American composer Samuel Barber, in West Chester, Pa.; 1930 - American composer and jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, in Forth Worth, Texas; Deaths 1706 - Burial date of German composer Johann Pachelbel, age c. 52, in Nuremberg; Premieres 1740 - Handel: oratorio "L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato," and Organ Concerto in Bb, Op. 7, no. 1, in London (Julian date: Feb. 27); 1748 - Handel: oratorio "Joshua," in London at the Covent Garden Theater; The event possibly included the premiere of Handel's "Concerto a due cori" No. 1 as well (Gregorian date March 20); 1842 - Verdi: opera "Nabucco" (Nabucodonosor), in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala; 1844 - Verdi: opera "Ernani," in Venice at the Teatro La Fenice; 1849 - Nicolai: opera "Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor" (after Shakespeare's play "The Merry Wives of Windsor"), in Berlin at the Königliches Opernhaus; 1868 - Thomas: opera "Hamlet," (after Shakespeare's play "Hamlet") at the Paris Opéra; 1877 - Tchaikovsky: symphonic-fantasy "Fancesca da Rimini," in Moscow (Julian date: Feb. 25); 1924 - Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 5 (first version), in Paris, by the composer; A revised version of this sonata premiered in Alma-Ata (USSR) on February 5, 1954, by Anatoli Vedernikov; 1930 - Weill: opera "Die Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny" (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), in Leipzig at the Neues Theater; 1941 - Cowell: Symphony No. 2 ("Antropos"), in Brooklyn; 1951 - Honegger: Symphony No. 5 ("Di tre re"), by the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch conducting; 1980 - Earle Brown: "Caldar Piece," for percussionists and mobile, in Valencia, Calif.; 1982 - Berio: opera "La vera storia" (The True Story), in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala; Others 1831 - Italian violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini makes his Parisian debut a the Opéra; Composers in the audience include Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Halvéy; and Franz Liszt (who transcribes Pagnini's showpiece "La Campanella" for piano); Also in attendance are the many famous novelists and poets, including George Sand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Mussset and Heinrich Heine. Links and Resources On Johann Pachelbel On George Rochberg
A career Q&A with Audra McDonald, SAG Award Nominee for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. Moderated by Richard Ridge of BroadwayWorld.com's "Backstage with Richard Ridge." Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the breadth and versatility of her artistry as both a singer and an actress. Recipient of a record-breaking six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and an Emmy Award, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2015. In addition to her Tony-winning performances in Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, she has appeared on Broadway in The Secret Garden, Marie Christine (Tony nomination), Henry IV,110 in the Shade (Tony nomination), and Shuffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. The Juilliard-trained soprano's opera credits include La voix humaine and Send at Houston Grand Opera, and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at Los Angeles Opera. On television, she was seen by millions as the Mother Abbess in NBC's The Sound of Music Live! and played Dr. Naomi Bennett on ABC's Private Practice. She won an Emmy Award for her role as host of PBS's Live From Lincoln Center and has received nominations for Wit, A Raisin in the Sun, and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill. On film, she recently appeared opposite Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash and plays the Garderobe in Disney's upcoming live-action Beauty and the Beast. An exclusive recording artist for Nonesuch Records, she has released five solo albums for the label. McDonald also maintains a major career as a concert artist, regularly appearing on the great stages of the world and with leading international orchestras. Of all her many roles, her favorites are the ones performed offstage: passionate advocate for equal rights and homeless youth, wife to actor Will Swenson, and mother to her growing family.
The Australian tenor, Gregory Dempsey, was born in Melbourne in1931. He originally trained as a baritone but made his debut as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni in 1954 with National Opera of Victoria, also appearing as Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana and Pedro in d’Albert’s Tiefland. In 1955 he won the £1,000 Lever Award (a commercial radio award) and in 1956 was a grand finalist in the Mobil Quest.When the Elizabethan Trust Opera was formed in 1956 he took part in its season of four operas. The following season, he appeared in their productions of Tosca, La bohème and The Tales of Hoffmann, and in the 1958 season sang principal roles in Carmen, The Barber of Seville and Fidelio. He became a permanent member of the chorus for the Channel 9 television singers. 1960 found him singing Monostatos in The Magic Flute, the First Jew in Salome, Goro in Madama Butterfly and Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi. During this season, Gregory Dempsey sang a matinee of Goro in Madama Butterfly, followed by Luigi in Il tabarro (replacing another tenor) followed by Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi. Three roles, quite different roles, in one day!In Perth, he sang in both opera in a double-bill as Mundit – an aborigine – in the 1962 premiere of the Australian opera, Dalgerie and followed with Beppe in Pagliacci after interval. Gregory Dempsey joined Sadler’s Wells Opera in London in 1962 and this was his main UK base for the next fifteen years. His roles there and the Coliseum included Tom Rakewell, Peter Grimes, Jimmy Mahoney, Albert Gregor, Skuratov, Don José, Erik, David, Mime (Das Rhinegold and Siegfried) and the Shepherd in King Roger. He created the role of Boconnion in Richard Rodney Bennet’s The Mines of Sulphur after which one critic wrote “an heroic-villainous part of formidable challenge.” Dempsey appeared as Dionysus in the British premiere of Henze’s The Bassarids and the title role in the first British staging of The Adventures of Mr Brouček. Gregory Dempsey worked frequently with Scottish Opera, in roles including Britten’s Albert Herring, Quint and Lysander, as well as Florestan, Aeneas in The Trojans, David and Števa. Later, with Scottish Opera, he created the role of Bothwell in Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots in 1977. He made his Covent Garden debut in 1972 as Števa, returning as the Drum Major in Wozzeck. In the USA he appeared in San Francisco from 1966, as Albert Gregor and Tom Rakewell.He returned to Sydney to become a member of Opera Australia singing David in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Herman in Queen of Spades, Dimitri in Boris Godunov, Jimmy in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Mime in both Das Rheingold and Siegfried, Trin in La fanciulla del West, Valzacchi in Der Rosenkavalier and Bob Boles in Peter Grimes. With Victoria State Opera he sang Nero in L’incoronazione di Poppea, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, The Magician in The Consul, Monostatos in The Magic Flute, Benoît and Alcindoro in La bohème, Incredible in Andrea Chenier, Prince Populescu in Countess Maritza, Ajax l in La belle Hélène, Jamie in My Fair Lady and Borsa in Rigoletto. With the Adelaide Festival, he was seen as Nero in L’incoronazione di Poppea, Mark in The Midsummer Marriage, Gregor in The Makropulos Case, Zinoviy Borisovich Izmailov in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and The Adventures of Mr. Brouček. His clear, perfectly tuned tenor voice was suited to a plethora of different repertoire and styles. From Monteverdi to the most difficult contemporary compositions, Gregory Dempsey made them relevant to every audience. His charm and ever-ready humour made him loved by every colleague.(Text: Brian Castles-Onion)The STAGES podcast is available from Apple podcast, Whooshkaa, Spotify and where you find your favourite podcasts. www.stagespodcast.com.au
Hoy traemos a una excelente actriz y cantante, toda una mega estrella en los países de habla inglesa, pero bastante desconocida para el gran público, ajeno al mundo del teatro y al musical. Hoy en protagonistas damos un repaso a la vida y carrera de Audra McDonald. Estamos ante la mujer que ostenta el record con sus 50 años recién cumplidos de ser la persona que ha conseguido el mayor número de Premios Tony por su trabajo en los escenarios de Broadway, nada menos que SEIS y en todas las categorías a las que puede optar una actriz, tanto en teatro de texto como en el musical, pero no adelantemos acontecimientos. Vamos a comenzar como debe hacerse en todo, yendo paso a paso. Espero te guste la selección que hemos preparado de este extraordinaria intérprete que volverá en concierto al Teatro Real de Madrid el próximo Septiembre de 2021. 00h 00'00" I am what I am 00h 02'50" Presentación 00h 03'45" Cabecera 00h 04'37" DEBUT EN EL MUSICAL con RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN 00h 06'17" Mister Snow 00h 09'49" If I loved you - con Josh Groban 00h 13'59" TEATRO DE TEXTO, MUSICAL y CINE 00h 15'17" Master class - con Zoe Caldwell 00h 17'48" Your daddy’s son 00h 21'27” You were meant for me 00h 24'11" GRABACIONES DE ESTUDIO y CONCIERTOS 00h 24'59" A little bit in love 00h 27'54" Tonight - con Mandy Patinkin 00h 31'45" Lloyd Webber Love Trio - con Marin Mazzie y Judy Khun 00h 38'48" RODGERS & HART y MICHAEL JOHN LA CHIUSA 00h 39'23" Beautiful / I Will love you 00h 43'59" Why can’t I? - con Dawn Upshaw 00h 47'40" ANNIE & DREAMGIRLS 00h 48'57" Maybe/Tomorrow 00h 50'58" Dreamgirls 00h 54'10" PASSION & 7 DEADLY SINS 00h 55'32" Happiness - con Michael Cerveris 01h 00'12" My book 01h 04'43" MAHAGONNY & 110 IN THE SHADE 01h 05'18" Alabama song 01h 07'59" Simple little things 01h 11'13" PORGY AND BESS & SOUND AND MUSIC LIVE 01h 12'43" I loves you Porgy - con Norm Lewis 01h 15'50" Climb every mountain 01h 18'30" GRANDES COMPOSITORES MODERNOS 01h 19'03" God give me strenght (Burt Bacharach y Elvis Costello) 01h 23'48" I had myself a true love (Harold Arlen) 01h 27'40" I think it’s gonna rain today (Randy Newman) 01h 30'42" Stars and the moon (Jason Robert Brown) 01h 35'00" CLÁSICOS DEL CANCIONERO AMERICANO 01h 35'25" All the things you are (Jerome Kern) - con Norm Lewis 01h 38'07" I don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing (Duke Ellington) 01h 41'48" How long has this been going on? (George Gershwin) 01h 44'54" LADY DAY AT EMERSON's, BAR & GRILL & SHUFFLE ALONG 01h 46'29" God bless the child 01h 50'31" You’re lucky to me 01h 52'55" ALLEGRO & HELLO AGAIN 01h 54'06" Come home 01h 57'33" Beyond the moon 02h 02'03" FELICITANDO A SONDHEIM 02h 02'48" The ladies who lunch - con Christine Baranski y Maryl Streep 02h 07'10" AUDRA SOLIDARIA Y COMPROMETIDA 02h 08'49" Singing you home - con Jason Robert Brown
Hoy traemos a una excelente actriz y cantante, toda una mega estrella en los países de habla inglesa, pero bastante desconocida para el gran público, ajeno al mundo del teatro y al musical. Hoy en protagonistas damos un repaso a la vida y carrera de Audra McDonald. Estamos ante la mujer que ostenta el record con sus 50 años recién cumplidos de ser la persona que ha conseguido el mayor número de Premios Tony por su trabajo en los escenarios de Broadway, nada menos que SEIS y en todas las categorías a las que puede optar una actriz, tanto en teatro de texto como en el musical, pero no adelantemos acontecimientos. Vamos a comenzar como debe hacerse en todo, yendo paso a paso. Espero te guste la selección que hemos preparado de este extraordinaria intérprete que volverá en concierto al Teatro Real de Madrid el próximo Septiembre de 2021. 00h 00'00" I am what I am 00h 02'50" Presentación 00h 03'45" Cabecera 00h 04'37" DEBUT EN EL MUSICAL con RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN 00h 06'17" Mister Snow 00h 09'49" If I loved you - con Josh Groban 00h 13'59" TEATRO DE TEXTO, MUSICAL y CINE 00h 15'17" Master class - con Zoe Caldwell 00h 17'48" Your daddy’s son 00h 21'27” You were meant for me 00h 24'11" GRABACIONES DE ESTUDIO y CONCIERTOS 00h 24'59" A little bit in love 00h 27'54" Tonight - con Mandy Patinkin 00h 31'45" Lloyd Webber Love Trio - con Marin Mazzie y Judy Khun 00h 38'48" RODGERS & HART y MICHAEL JOHN LA CHIUSA 00h 39'23" Beautiful / I Will love you 00h 43'59" Why can’t I? - con Dawn Upshaw 00h 47'40" ANNIE & DREAMGIRLS 00h 48'57" Maybe/Tomorrow 00h 50'58" Dreamgirls 00h 54'10" PASSION & 7 DEADLY SINS 00h 55'32" Happiness - con Michael Cerveris 01h 00'12" My book 01h 04'43" MAHAGONNY & 110 IN THE SHADE 01h 05'18" Alabama song 01h 07'59" Simple little things 01h 11'13" PORGY AND BESS & SOUND AND MUSIC LIVE 01h 12'43" I loves you Porgy - con Norm Lewis 01h 15'50" Climb every mountain 01h 18'30" GRANDES COMPOSITORES MODERNOS 01h 19'03" God give me strenght (Burt Bacharach y Elvis Costello) 01h 23'48" I had myself a true love (Harold Arlen) 01h 27'40" I think it’s gonna rain today (Randy Newman) 01h 30'42" Stars and the moon (Jason Robert Brown) 01h 35'00" CLÁSICOS DEL CANCIONERO AMERICANO 01h 35'25" All the things you are (Jerome Kern) - con Norm Lewis 01h 38'07" I don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing (Duke Ellington) 01h 41'48" How long has this been going on? (George Gershwin) 01h 44'54" LADY DAY AT EMERSON's, BAR & GRILL & SHUFFLE ALONG 01h 46'29" God bless the child 01h 50'31" You’re lucky to me 01h 52'55" ALLEGRO & HELLO AGAIN 01h 54'06" Come home 01h 57'33" Beyond the moon 02h 02'03" FELICITANDO A SONDHEIM 02h 02'48" The ladies who lunch - con Christine Baranski y Maryl Streep 02h 07'10" AUDRA SOLIDARIA Y COMPROMETIDA 02h 08'49" Singing you home - con Jason Robert Brown
La emigración gallega está llena de historias extraordinarias, de triunfos y fracasos, de ruinas y fortunas. De entre los triunfadores, algunos volvieron y plantaron palnmeras, construyeron hoteles, fundaron escuelas y embrearon carreteras. Otros se eternizaron en su nueva tierra, se acriollaron y llegaron a generales o incluso a presidentes. Pero ninguno entre los hijos de Galicia llegó a dignidad más alta que la que alcanzó el avionense Alfonso Graña en el Alto Marañón, en lo más profundo del Amazonas peruano. Lo documentó en el Ya, Víctor de la Serna, el periodista falangista que lo bautizó como Alfonso I de la Amazonía: «Alfonso Graña, el español que reina como señor único, por encima de tratados y fronteras, sobre un territorio tan extenso como España, allí donde se parten en dos el mundo, la noche y el día.» No sabemos cuando se inauguró su reinado sobre los jíbaros amazónicos, esos que alcanzaron renombre mundial por su afición por reducir cabezas y por ser imposibles a toda civilización. Con el mismo ánimo que en los estertores del siglo XIX dejó atrás su Avión natal, un día de 1922, cuando la fiebre del caucho ya no necesitaba de cataplasmas, abandonó Iquitos, el primer puerto del Amazonas peruano, y se adentró en la selva en busca de un porvenir o de algo de comer. Pasaron muchos años antes de que nadie volviera a saber de él. Alfonso Graña nació en Amuidal, en el conceyo de Avión y en la provincia de Ourense. Era 1878, A diferencia de la mayoría de sus hermanos, esquivó las epidemias y resistió el hambre. Ganó así la oportunidad de huir. No quiso ser original. A Madrid no podía ir, no eran aún tiempos en los que un analfabeto pudiera ser ministro, y había que subir muchos puertos para llegar a una fábrica de Bilbao o Barcelona. El camino más directo requerí subir solo un puerto, el de Vigo. Se decía que en Argentina se comía carne todos los días. Carne todos los días. Tenía más magnetismo que el oro. Pero Graña no fue a Argentina, ni siquiera a Cuba, que aún era un destino nacional. Brasil necesitaba colonos para el Amazonas. Los papeles estaban arreglados. Figúrate, si hasta te pagaban el pasaje. En cuarta, pero a caballo regalado… Graña entró en el orden y el progreso por Belém de Para. Fue una escala antes de llegar al epicentro de la fiebre del caucho, Manaos. Manaos era la ciudad más rica y moderna de su tiempo. Las casas tenían luz y agua, en su ópera cantaba Carusso y los tranvías eran eléctricos, no como los de Nueva York que eran arrastrados por bestias. La ropa de Manaos se lavaba en Portgal y había más putas que en la imaginaria Mahagonny. Un día los ingleses, que no estaban en contra de los monoplios pero que preferían que fueran de su propiedad, robaron la semilla de la serengueira, la plantaron en Malasia al borde de las carreteras y jodieron la exclusiva sudamericana en el negocio del látex. Los altos costes de sacar cosas de la selva hicieron lo demás. En poco más de una década nadie recordaba la edad de oro de Iquitos o de Manaos. Graña vivió del caucho en Manaos. También en Iquitos. Quizás llegó antes, pero en 1910 ya era habitante del centro del látex peruano. En los últimos años diez ya no se ataban los perros con longaniza, pero aún se podía vivir. Además, con su paisano Cesáreo Mosquera, el dueño de la librería Amigos del país, Graña aprendió a leer los carteles que avisaban de que en Iquitos no había futuro. Así llegamos a ese día de 1922 en el que Graña preguntó a alguien que qué había río arriba. Como unos le dijeron que nada y otro que los terribles indios jíbaros que a todos los «cristianos» les hacían mondongo, nuestro hombre se fue a comprobarlo por sí mismo. Eso sí, para saber lo que vió, tendremos que esperar a la próxima semana. Grabado, cada uno en su casa, por Elena Ojeda, Xisco Rojo, Eugenio Hernández, Carlos Lapeña, Sergio Delgado, Juan Diego Yanda y África Egido. Un programa escrito y dirigido por Carlos Lapeña.
La emigración gallega está llena de historias extraordinarias, de triunfos y fracasos, de ruinas y fortunas. De entre los triunfadores, algunos volvieron y plantaron palnmeras, construyeron hoteles, fundaron escuelas y embrearon carreteras. Otros se eternizaron en su nueva tierra, se acriollaron y llegaron a generales o incluso a presidentes. Pero ninguno entre los hijos de Galicia llegó a dignidad más alta que la que alcanzó el avionense Alfonso Graña en el Alto Marañón, en lo más profundo del Amazonas peruano. Lo documentó en el Ya, Víctor de la Serna, el periodista falangista que lo bautizó como Alfonso I de la Amazonía: «Alfonso Graña, el español que reina como señor único, por encima de tratados y fronteras, sobre un territorio tan extenso como España, allí donde se parten en dos el mundo, la noche y el día.» No sabemos cuando se inauguró su reinado sobre los jíbaros amazónicos, esos que alcanzaron renombre mundial por su afición por reducir cabezas y por ser imposibles a toda civilización. Con el mismo ánimo que en los estertores del siglo XIX dejó atrás su Avión natal, un día de 1922, cuando la fiebre del caucho ya no necesitaba de cataplasmas, abandonó Iquitos, el primer puerto del Amazonas peruano, y se adentró en la selva en busca de un porvenir o de algo de comer. Pasaron muchos años antes de que nadie volviera a saber de él. Alfonso Graña nació en Amuidal, en el conceyo de Avión y en la provincia de Ourense. Era 1878, A diferencia de la mayoría de sus hermanos, esquivó las epidemias y resistió el hambre. Ganó así la oportunidad de huir. No quiso ser original. A Madrid no podía ir, no eran aún tiempos en los que un analfabeto pudiera ser ministro, y había que subir muchos puertos para llegar a una fábrica de Bilbao o Barcelona. El camino más directo requerí subir solo un puerto, el de Vigo. Se decía que en Argentina se comía carne todos los días. Carne todos los días. Tenía más magnetismo que el oro. Pero Graña no fue a Argentina, ni siquiera a Cuba, que aún era un destino nacional. Brasil necesitaba colonos para el Amazonas. Los papeles estaban arreglados. Figúrate, si hasta te pagaban el pasaje. En cuarta, pero a caballo regalado… Graña entró en el orden y el progreso por Belém de Para. Fue una escala antes de llegar al epicentro de la fiebre del caucho, Manaos. Manaos era la ciudad más rica y moderna de su tiempo. Las casas tenían luz y agua, en su ópera cantaba Carusso y los tranvías eran eléctricos, no como los de Nueva York que eran arrastrados por bestias. La ropa de Manaos se lavaba en Portgal y había más putas que en la imaginaria Mahagonny. Un día los ingleses, que no estaban en contra de los monoplios pero que preferían que fueran de su propiedad, robaron la semilla de la serengueira, la plantaron en Malasia al borde de las carreteras y jodieron la exclusiva sudamericana en el negocio del látex. Los altos costes de sacar cosas de la selva hicieron lo demás. En poco más de una década nadie recordaba la edad de oro de Iquitos o de Manaos. Graña vivió del caucho en Manaos. También en Iquitos. Quizás llegó antes, pero en 1910 ya era habitante del centro del látex peruano. En los últimos años diez ya no se ataban los perros con longaniza, pero aún se podía vivir. Además, con su paisano Cesáreo Mosquera, el dueño de la librería Amigos del país, Graña aprendió a leer los carteles que avisaban de que en Iquitos no había futuro. Así llegamos a ese día de 1922 en el que Graña preguntó a alguien que qué había río arriba. Como unos le dijeron que nada y otro que los terribles indios jíbaros que a todos los «cristianos» les hacían mondongo, nuestro hombre se fue a comprobarlo por sí mismo. Eso sí, para saber lo que vió, tendremos que esperar a la próxima semana. Grabado, cada uno en su casa, por Elena Ojeda, Xisco Rojo, Eugenio Hernández, Carlos Lapeña, Sergio Delgado, Juan Diego Yanda y África Egido. Un programa escrito y dirigido por Carlos Lapeña.
Zijn nieuwsgierigheid zorgde ervoor dat hij vaak begon aan muziekstukken waar zijn stem nog helemaal niet klaar voor was, vertelt bariton Thomas Oliemans. Hij zou vorige maand met het Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest in de opera Mahagonny hebben gestaan, maar daar kwam tijdens een repetitie abrupt een einde aan door de coronacrisis. Hij vertelt over afgelaste producties, maar ook over audities, zijn groep 8 musical en het omgaan met succes én teleurstellingen.
Porous Borders: Experimental Music in the Southern Hemisphere
Today on Porous Borders is Josten Myburgh, a composer, musician, improviser, and curator from Perth in Western Australia. I met Josten last December at KLEX festival in Kuala Lumpur, and in the interview, we talk a lot about Josten's performance from the festival. Video of that performance is available in full at the link below.Josten performs on saxophone and electronics as a solo improviser and with the groups Tchake, Mahagonny, and Breaking Waves, and he's part of organising the record label Tone List, which is a label focused on experimental music and sound from Western Australia. As part of his work with Tone List, Josten also organises the Audible Edge Festival every year. This year's festival was set to run in April and obviously it has been postponed, so if you have any cash to spare, head over to the Tone List bandcamp and grab something from there. If you want something that Josten's involved with, check out the record called Berlin Split; you can get it as a CD or a download. I've been working on this podcast for about 6 months now, and I've really loved all the conversations I've had for it. This conversation in particular is one of my absolute favourites, and if I had to pick one that represents what the podcast is about and what I want to achieve with it, it would be this one. Josten talks a lot about why he's stayed in Perth instead of moving to a bigger city, and also why he's made a point of making strong connections with South-East Asia. To give you a bit of context, this interview was recorded the day after KLEX, which is why we spend a lot of time talking about the festival and some of our favourite performances there. Again, check out my YouTube channel because there's video of a bunch of those performances on there, and whatever isn't there already is coming in the future. At the time of recording, I was in the middle of a tour with some friends from Indonesia and Malaysia and I don't think I'd gone to sleep before 3am for the three or four nights prior, so I was really struggling to form sentences. Josten was about to head back to Perth after many months of traveling and performing all over the world, and he still managed to be incredibly articulate. Later this week, I have a new Anquan record coming out, so please follow me on Bandcamp or Spotify or whatever you use. If anyone's stuck at home and want to talk, please reach out over email or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'm in day 7 of self-isolation at the moment and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the sun again next week. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again next week. LinksJosten's website: http://www.jostenmyburgh.com/Tone List bandcamp: https://tonelist.bandcamp.com/Tone List website: https://www.tonelist.com.au/Josten's performance from KLEX 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqkQZohX7IY Anquan bandcamp page: https://anquan.bandcamp.com/Sonic Vortex Vol. 1 (compilation of South-East Asian noise and experimental music): https://mindblasting.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/sonic-vortex-volume-1/Pancawala split (Coffee Faith, Dissonant, BRRR., DJ Miko, Anquan): https://mindblasting.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/pancawala-split/Concrescence Records YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqKkFOv5-FOVTTbl0oojrfw
Sopraano Karita Mattilan, 59, kaulalla kimaltaa kultainen alligaattori. Hän hankki riipuksen tammikuussa 2018 kotikulmiltaan Floridan Naplesista. Hän oli vaihdattamassa kultasepänliikkeessä kelloihinsa pattereita, kun hän huomasi korun vitriinissä. Lue myös: Karita Mattila: ”Minua ajaa itsekritiikki” Alligaattori edustaa Karitalle kotiseutua, jonka lammissa niitä ui. Karita osti korun, koska hän tarvitsi piristystä elämäänsä. Viime talvena Karita ja hänen puolisonsa Tapio Kuneinen jättivät avioerohakemuksen. Kolmekymmentä vuotta kestänyt liitto päättyi yhteisestä sopimuksesta. ”Pitkästä liitosta erotaan vain todellisista syistä. Eromme ei ollut kuitenkaan riitainen”, Karita Mattila kertoi Kotiliedelle heinäkuussa Etelä-Ranskassa, Aix en Provencen pikkukaupungissa. Erossa katosi arkiturva: "Tunsin itseni ajopuuksi" Eron myötä huippusopraano Mattilan arki mullistui. ”Avioero vaikuttaa kaikkeen. Sitä ei voi peittää, enkä haluakaan.” Lue myös: Maailmalle muuttanut Karita Mattila: ”Menestyjät eivät mahdu Suomeen” Hän rinnastaa eron hetkeen, kun parikymppisenä menettää lapsenuskonsa. Kotiopit eivät enää päde, ja arvomaailma menee uusiksi. Erossa elämästä katosi arkinen turva, johon pitkässä liitossa tottui. Samoin harmonia. Varmuus. Ja manageri, sillä Tapio oli hoitanut niitä hommia. ”Arjen manageeraaminen tuli harteilleni, ja aluksi se pelotti.” Karita tunsi itsensä ajopuuksi. ”Joku on sanonut, että jos on ajopuu, ei ole muuta kuin luottamus, että pysyy pinnalla.” Karita Mattila tähditti heinäkuussa Mahagonny-oopperaa Ranskassa. Usko pärjäämiseen palasi Pikkuhiljaa Karita alkoi uskoa pärjäävänsä ja oppi hoitamaan asioita, joista puoliso oli vastannut. Työkuvioissa on apuna agentti. Sopraanon työtahti on kova, ja hän sanoo, että uusien roolien opiskelu, liikkeellä olo ja esiintyminen ovat auttaneet pysymään pinnalla vaikeinakin hetkinä. Kuluneena vuonna Karita on itkenyt usein. Tunteet ovat purkautuneet yksin ollessa, klassista musiikkia kuunnellessa. Vaikka hän on viihtynyt aina myös yksin, avioeron jälkeen hän on tuntenut itsensä välillä yksinäiseksi. ”Vaikka tunteeni ovat menneet vuoristorataa, en ole voinut ryhtyä surkeilemaan kohtuuttomasti ja ajattelemaan, että uuteen elämäntilanteeseen tottuminen olisi ylivoimaista.” Hän miettii hetken ja lisää: ”Olematta uskovainen sanon, että työ on minulle siunaus.” Toinen iloa elämään tuonut asia on ollut Twitteriin liittyminen. Vuoden sisällä 7500 ihmistä ympäri maailmaa on ryhtynyt seuraamaan sopraanon elämänmakuisia päivityksiä. Kuuntele Karitan koko haastattelu podcastina! Luit lyhennelmän Kotilieden jutusta, jossa Karita Mattila kertoo uudesta elämäntilanteestaan, tunteistaan, haaveistaan ja työstään. Voit lukea koko jutun Kotilieden numerosta 20/2019 (tilaa lehti nyt tarjoushinnalla!) tai kuunnella sen jo nyt podcastina:
Author of The New York Times bestseller, "Patti LuPone: A Memoir," Miss Patti LuPone just concluded her critically acclaimed run as cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein in the Scott Frankel-Michael Korie-Douglas Wright-Michael Grief musical "War Paint." Her recent NY stage appearances include Douglas Carter Beane’s new play "Shows For Days," directed by Jerry Zaks at Lincoln Center Theater, her debut with the New York City Ballet as Anna in their new production of "The Seven Deadly Sins," Joanne in the New York Philharmonic’s production of "Company," David Mamet’s "The Anarchist," and Lincoln Center Theater’s production of the musical "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," for which she was nominated for Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Winner of the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Actress in a Musical and the Drama League Award for Outstanding Performance of the Season for her performance as Madame Rose in the most recent Broadway production of "Gypsy," her other stage credits include appearances with the Los Angeles Opera in their new production of John Corigliano’s "The Ghosts of Versailles" and Weill-Brecht’s "Mahagonny" (debut), the world premiere of Jake Heggie’s opera "To Hell and Back" with San Francisco’s Baroque Philharmonia Orchestra, Mrs. Lovett in John Doyle’s production of "Sweeney Todd" (Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle nominations; Drama League Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre), the title role in Marc Blitzstein’s "Regina," a musical version of Lillian Hellman’s "The Little Foxes" at the Kennedy Center, Fosca in a concert version of "Passion," which was also broadcast on PBS’ Live From Lincoln Center, a multi-city tour of her theatrical concert Matters of the Heart, the City Center Encores! productions of "Can-Can" and "Pal Joey," the NY Philharmonic’s productions of "Candide" and "Sweeney Todd" (NY Phil debut) and performances on Broadway in Michael Frayn’s "Noises Off," David Mamet’s "The Old Neighborhood," Terrence McNally's "Master Class" and in her own concert "Patti LuPone On Broadway." In London, she won the Olivier Award for her performances as Fantine in the original production of "Les Miserables" and in the Acting Company production of "The Cradle Will Rock." She also created the role of Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard," for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award, and recreated her Broadway performance of Maria Callas in "Master Class." Film: Cliffs of Freedom (upcoming), The Comedian, Union Square, Parker, City by the Sea, David Mamet’s Heist, State and Main; Just Looking, Summer of Sam, The 24 Hour Woman, Family Prayers, Driving Miss Daisy, Witness. Television: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Penny Dreadful (Critics Choice nomination), Girls, American Horror Story: Coven, Law & Order: SVU, Glee, 30 Rock, PBS Great Performances The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Ugly Betty, Will & Grace (as herself), PBS Great Performances’ Candide, Oz , the TNT film Monday Night Mayhem, PBS’ Evening At The Pops with John Williams and Yo Yo Ma, Falcone, Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story (Showtime); Frasier (1998 Emmy nomination); Law & Order, An Evening with Patti LuPone (PBS), the NBC movie Her Last Chance, Showtime's ACE Award and Emmy nominated The Song Spinner (Daytime Emmy nomination, Best Actress), The Water Engine, L.B.J., AMC's Remember WENN and ABC's Life Goes On. Recordings include: Far Away Places, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Patti LuPone at Les Mouches, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd (both the 2006 Broadway revival cast recording and 2000 live performance recording on NY Philharmonic’s Special Editions Label); and The Lady with the Torch.
"Du darfst alles für Geld" - darum geht es in der Oper "Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny". Gerade in Zeiten des Turbokapitalismus ist dieses Motto von unverminderter Aktualität. Sebastian Baumgarten hat "Mahagonny" für die Oper Zürich neu inszeniert - eine szenisch wie musikalisch gleichermaßen überzeugende Produktion.
a) Ultima parte della conversazione con Antonella Gargano, ordinario di Letteratura tedesca alla Sapienza di Roma. Brani tratti da "L'eccezione e la regola", "Mahagonny", "Baal" b) Conversazione con Renato Palazzi, critico teatrale del "Sole 24 ore". Brani tratti da "A coloro che verranno", "Madre Courage", "La canzone della inadeguatezza degli umani sforzi"
Discuss on Reddit ➤ Support the Show ➤ Hallo kinder! We’re going further than we’ve ever gone before for our thirtieth birthday, back to pre-war Germany and Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera.” We learn the differences between Verfremdungseffekt and Gesamtkunstwerk, talk about how torturous times can create form-changing art and reflect on how Brechtian theatre exists today. The Threepenny Opera – 1954 New York Cast Blitzstein Adaptation Amazon / iTunes / Spotify SHOW NOTES If you’ve only ever listened to the OBC, why not try something new and listen to the RIAS Berlin Symphony Orchestra recording starring Ute Lemper? It’s Jimi’s all time favourite. Don’t tell Brecht, but you should REALLY listen to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ by Wagner if you haven’t. It’s pretty darn life changing. After that, continue you on your operatic journey and check out our musical theatre pal Patti LuPone in Brecht and Weill’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’ and then buy the DVD. Here’s the queen of cabaret, Lotte Lenya, singing one of Jimi’s all-time favourite musical theatre numbers - ‘Pirate Jenny.’ Then have a swatch at Ute Lemper, her contemporary counterpart, doing the same in German. But if you want something completely different, check out Amanda Palmer taking her NSFW take on it! Which do you prefer? Why was Bob Dylan aroused? It’s a question we ask ourselves every day. Check out this article to find a bit about why! We’ve not heard from ‘Forbidden Broadway’ in a while, check out their inadvertent pastiche of ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in their ‘Spring Awakening’ spoof! A SMASHING QUESTION Which musical caused the events of this quote to occur:“From the outside, I’m sure it sounded like all hell had broken loose in my dressing room, which in fact it had. I was hysterical … I took to batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved a lamp out the second-floor window.”
Kurt Weill's opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny opens at the Royal Opera House soon - singers Kurt Streit and Christine Rice take a break from rehearsals to join Sean Rafferty to talk about their characters, and how mezzo-sopranos are 'quite used to playing hookers and whores'...
On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe explores the fracturing political landscape and the rise of anti-establishment parties. The politics lecturer Robert Ford explains the increasing support for the SNP, UKIP, and the Greens and what that means for the forthcoming General Election. Catherine De Vries is a Professor of European politics and compares what's happening across the Channel. Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders of Otpor - the movement that played a pivotal role in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic - and he advises how using humour, rice pudding and lego men can change the world. The Royal Opera House is staging Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a satire on money, morality and pleasure-seeking, and its director John Fulljames seeks out the contemporary resonances in this story of consumerism and loss of humanity. Producer: Katy Hickman.
The great Astrid Varnay was born on April 25, 1918. Let us celebrate the memory of this legendary soprano with highlights from her illustrious career. All selections are from the 1950's and they include scenes from Parsifal, Tannhauser (Venus and Elizabeth),Tristan und Isolde, Flying Dutchman (with Hans Hotter),Elektra (w.Hoengen and Schoeffler, and concluding with the Gotterdmaerung Immolation Scene. (68 min.) She made her sensational debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 6 December 1941 in a broadcast performance singing Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walküre, substituting for the indisposed Lotte Lehmann with almost no rehearsal. This was her first appearance in a leading role, and it was a triumph. Six days later she replaced the ailing Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde in the same opera. Varnay and Weigert became closer and were married in 1944. It was also at this time that she had lessons with former Metropolitan Opera tenor, Paul Althouse. In 1948 she made her debut at Covent Garden and in 1951 in Florence as Lady Macbeth. In that year she also made her debut at Bayreuth after Flagstad, who had declined the invitation to Bayreuth, recommended that Wieland Wagner engage Varnay. She sang at Bayreuth for the next seventeen years, and appeared regularly at the Metropolitan until 1956. She left when it was clear that the Met director Rudolf Bing did not appreciate her, and went on to become a mainstay of the world's other great opera houses, especially in Germany, in Wagner and Strauss but also several Verdi and other roles. She had already made Munich her home, where audiences considered her a goddess. In 1969 she gave up her repertoire of heavy dramatic soprano roles and began a new career singing mezzo roles. After being the world's leading Elektra for over twenty years, she now established herself as a great interpreter of Klytemnestra. The role of Herodias in Salome became her most often-performed role: 236 performances. She returned to the Metropolitan in 1974 and last appeared there in Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1979. In the mid-1980s, character roles now became Varnay's metier. Her last appearance on stage was in Munich in 1995, fifty-five years after her Metropolitan debut. In 1998 she published her autobiography Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera, written with Donald Arthur (German title is Hab'mir's gelobt). In 2004, a documentary about her life and first New York career entitled Never Before, produced by Donald Collup, received acclaim in the USA. Her recordings of Strauss heroines such as Elektra and Salome along with the Wagnerian roles are among the treasures of the medium, while transcriptions of broadcast performances of her great roles document her art in sound, and a few video recordings of her late career preserve evidence of her acting ability. Astrid Varnay died in Munich on 4 September 2006, aged 88. Selected recordings
A brilliant Elektra with Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Hans Hotter, and Res Fischer from 1953 under Richard Kraus. (71 min.) She made her sensational debut at the Metropolitan Opera on 6 December 1941 in a broadcast performance singing Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walküre, substituting for the indisposed Lotte Lehmann with almost no rehearsal. This was her first appearance in a leading role, and it was a triumph. Six days later she replaced the ailing Helen Traubel as Brünnhilde in the same opera. Varnay and Weigert became closer and were married in 1944. It was also at this time that she had lessons with former Metropolitan Opera tenor, Paul Althouse. In 1948 she made her debut at Covent Garden and in 1951 in Florence as Lady Macbeth. In that year she also made her debut at Bayreuth after Flagstad, who had declined the invitation to Bayreuth, recommended that Wieland Wagner engage Varnay. She sang at Bayreuth for the next seventeen years, and appeared regularly at the Metropolitan until 1956. She left when it was clear that the Met director Rudolf Bing did not appreciate her, and went on to become a mainstay of the world's other great opera houses, especially in Germany, in Wagner and Strauss but also several Verdi and other roles. She had already made Munich her home, where audiences considered her a goddess. In 1969 she gave up her repertoire of heavy dramatic soprano roles and began a new career singing mezzo roles. After being the world's leading Elektra for over twenty years, she now established herself as a great interpreter of Klytemnestra. The role of Herodias in Salome became her most often-performed role: 236 performances. She returned to the Metropolitan in 1974 and last appeared there in Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1979. In the mid-1980s, character roles now became Varnay's metier. Her last appearance on stage was in Munich in 1995, fifty-five years after her Metropolitan debut. In 1998 she published her autobiography Fifty-Five Years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera, written with Donald Arthur (German title is Hab'mir's gelobt). In 2004, a documentary about her life and first New York career entitled Never before, produced by Donald Collup, who interviewed her, received acclaim in the USA. Her recordings of Strauss heroines such as Elektra and Salome along with the Wagnerian roles are among the treasures of the medium, while transcriptions of broadcast performances of her great roles document her art in sound, and a few video recordings of her late career preserve evidence of her acting ability. Astrid Varnay died in Munich on 4 September 2006, aged 88.
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