Free live music in Las Palmas, February 2024

Contrary to what the councillor of the Ayuntamiento says, the Carnival of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 2024 was anything but a success. For me, the worst Carnival I’ve seen here. For many locals, too. La Gran Cabalgata (Saturday 17 February) was underwhelming to say the least. Suadu Sene Faye — Second Maid of Honour who really should have been the Queen of the Carnival of Las Palmas, and who was the main reason I went to see the Cabalgata — was not even there. The procession was eerily silent; not a single samba band as far as I could see. Mucha policía, poca diversión. On Sunday, miserable Entierro de la Sardina, featuring the smallest ever sardine on these shores, followed by the never-materialised drone show, was the cherry on top of this disaster. Praise the sardine, it’s over!

Enough negativity: finally, good quality live music is back, and it has nothing to do with Carnival. I wish it was a bit warmer (and drier) outside though: the only indoor event I went to was the masterclass in Teatro Guiniguada.

• 14 February: Quartet D’Arezzo @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles, Calle Benito Pérez Galdós, 4, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
  Mozart, Bach and some tangos. Featuring Pablo Melián (violin), Luis Montesdeoca (violin), Ayose García (viola) and Marisa Roda (cello).

  

• 15 February: Beatriz Martín @ Museo Castillo de Mata, Calle Domingo Guerra del Río, 147
  The singer-songwriter from Tenerife was a star of the second concert from the cycle «12 Noches de autor» (I missed the first one in January).

  

• 24 February: Verónica Ferreiro @ Teatro Guiniguada, Plaza F. Mesa de León
  The first masterclass of this year organised by Mousikê La Laguna.

• 24 February: «Con alma mexicana» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos, Parque Doramas
  Fabiola Trujillo has opened the new Musicando season. Very different from her «La flor de la canela» programme of 2021 — as you can guess from the name, this time the focus was on Mexico. The “mariachi band” included Luis Montesdeoca, Carlos Marrero, Óscar Guerra and Izan Falcón (violins), Juan Ramón Martín, Juan Antonio Guerrero and José Antonio García “Pepé” (trumpets), Ivanoff Rodríguez (bass), Daniel García (vihuela), Abraham Sierra (contra) and Juan Carlos Sierra (guitar, musical director).

  

• 28 February: «Italia» @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles
  Chiara Salerno (soprano) and Nauzet Mederos (piano) offered an evening of Italian opera and Neapolitan song. My favourite was their rendition of ’O surdato ’nnammurato.

  

And that was it for February.

Domingo Domingo

a film by Laura García Andreu

Hallo, mein Name ist Domingo Domingo. Willst du meine Mandarinen probieren?

A humorous and touching documentary about an inventive farmer from Valencian community. While the old timers spend their days in the bar (nothing wrong with it) complaining how orange growing is going to the dogs, Domingo Domingo has a cunning plan... (In Valencian, with Spanish subtitles.)

Planet Earth III

a film by Kiri Cashell, Tom Greenhalgh, Abigail Lees, Will Ridgeon and Sarah Whalley
presented and narrated by David Attenborough

Whales should be saved and you agree wholeheartedly about that, except as far as you knew they were all pretty strong swimmers anyway. Rhinos should also be saved, but where would you get a rubber ring big enough to go round them?

Gray Joliffe, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Life

If Planet Earth II was a brilliant update to Planet Earth, its follow-up, Planet Earth III, looks like an unnecessary postscript to Planet Earth II. As usual, amazing camerawork and stunning locations. It’s all but destroyed by simplistic writing repeating the same (not winning) formula episode after episode and by a force-fed tree-hugging agenda that would convert born vegans to whale-munching carnivores. Also, some scenes, if not actually staged, certainly look as if they were staged.

OK, I admit it, there are parts worth watching. For instance,

• A sea angel hunting the sea butterfly (Coasts);
• African jacana chicks learning to walk on water (Freshwater);
• Temminck’s tragopan gets disheartened by the sight of the golden pheasant’s mating dance (Forests);
• Jaime Culebras looking for a mate for Sad Santiago (Heroes);
• Almost all of the Extremes episode.

I’ve found on YouTube some pretty cool Behind the Scenes footage that unfortunately didn’t make it to the DVD. Such as this:

Поёт Марк Бернес

by Mark Bernes

Very different from Les Grandes Musiques de Films but equally loved by my mum was an LP called simply «Поёт Марк Бернес» (Mark Bernes sings). Since the mid-seventies, although she was perfectly able to put it on the turntable, my mum would rather ask my brother or me to do it. As a result, the vinyl was scratched beyond any reason. So yes, another record I grew up listening to and damaging it in the process.

On the sleeve, a black and white photo of a middle-aged man holding a mike. Back then, I’d probably say “an old man”. Old? The album was released in 1968; Mark Naumovich Bernes (Марк Наумович Бернес) died the following year aged 57.

I myself would never call Bernes «певец» (singer) — I felt that word was reserved for the likes of Iosif Kobzon, Lev Leshchenko or Muslim Magomayev. Bernes was a chansonnier. He was not singing his heart out but talking, joking, telling a story.

I can’t listen to this disc now with the same ears as 50 years ago. The opener, «С чего начинается Родина» (What Does the Homeland Begin With), just makes me cringe. I can live with most of the lyrics — I mean, it’s all right, not worse than a typical Anglophone pop song — such as the one of surprisingly jazzy «Всё ещё впереди» (Everything is Still to Come). Two tracks, however, are unquestionable masterpieces: «Тёмная ночь» (Dark is the Night) and «Шаланды, полные кефали» (Scows Full of Mullet)^*, both composed by Nikita Bogoslovsky with lyrics by Vladimir Agatov for the 1943 film «Два бойца» (Two Soldiers). The songs in the movie sound quite different from those on the 1968 record. For example, in the “original” «Шаланды» Bernes pronounced the name Odessa as «Одэсса» /ɐˈdɛsːə/ while in the ’60s rendition it’s the normative «Одесса» /ɐˈdʲesːə/. Imprinting and all, I still prefer the latter version^†.

As for «Тёмная ночь», it deservedly became one of the most famous and beloved Soviet songs created during the Great Patriotic War... and that despite neither being patriotic nor mentioning the war. Yes, we know, the war is raging on — in the film. Bullets, mortal combat, death are all present, but there is no word “war” in the lyrics. And so the song transcends time, place and circumstances. An immortal classic.

*	Curiously, the word шаланда comes from the French chaland (barge), and that, in its turn, from Ancient Greek χελάνδιον; кефаль (mullet) from κέφαλος; and Одесса (Odessa) itself was named after the ancient Greek city of Odessos (Ὀδησσός).
†	According to Nikita Bogoslovsky, «Шаланды», its success notwithstanding, was harshly criticised by Soviet bureaucrats (who likened the song to criminal folklore) and not recommended for official performances.

Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

Ten delightfully complex, dark and/or disturbing gems from arguably the greatest living short story master.

Inevitably, the “our Chekhov” cliché (attributed to Cynthia Ozick) has found its way onto the book’s dustjacket. Have those who repeat it ever read Chekhov? Or Alice Munro? Well, Munro is nothing like Chekhov. She’s in a class of her own.

The first nine stories all take place in Canada. Now, as a note aside: I don’t know much about Canada. It’s a huge and sparsely populated country. Apart from ice hockey, it gave us, off the top of my head, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Maynard Ferguson, Oscar Peterson, Kenny Wheeler, Diana Krall, Lhasa de Sela, Tanya Tagaq, Peaches, Lido Pimienta, Leslie Nielsen, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Keanu Reeves, Donald Sutherland, Rush, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cirque du Soleil... And, of course, Alice Munro. The Klondike Gold Rush inspired many a work by Jack London that I enjoyed reading as a kid. Yet the first thing that springs to my mind is The Lumberjack Song. Oh, the power of a stereotype.

To be fair, a wood cutter by the name of Roy actually is a protagonist of the short story called Wood. As Canadian as possible under the circumstances? Maybe. To me, Roy is a stereotypical Finn.

This curious diagram from Wikipedia shows the evolution of sections in Wood, first published in 1980 and then in its revised form in this collection (2009):

“The 2009 version comprises eight sections to the 1980 version’s three, and has a new ending.”

The title story — at 50+ pages, shouldn’t it be called a novella? — is quite different from the rest. It is based on the life of the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya (Sophia Kovalevsky in the story) and, as far as I can see, pretty faithful to historical events.

As another note aside: yes I heard about Kovalevskaya when I was in school, and later at the university. Not much though. The fact that she was not able to attend a university, let alone get any teaching job, either in Russia or abroad, was somehow glossed over^*. Her mentor, Karl Weierstrass — that Weierstrass, the author of an endless list of theorems — also appears in the story.

The amazing thing is, even here, even knowing how it’s gonna end, Munro’s stories and characters are not predictable.

If I were to choose three stories, it would be those that are narrated in the first person: Child’s Play, Some Women and Wenlock Edge.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would have called smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.
These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.
Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?
Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?
The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.
And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.
“Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

Some Women

*

Or so I thought until I came across the 1948 essay by Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina [1]. The author does not make any secret that Kovalevskaya was not employable in pre-revolutionary Russia — and adds that Currently in the Soviet Union, all conditions have been created for a woman to engage in science equally with a man, if this corresponds to her natural inclinations. Polubarinova-Kochina, a distinguished mathematician herself, lived through the birth and death of the USSR and died at the young age of 100.

1. Полубаринова-Кочина, П.Я. Софья Васильевна Ковалевская (очерк научной деятельности). В сборнике С.В. Ковалевская. Научные работы. Редакция и комментарии члена-корреспондента АН СССР П.Я. Полубариновой-Кочиной. Издательство Академии Наук СССР, Москва, 1948, стр. 313—342.

Rock and Roll y malas compañías

a film by Lauren Jordan

Imagine the clip below going on for 100 minutes. That’s what this film is like.

It seems to be made for (and by) folks with attention span of about 15 seconds. If you want to learn about history of rockabilly in Spain — or to hear at least one complete song other than that by the very Lauren Jordan — look elsewhere.

Alis

a film by Clare Weiskopf and Nicolás van Hemelryck

La Arcadia is a shelter/boarding school in Bogotá, Colombia, for teenage girls who had been homeless or “had a complicated past”. Twenty of its residents, interviewed individually, were tasked to describe their new imaginary classmate, Alis. How does she look, what does she like. Why she is here. What will become of her in the future. As the film’s creators explain, there was no preparation; all girls created/improvised their own versions of Alis during the interview. When asked at the end of the interview if Alis really exists, they were affirmative. #AlisExiste.

Alis was the first Documental del Mes of 2024. Although the film is in Spanish, I wish they put the Spanish subtitles too, for at times it was difficult to understand the dialogue.