Live music in Las Palmas, April 2023

This is what I’ve seen in April:

• 1 April: «Tarasca» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos, Parque Doramas, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
  A show by Compañía Pieles, featuring José Félix Álvarez, Laura Álvarez, Fátima Rodríguez (vocals), Juan Antonio Mora (double bass), Itahisa Darias (violin), Jeremías Martín (piano, accordion), Fernanda Alonso (flute), Ventor de la Guardia, Fede Beuster, Jonatan Rodríguez, Carlos Castañeda and Guillermo Molina (percussion).

• 12 April: Coro vocal & Grupo coral @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles, Calle Benito Pérez Galdós, 4
  The first of three concerts dedicated to the 50^th anniversary of Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. I didn’t know until now that Palacete, bought 50 years ago by the Auyntamiento, was the first home of the Conservatory until, 16 years later, it moved to the bigger building. Featuring voices of Cristina Batista, Kati Brzoska, Gaire Concepción Suárez, Ana Falcón Muñoz, Noemi González, Jennibel Hernández, Joel Hernández Díaz, Paula Herrera Hernández, Teresa de Los Ángeles Rodríguez Vázquez, Daniel Marrero González, Francesco Pisapia, Andrea Quintana and Herminia Sánchez Déniz, accompanied, in turns, by Cristina Díaz Álamo, Diego Rodríguez Ramírez and Ulrika Törnros (piano) and Mireia Santana (guitar). The complete programme of the evening is available here.

  

• 15 April: «Recordando a Nino Bravo» @ Plaza de Santa Ana
  Serafín Zubiri and Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria conducted by Juan Roda, with special guest Cristina Ramos, paid a tribute to Nino Bravo, on occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the singer’s untimely death.
• 19 April: Grupos de cámara @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles
  The evening of classical chamber music. Featuring talents of Ysaren García, (violin), Ayose Alonso (violin), Celia Santana (cello), Inés Alén González (flute), Adriana Cabrera Almeida (clarinet), Clara Reyes (violin), David Martín (violin), Nuria Hernando (cello), Indara Saavedra (violin), Claudia Ramírez (cello), Marta de J. López Falcón (flute), Paqui Santana Pérez (flute), Fernando Barrio (bandurria), Eleazar Pérez (bandurria), Aarón Díaz (laúd), Marta García (guitar) and Sofía Pérez (guitar). The complete programme is available here.

  

• 22 April: Mayte Martín «Tatuajes» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos
  A new programme by the Catalan cantaora, accompanied by Nelsa Baró (piano), Guillermo Prats (double bass), and Vicens Soler (drums), covering standards such as Eu sei que vou te amar, La bien pagá, Ne me quitte pas and Procuro olvidarte.

• 26 April: Piano @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles
  The evening of piano music, with (in the order of appearance): Lidia Tabraue Santiago, Clara Quintana Jiménez, Darío Díaz-Flores Martín, Lía Zimmermann González, Valentina Cabrera Kalinina, Martina Gómez Vázquez, Aaron Grande Castilla, Valentina López Jáuregui, Ariadna Dipierri Romero, Irene Caballero Cerpa, Jorge Vega Saavedra, Noah Mesa Martínez, Luis Rodríguez González, Laura Salazar Sánchez, Orlando Cabrera Martín, Diego Rodríguez Ramírez, Yeling Li Ye, Miguel Raith Corimanya and Miguel Alonso Corimanya. The complete programme is available here.

  

• 27 April: Pedro Martínez @ Teatro Guiniguada, Plaza F. Mesa de León
  A masterclass of South American rhythms and guitar, with focus on samba, festejo, chacarera and polka paraguaya, this latter completely different from polka as we know it.

• 29 April: La Mare @ Espacio Cultural Jesús Arencibia, Avenida 8 de Marzo / Rotonda Cruz del Ovejero
  With La Mare (vocals, Spanish guitar, pandero cuadrado), Pablo López (bass, vocals) and Xerach Peñate (drums, vocals). This is the first time we’ve been to the brand new (opened this February) Centro de Actividades Culturales y Comunitarias Jesús Arencibia in Tamaraceite. The verdict: nice concert venue, with really comfy chairs; accessible by public transport (city and Global buses); not particularly well-advertised so the auditorium was not exactly full. I wouldn’t know about this concert if not for a note on Xerach’s Facebook page.

  

And that was it for April.

Red Rose Speedway

by Paul McCartney and Wings

I totally agree with Shaad D’Souza: there’s nothing more ridiculous than fifth-anniversary reissues. Second-anniversary reissues, maybe. Classic rock or whatever starts at 40 and, if it isn’t happily forgotten yet, well, let’s celebrate its 50^th anniversary then.

Now we are firmly in the golden jubilee territory. Earlier this year, Birds of Fire, Light as a Feather, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Who Do We Think We Are!, Cum On Feel the Noize, The Dark Side of the Moon, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Houses of the Holy all turned fifty. Ditto The Beatles’ Red and Blue albums (I know, I know, they are compilations, but I grew up on them, so shut up).

Enter Red Rose Speedway, an underrated gem of Macca’s discography and my favourite Wings record ever. Good thing it never made it to double albumhood coz that would be just disappointing. I don’t care what they (Wings) had in mind at the time, but this classic (single LP, that is) version is as close to a concept album as any of their works ever was. Maybe because Alan Parsons sprinkled his fairy dust on it (as he did on Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon).

The Beatles were masters of medleys consisting of songs that only exist in their medleys. Here, we have a good one too: Hold Me Tight—Lazy Dynamite—Hands of Love—Power Cut. I wonder if they thought of making the whole album one big medley. I’d love that.

Here’s a fun factoid: some years ago, listening to “le fil”, a single note “thread” that runs through the length of the 2005 album of the same name by Camille, I realised where I heard this noise before. By some strange coincidence, it was “a feature” of a recording of Red Rose Speedway that we had on a double-track magnetic tape reel in the ’70s. Where this quiet but piercing sound was filtering from remained a mystery. Maybe from another dimension? When I finally got hold of the original, I missed that drone note.

Brise-lames

a film by Hélène Robert and Jeremy Perrin

Five years after the devastating 2011 tsunami, a huge seawall is being constructed along the Japanese coast as the survivors struggle to come to grips with the tragedy.

Las hijas de Lilith

by Erika Bornay
introduction by Pilar Pedraza

I honestly wanted to like this book. Now that I finished reading it, I still like the idea of this book: to explore the rise and fall of femme fatale in art of the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries from the feminist perspective. Not the implementation though.

First, the style. If the author wanted to make a misery of your reading experience, she mostly succeeded. Long and convoluted sentences abound, as does the use of passive voice and first person plural albeit there is only one author^*. Like this passage (p. 19):

Otros aspectos cuyos análisis también se echan de menos, y que ya hemos señalado líneas atrás, confluyeron asimismo en el desarrollo y creciente expansión de estas imágenes en la iconoesfera europea, que, si en un principio, en Dante Gabriel Rossetti y Gustave Moreau, fueron producto de eruditas fantasías canalizadoras de oscuras pulsiones sexuales, más adelante, cuando el mito femenino por ellos creado fue recogido por los «baudelerianos», fueron recreadas por estos agregándoles los rasgos de las femmes damnées y las femmes stériles del poeta, conformando una imagen que conectaría con la atmósfera de rechazo hacia el sexo femenino de su entorno social.

The word “perverse” and variations thereof (perverso, perversa, perversidad) are overused to the degree that they lose any meaning. In the chapter about Salome, the author insists on the absurd expression cabeza decapitada, “decapitated head”.

You’d think, once you plough through the text, great intellectual reward awaits. You may be disappointed. The “analysis” (another worn-out word there) of artworks could be boiled down to looking for — and finding — polarising stereotypes: Madonna vs whore and man/God/virtue/soul/spirit/reason/art vs woman/Devil/sin/body/matter/instinct/nature. Of the two dichotomies, the latter trumps the former: Madonna is still a woman and as such is inferior to a man. The recurrent themes are reduced to simplistic formulae such as woman = beast = evil, woman = monster = evil, woman = lust = evil, woman + redhead = evil, woman + power = evil, woman + sterile = evil, woman + homosexual = evil, woman = castrating = evil, woman = child = evil, woman = death = evil... You’ve got the idea.

The book is full of quotes in languages other than Spanish. I attribute this not as much to snobbery as to availability of Spanish translations to the author coupled with good old laziness. For example, on p. 225 Edvard Munch is quoted in Catalan because, the footnote explains, its source was a catalogue of Munch exhibition in Barcelona. Given that not everybody in Spanish-speaking world is fluent in English (French, German, Italian or, for that matter, Catalan), it could be nice to provide the reader with translations.

The volume I took from the library is marked as the 3^rd edition (Ediciones Cátedra, 2021, ISBN 978-84-376-4134-8); on the same page, the first edition is said to be 2020. Yet according to Bornay’s bibliography, the first edition of Las hijas de Lilith appeared in 1990. I found what is called the 1^st edition (1990) and the 2^nd edition (1995) on Internet Archive. A handful of illustrations differ but the text remains essentially the same. Even the phrase “la segunda mitad del pasado siglo” (p. 50), “the second half of the last century”, obviously referring to the 19^th century, has not been corrected.

Does it matter? Let’s check out the literature references. In this (2021) edition, the only post-1990 sources cited are Nana, Mito y Realidad (Madrid, Alianza, 1991) by Werner Hofmann, which is a translation of a German book Nana: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (DuMont, Köln, 1973), as well as Bornay’s own La cabellera femenina: un diálogo entre poesía y pintura (Madrid, Cátedra, 1994). The rest of the bibliography seems to be identical to that of the older edition. So we have to take any mention of “new”, “recently discovered”, “in the last years” and so on with a spoonful of salt (and subtract 30 years).

On a positive note, I discovered new (for me) artists. The book is printed on excellent heavy paper and most of the illustations are also of decent quality; it’s a pleasure to hold in hands. For the reasons unknown, several oil paintings are reproduced in black and white. I think it would make a good gift if it were available in hardback.

Now let us look at the pictures.

If the 1^st edition (1990) shows a small fragment (just a face) of Judith II by Klimt on its cover, its 1995 follow-up features an illustration by Margarita Suárez Carreño, also of a female face. The cover of the 2021 edition is graced by the nude figure of Lilith (1889) by John Collier. No doubt, calculated to grab attention of a male passer-by like me.

My mum used to say — Part 3

A follow-up to the first and second parts.

• ба: well I never! (an exclamation of surprise) ♦ «ба, какие люди!»
• без сопливых обойдёмся: keep your opinion to yourself, pal
• брехня: lie, bullshit
• брюхо: paunch
• в нашей маленькой компании кто-то сильно навонял: somebody’s farted and I think it’s you
• Вечёрка: газета «Вечерняя Москва» // the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, “Evening Moscow”
• возникать: to argue, protest or talk too much ♦ «не возникай»
• выскочка: smartass, upstart
• дуракам закон не писан: no telling what a fool will do
• дурной пример заразителен: bad habits are contagious
• дурью маяться: to fool around, to waste time
• ему (ей) ссы в глаза, а он (она) — всё божья роса: said about somebody who is either stubborn, or dumb, or both; see also хоть кол на голове теши
• если бы, да кабы (во рту б выросли грибы): to stop meaningless speculations along the lines of “what if”
• ё-мазэ́: (probably from “your mother”) euphemism of твою мать; damn! see also твою дивизию, ядрёна копоть
• Жэньминь жибао: any broadsheet newspaper and not People’s Daily (Rénmín Rìbào), which my mum had never read
• забраковать: to reject
• заколебать: надоесть, утомить // to annoy
• захомутать: запрячь // to harness; figuratively, to give a long and unpleasant task
• злюка, злючка: a vicious or angry creature
• и не говори: tell me about it!
• изба-читальня: said when everybody in the room is reading
• к каждой бочке затычка, ко всем бочкам затычка: know-it-all
• катись колбаской по Малой Спасской: катись отсюда; гуляй, Вася // get lost! see also иди гуляй
• коврижка: any type of home-made cake
• колхоз: (ironically) a bunch of people ♦ «попрёмся всем колхозом»
• лапти: (ironically) any kind of footwear; cf. чепец, чепчик
• ласточка: affectionate term of address to a child or a much younger person ♦ «ах ты ж ласточка моя»
• лучше честно пёрнуть, чем предательски бзднуть: it’s better to honestly fart than treacherously fizzle
• лясы точить: indulge in empty talk ♦ «хорэ лясы точить»: enough chit-chat!
• (менять) шило на мыло: (to pick) the least-worst option
• на мази́: решено, договорено // sorted, (almost) decided, agreed; abgemacht!
• навернуть, наворачивать: to eat with appetite
• нахлобучить, нахлобучивать: to slap on (a hat)
• не в духе: out of sorts, not in the mood
• не к спеху: успеется // it can wait
• ни бе ни ме: ничего (не знать) // not to know the first thing about something
• ни богу свечка ни чёрту кочерга: ни рыба ни мясо, ни два ни полтора // neither fish nor fowl, neither here nor there
• ни мычит, ни телится: said about somebody who does not give any meaningful answer or procrastinates
• ни ответа, ни привета: said about somebody from whom nothing was heard for a long time; radio silence
• ни свет ни заря: очень рано утром // very early in the morning
• ни сном ни духом: absolutely (in negative sentences) ♦ «не знаю, ни сном ни духом»
• ни уму ни сердцу: (appeals to) neither mind nor heart; something that is both useless and boring
• опять двадцать пять: here we go again
• от греха (подальше): just in case
• отлупить: to beat up; see also отметелить
• пампушка: any sort of bun or doughnut that my mum liked, including pampushka proper ♦ «налепить пампушек»
• пока свинья не поваляет, не поест: literally, “a pig won’t eat until it rolls” (the food in the dirt); said about anybody who drops their food on the floor
• помолчи — за умного сойдёшь: be quiet, you’ll pass for a smart one
• пора́, брат (пора́): it’s time to go; a quote from Pushkin’s Узник (Prisoner)
• пора, красавица (проснись): it’s time (to wake up); a quote from Pushkin’s Зимнее утро (Winter Morning)
• почесать: пойти, побежать // to start going or running ♦ «ну я почесала»; see also чесать
• протрястись, растрястись: go for a stroll, especially after a meal; see also прошвырнуться
• психануть: to lose temper, to hit the ceiling
• путаться под ногами: to get in the way; said about pets, kids, helpers, etc.
• разориться: to splash out
• разреветься: to burst into tears; see also реветь
• районка: районная газета, в нашем случае «Новые рубежи» // a regional newspaper, in our case Novye Rubezhi, “New Frontiers”
• реветь: to cry, to weep; see also разреветься
• с моего места как с солёного теста: get out of my place!
• с чувством лёгкого голода: literally, “with a feeling of slight hunger”; used ironically in a sense “full up”
• сикось-накось: косо, криво // higgledy-piggledy ♦ «приляпать сикось-накось»
• слепой сказал, «посмотрим, как безногий будет танцевать»: (a long way to say) посмотрим // let’s see, we’ll see
• сплошь и рядом: очень часто // very often
• столбняк: ступор // stupor ♦ «на меня аж столбняк напал»
• так, сказал бедняк: conversation filler
• твою дивизию: euphemism of твою мать; damn! see also ё-мазэ, ядрёна копоть
• умная мысля́ приходит опосля: a good idea comes too late
• хлястик: strap
• хомут: обуза, ярмо // yoke, burden; see also захомутать
• хоть кол на голове теши: stubborn as a mule, thick as a brick, or both; see also ему ссы в глаза, а он — всё божья роса
• чепец, чепчик: (ironically) any kind of hat, especially knitted one; cf. лапти
• чесать: идти, бежать // to go, to run ♦ «куда чешешь?»; see also почесать
• читать нотации: to preach, to lecture
• чмы́хать (носом): шмы́гать // to sniff
• что ты понимаешь в колбасных обрезках: what do you know about it (so shut up)
• чья бы корова мычала, а твоя бы молчала: look at yourself, pal
• ядрёна копоть: euphemism of твою мать; damn! see also ё-мазэ, твою дивизию

Olyan, mint otthon

a film by Márta Mészáros

Unusually for me, I kept worrying that something bad will happen to the protagonists, to say nothing of the dog. But no. Of the three films of Marta Mészarós cycle I’ve seen so far, Just like Home, starring Jan Nowicki as András, Zsuzsa Czinkóczi as Zsuzsa and Anna Karina (Alphaville) as Anna, is the closest thing to comedy. Could it be that the title indeed refers to the director’s own feelings towards her native country at that particular time?

Örökbefogadás

a film by Márta Mészáros

Two women, Kata (Kati Berek) and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vígh), develop an unlikely friendship. A deep and heartwarming picture with a beautiful jazzy score by György Kovács.

If The Girl (1968) was the first film directed by a woman in Hungary, Adoption became the first ditto to win the Golden Bear in 1975. To put things in perspective: it was not until 2010 that either the Oscar for Best Director or BAFTA Award for Best Direction went to a woman — in this case, the same woman, Kathryn Bigelow.

Celestia

by Manuele Fior
translated by Regina López Muñoz

I loved 5,000 Kilometers Per Second so I took another book by Fior from the library. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Celestia is visually stunning graphical novel with (too) many interesting ideas that don’t quite glue into a coherent story. For me, the best parts are those where the heroes keep quiet, especially Pierrot. I think the whole thing would benifit enormously from dropping the dialogue altogether.

A buyer of the English edition of Celestia complained at Amazon.com about nudity and sex scenes in the book that make it not appropriate for teens. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she didn’t complain about violence (unrelated to sex) which is also present there.

Eltávozott nap

a film by Márta Mészáros

When I grew up, I was fascinated with Hungary. Not as exotic as Cuba but still, pretty exotic — impenetrable language always helps — and at the same time friendly socialist country from where cool, or at least colourful, things used to trickle into our grey reality. From my childhood, I remember novelty of orange Ikarus buses, the “rare bird” of imported chicken, and books by Corvina publishers that belonged to my mum, the best of which was the oversize Anatomy for the Artists by Jenő Barcsay. From a later period: then-still-cheap and way too sweet Tokaji wine; the 1978 Skorpió album Gyere Velem!, borrowed from (and, sorry to admit it, never returned to) a childhood friend; music books by Editio Musica Budapest, some of which I bought myself. (I still have Gitarakkord Kislexikon by Tibor Csepei on my shelf.) I don’t remember any single Hungarian film from those times though. While at the universtity, I watched István Szabó’s German-language trilogy (Mephisto, Oberst Redl and Hanussen), which I think does not quite count. Now, thanks to the Márta Mészáros retrospective, I can at last get acquainted with real Hungarian cinema.

Watching Mészáros’ debut feature, I can see why films like this were not shown in the Soviet Union. Lacking defined plot and moral, the movie follows the adventures of Erzsi (Kati Kovács), an independent, curious and, apparently, sexually liberated “titular” girl^*. Not what I’d call a comedy but with some wonderfully subtle comic scenes, like the one with a mysterious man “from the countryside” who claims he knew Erzsi’s parents...

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*

Of the English (The Girl) and Spanish (La muchacha) titles. The picture was internationally released as The Day Has Gone. A better translation of the original Hungarian title, “[A] day gone by”, was done in the Soviet Union (Ушедший день in Russian). It could be that the film was named after the theme by the psychedelic rockers Illés, who make a mildly embarrassing appearance as a dance hall band.