6 posts tagged “spanish”

Update: I can no longer recommend this show. News is thin and stale, presentation is more irritating than funny. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!

Update: Olivia has left Mobuzz. Gabe Mac will present in her stead.

Mobuzz.tv Site
Mobuzz.tv YouTube Channel

Las cosas se van mejorando... mira a la izquierda... Dvorak Uncensored

Todavia hay que ver cual es mejor: Google o AltaVista/BabelFish?

Ai, tu, siempre primero, eh? Bien pero tus imagenes estan rotas... las mias no!

Dvorak.org/blog Translation Test

Aquí lo tienes
Aquí el "podcast"

Lecciones de Español, y ahora noticias de Latino America también.

Update: I'm having trouble with their podcast feed; they may have stopped in favor of video podcasts or local Spanish lessons (in Colorado.) I thought they had started up something more regular...

Though celebrated as a composer for the piano, Isaac Albéniz by no means confined himself to piano music.  Indeed he devoted more than a decade of his almost forty-nine years to writing music for the stage (which recently received attention with the revival of his operatic works Pepita Jiménez and Merlin). Intermittently throughout his career he wrote songs – more than two dozen of them – as well as several orchestral and chamber works.

Born in Camprodón, Gerona on May 29 1860, Albéniz began life as a prodigy and after many adventurous concert tours that took him as far away from home as the Americas (trips that constantly interrupted his classes at the Madrid Conservatory), he settled down to a serious course of studies in Belgium.  With a pension from King Alfonso XII of Spain, he entered the Brussels Conservatory in 1876, graduating in 1879 with first prize in piano, which was awarded unanimously.  He returned to Spain to establish himself as an accomplished virtuoso; in addition he began to compose and conduct.  He soon became director of a traveling zarzuela company and wrote three zarzuelas (none of which survives today).  In 1883 he settled in Barcelona, studying composition with Felipe Pedrell.  Increasingly Albéniz incorporated his own compositions on his recitals.   In 1885 he moved to Madrid where his works would be published by the leading music publishers of the day: Benito Zozaya and Antonio Romero.

Albéniz's reputation as a pianist and a composer continued to grow.  In the spring of 1889 he traveled to Paris, appearing with the Colonne Orchestra in a concert that included his Piano Concerto, op. 78.  From Paris he proceeded to England, where his performances brought him instant success and return engagements.  In 1890 he came in contact with the entrepreneur Henry Lowenfeld who contracted Albéniz's services both as a performer and composer.  As a result, Albéniz moved with his family (his wife, Rosina, and three children) to London and through Lowenfeld eventually became involved with musical theater.  For approximately a decade Albéniz devoted much of his talent and energies to the creation and production of music for the stage.  During this time he had moved from London to Paris.

In the French capital he came in contact with Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Charles Bordes, and later Paul Dukas and Gabriel Fauré, forming close ties with the French musical community.  From 1898 to 1900 he taught advanced piano at the Schola Cantorum, but in 1900, because of poor health, he returned to the warmer climate of Spain.  He became involved with Enrique Morera and the promotion of Catalan lyrical works.  When, however, his efforts failed to have his own stage works produced, he returned to Paris where his music was accepted, praised, and performed.  Albéniz's Paris residence became a haven for Spanish artists (among them Joaquín Turina and Manuel de Falla); here they found support and encouragement for their own endeavors.

Albéniz's preoccupation with larger musical forms brought about a change in his compositional style from the basically light, attractive pieces of his early career to a more complex art.  Although he did not stop performing, his appearances diminished as he became absorbed with the composition and production of his operatic works. 

As Coutts began to tire of writing librettos, Albéniz gradually returned to the piano and his native landscape for inspiration.  La Vega (1896-98) foreshadows his later style, which blossomed with his masterpiece, Iberia (1905-1908).  The compositional texture and language that define Iberia are characteristic of Quatre mélodies (to poems by Coutts), Albéniz's last vocal work and last completed pieces.  Suffering from nephritis, Albéniz died in Cambo-les-Bains in the French Pyrenees on May 18, 1909.

Faccio mio blog. Estoy blogeando. J'écris mon blog. Mumblety blog.

My blog's tag line is now trilingual quadrilingual, my profile is now bilingual.

I'm going to make an effort to blog in other languages, partly for myself, and partly for my small but worldly audience.

Not that everything needs to be in two languages, but where no other word will do, the word and possibly a translation will be used.

George W. Bush: "The French have no word for entrepreneur"
Le petit Roi George: "Je suis un idiot" ou "Je suis une salope"

And besides, sometimes comedy can be translated perfectly when you leave certain words untranslated. And, as an exemplum gratuitum, id est, quid pro quo, I may decide to spell out Latin abbrevs.

Merci bien, M. Jeemee, qui sait que veut dire "Salope." Bien sûr, j'ai appris pas ce mot à l'Alliance Française...