International String Orchestra Festival 5th April 2010

This year marks the fourth International Spring Orchestra Festival and will be taking place between 5 and 9 April 2010, at the Manoel Theatre.

The festival will kick off on Monday 5th April at 7:30pm by the Rotterdam Sinfonietta with conductor Roberto Beltran. On Tuesday 6th April, at 7:30pm at the Sala Isouard violinist Emanuel Salvador and pianist Giselle Grima will take you on a journey “from Schumann to the 21st Century” with works by Schumann, Liszt, Ysaÿe and local composer Ruben Zahra. On Wednesday 7th, the soloists of the Rotterdam Sinfonietta will be giving a concert at 12:30pm at the Sala Isouard, Teatru Manoel for whoever will be in Valletta and wants to pass by to listen to fascinating chamber repertoire. On Thursday 8th April the Rotterdam Sinfonietta will give a concert at the reception of Mater Dei hospital for the patients and their relatives as well as to commemorate the first anniversary of the Malta Heart Foundation. The festival will close with another orchestral concert on Friday 9th April at 7.30pm by the Rotterdam Sinfonietta who will feature the young local piano prodigy Charlene Farrugia as guest soloist, and will be performing Ravel’s colourful Tzigane, and Bartok’s astonishing Miraculous Mandarin Suite amongst others.

However, this is not all. This year the festival will include six short concerts “Discovering the orchestra” aimed at young audiences aged between 8 and 16 years. These orchestral concerts each of approximately an hour long, will take place at the Manoel Theatre. The first two concerts begin on the 5th April at 16:00 and 17:30, and next four on Friday 9th April at 9:30, 11:00, 16:00 and 17:30 respectively. Children within this age bracket or younger are admitted for free, if accompanied, each guardian/parent makes a donation of €1.

This year’s event is made possible through the Vodafone Malta Foundation and The Malta Arts Fund.

Tickets are sold at €25, €15, €10 and may be booked from the Manoel theatre box office 2124 6389 or online www.teatrumanoel.com.mt. The lunchtime chamber concert is open to the public free of charge.

Mon. 5th April 19:30 Opening Concert - The Rotterdam Ensemble - Teatru Manoel, works by Kodaly, Ravel, Saint-Saens

Schedule:

Tue. 6th April 19:30 Violin and Piano Recital "from Schumann to the 21st Century" by Emanuel Salvador (violin) and Giselle Grima (piano), Sala Isouard, works by Schumann, Liszt, Paganini, Ysaye, and Zahra.

Wed. 7th April 19:30 The Rotterdam Ensemble - concert at Mater Dei Hospital - free entry

Thur. 8th April Lunchtime Chamber concert 12:30 sala isoard - free entry

Frid. 9th April Closing concert - The Rotterdam Ensemble - Teatru Manoel, guest soloist Charlene Farrugia, works by Bartok, Debussy, Poulenc and Saint-Saens

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mymaltainfo.com

Klein Karoo National Arts Festival 1st - 8th 2010 anually

he festival presents over 2000 shows, working with over 750 artists (mainly South African, as well as influences from Belgium and Holland) in 40 different venues. There are a range of fringe theater productions in English, although the majority of the larger productions are in Afrikaans.

In addition to the major productions and shows, there are always sideshows aplenty, as well as an arts and crafts market and a food and wine festival, while traditional dancing, poetry readings, children theater and gallery exhibitions complete the program. As a special tribute to the town's ostrich farming, punters are also able to watch them, race them, ride them, or buy their feathers and eggs to take home as souvenirs.

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whatsonwhen

National Tartan Day 10 Apr 2010 (annual)

In honor of National Tartan Day, 10,000 pipers and drummers of all ages and abilities assemble on New York's 6th Avenue to form the largest pipe band in the world. Ear plugs might be in order.

National Tartan Day sees numerous groups and societies throughout Canada and America celebrate their Scottish roots, based on the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath (1320). The Scottish Declaration of Independence has special resonance for Americans, as this groundbreaking document was the inspiration behind America's own Declaration.

Pipers from over 26 countries join together on New York's 6th Avenue on National Tartan Day to play renditions of such Highland classics as Green Hills of Tyro l, Battle's O'er Lochanside, Farewell to the Creeks, Cock of the North and Scotland the Brave.

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whatsonwhen

Hana Matsuri ( Buddha's Birthday) on 8th April 2010 anually

Temples throughout Japan are packed during Hana Matsuri, as people gather to celebrate the birth of Buddha. It's a time to admire the flowers in the flower hall and pour sweet tea on the Buddha's head.

Processions can be seen in many places, with children dressed in their best kimonos, chanting their way to the temple alongside decorative floats. Inside every temple a Hanamido or flower hall is prepared, where a statue of the baby Buddha sits adorned with flowers. Worshipers pour amacha or hydrangea leaf tea on its head as an offering.

According to legend, Buddha was born in the garden of Lumbini in Nepal. It is said that when he was born the birds sang, the flowers bloomed and sweet rain fell from the heavens to welcome him - which explains all the flowers and sweet tea in today's ceremonies.

Hana Matsuri happens in Buddhist temples throughout Japan, but Tokyo is especially festive at this time. Head for the Sensoji Temple in the ancient Asakusa district of the city, where there is a children's parade in the morning

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Whatsonwhen

Blessing of the Bicycles 10 Apr 2010 (annual)

New York has a flourishing bicycling community. Hundreds of cyclists aim to ensure safe pedaling by attending the somewhat eccentric Blessing of the Bicycles ceremony, held at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan each spring.

Each year a blessing is offered to kick off a safe cycling season, with holy water sprinkled over each bike in the process. This is followed by a moment of silence to remember those who have died in cycling accidents during the past year. Bike messengers, racers, commuters, recreational bikers and, of course, children, are all invited to this colorful service.

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Whatsonwhen

The event has been running since 1999 and adds to the cathedral's colourful collection of annual events and services, which include summer and winter solstice concerts as well as Halloween, Christmas, New Year and Easter happenings.

Printemps de Bourges, Bourges, France

13 Apr 2010 - 18 Apr 2010

The annual 'Spring in Bourges' music festival is one of the biggest events of its kind in the region and attracts legions of music fans, young and old. In addition to some of the best local, national and international bands, there are also plenty of other distractions, including theater, poetry, art and comedy as well as a bustling craft and food market. U2, Stevie Wonder and Barry White have all performed here in the past and each year the line-up includes some of the biggest names from the music world.

Walt Disney Remembered: The Life of a Difficult Genius

Art imitates life, and life imitates art, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. Take the little town of Marceline, Missouri, a place so idyllic, so orderly, so utterly fine that it seemed impossible to improve on. Marceline declined once the automobile came and the crowds started to roll in, but it is forever enshrined in the memories of several generations of Americans, and of people from every corner of the world.Walt Disney in 1945

The person who put Marceline there, who remembered it as the best of all possible places, was Walt Disney—Walter Elias Disney, in full—who lived in the little town for only a few years as a child at the turn of the last century. It did not matter that his father failed in business there, so that the family had to leave it for the city in order to make a living. Disney took paradise and, characteristically, improved on it, turning his vision into Main Street, U.S.A., a perfect place in the perfect world of Disneyland.

Walt Disney has been gone for 42 years, having died on December 15, 1966. In the years since, historians and pop-culture students alike have debated Disney endlessly, some convinced that he was as dark a character as his witches and sorcerers.

Enter Neal Gabler, author of the indispensable An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, and other books of film and cultural history, who was granted unrestricted access to the vast Disney archive on the sole condition that he write a “serious” book. That he certainly did; his book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination is serious, and definitive.

Disney took a long road from Marceline to cultural icon, which Gabler carefully traces through the pages of his very long but unfailingly readable book. Driven by a strange and unhappy family—always a motivation to succeed at something and then get far away—Disney founded an advertising cartooning firm, then a partnership with an oddly named fellow named Ub Iwerks (or, formally, Ubbe Iwwerks) to make animations. The new studio was soon recognized as one of the best in the business, but thanks to Disney’s free-spending ways, it was always on the edge of bankruptcy. It remained so when the studio moved to Hollywood.

Following one painful negotiation that almost cost him his company, Disney cobbled together ideas from many sources and came up with Mickey Mouse, whose immediate appeal was that he was both recognizable and easy to draw. “Mickey Mouse was the product of desperation and calculation,” Gabler writes, “the desperation born of Walt Disney’s need to re-create an animation sanctuary and the calculation of what the market would accept.”

The market accepted Mickey, and Disney’s studio was on its way, making a succession of brilliant animations that thrilled Depression- and World War II–era audiences: The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Pinocchio. The money rolled in, but, as Gabler notes, Disney “was not much of a businessman, and he cared nothing for money except as a means to an end.” He did keep tight, micro-managerial control over the studio otherwise, though, and the friendly, avuncular figure he portrayed for all those years on the long-running television series The Wonderful World of Disney was not at all the man his employees saw.

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Britannica Blog

This Song

I think this song is about falling in love or at least how it should feel. Like nothing makes sense and everything you thought you knew has a whole new perspective. You're sitting in a daze so all you can do it try to find the beat. :)

alright, it to me this song makes me think about how it used to be so easy for me to say to my self that i was in love with this guy, and now I can't remember the feeling of being in love, and I can't remember why I was in love with him, and why I cried for him

Pretty much comes down the fact that each person gets something a little different out of each song they listen to.

No one is wrong or right.

I think that's how songs should be.

I really relate to this song because it reminds me of letting go of someone who you cared so much about and then realizing that you don't even miss them that much.
And then, after you've healed, and you hear your old favorite song, you can't believe that you ever liked it so much, and you're so surprised to discover that you don't even remember the lyrics


I think this song is about getting older, like someone you love with Alzheimer's who is not the way they used to be and how they can't remember the simple things they loved It is telling you to embrace what you love while you have it.

and now,

I take it as losing direction in your life. You had a plan, a purpose, and a moral compass to follow, and life was good, when suddenly you forget. You can't believe your own thoughts anymore, and reality seems foreign...you try to drown it out. You find yourself doing things you never thought you would, good and bad.