Armenian Cultural News‏

SERGEI PARADJANOV FESTIVAL LAUNCHES IN UK
PanARMENIAN.Net
23.02.2010 17:10 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Sergei Paradjanov Festival in London and Bristol
was opened with Yuri Mechitov's photographic exhibition at the National
Theatre Monday, February 22.

The exhibition is composed of rarely seen photographs taken by
Georgian photographer Yuri Mechitov during his 11 year friendship
with the director.

The Sergei Paradjanov Festival in London and Bristol is the first
major celebration of the legendary artist and filmmaker whose talent
transcends religious and political boarders, drawing on the cultural
traditions of Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine and Russia. The Festival aims
to present the life and works of Sergei Paradjanov to UK audiences
through a series of diverse events that include: a film season;
a moving image installation; a symposium and a workshop at the
BFI Southbank; a photographic exhibition at the National Theatre;
screenings and talks at Pushkin House; a concert at St. Yeghiche
Armenian Church; a film retrospective at Arnolfini (Bristol); and a
photographic exhibition at The Bristol Gallery.

"The films of Sergei Paradjanov have always captivated me with
their unique cinematic language and the poetic strength of their
imagination. For me, Paradjanov is like a slap in the face to banality,
harshness, self-interest and general uniformity," festival organiser
Layla Alexander-Garrett said.

The festival will last till March 28.

Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) is one of the 20th century's greatest
masters of cinema. An Armenian born in Georgia, Paradjanov studied film
in Moscow, worked in Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia. He started making
films in 1954 and is celebrated for his poetic and visionary films
including The Colour of Pomegranates (1968) and Ashik Kerib (1988).

A winner of British Academy Award for the "Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors", Paradjanov was a constant target of Soviet authorities;
deprived of the opportunity to make films for fifteen years, five
of which were spent in hard labour camps, he found the most vibrant
means of expressing his talent through drawings, collages and writing.

THE PARADJANOV SEASON N LONDON
By Nadia Kidd; Ksenia Galouchko
The Daily Telegraph
February 23, 2010 Tuesday
London

This March the British Film Institute on London's Southbank will
host a season of Armenian film-maker Sergei Paradj anov's works.The
festival will include Paradj anov's acclaimed features, short films
and documentaries. Elisabetta Eabrizi, curator of the festival,
has long nurtured a passion for the director. Having completed her
university dissertation on his works, since 2005 she has been engaged
by the idea of making Paradjanov known to a wider international
audience. Paradj anov's legacy has shaped the styles of several
British film-makers, including that of Derek Jarman, whose works were
inspired by The Colour of Pomegranates. Other"followers" include the
Brothers Quay, whom Eabrizi calls "the real masters of animation'.'
Although prominent in his influence on filmmakers of the 20th century,
along with fashion designers, musicians and artists, Paradjanov is
virtually unknown among film lovers.

To Eabrizi, the director's ability to bring together a variety of
cultures and religions, such as Islam and Christianity, in his films
makes them topical and modern in today's political and social context.

So when Eabrizi met Layla Alexander-Garret, a London-based Russian
art promoter who was also searching for a venue to host a Paradjanov
film festival, she knew it was a dream come true. Together, the
two Paradjanov admirers pooled then: contacts and experience, and
finally made the long anticipated two-and-a-half-month Paradjanov
festival happen.

The festival will be the biggest Paradjanov celebration ever held
in the UK. The most rec ent Paradj anov-themed cultural event in
the UK goes back to 10 years ago, when the Lumiere cinema put on an
exhibition and screenings in memory of his craft. The festival will
host screenings of Paradjanov's and Paradjanov-influenced films,
including documentaries by Russian, Ukrainian, Erench and German
film-makers. Some screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions
with Paradjanov's friends and collaborators, along with Paradjanov
scholars. According to Eabrizi, the festival films will be introduced
by, among others, director Patrick Cazals and film critic and writer
Tony Rayns.

The March 6 symposium will bring together a large variety of guests,
including the director of the Armenian-based Paradjanov museum
and those who have worked with Paradjanov. Contemporary artist Mat
Collishaw has been commissioned to produce a moving image installation
for the festival. The project unites sculpture and the moving image
in an atmospheric work inspired by Paradjanov's craft. According
to Eabrizi, Colh'shaw, whose show runs until May 9, has managed to
poetically convey the spirit of Paradjanov's artistic endeavour.

Some events at the festival are being organised exclusively by
Eabrizi's Russian partner Alexander- Garret, including the photo
exhibition by a Georgian artist Yuri Mechitov, which contains rare
pictures taken during his long friendship with Sergei Paradjanov,
in addition to a memorial concert at the Armenian Church, and a set
of events at the Pushkin House, Russian cultural centre in London,
and in Bristol. And what could be Eabrizi's next artistic project?

Considering the successful professional collaboration with
Alexander-Garret, the curator might opt for a season of Russian film
classics.

YASMIN LEVY AT CADOGAN HALL, SW1
The Times
February 26, 2010
UK

Ancestral Sephardic songs made for a potent display from the Israeli
singerClive Davis

Recommend?

At one level, the Israeli singer's message is profoundly pessimistic:
Yasmin Levy tells her audience that Ladino - the Sephardic language of
an ever-shrinking minority scattered across the globe - is doomed to
extinction. Those who use it in daily life are growing older by the
day; the younger generation, including Levy herself, has lost that
instinctive connection. Hebrew or Spanish have taken its place. Yet
she sees performances of the ancestral songs as a way of preserving
the words and imagery, and in that respect, she is winning her battle
against history.

Whether or not she needed to delve so deeply into the affinities with
flamenco has been a moot point among her admirers. Levy sometimes
seemed so eager to explore the byways of Andalusia that her voice
slipped into a shrill and overbearing tone. It was a relief to find
her reining in the excesses on her stylish new album, Sentir.

Cadogan Hall's acoustics were not best suited to Levy's incantatory
vibrato, but this was still a potent display from a defiantly
multicultural group that included an Armenian reeds player, Vardan
Hovanissian, and a Scottish guitarist, Cuffy Cuthbertson. If some of
the intimacy of the studio recording was lost in this spacious setting,
Levy calmly drew her audience closer with playful introductions and
translations that undercut the often melancholy and fatalistic content
of the songs themselves. "Did I make you miserable yet?" she asked
jokingly at one point. Sometimes, in fact, she tried too hard to make
us feel at home: the stark poetry of the songs - a contemporary blend
of Ladino and Spanish - works well enough on its own austere terms.

As Hovanissian and his colleagues took their concise solos, Levy
prowled the stage, essaying delicate, Zen-like dance steps. On the
serene ballad Una Pastora she was left alone on the stage as she
communed with the voice of her late father, the revered musicologist
Yitzhak Levy. Elsewhere, the soaring arrangement of Leonard Cohen's
Hallelujah fitted neatly into the mix, and at the end the stirring
Balkan pulse of Jaco transformed the venue into something resembling
a sun-dappled village square.

ARMENIAN CONDUCTOR LEADS ANKARA CHOIR IN PERFORMING

GOMIDAS SCORE
Asbarez
Feb 26th, 2010

ANKARA (Combined Sources)-The Ankara Radio Polyphonic Choir
has performed a composition by the famous Armenian composer and
ethnomusicologist, Gomidas Vartabed, the Turkish Hurriyet reported
on Thursday.

The piece, "Gali Yerg" (Harvest Wind), was performed in Armenian under
the direction of Istanbul-based Armenian conductor Hagop Mamigonyan.

The choir will sing it again at an Armenian church in Istanbul

Gomidas Vartabed (Soghomon Soghomonian) was an Armenian priest,
composer, ethnomusicologist and luminary of the Ottoman Empire and
is considered to be the founder of Armenian modern classical music.

Born in 1869 in Kutahya, he endured the Armenian Genocide and was
arrested on April 24, 1915 along with 100s of other leaders of the
Armenian community. Gomidas was the first non-European to be admitted
to the International Music Society and traveled through Europe and
the Middle East giving lectures and performances to raise awareness
of Armenian music. Gomidas Vartabed died in Paris France in 1935 in a
psychiatric hospital and his ashes were sent to Yerevan, where street
names and statues of him preserve his memory.

The choir, affiliated with the state-owned Turkish Radio and
Television Corporation (TRT), performed the work as part of a larger
40th anniversary celebration for TRT in which 40 Turkish and foreign
conductors were invited to lead the choir in separate concerts,
performing songs of their choosing.

"When I told them on the phone that I wanted to perform an Armenian
work, there was silence for a few seconds on the other end of the
line, but my request was accepted," Mamigonyan was quoted by Hurriyet
as saying.

The youngest of the 40 composers, Mamigonyan is the chief conductor
of the 40-person polyphonic Surp Lusavoric Armenian Choir in Istanbul,
which has been performing in Istanbul for 80 years.

Recordings of the concert will be available in the coming months. In
another historic first, the Ankara Radio Polyphonic Choir will also
perform the same composition in the Holy Trinity Armenian Church in
Istanbul's Beyoglu district.

Mamigonyan said he had doubts until he started working with the
choir and was worried that the TRT administration would retreat at
the last minute. But he was eventually allowed to perform the piece,
achieving a first in modern Turkish history.

In previous years, performing Armenian songs had been banned on TRT
television channels and radio stations, despite the rich contributions
to Turkish music made by Armenians over the centuries.

"Unfortunately, many of the traditions and accomplishments by Armenians
and other ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire have been trivialized
or obfuscated from collective Turkish historical memory," Antranig
Kzirian, a noted musician and oud composer told Asbarez on Friday.

Kzirian explained this phenomenon as part of a "parallel process"
perpetuated both by Turkey's "reluctance to acknowledge that
non-Turkish cultures contributed greatly to Anatolian culture; and
externally," as well as by "the diasporan-Armenian community's taboo
in discussing issues related to the Armenian Genocide."

"It remains regrettable that, within an artistic and cultural
framework, Armenian losses in the Genocide also indirectly resulted in
the collective amnesia of Armenian composers living during the Ottoman
Empire," he added. "This incalculable cultural cost has presented a
sadly incomplete tapestry of the rich mosaic and diversity of Armenian
artistic expression."

Composers and luminaries of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries
such as Baba Hampartsoum Limondjian, Udi Hrant Kenkulian and Kemani
Tatyos Ekserciyan and several other Armenian composers contributed
greatly to the Armenian nation's achievements, Kzirian said.

"Limondjian's creation of a notation system for classical music, for
example, was used in the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years and it
remains in use today in the Armenian Apostolic Church," he added.

Kzirian said he hoped that Armenian communities can "rediscover parts
of our great cultural and musical tradition." But this would only be
possible, he noted, through acknowledgement and a growing openness of
the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey and abroad.