BUSINESS TRIP

Hello my friends. Due to my business trip to Funchal, Madeira, there may be a short delay with the connection on my blog. So see you soon...

Leonard Cohen Tour 2009

Leonard Cohen

legendary Canadian singer and songwriter,

will perform at Bratislava's Incheba Expo Arena

on Friday, August 28, 2009

One of the most fascinating and enigmatic - if not the most successful - singer, songwriters of the late '60s, Leonard Cohen has retained an audience across four decades of music-making interrupted by various digressions into personal and creative exploration, all of which have only added to the mystique surrounding him. Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon), he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century, which is all the more remarkable an achievement for someone who didn't even aspire to a musical career until he was in his thirties.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the Montreal suburb of Westmount.in 1934, a year before Elvis Presley or Ronnie Hawkins, and his background - personal, social, and intellectual - couldn't have been more different from those of any rock stars of any generation; nor can he be easily compared even with any members of the generation of folksingers who came of age in the 1960s. Though he knew some country music and played it a bit as a boy, he didn't start performing on even a semi-regular basis, much less recording, until after he had already written several books - and as an established novelist and poet, his literary accomplishments far exceed those of Bob Dylan or most anyone else who one cares to mention in music, at least this side of operatic librettists such as Hugo Von Hoffmanstahl or Stefan Zweig, figures from another musical and cultural world

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ENJOY MUSIC

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NOTES

 

 

 

 

Love isn't a decision. It's a feeling.

If we could decide who we loved,

it would be much simpler,

but much less magical.

 

 

(Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 1998 )

 

 

 

RIGOLETTO

In the settlement St. Margarethen (Austria), only about 50 km from Vienna is a 2-thousand-years old Roman quarry of Leitha limestone. Stone from this quarry was used in the construction of St. Stephen's Cathedral and other buildings in Vienna.

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Every summer, it is the venue for an open air opera, which has a fantastic reputation. Open air stage is the largest natural stage in Europe. During the summer come artists of different countries here. Last summer it was opera

LA TRAVIATA

and this summer it is

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RIGOLETTO

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by Giuseppe Verdi. The performance was as usual gorgeous...

The opera focuses on the story of Rigoletto, the Duke of Mantova’s jester. The material Verdi excitedly wrote about Victor Hugo’s drama "Le roi s’amuse", which he adopted for his opera – a work composed in a creative frenzy.

It tells the tale of a middle aged hunch-backed court Jester, employed by the overly licentious Duke of Mantova, who is overly protective of his only daughter, Gilda. Poor Rigoletto gets a curse on him, his daughter was kidnapped. Rigoletto swears vengeance on the Duke.

The aria "Povero RIGOLETTO" superbly express his sorrow.