From Marie!
Record crowds ready to watch Sydney swing
By Christine Sams
January 2, 2005
Sun-Herald
Drawcard ... The Black Rider is a main attraction despite Marianne Faithfull's withdrawal.
Sydney Festival organisers report record ticket sales ahead of the annual arts extravaganza, which opens on Saturday night.
The festival, which features live theatre, dance, visual arts and classical music, has been embraced by fans eager to see live performers from rock star Jarvis Cocker to African supergroup the Super Rail Band De Bamako.
"We are having record sales," said festival associate artistic director Lissa Twomey. "Some shows are already sold out."
The hottest show at the festival is Came So Far For Beauty, a tribute to Leonard Cohen, which features musicians including Nick Cave, Cocker (from British pop band Pulp), Beth Orton and Rufus Wainwright. The event, with tickets priced from $70 to $148, sold out last week.
The other main attraction is The Black Rider, despite the absence of leading lady Marianne Faithfull, who withdrew last month and will be replaced by actor Nigel Richards, who did the show in San Francisco.
"Despite the absence of Marianne Faithfull, the production will not be compromised," said Ms Twomey. "Nigel got rave reviews in San Francisco."
A challenge for organisers was creating an event which embraces a large segment of Sydneysiders - not just those who can afford the high-end ticket prices. That's why the tradition of free shows continues, including the opening event The Lazy Kings at Sydney Olympic Park.
"There will be three massive parades on the site," Ms Twomey said. "And we're encouraging people to join in - it will be spectacular."
Traditional free events include Jazz In The Domain, with James Morrison and friends. Symphony In The Domain, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, would centre on a "galactic theme", Ms Twomey said.
Came So Far For Beauty in Sydney
-
Andrew (Darby)
- Posts: 1117
- Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2002 5:46 pm
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
If I was a Sydney resident, I'd be aiming to go along to a fair bit of this festival. Anyway, I'm more than happy to just be going to Came So Far For Beauty and now that it's January have really started my countdown! 
Several of our celebrants from the Toowoomba LC 70th birthday event are also going to be there, so I'm looking forward to connecting with them again.
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
Several of our celebrants from the Toowoomba LC 70th birthday event are also going to be there, so I'm looking forward to connecting with them again.
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
'I cannot give the reasons
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
Hi Andrew,
I am so glad that you will be able to see Came So Far For Beauty. I suspect that it will only have become better after New York and Brighton. Arthur and Bernadette Moore will be attending also. Please greet Martha, Perla and Julie, if you have the chance.
We'll be anxiously awaiting a report.
Joe
I am so glad that you will be able to see Came So Far For Beauty. I suspect that it will only have become better after New York and Brighton. Arthur and Bernadette Moore will be attending also. Please greet Martha, Perla and Julie, if you have the chance.
We'll be anxiously awaiting a report.
Joe
"Say a prayer for the cowboy..."
This article was also found my Marie!
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/ ... click=true
He's their man
January 2, 2005
Leonard Cohen, who for the past decade has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism.
Leonard Cohen inspires an uncommon kind of devotion among his fans, as the all-star line-up at a tribute concert in Sydney proves. Guy Blackman reports.
"I don’t think he plans on performing any more, and now he doesn’t have to because we’re doing it,” American music industry veteran Hal Willner says of Leonard Cohen. “He is really happy, he has been totally supportive in every way.”
Willner — who has worked with everyone from Sting to Sun Ra and whose credits as a movie soundtrack director include Gangs of New York and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts — is the man behind Came So Far For Beauty, an all-star concert tribute to the music of Leonard Cohen.The concert will be performed for three nights only at the Sydney Opera House later this month, as part of the Sydney Festival.
Already in his 30s when he had his first musical success, the Canadian-born Cohen is now 70. For the past decade he has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism. It seems unlikely he will ever return to live performance.
Cohen was a respected but relatively obscure poet and novelist in 1968 when his first (and still his most famous) song, Suzanne, introduced a literate, decadent and world-weary romantic vision to the world of pop music. His subsequent body of work, consisting of just 11 studio albums recorded over five decades, has become the subject of more serious analysis and feverish discussion than virtually anyone bar Bob Dylan.
“I just adore Leonard Cohen’s music,” says Willner. “I know it backwards and forwards. So the opportunity to do what I call an exploration or a dissection of his music is fantastic. Hey — I get to choose the set list!”
And the line-up. The hand-picked cast is impeccable, comprising Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, the Handsome Family and Cohen back-up singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen.
Each night these 13 performers will present 31 songs from Cohen’s total canon of 101, with the backing of a nine-piece band.
The show has already been staged in New York and Brighton, England, to uniformly rave reviews — no small feat for a night dedicated to a man whose music inspires such fierce devotion. Late last year Nick Cave told The Age’s Patrick Donovan how Came So Far For Beauty managed to come as far as Australia.
“Hal’s events are notoriously ramshackle, with lots of different people singing,” he said. “In Brighton, it somehow clicked together, and after that we got offers from all over to do more stuff. But we didn’t want to spend the next year doing tributes to Leonard Cohen — we all have other things to do. But the Sydney Opera House is too interesting to pass up.”
Cave is a Cohen fanatic and his version of Cohen’s Tower of Song was included on I’m Your Fan, a tribute album compiled by French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles in the early 1990s. At that time, Cave was asked how he first fell under Cohen’s spell. “I discovered Leonard Cohen with (his third album) Songs of Love And Hate,” he said. “I listened to this record for hours at a friend’s house. I was very young and I believe this was the first record that really had an effect on me. “In the past, I only listened to my brother’s records. Leonard Cohen was the first one I discovered by myself. He is the symbol of my musical independence.
“I remember these other guys that came to my friend’s house who thought Songs of Love And Hate was too depressing. I’ve realised that this depression theory was ridiculous. The sadness of Cohen was inspirational, it gave me a lot of energy. I always remember this when someone says that my records are morbid or depressing.”
Cave first worked with Willner on a 1999 tribute to filmmaker and American folk music anthologist Harry Smith. Since the early ’80s, Willner has made an unusual career for himself by honouring the work of the world’s most intriguing artists, paying homage to such diverse figures as jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, existentialist German composer Kurt Weill, even Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade.
Willner believes the grand theatre of American childhood in the 1960s was the inspiration for his career path. He grew up listening to the Beatles, watching the Rolling Stones and the Moscow Circus on the same TV variety show, hearing Ornette Coleman, Jack Benny and Orson Welles side by side on the radio. “It was an era when the Fireside Theatre and Bill Cosby were on the pop charts. You also had movies like Fellini’s Satyricon. That was the era I grew up in, it was my kind of vaudeville.”
This, however, is the first time Willner has paid tribute to an artist still very much alive. To him, the distinction is just an added bonus. “If he’s still alive, that’s great!” he says. “It’s important to me to have the approval of the artist, especially now when we’re seeing something that we’ve never really seen before in the history of music, which is artists making records 30 or 40 years into their career, doing music as good as it ever was. Some of those songs on Ten New Songs, or Tom Waits’ records, Bob Dylan’s records ... These people have been making records for 40 years. It has never happened before. Look at Sinatra — he had, what, five great years?”
Indeed, Cohen has been comparatively prolific in recent times, releasing two albums in the space of three years. Ten New Songs came in 2001, and was his first album since 1992. In November last year he released Dear Heather. Both continue in the style first adopted on 1988’s I’m Your Man. Their sound is so unfashionably slick, so full of dated synthesisers and soulless saxophone solos, as to be almost timeless. Cohen’s words drop deadpan over a bed of tasteful musical mush, more like a catalyst for the listener’s own emotional response than a direct portrayal of emotion itself. It’s a selfeffacing, almost humble style that accords with Cohen’s embrace of Buddhism.
It’s also an approach that strikes a chord with Rennie Sparks, of American country-noir duo the Handsome Family. “Unfortunately, pop music has become a lot about the personality of the singer, or the singer’s nice ass,” she says. “That’s not really what songwriting is about. A good song should be able to be sung by anybody, it shouldn’t only be the property of one person. That’s what I love about Leonard Cohen — his songs are like that. They’re very personal, but anybody can really sing them and feel them. It’s a magical thing.”
Strangely enough, not all of the performers assembled for Came So Far For Beauty are so fervent about Cohen’s music. Montreal-based Kate McGarrigle, who has been releasing folky, odd and always enchanting albums with sister Anna since 1976, grew up in the same city as Cohen, even attended the same university, but didn’t come to appreciate his music until she and Anna were invited to participate in the concert.
“Suzanne kind of showed up at a time when I wasn’t doing any music,” she says. “At that point I was probably much more into Motown. I never really listened a lot to singer-songwriters, other than Bob Dylan. So Suzanne kind of came and went in my life, and didn’t make any impression on me at all.
“When it really came to mean something was when Hal Willner asked us to do this. He gave us all these records to listen to, and we had to choose songs. We ended up choosing the very early ones, the very simple ones on nylon string guitar, because they reminded us of our youth in coffee houses in the early ’60s, of little simple songs with only three chords. So when we started singing songs like Winter Lady, we suddenly realised how good they were.”
McGarrigle’s children are much less off-hand, however. Rufus and Martha Wainwright, whose father is eccentric ’70s songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, are both huge fans. The flamboyant Rufus has described Cohen as the greatest living poet on Earth, while Martha has been performing Cohen’s Tower of Song in concert for many years.
Rennie Sparks, though, loves Cohen so much he has become more myth than man in her mind. She is one of the few cast members who has never met him, and would prefer to keep it that way.
“I don’t want to know about him as a human being,” she says. “Perla Batalla told me once about going to a dollar store with Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if I want to do that! I just want to imagine him alone in a cave with a little lamp, writing in blood.”
*Came So Far For Beauty is at the Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30.
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/ ... click=true
He's their man
January 2, 2005
Leonard Cohen, who for the past decade has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism.
Leonard Cohen inspires an uncommon kind of devotion among his fans, as the all-star line-up at a tribute concert in Sydney proves. Guy Blackman reports.
"I don’t think he plans on performing any more, and now he doesn’t have to because we’re doing it,” American music industry veteran Hal Willner says of Leonard Cohen. “He is really happy, he has been totally supportive in every way.”
Willner — who has worked with everyone from Sting to Sun Ra and whose credits as a movie soundtrack director include Gangs of New York and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts — is the man behind Came So Far For Beauty, an all-star concert tribute to the music of Leonard Cohen.The concert will be performed for three nights only at the Sydney Opera House later this month, as part of the Sydney Festival.
Already in his 30s when he had his first musical success, the Canadian-born Cohen is now 70. For the past decade he has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism. It seems unlikely he will ever return to live performance.
Cohen was a respected but relatively obscure poet and novelist in 1968 when his first (and still his most famous) song, Suzanne, introduced a literate, decadent and world-weary romantic vision to the world of pop music. His subsequent body of work, consisting of just 11 studio albums recorded over five decades, has become the subject of more serious analysis and feverish discussion than virtually anyone bar Bob Dylan.
“I just adore Leonard Cohen’s music,” says Willner. “I know it backwards and forwards. So the opportunity to do what I call an exploration or a dissection of his music is fantastic. Hey — I get to choose the set list!”
And the line-up. The hand-picked cast is impeccable, comprising Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, the Handsome Family and Cohen back-up singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen.
Each night these 13 performers will present 31 songs from Cohen’s total canon of 101, with the backing of a nine-piece band.
The show has already been staged in New York and Brighton, England, to uniformly rave reviews — no small feat for a night dedicated to a man whose music inspires such fierce devotion. Late last year Nick Cave told The Age’s Patrick Donovan how Came So Far For Beauty managed to come as far as Australia.
“Hal’s events are notoriously ramshackle, with lots of different people singing,” he said. “In Brighton, it somehow clicked together, and after that we got offers from all over to do more stuff. But we didn’t want to spend the next year doing tributes to Leonard Cohen — we all have other things to do. But the Sydney Opera House is too interesting to pass up.”
Cave is a Cohen fanatic and his version of Cohen’s Tower of Song was included on I’m Your Fan, a tribute album compiled by French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles in the early 1990s. At that time, Cave was asked how he first fell under Cohen’s spell. “I discovered Leonard Cohen with (his third album) Songs of Love And Hate,” he said. “I listened to this record for hours at a friend’s house. I was very young and I believe this was the first record that really had an effect on me. “In the past, I only listened to my brother’s records. Leonard Cohen was the first one I discovered by myself. He is the symbol of my musical independence.
“I remember these other guys that came to my friend’s house who thought Songs of Love And Hate was too depressing. I’ve realised that this depression theory was ridiculous. The sadness of Cohen was inspirational, it gave me a lot of energy. I always remember this when someone says that my records are morbid or depressing.”
Cave first worked with Willner on a 1999 tribute to filmmaker and American folk music anthologist Harry Smith. Since the early ’80s, Willner has made an unusual career for himself by honouring the work of the world’s most intriguing artists, paying homage to such diverse figures as jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, existentialist German composer Kurt Weill, even Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade.
Willner believes the grand theatre of American childhood in the 1960s was the inspiration for his career path. He grew up listening to the Beatles, watching the Rolling Stones and the Moscow Circus on the same TV variety show, hearing Ornette Coleman, Jack Benny and Orson Welles side by side on the radio. “It was an era when the Fireside Theatre and Bill Cosby were on the pop charts. You also had movies like Fellini’s Satyricon. That was the era I grew up in, it was my kind of vaudeville.”
This, however, is the first time Willner has paid tribute to an artist still very much alive. To him, the distinction is just an added bonus. “If he’s still alive, that’s great!” he says. “It’s important to me to have the approval of the artist, especially now when we’re seeing something that we’ve never really seen before in the history of music, which is artists making records 30 or 40 years into their career, doing music as good as it ever was. Some of those songs on Ten New Songs, or Tom Waits’ records, Bob Dylan’s records ... These people have been making records for 40 years. It has never happened before. Look at Sinatra — he had, what, five great years?”
Indeed, Cohen has been comparatively prolific in recent times, releasing two albums in the space of three years. Ten New Songs came in 2001, and was his first album since 1992. In November last year he released Dear Heather. Both continue in the style first adopted on 1988’s I’m Your Man. Their sound is so unfashionably slick, so full of dated synthesisers and soulless saxophone solos, as to be almost timeless. Cohen’s words drop deadpan over a bed of tasteful musical mush, more like a catalyst for the listener’s own emotional response than a direct portrayal of emotion itself. It’s a selfeffacing, almost humble style that accords with Cohen’s embrace of Buddhism.
It’s also an approach that strikes a chord with Rennie Sparks, of American country-noir duo the Handsome Family. “Unfortunately, pop music has become a lot about the personality of the singer, or the singer’s nice ass,” she says. “That’s not really what songwriting is about. A good song should be able to be sung by anybody, it shouldn’t only be the property of one person. That’s what I love about Leonard Cohen — his songs are like that. They’re very personal, but anybody can really sing them and feel them. It’s a magical thing.”
Strangely enough, not all of the performers assembled for Came So Far For Beauty are so fervent about Cohen’s music. Montreal-based Kate McGarrigle, who has been releasing folky, odd and always enchanting albums with sister Anna since 1976, grew up in the same city as Cohen, even attended the same university, but didn’t come to appreciate his music until she and Anna were invited to participate in the concert.
“Suzanne kind of showed up at a time when I wasn’t doing any music,” she says. “At that point I was probably much more into Motown. I never really listened a lot to singer-songwriters, other than Bob Dylan. So Suzanne kind of came and went in my life, and didn’t make any impression on me at all.
“When it really came to mean something was when Hal Willner asked us to do this. He gave us all these records to listen to, and we had to choose songs. We ended up choosing the very early ones, the very simple ones on nylon string guitar, because they reminded us of our youth in coffee houses in the early ’60s, of little simple songs with only three chords. So when we started singing songs like Winter Lady, we suddenly realised how good they were.”
McGarrigle’s children are much less off-hand, however. Rufus and Martha Wainwright, whose father is eccentric ’70s songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, are both huge fans. The flamboyant Rufus has described Cohen as the greatest living poet on Earth, while Martha has been performing Cohen’s Tower of Song in concert for many years.
Rennie Sparks, though, loves Cohen so much he has become more myth than man in her mind. She is one of the few cast members who has never met him, and would prefer to keep it that way.
“I don’t want to know about him as a human being,” she says. “Perla Batalla told me once about going to a dollar store with Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if I want to do that! I just want to imagine him alone in a cave with a little lamp, writing in blood.”
*Came So Far For Beauty is at the Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30.
Joe Wrote
Hi Andrew,
I am so glad that you will be able to see Came So Far For Beauty. I suspect that it will only have become better after New York and Brighton. Arthur and Bernadette Moore will be attending also. Please greet Martha, Perla and Julie, if you have the chance.
We'll be anxiously awaiting a report.
Joe
------------------------------------------------------------
Ha ha Joe,
A couple of days ago I e-mailed Andrew telling him not to worry about writing a report - to just enjoy the show. Mind you, if he can write a report without detracting from his own enjoyment that would be great.
--
Paul.
Hi Andrew,
I am so glad that you will be able to see Came So Far For Beauty. I suspect that it will only have become better after New York and Brighton. Arthur and Bernadette Moore will be attending also. Please greet Martha, Perla and Julie, if you have the chance.
We'll be anxiously awaiting a report.
Joe
------------------------------------------------------------
Ha ha Joe,
A couple of days ago I e-mailed Andrew telling him not to worry about writing a report - to just enjoy the show. Mind you, if he can write a report without detracting from his own enjoyment that would be great.
--
Paul.
Makes me a little sad to read that this event has been sold out since last week. As the distance from Bangkok to Sydney is - well, still frightening long, but less than half compared to my old residence town Vienna - manageable for me, I checked for tickets on the Internet some 3 month ago on a link provided by Jarkko here. At that time it said it was sold out. So I guess I should have tried just a little bit harder.
Does anybody know why the project has not been released on CD or DVD, as most of Hal Wilner's other fine projects in the past, though?
Does anybody know why the project has not been released on CD or DVD, as most of Hal Wilner's other fine projects in the past, though?
? Seriously, I have no idea -
Andrew (Darby)
- Posts: 1117
- Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2002 5:46 pm
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
Joe & Paul
Fortunately, I think there's a perfect compromise to be had: I enjoy writing such reports, so I won't be able to help myself in this circumstance!
The only qualification I would add is, that such a report will never approach the mammoth effort of your comprehensive and engrossing Brooklyn one, Joe!
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
Fortunately, I think there's a perfect compromise to be had: I enjoy writing such reports, so I won't be able to help myself in this circumstance!
The only qualification I would add is, that such a report will never approach the mammoth effort of your comprehensive and engrossing Brooklyn one, Joe!
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
'I cannot give the reasons
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
-
Andrew (Darby)
- Posts: 1117
- Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2002 5:46 pm
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
Myfair, I'm sorry to hear this! 
There has been some confusion in my mind about when the 3 concerts were totally sold out - all I know is that the agency selling them didn't advertise the event after a comparatively short time of it being on their web-site, so perhaps it did sell out fairly early (and by the time you first enquired)! 
I have a Cohen cohort here in Toowoomba who is in the same boat, but is going down there anyway, on the off chance of picking up one ticket - as Elizabeth suggests this would be a far more costly and chancy move for you
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
There has been some confusion in my mind about when the 3 concerts were totally sold out - all I know is that the agency selling them didn't advertise the event after a comparatively short time of it being on their web-site, so perhaps it did sell out fairly early (and by the time you first enquired)! I have a Cohen cohort here in Toowoomba who is in the same boat, but is going down there anyway, on the off chance of picking up one ticket - as Elizabeth suggests this would be a far more costly and chancy move for you
Cheers
Andrew (Darby)
'I cannot give the reasons
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
I only sing the tunes
The sadness of the seasons
The madness of the moons'
~ Mervyn Peake ~
-
Anne-Marie
- Posts: 139
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:03 am
-
Anne-Marie
- Posts: 139
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:03 am
THANKSlizzytysh wrote:That's a new take on it, Anne-Marie, but you're right. Welcome to the Forum
~ Lizzytysh
Last edited by Anne-Marie on Fri Feb 25, 2005 8:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Andrew, I would not mind the cost, but the idea of standing in front of the hall with no ticket would certainly break my heart.
Also, cannot get away from here on such a short notice .....
Still dreaming of a CD or better DVD from this event!
Makes me also think: Why has there been no Leonard Cohen DVD release with Live recordings?
I believe he is in a commercial status where such a release would probably not produce a hell of money, but definitely not cut on his other releases sales at all, as his fans are not likely the teens with very limited budget, who might sacrifice the purchase of his latest album in favor of a DVD.
Does not make sense to me from a commercial point of view to not release great Live recordings like Austin City Limit, or some older footage, including the "Bird on a wire" movie I remember having seen three or four times when it was in the cinemas late seventees .......
Myfair
Also, cannot get away from here on such a short notice .....
Still dreaming of a CD or better DVD from this event!
Makes me also think: Why has there been no Leonard Cohen DVD release with Live recordings?
I believe he is in a commercial status where such a release would probably not produce a hell of money, but definitely not cut on his other releases sales at all, as his fans are not likely the teens with very limited budget, who might sacrifice the purchase of his latest album in favor of a DVD.
Does not make sense to me from a commercial point of view to not release great Live recordings like Austin City Limit, or some older footage, including the "Bird on a wire" movie I remember having seen three or four times when it was in the cinemas late seventees .......
Myfair