Mal Hombre's Culture Corner

[rustler]

I am a great lover of opera, and have been for many years, and Pagliacci is a favourite.
However, probably my favourite tenor aria of all is from La fanciulla del west, by Puccini... Ch'ella mi Creda.

Here's the late Lucianno Pavarotti singing this beautiful aria....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bJVtnvyG3o

Here the outlaw Ramirez is about to be hung by the gold diggers/miners. And he sings about asking them to tell his beloved Minné that he has gone away, not that they have hung him. He sings of his love for her as they tie the noose around his neck.....

[rustler]

I am also a lover of Japanese culture and history, and a favourite piece of music of mine is...


Chidori no Kyoku (the song of the plover). This comes from the Edo period, 1600-1868.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp7rTU6gQyQ


Beautiful and tranquil music......

[rustler]

My musical tastes are wide and varied, and flamenco is a passion of mine and has been for many years.
The main thing with flamenco is the cante, the song. The baille, dance comes next in importance, and the solo guitar is a relative newcomer. Before the war the guitar was used solely for accompaniment.

One of the purest, and most profound of flamenco songs is a piece called Saeta which is an adoration of the Virgin Mary. Performed without accompaniment, except perhaps a hammer on an anvil or something similar to mark time.
Here it is performed in an astounding version by a young girl called Pilar Bogado, who is only about 11 or 12 when this film was made.
Flamenco is notoriously difficult to sing, but she sings with such skill and control that totally leave the audience speechless. At 5.18 she has one of the panel on the show literally in tears, and I must admit, whenever I hear this version, I am too! Her skill and clarity are breathtaking, at any age!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6kCoL1i2LQ





PS. The use of the word 'Olé', is actually a corruption of the word 'Allah', and harks back to the days when Spain was virtually run by the Moors. It signifies a piece of music etc. that at that exact moment, has been touched by God.

R.

[Attila The Hun]

You have great tastes, Rustler, most of which I share!

Another!:

The complete 'Heike monogatari', my favourite Japanese tale of the Genpei war,made famous by its inclusion in the legend of the blind biwa-player Hoichi. Here performed by Ueda Junko:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlHMvLFvM9M

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by rustler

I am a great lover of opera, and have been for many years, and Pagliacci is a favourite.
However, probably my favourite tenor aria of all is from La fanciulla del west, by Puccini... Ch'ella mi Creda.

Here's the late Lucianno Pavarotti singing this beautiful aria....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bJVtnvyG3o

Here the outlaw Ramirez is about to be hung by the gold diggers/miners. And he sings about asking them to tell his beloved Minné that he has gone away, not that they have hung him. He sings of his love for her as they tie the noose around his neck.....

Fanciulla del West is a curiousity, with not much "Western" about it . . . Puccini had managed some orientalism in Turandot, to good exotic effect. But in Fanciulla, he really didn't know what to do with an American setting.

He does lift a bit of Dvorak . . . but in turn, Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted "his" most famous melody, "Music of the Night" from Puccini's "Quello Che Tacete". Fanciulla was still under copyright when Phantom came out, and its rumored that Lloyd Webber paid some settlement to the Puccini estate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFs2a9c-hCo

(theme is at roughly 30 second mark)

[TommySwiftJr.]

Originally Posted by rustler

I am a great lover of opera, and have been for many years, and Pagliacci is a favourite.
However, probably my favourite tenor aria of all is from La fanciulla del west, by Puccini..

Amazing to see this piece of beauty mentioned. One of my favourite classical records.



Especially this aria totally does it for me:



http://youtu.be/8pXsdd28S5k

[danton]

I sorry, but having hung about here for a few years the notion of linking Mal Hombre to culture is just absurd. Like Eric Pickles and dieting …



Before…………After

[danton]

Originally Posted by danton

I sorry, but having hung about here for a few years the notion of linking Mal Hombre to culture is just absurd. Like Eric Pickles and dieting …



Before…………After

Actually, this is a very cultured thread!

[ubu55]

Always fond of the West Coast brand of Photorealism, 60's-70's movement that returned to an appreciation of the sensuous figurative image. Idealized the everyday: the street; the automobile; the diner; urban & suburban sprawl; neighborhoods; fairs & horse shows... images of our everyday life. Cars played a big part, cars are a kind of clock, a reference of the passage of time, like photos of children as they age. We could easily distinguish models & years then, & they're often repositories of memory.

This is the work of Ralph Goings, who chose diners, & pick-up trucks as his subject. If pie & coffee had a soul it would look like his vision of it...

The technique's deceptively simple: take a photograph, turn it into a color slide and a large reference print. Project the image on canvas or paper, trace it out, then paint it (There's speculation Vermeer used a camera obscura for the same purpose)
Sound easy? Not even. Here's a detail from a Ralph Goings painting, a ketchup bottle top...

...the goal's not merely being faithful to the original, but hyper-realizing it. After the mere outline comes skill & enormous concentration. Recognizing & reproducing light & shade, color & form... manipulating materials, paint & brushes, oil, dryers, thinners & varnish, even the white ground that glows through the paint.

Ralph Goings:
"In 1963 I wanted to start painting again but I decided I wasn't going to do abstract pictures. It occurred to me that I should go as far to the opposite as I could. ... It occurred to me that projecting and tracing the photograph instead of copying it freehand would be even more shocking. To copy a photograph literally was considered a bad thing to do. It went against all of my art school training... some people were upset by what I was doing and said 'it's not art, it can't possibly be art'. That gave me encouragement in a perverse way, because I was delighted to be doing something that was really upsetting people... I was having a hell of a lot of fun..."

Like Pop Art, Photorealism was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, which dominated/smothered American Art from the late 40's well on into the 80's & 90's, when the academics & critics matriculated in it finally began to retire & die off.

[ubu55]

Richard McLean

Like Ralph Goings & Robert Bechtel, Richard McLean attended Oakland College of Arts and Crafts in the late 50's. Like them he found in Photorealism a discipline that fascinated. His chosen subject: Horses & horse culture, county fairs & racetracks... a time-honored subject for artists, Britain has one of the very best, George Stubbs

wealthy horse racing owners pay big money for a mclean portrait of their thoroughbred