Monthly Archives: February 2013

When the Beatles met the sugar plum fairy

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When I was still a little child, my acquaintance with the world of classical ballet (and I suspect not just mine) was made through The Nutcracker. It was love at first sight (and hearing), as the delightful music of Tchaikovsky coupled with a most extraordinary set of characters such as the Mouse King, the Nutcracker Prince with his soldiers, and of course the Sugar Plum Fairy.

One of Tchaikovsky’s most celebrated works, the immense popularity of The Nutcracker owes much to a tradition that started in 1954, when the New York City Ballet first performed the ballet choreographed by George Balanchine. The company has since performed the ballet every year during the Christmas season with great success, paving the way for a growing number of performances across the world by several ballet companies in the years that followed.

‘Best of Balanchine’, performed by the Dutch National Ballet in the Amsterdam Music Theater

In 1965, the British orchestral composer Arthur Wilkinson made a very special arrangement of music by The Beatles, blending some of their well-known tunes with movements from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. The result of this peculiar musical marriage was called the Beatle Cracker Suite.

A musical allusion to Tchaikovsky’s popular ballet can also be found  in the film Magical Mystery Tour. It was the Beatles’ producer George Martin who, seeing that the opening strain of All My Loving is almost identical to the melody from Nutcracker’s Pas de deux but turned upside down, decided to arrange the song à la Tchaikovsky for the film’s background music.

The most intriguing manifestation of the unique relationship between the Russian master and the British pop stars was perhaps one not made through notes. It would be, however, captured on record through the soft, rather lazy and yet mysterious-sounding voice of Lennon, as he was whispering “sugar-plum-fairy, sugar-plum-fairy” into the microphone during the intro of the epic A Day in the Life (as can be heard in the Love version of the song).

It appears the little fairy’s dance had taken her all the way from Russia’s imposing music theaters to the Abbey Road Studios in London amidst the swinging sixties. What an honor indeed to have been summoned by The Beatles on such a special day in their life. No doubt Tchaikovsky would not have minded her leaving home!

Buena música

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It is simply impossible to overstress the enormous influence of Cuban music and its contribution to the development of various genres around the world, from jazz and salsa to the Argentine tango and the Spanish nuevo flamenco.

Known for its extensive blending of diverse styles and rhythms, Cuban music was in return also influenced by popular US music, as in the case of filín, a Cuban fashion of the 1940s and 1950s. Although Cuban jazz had also started in Havana around 1910-1930 it was not until the 1940s that the big band era arrived, owing much to great bandleaders like Armando Romeu Jr. and Damaso Perez Prado.

It was in the 1950s that Benny Moré, widely regarded as the greatest Cuban singer of all time, reached his heyday with his orchestra Banda Gigante (Big Band). Playing at the dance halls La Tropical and El Sierra in Havana, Moré and the group enjoyed immense popularity and went on to tour Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Mexico and the United States, where they performed at the Oscars.

The aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 saw the closing down of several night clubs and venues for popular music. As a result, many musicians were left without employment and emigrated to Puerto Rico, Florida and New York. Meanwhile in Cuba, artistic activity came increasingly under the control of the socialist regime, and with the movement of nueva trova music started to acquired a more political edge, combining traditional folk elements with often politicized lyrics.

A breakthrough for many legendary local musicians whose performing careers had come to a halt after the rise of Fidel Castro was the release of Buena Vista Social Club (1997). The album was the project of American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder, who visited Havana in 1996 to seek out and record these performers. Wim Wenders also captured the sessions on film, together with sell-out live performances of the group in Amsterdam and New York.

Following the album’s astonishing commercial and critical success, a number of its key performers (including singer Ibrahim Ferrer, guitarist/singer Compay Segundo, pianist Rubén González and trumpeter Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabal) set out to record solo albums, despite of their advanced age (all of them had been active in the Cuban music scene since the 1940s-50s).

Fifteen years after the release of Buena Vista Social Club, its reverberations are still felt quite strongly. As a result of its international success, younger audiences across the globe have had the chance to watch and listen live to these extraordinary musicians, while getting to know some of the younger talents of the contemporary Cuban music scene.

The Havana Lounge live in Paradiso, Amsterdam (15/02/2013)

It appears, then, that Ry Cooder’s fateful visit to Havana in 1996 managed indeed to rekindle the interest in Cuban tradition, opening a large window for international audiences with a vista to the horizon of Cuban music. A music so rich in its warmth, expression and feeling that surely makes for a most enjoyable view.

Memories of Valentine

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Written in 1937 by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, My Funny Valentine would go on to become a popular jazz standard, appearing on more than 1300(!) albums in total and performed by such great artists as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis.

One of its earliest and most memorable recordings was by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in 1952, which featured a captivating solo by Chet Baker. It was a major hit, and became a tune closely associated with Baker until the end of his turbulent life.

Plaque in memory of Chet Baker outside Hotel Prins Hendrik in Amsterdam (photo by Jeroen Coert)

A life that came to an abrupt end on on May 13, 1988, when the American trumpeter, flugelhornist and vocalist was found dead on Prins Hendrikkade, the street below his room at Hotel Prins Hendrik in Amsterdam (nearby the city’s Central Station).  An autopsy found heroin and cocaine in his body and these drugs were also found in his hotel room. His death was ruled an accident.

I also happened to live on Prins Hendrikkade for one year when I first came to study in the Dutch capital, oblivious of the grim connection between the street and Baker’s death. Ever since I found out about it, memories of my student days mingle with Baker’s melodies as I pass by the area around Hotel Prins Hendrik.

Uprooted flower

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Music & Lyrics: The Muser

“The souls of men are like flowers, each rooted to its place. One can’t go to another because it would have to break away from its roots… A flower can’t do anything to make a seed go to its right place; the wind does that and the wind comes and goes when it pleases.” (Hermann Hesse, Knulp)

Uprooted flower

They say that love makes two become one

but who could dare to share his soul?

We come together, we join, and have fun

but in the evening when the sky is dark

we feel so lonely as the stars

No reason why, a pointless cry and despair

Each one is on his own, all alone,

staring at a fountain full of tears

A man must bear the pain without an aid

A heart is like a flower rooted up

How nice it would be if the two became one

but could this happen for real?

We like to think it is a short and straight path

but there are crossroads where we break up

and left so lonely as the stars above

No reason why, a pointless cry and despair

Each one is on his own, all alone,

staring at a fountain full of tears

A man must bear the pain without an aid

A heart is like a flower that’s rooted up

carried away by the wind

A hymn to unfulfilled love

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In most cases, books are admittedly better than the movies they serve as a basis for.  But can the same be said about music adaptations? What about all those cases where novels and poems become a chief source of inspiration for great composers, leading to the creation of some of their most stunning and everlasting masterpieces?

I remember reading Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin when I was still in highschool, my teenage mind trying to reconstruct the novel’s theatrical setting and visualize its vivid characters. I would picture Onegin as a proud, fine-looking dandy kindly rejecting the love and pure feelings of young Tatyana, a landowner’s charming and shy daughter of introspective nature. Furthermore, I would try to follow how a silly quarrel could end with the fatal duel between Onegin and his good friend Lensky and how, finally, Onegin’s feelings for Tatyana would change when they would meet again many years later, their roles now having been reversed.

These fading images and scarce recollections of Pushkin’s novel came back to me recently, after watching Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin performed by the Stanislavski Opera at the Royal Theater Carré in Amsterdam.

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I’ve never been a big opera enthusiast, but works such as this always make me think of the considerably powerful effect opera can have when performed convincingly and given the right context. In the case of Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s beautiful music adds a whole new dimension to the familiar story, and it feels as if Pushkin’s masterpiece has been translated into a universal language that brings out its very essence, making it accessible to anyone with enough sensitivity and eagerness to partake in the dramatic events happening on stage.

Although Eugene Onegin touches upon several intriguing themes such as social conventions and the link between reality and fiction, it is ultimately a tragic story about unfulfilled love. It is evocative of the very human cry of desperation on behalf of the broken-hearted that has been repeatedly expressed through art since antuiquity, as in Sappho’s prayer in Hymn to Aphrodite:

Hear and heal a suppliant’s pain:

Let not love be love in vain!

Unlike Pushkin’s dark finale, Sappho’s hymn ends with Aphrodite’s promise to resolve the intense pain and the goddess’s assurance that the reluctant lover will soon know love as intense as that suffered by the poet:

Soon, thro’ long reluctance earn’d,

Love refused be Love return’d.

In Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, it is the sheer magic and moving power of music that serves as a substitute for such divine intervention, bringing thus consolation and a much-needed catharsis to the agony of the audience.