A ZAIA fan has recorded their own rendition of the song NOI from the show, complete with photos from the Zaia theater performances and pics of the band. (Hey, I’m in those pics!). Chicago Rose who performs this song in the show with the cast says “I love it”. And I think it’s pretty darn cool too.

Zaia is a resident Cirque Du Soleil show performing at the Venetian casino in Macau, China which opened in July 2008.

Video Description:

This is a recording of me singing Noi by Violaine Corradi. the piece is from show Zaia of cirque du soleil.

“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music.

This 10-part series takes an in-depth look at the process of bringing Shrek to Broadway through interviews with the Tony Award-winning creative team and cast, behind-the-scenes footage and exclusive content.

I did not like this piece on first listen – then I read about it’s background: the description of Janacek’s unrequited love and pining. And now the piece is very powerful to me.

Janacek once wrote: “I maintain that a pure musical note means nothing unless it is pinned down in life, blood and locale; otherwise, it is a worthless toy.”

And that is exactly true for this piece, the “Intimate Letters”. How many songs do we each have in our personal lives that are tied to a certain event or emotion that triggers our memory when we hear it? Or to have a piece like this framed with new information so the performance takes on a deeper perceived meaning.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He-c3K18sb4

The following from:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94294582

At age 63, Czech composer Leos Janacek began his most unusual writing project — a constant stream of more than 700 love letters written to a married woman 37 years his junior. It’s remarkable, considering that the young woman, named Kamila, expressed little feeling for Janacek or his music.

Even so, Janacek filled his letters with passion. At an age when most people slow down, Janacek, fueled by his own unrequited love, went into high gear. He composed some of his best music, including the String Quartet No. 2 — called, appropriately, Intimate Letters.

Commentator Rob Kapilow pinpoints a section from the third movement of the quartet which he says reveals much about Janacek’s unique sound-world. The passage is actually a musical portrait of Kamila, one that Janacek described to her in a letter: “It will be very cheerful, and then dissolve into a vision of your image, transparent, as if in the mist.”

Power-Packed Emotional Nuggets

“As obsessed as he was with Kamila,” Kapilow says, “Janacek was obsessed with short musical ideas that could convey maximum emotional impact in the fewest possible notes.”

Janacek’s portrait begins with simple-sounding repeated notes for the viola. The music speeds up, Kapilow says, but not in the usual way.

“It’s not just a note speeding up,” he says. “It’s actually the blood quickening at the thought of Kamila, and it runs through the whole passage.”

Janacek tells us all he feels for Kamila in a compact, rhythmically clear set of notes: short-short, long-long, and a repeated note, Kapilow says. The same pattern is heard over and over, but every time it’s a little different, more complicated, with anguish at every step.

“Each time, it’s taking us deeper into his feelings for Kamila,” Kapilow says. “All these note changes are in the favor of emotion, and they are constantly surprising and shifting, just like the letters he would write — every mood would shift at an incredibly fast pace.”

Janacek once wrote: “I maintain that a pure musical note means nothing unless it is pinned down in life, blood and locale; otherwise, it is a worthless toy.”

Reading through Janacek’s letters, Kapilow says there are hints that the composer was aware of his own fictionalized love affair. Yet the fiction must have been incredibly real, driving him to compose piece after piece.

“Maybe in the areas of inspiration, the distinction between fiction and reality is unimportant,” Kapilow says. “In any case, we should all be as lucky and creative with our fictions as Janacek was with his.”

A montage of the clowns of Cirque Du Soleil. I see Dimitri Hatton here from our ZAIA Cirque show doing his Montgolfiere passage and “Mad Conductor” act. I’m sure that Onofrio Colucci is also in this video but I’m not sure which clown he is (formerly with “O” and Zaia, currently with ZED in Tokyo).

You’ll also see Brian Dewhurst from Mystere. I had the chance to see Mystere performed in Vegas several years ago and the pre-show antics of Dewhurst stand out in my memory as one of the highlights of the show. He is SO funny.

Leonard Bernstein. Young people’s concerts. What is Orchestration?. March 8, 1958

Bernstein discusses orchestration beginning with Rimsky-Korsakov live performance examples. He also plays examples of bad orchestration.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J6ZjRnvnMk

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3Kxa_mRx1U

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIE0D2WfKFY

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVNZ3pJO4SU

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLXNr7aRhcA

Compare the two conducting and performance styles for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Top video is concluding part two of Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture performed by the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Mark Elder at the Royal Albert Hall during the Nations Favourite Prom 2004

Bottom video is the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LY11kV444

In this interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Gerd Jacob (Zwienicki) Wiener shares his memories of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogroms.

Fuerzabruta – The New Show from the creators of DE LA GUARDA. Visit fuerzabrutanyc.com for more info

A young man with no disabilities and many abilities! This should inspire most people to be thankful for what we’re given and to realize most of our limitations are decided by ourselves. And I think his Claire De Lune sounds pretty good!