Thursday, July 30, 2020

Andrea Bocelli violated Italy’s lock-down ...

 ... because he felt ‘humiliated and offended’

Andrea Bocelli has criticised Italy’s approach to COVID-19

Andrea Bocelli has criticised Italy’s approach to COVID-19. Picture: Getty

By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM

The tenor encouraged people to reject social distancing, said children in schools shouldn’t wear masks and said he knows no one admitted to intensive care from COVID-19.

Andrea Bocelli says he voluntarily violated the ban on going out during Italy’s lock-down.

Speaking as a guest at a conference in the Senate, called Covid-19 in Italy: Between Information, Science and Rights, the Italian tenor said:

“I looked at reality and I saw that things were not as we were being told.

“When I started to express doubts about the seriousness of this so-called pandemic, the first to attack me were my children who told me to think about Tosca, because you don’t understand viruses.

“I know a lot of people but none of them ended up in intensive care. So, what was all this gravity for?”

Read more: Andrea Bocelli criticised for ‘dangerous’ remarks on Italy’s lockdown >

Bocelli says he violated the ban on going out during Italy’s lockdown.
Bocelli says he violated the ban on going out during Italy’s lockdown. Picture: Getty

Bocelli went on to say he felt “humiliated and offended as a citizen”, when a national quarantine was imposed by the Italian government on 9 March, restricting the movement of people in response to the coronavirus crisis.

The 61-year-old singer, who recently admitted to having had COVID-19 before his historic Easter concert at Milan Cathedral, also said he violated lockdown by going out, because “it didn’t seem right or healthy to me”.

He added: “I am of a certain age and I need sun and vitamin D.”

Bocelli announced he had tested positive for the virus in March, weeks before his ‘Music for Hope’ concert. He had no serious symptoms linked to the virus, and added that he had donated blood to fund research.

Read more: Andrea Bocelli says he had coronavirus before historic Easter concert >

Bocelli, who has two grown-up sons from his previous marriage and one daughter with wife and manager, Veronica Berti, also criticised the Italian government’s approach to reopening schools.

“I have an 8-year-old daughter and it’s unthinkable that these children will have to go to school divided by a piece of plexiglass and hidden behind a mask.

“It’s unthinkable that schools were closed so quickly, and with the same speed nightclubs were reopened, where young people go not to learn, but to disperse their brains.”

At the end of his speech, Bocelli controversially encouraged others to reject lockdown and social distancing rules. “Let’s refuse to follow this rule, let’s take some books, turn around, get to know each other, speak, talk to each other.”

The tenor has since apologised for his comments, saying: “If my speech to the Italian Senate caused suffering, I wish to extend my sincere apologies, because my intention could not have been more different.

“[My intent] was to send a message of hope for a near future in which – children first and foremost – can find a sense of normality again and hope to live ‘as children’, playing with and hugging one another, as they should at their age, and to be able to grow up happy and healthy.”

Under the latest lock-down rules in Italy – which have now been largely regionalized – face masks are mandatory on public transport and in shops, and social distancing of one metre is required in public spaces.

Theatres and concert halls can now resume; indoor events with a maximum attendance of 200 audience members; and 1,000 for outdoor areas. It is estimated that 35,000 people have died of coronavirus in Italy.

(C) 2020 by ClassicFM

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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Who was George Bridgetower?

The violin virtuoso who fell out with Beethoven


George Bridgetower, the violinist who fell out with Beethoven
George Bridgetower, the violinist who fell out with Beethoven. Picture: Getty
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM
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Have you heard of the Afro-European violin virtuoso, by whom Beethoven was so impressed that he composed a sonata just for him? Here’s the story of George Bridgetower.
George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was born in 1778 (or 1780, no one quite knows which) in Poland, to an Eastern European mother and West Indian father.
His father was a servant in Prince Esterházy’s Hungarian castle, a spectacular building which boasted an opera house, a puppet theatre and the established composer, Joseph Haydn, as Kappelmeister.
By the time young Bridgetower and his family moved to London, music was in his veins. Aged 10, George became a professional violinist and gave performances with the Royal Philharmonic Society Orchestra. The young prodigy began composing and teaching, and later attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree.
By 1789, Bridgetower was taking his music to Paris, London, Bristol and Bath.
After his Paris concert, French journal Le Mercure de France wrote: “His talent is one of the best replies one can give to philosophers who wish to deprive people of his nation and colour of the opportunity to distinguish themselves in the arts.”
In April 1803, Bridgetower arrived in Vienna from England. He was already an established violinist, having being employed by the Prince of Wales (later George IV), and polyglot, being fluent in English, German, French, Italian and Polish.
During an episode of Beethoven: The Man Revealed on Classic FM, Beethoven expert John Suchet said of the brilliant young violinist’s arrival in the musical capital: “With such credentials he was swiftly introduced into aristocratic circles in Vienna.
“And such was his skill on the violin, he was taken to meet Beethoven.”
Beethoven was deeply impressed by Bridgetower’s virtuosity and composed a sonata just for him – his Violin Sonata No. 9, of which Suchet says: “Violinists today regard it as the Mount Everest of violin sonatas. If you can play that, you can play anything.”
Bridgetower and Beethoven played the sonata together, on violin and piano. A glittering assembly gathered to watch the pair, and the performance was a triumph. Beethoven dedicated the sonata to the young violinist, calling it the ‘Sonata per un Mulattico Lunatico’.
“And then, Bridgetower made a mistake. A mistake he would regret for the rest of his life,” Suchet says. “He made an off-colour remark about a lady that Beethoven knew. And Beethoven was furious.”
The composer withdrew his dedication, and the sonata would come to be known as the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata instead, after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.
After the fall-out, Suchet says, “Beethoven and Bridgetower never met again. Bridgetower left Vienna soon afterwards to visit relatives of his mother in Poland.
“There are two sad codas to this story. Many years later, at around the age of 80, Bridgetower was living in a home for the destitute in Peckham, in South London. His hands had long since succumbed to arthritis. He could no longer move his fingers in the way he once had. The residents and staff of the care home had no idea this resident had once been a famous violinist who played for royalty.”
The second tragedy, Suchet says, was that Kreutzer received the manuscript in Paris, took one look at it and declared it unplayable. Despite it bearing his name, he never once performed the sonata in public.
George Bridgetower died penniless on 29 February 1860, all but forgotten by the classical music world.
“There were no relatives to be with him,” Suchet says. “The woman who signed his death certificate was illiterate and signed her name with a cross.”
Today, he is buried in Kensel Green Cemetery in West London.
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A digital artist is creating remarkable 3D portraits of Brahms, Liszt and Chopin


Liszt, Chopin and Brahms
Liszt, Chopin and Brahms. Picture: Hadi Karimi
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM
The great composers’ faces, reconstructed as if they are alive today.
An artist has been crafting digital portraits of the great Romantics, bringing four musical greats once shrouded in awe and mystery into the modern world.
Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Schubert can all be admired in 3D and in color, as if reborn from the ashes.
Hadi Karimi, the Iranian CG artist behind the new renderings, is an expert in sculpting 3D portraits of Hollywood stars and other famous figures. But, he says, he’s “always been a fan of classical music”. So, he decided to take on a new project.
“We grew up with all these beautiful symphonies and memorable melodies, but do we know the minds behind them?” Karimi tells Classic FM.
“Sometimes we remember them by just a name and if we’re lucky there’s a painting or a black and white photo from centuries ago that could barely show us what they actually looked like.”
Faces, as Karimi says, get lost in history. Photographs quickly deteriorate, and we are left with only death masks and portraits to rely on for an accurate picture of what our treasured historical figures actually looked like.
Karimi adds: “The mid-19th century was the time that photography started to become popular throughout Europe and paintings, life masks, began to fade. Daguerreotypes were very expensive and only the wealthy could afford them – and the same with masks and paintings!”
Of Chopin, there are just two known photographs: an unflattering daguerreotype, which was taken when the Polish composer was rather ill; and a reproduced version of a deteriorated photograph, that was lost during the Second World War. With no ‘true’ photographs to play with, Karimi worked from the composer’s death mask.
For Schubert, who – incredibly – wasn’t famous during his lifetime, the situation was equally tricky, as the Austrian early Romantic couldn’t have afforded a skilled artist to do his portrait.
“Most of the portraits of him were done decades after his death when his music finally started to make it to the mainstream,” Karimi explains. “All I could find as a reference was just one photo of a cast impression of his life/death mask, unfortunately the original mask is lost or destroyed in the market.”
But for Brahms and Liszt, the process was slightly easier.
Liszt is based on photographs of the composer, taken by Franz Hanfstaengl in 1858. And for the former, “Luckily there are many photographs of Brahms on the internet, even from his teenage years! I tried to picture him in his thirties (around 1860).”
All the sculpting was done using ZBrush, a digital sculpting tool that combines 3D and 2.5D modelling, texturing and painting. The colour texture was painted in Substance Painter, and for the German maestro’s floppy locks, the artist used XGen, an interactive tool used for creating realistic-looking hair.
“Thanks to the current technology along with the techniques that I’ve learned throughout my career as a CG artist, I can present to you the result of days and nights of my works and studies,” Karimi says.
“In this series of facial reconstructions, not only did I gather the references like photographs, paintings, life/death masks, … but also took a step further to study their personality so that I could reflect that in their facial expressions.
“I hope that I did them justice,” Karimi adds.
The reaction to his portraits has been extraordinary. “Amazing as usual,” one Twitter user comments. Other have requested Beethoven and Wagner as the next composers to get the 3D treatment.
British pianist and Chopin expert Warren Mailley-Smith, who five years ago memorised the Romantic’s entire repertoire for solo piano, remarked it was “quite incredible to actually see the man”.
“Some of these great composers can end up with such legendary, god-like status it’s easy to forget how perfectly ordinary as human beings they otherwise were.”
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