October 2002
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Gramophone Awards for Cecilia Bartoli and Takacs Quartet
Cecilia Bartoli - new website at www.ceciliabartolionline.com
Sir Georg Solti's 90th Birthday Celebrations
Bond are back!!
Gramophone Awards for Cecilia Bartoli and Takacs Quartet
Decca Music Group artists scooped 2 awards at the recent Gramophone Awards in London. Cecilia Bartoli's Gluck Arias won Best Recital and The Takacs Quartet won Best Chamber Music for Beethoven String Quartets Nos 7-10.
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Cecilia Bartoli - new website at www.ceciliabartolionline.com |
Cecilia Bartoli's website has just been relaunched at www.ceciliabartolionline.com. Check out the site for the laterst pictures and news, as well as a comprehensive discography and guestbook
Cecilia's latest release The Art of Cecilia Bartoli has also just been released. Find out more at her new website
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Sir Georg Solti's 90th Birthday Celebrations
The Hungarian-born maestro Sir Georg Solti, considered one of the greatest orchestral conductors of the modern era, died five years ago on 5 September 1997, the very same week that the world mourned the deaths of Diana Princess of Wales and Mother Theresa. Five years on Solti's musical legacy is very much alive. In what would have been his 90th birthday year, Solti's legacy is marked with the launch of a new website and a host of events in the key cities around the globe associated with landmarks in his life and career.
The official new website - www.georgsolti.com - will go live on 21 October, the day that Solti would have celebrated his 90th
year. Designed as an inspiration to all music lovers and the next
generation of young musicians, the site is a lavish, audio-visual
exploration of his life's journey that communicates the dynamism,
energy and sheer vitality of Solti, in his own voice.
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Bond are back!! |
In just two hectic years Haylie Ecker
(first violin), Eos Chater (second violin), Tania Davis (viola) and
Gay-Yee Westerhoff ('cello) have been hitting the headlines and
smashing records: the best-selling string quartet ever, the first
all-female string quartet to appear in the Pop Charts, the first and
only quartet to be kicked out of the Classical Charts……they are,
quite simply, the most successful string quartet of all time.
Launched in a blaze of publicity, Bond
were initially dubbed by the world's press as "the classical Spice
Girls" on account of their sexy image and rock'n'roll style. Over
two million album sales later, it's only the gender - and their
success - they have in common with the late proponents of Girl
Power.
Bringing their sizzling string
sorcery to all corners of the globe, Bond have conquered every
country they have so far visited. Highlights include seeing in the
new year onstage at a snow-shrouded Brandenberg Gate in Berlin,
sharing a stage in Italy with superstar tenor, Luciano Pavarotti,
playing at the MTV Awards in the USA and Singapore and bringing the
New York traffic to a dramatic halt with televised performances in
Times Square and on Wall Street.
Now it
is time for the quartet to move on. For nine months, the Bond girls
have been busy in the studio creating their second album, due for
release in Autumn 2002. It's going to be reassuringly familiar - yet
refreshingly different.
Collaborating
with five different producers - Magnus Fiennes (who worked on Born),
Youth, Stuart Chrichton, Andy Wright and Robin Twelftree - the girls
have had a far greater hand in composition this time, writing and
co-writing several tracks. A handful of chill-out numbers might be
at home in the Buddha Bar, blending Arab, Asian and Irish
influences; classical connoisseurs will recognise the Albinoni
Adagio and Borodin's Polovtsian Dances as inspirations for two of
them (Adagio and Strange Paradise).
There's a contemporary rock-style number,
Speed, incorporating the sound of racing-car engines and heartbeats,
an energy-packed gypsy-influenced track and even a Bollywood tune,
conceived before the latest craze. Due to popular demand at their
live shows, there is the Bond girls' take on tango (Liebertango)
and, in their biggest departure to date, a version of Led Zeppelin's
string-drenched rock classic, Kashmir.
"The first album introduced us to the audience and this time we have been much more involved at every stage of the creative process, from conceiving album ideas, composing and co-writing, through to collaborating with the producers on the final sound of the album," says Tania. "It's more credible, if you like. More us."
Gay-Yee adds: "We've learned so
much over the past two years. With the first album, we didn't know
what people would think or like. The new album has a more
contemporary feel in the production, and an increased number of
influences than before, but still keeps the Bond ingredients."
Born, the first album, agrees Haylie,
showed them what was possible and what worked best. "On this album,
we have tried to bring out many of the strongest musical elements
and ideas which worked on our first album, and developed those
elements. I think it has a more groovy chill-out vibe that will
definitely appeal to a younger audience."
Since launching the first album, the girls have
continuously travelled the world for promoting and concert tours.
Says Gay-Yee, "although we've all missed home, we've had the most
amazing time, travelling together, meeting so many interesting
people from a whole range of cultures, and making lots of new
friends. We're particularly looking forward to doing live concerts
again"
Their travels around the world,
adds Eos, have brought fresh ethnic influences to bear on their
music. "Every place we go to, we always try to explore the local
music in advance if we don't already have knowledge of it. This
enables us to explore new influences and directions and has opened
our ears to all sorts of new approaches, sounds and styles."
As they enter the next chapter of their career,
the originality of the quartet is still a relatively new phenomenon
in the music industry and the girls themselves have trouble putting
an exact definition to their sound. Haylie says "it's true that it
is difficult to define and categorise - the form of the quartet
itself and much of the writing is based on classical music, with a
mixture of sounds, melodies and rhythms from around the world."
Tania adds, "It's an eclectic musical mix characterised by so many
different cultural influences and musical styles with the classical
string quartet at its heart."
They are
even in partial agreement with the chart officials who threw them
out of the classical Top 10 on the grounds that they were not
classical. "We all love classical music but we know our music isn't
strictly classical in form and content, but then neither is a lot of
music in the classical charts," says Eos. "We've actually never said
we play straight classical music - inevitably, it's classically
influenced, though I always just call it 'global' because it blends
a lot of multi-cultural musical styles and musical genres."
Whatever it is, it's here to stay.
Keep up to date with bond at their official website at www.bond-music.com
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