Esteban Jiménez, a Rising Cello Star

His musical vision, full of elegance and sensitivity, always ready to excite, has recently led him to be the second Spanish musician since 1997 to be Laureate in the prestigious Witold Lutoslawski International Competition in Warsaw, where he also obtained the Special Jury Prize for the best interpretation of a work by said composer and Special Prize granted by the Polish Society of Authors and Composers.

Initially a student of Richard Eade's (Soloist at the Seville Royal Symphony Orchestra), and Iagoba Fanlo's (Real C.S.M. Aragón), he has expanded his training in different masterclasses with teachers such as Frans Helmerson, Sung-Won Yang, Johannes Moser or Norbert Anger.

As for his record, he has been awarded first prizes in the 17th International Violoncello Competition in Portugal, the first International Valencia Cello Competition, the Paderewski International Cello Competition or the Slava International Cello Competition, and has been a finalist in others, such as the Llanes 20th International Violoncello Competition or the 7th David Popper International Cello Competition.

His debut as a soloist took place at the age of 11 with the Seville Philharmonia Orchestra, in the León Auditorium, performing the Kódaly Sonata. He has performed on the most important stages in Madrid, such as the Juan March Foundation or the National Auditorium and recently with the Warsaw Philharmonic under the baton of Marek Mos.

He has been part of the prestigious Barenboim-Said Foundation and is currently completing his training at the Katarina Gurska Higher Music Center in Madrid with professors Karolina Styczen and Michal Dmochowski, where he enjoys an Honor Scholarship for his foundation.

Hallelujah, a Queer Dance

Historic Montreal Church Is Backdrop for Queer Love Story Dance Video

June 3, 2019/by Francis DeBernardo, Editor

The dancers soar across the church aisles and the altar, embrace as they spin and cover each other in blue and red chalk. They do this after opening video clips of homophobic protests and violence have flashed across the screen. All of this accompanied by a recording of Jeff Buckley’s popular song, Hallelujah. Near the end the two men share a brief kiss.  The final image is a large banner they create that reads ‘Choose Love,’ raised high over a backdrop of stained glass.

This dance performance video, entitled Hallelujah, was set and filmed in Quebec’s historic Church of St. Pierre Apôtre. It is a queer love story produced by Matthew Richardson –and the church leaders were happy to host it.

A still from the video.

“They welcomed me, my message, and our creation with open arms,” said Richardson, the show’s creator and  a former Cirque Du Soleil performer. Hallelujah is one of five dances he will direct as part of his Circus Queer Project. The video is deeply intimate in a deeply Catholic setting.

There is much to praise in this project: Richardson’s work and vision, the stunning grace of the dance in this particular space, the warm welcome of the Catholic community in Montreal, and the attention that it is getting in multiple publications. Further projects like Hallelujah are necessary in continuing to emphasize the beauty found in LGBTQ+ relationships in a long-denied religious setting. These initiatives, and their visibility, are essential to fulfilling the love that Catholicism promises to support and provide.

Introducing Orville Peck, a Queer Artist of his Time

 Orville Peck's 'Bronco' album cements his place in pop culture — and country music

By Amy Campbell, GQ Magazine Australia, 21 Apr 2022

For artists of colour, queer artists and anyone who isn’t your typical Jack Daniels-drinking, pickup truck-driving crooner from the Deep South, finding mainstream fame in country music has always been an uphill battle. And summiting that hill isn’t even the end. Because earning fans is one thing. Being accepted and embraced by the vastly white, vastly straight country music institution is another struggle altogether.

Orville Peck discovered this in 2019, with the release of his debut album Pony. Here was a country artist who was born in South Africa, but lives in Canada, singing about love affairs with cowboys, not cowgirls. His elaborate disguises and cinematic visuals saw new audiences flock to the genre, hungry for more of the masked singer’s storytelling and deep, affectionate tenor.

Even Harry Styles was a fan—in November 2021, he asked Peck to play his ‘Harryween’ concert at Madison Square Garden in New York. 

But the old guard was harder to convince. 

“There were times when people straight-up told me this wouldn’t exist in the country world… they didn’t know where to place it, they didn’t know what to call it,” the artist said in a 2020 interview with GQ. When we catch up today, he says he’s still battling some of the same prejudices. “It’s funny, because I feel like I'm writing about the same stuff that straight country artists are writing about. The only real difference is I’m writing about a different gender."

“I think in 2022, the people who consider that an anomaly… they are the anomaly,” he adds with a chuckle.

Now, on the eve of Pony’s third birthday, Peck returns with his sophomore album Bronco. Where Pony felt charming in its stripped-back candour, and follow-up EP Show Pony, which landed in 2020, popped with a more glittery sound (there’s a duet with Shania Twain), Bronco’s expansive soundscape and heavy-hearted lyrics radiate with authenticity, in a way that suggests Peck has come into his own.

“I wrote it with so much heart. It kind of wrote itself in a way, because of what I was going through,” offers the artist. “I was so busy with touring and so preoccupied with being a touring musician.

“Then Covid hit. Work stopped and it forced me to reckon with the fact that I was really, really unhappy as a person, I was running on empty, my personal life was hell, but I'd been distracting myself and escaping into my work.”

‘I sat around last year / wishing so many times I would die’, he sings on ‘The Curse of the Blackened Eye’.

Peck was also anxious about the inevitability of making a second album, and whether it would live up to the popularity of his first. It has. And his decision to double down on the nostalgic Western swing rather than rely on pop inflections—one critic likened Peck's vocals on Bronco to ‘a gothic Elvis Presley’—proves that Peck oughta be taken seriously.

“I think sometimes the best way to overcome barriers is to not even acknowledge them,” says the musician, when we ask whether he feels more accepted by the establishment. “I always approached my place in country music as if I already had a seat at the table. I sort of just sat down at the table, and people are finally starting to accept that I sit at it."

“Rather than wanting people to accept me, I realised that people would rather accept that I was already accepted, if that makes sense… there have been moments in my life career where I didn't believe in myself as much as I should've. And I'm glad that now, finally, I feel like I'm at a place where I don't question it for a second.”

At Coachella this week, as Peck belted out the melodies of Bronco in front of a crowd that chanted back every lyric, that sentiment rang delightfully, daringly true.

Here, there and everywhere: why the world is still crazy about the Beatles

Now and Then may be the band’s final song, but the appetite for books, exhibitions, films and TV series about the Fab Four seems never to wane. 

By NEIL SPENCER, The Observer, Sunday, October 29th, 2023

Perhaps the real surprise behind this week’s release of the “final” Beatles song, Now and Then, is not that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr wanted to resurrect the band one last time – uniting them with the “crystal clear” voice of John Lennon from a 1970s home tape, a feat enabled by technology Peter Jackson developed for his 2021 Get Back documentary – but that there remains a seemingly insatiable thirst for all things Fab Four.

It is now 60 years since Beatlemania engulfed first Britain and then, via America, the world. No one then imagined that in 2023 we would still be entranced by the group. The shelf life of pop acts was measured in months, or at best years – the Beatles themselves didn’t make it past their 1970 break-up. Yet this month sees a fresh surge of interest. Accompanying Now and Then are expanded versions of the Red and Blue compilations first issued in 1973, Philip Norman’s biography of George Harrison (to go alongside his tomes on Lennon and McCartney), and an Apple TV series, Murder Without A Trial, examining the 1980 killing of Lennon outside his New York home.

Until the end of last month, the National Portrait Gallery was running Eyes of The Storm, McCartney’s evocative exhibition after his “discovery” of a cache of photos from 1963-64. And you can still enjoy National Trust tours of John and Paul’s Liverpool homes, and hear Hey Jude ringing from English football terraces.

Some reasons for the ongoing obsession are straightforward. Since even the humblest contribution to Beatledom is guaranteed global attention, more products keep arriving. Then there is the nostalgia of baby boomers for their youth – not least in the US, where the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen were inspired to pick up guitars by the Beatles’ celebrated appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

Behind it all lies the enduring quality of the music – the exuberance of the early hits, the inventive plunge into psychedelia, the gentle beauty of the love songs – and where the Fabs pioneered, the rest followed. Their career still describes the perfect arc of pop success, from early gigs in Merseyside and immersion in the crucible of Hamburg lowlife to becoming local heroes, national sensations and international icons. Unlike their peers the Rolling Stones, they didn’t stick around to become a vainglorious tribute band to themselves.

The foursome’s panache – the “Beatle cuts”, the casual ostentation of their clothes, their gritty ambition – helped make them the personification of an era in which optimism, hope and social mobility were possible. They radiated an infectious joyousness which now seems remote and beyond reach, and even when they were naive – Maharishi, Apple – they were brave. As Harrison put it: “They [the public] gave their money, and gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems. They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then blamed it on us.”

Now and Then may be the Beatles’ “final song”, but it won’t be the final word in their story. McCartney, who has cannily curated the group’s legacy, may yet find another cache of photos, while one day, perhaps, we may get to read Lennon’s Dakota diaries, briefly glimpsed after his murder but swiftly recovered by Yoko Ono and kept secret ever since.

Frank Sinatra's songs + lyrics

OM SINATRA is a very enjoyable section of an Argentinian website for learners of English. Frank Sinatra's voice and his clear diction are perfect ingredients for practising English, so this section provides wide possibilities for ESL students and teachers. Here you will find 50 best lyrics, together with audios, some videos, glossaries and explanations. Choose your favourite song with on-screen original lyrics. Enjoy timeless classics such as My Way, New York, New York, or Strangers in the Night!

"Somebody To Love" / George Michael + Queen at Wembley Stadium 1992

Oh, those analogical times when singer and audiences would interact clapping hands together! No mobiles glued to their hands like synthetic prosthesis. What an emotional, unforgettable moment George Michael left for posterity with this electrifying rendition of "Somebody To Love". How well I remember showing my B2 students this video over the years! A musical jewel from the 90s, for sure.

The Beatles Are Back

In early 1969, John, Paul, George and Ringo worked on a project in London that would result in an amazing performance on a West End rooftop, and some of their most-loved songs. The story is captured in The Beatles: Get Back, a 2021 documentary series directed and produced by Peter Jackson. It covers the making of the Beatles' 1970 album Let It Be, which had the working title of Get Back, and draws from material originally captured for Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 documentary of the album. Originally conceived as a feature film, The Beatles: Get Back consists of three episodes with runtimes between two and three hours each, resulting in a total runtime of nearly eight hours of material.

Jackson characterised The Beatles: Get Back as "a documentary about a documentary". Commentators have described it as challenging longtime beliefs that the making of Let It Be was marked entirely by tensions between the Beatles, showing a more upbeat side of the production. It is premiering on Disney+ consecutively on 25, 26 and 27 November 2021.

IL MONDO, by Jimmy Fontana

Mamma mia, this song is out of this world!

George Michael Made It Big

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR of 2016 reaped all kinds of misfortunes, not the least of which was a steady string of celebrity deaths. Many of the high-profile musician deaths among them ranged from the sad but unsurprising (David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frey) to the completely unexpected, namely the loss of two titans in the music world: Prince, age 57, and George Michael, who was four years Prince’s junior.

Adding to the strangeness of it all was that Michael—the Grammy-Award-winning singer-songwriter who sold more than 100 million albums over a thirty-year career and co-founded the British pop duo Wham!—died on Christmas Day, only bolstering the popularity of the only New Wave holiday song to remain on the airwaves: “Last Christmas,” from 1984. The fact that Michael and band-mate Andrew Ridgeley donated all of the single’s proceeds to the famine in Ethiopia at the time is an early indication of Michael’s philanthropic commitments. News reports after his death revealed that Michael, whose net worth (as of 2002) was an estimated £210 million, routinely volunteered at a soup kitchen in England and asked that people not make a fuss over his presence there. Michael’s boyfriend, Fadi Fawaz, discovered him dead in his home in the Oxfordshire village of Goring-on-Thames. “I will never stop missing you,” Fawaz later tweeted.

Born to a Greek Cypriot immigrant father in north London in the early 1960s, George Michael entered the world as the younger brother of sisters Yioda and Melanie and, years later, in desperate need of an Anglicized stage name. His birth certificate reads “Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, DOB: June 25, 1963.” Stating his full name in an interview, he added, “To the outside world I am, and always will be, known as something else. But it’s not my name.” In keeping with this defiance, Georgios/George would go on to push the limits of normative sexuality and become a trailblazer for out gay male artists. Biographer Rob Jovanovic comments that his birth came at an anguished time, since his maternal uncle, who was probably gay, had committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven. Michael wouldn’t learn of this loss until he was a teenager. He speculates that his mother anguished over his sexual orientation because of her brother’s fate. “It’s a tragic story,” he later said of his uncle, and proof of “how much more difficult it must have been as a gay man in the 1950s.”

Around 1970, meanwhile, the Panayiotou family (renamed Panos) moved to Burnt Oak, Edgware, close to the restaurant his father owned and operated, where Georgios began violin lessons and later took to the drums. A pivotal moment came in the fall of 1975 when, beginning school at Bushey Meads School in Hertfordshire, he was seated next to an eleven-year-old Andrew Ridgeley (also in green blazer and tie) and began a lifelong friendship and collaboration that would be later be known as Wham!

By 1981, when Ridgeley had relocated to South London and was living the starving artist’s life, Michael (who still went by the surname Panos) had already come up with the melody for the hit “Careless Whisper,” which his older sister (always on hand to cut him down to size), had dubbed “Tuneless Whisper.” To become famous, he and Ridgeley would have to generate new songs and revise their whispery ballad, and the pair was determined to do just that. In the summer of 1982, Wham! got off to a wobbly start with the semi-rap single, “Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?),” which was reminiscent of Blondie’s “Rapture” and that spoken bit about “Fab Five Freddy” and “eating cars.” But Wham! recovered quickly with “Young Guns (Go for It!)” and an appearance on BBC1’s Top of the Pops show, which sent the single soaring. Soon thereafter, Michael began breaking away from Ridgeley with his first solo song, “Bad Boys.” And while their debut album Fantastic remained in the Top 100 for two years, Michael decided that “Careless Whisper” would be a solo single, so he flew to Miami on a big budget allocated by Epic Records to make the music video. Unhappy with the look of his hair, which his sister had styled for him, in the first cut, he insisted that the video be entirely reshot.

Wham!’s second album, Make it Big (1984)—hailed by Rolling Stone as an “almost flawless pop record”—elevated the duo to the ranks of Duran Duran and The Human League. Emblematic of the uplifting and synthesized sound of the 1980s were songs like “Everything She Wants” and “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.” The latter had been inspired by a note Ridgeley had written to his parents that read “Wake me up up,” to which Michael teasingly added “before you go go.” Calling themselves Wham!, they were one of the few bands (among them Danny Elfman’s Oingo Boingo) with an onomatopoetic name, and it even boasted the exclamation point that the pair loved to slap on their song titles. Their most popular songs, especially the back-to-back number one hits (the first to reach such heights since the Beatles), lived up the hype of Wham!’s name. Michael and Ridgeley became the first Western act to play in Communist China.

A musician’s solo career is ideally one in which they retain the fans of their erstwhile band, building on but reinventing the earlier sound and expanding the fan base to reach the rhyming sweet spot of show business: fame and acclaim. Michael accomplished all of this, dissolving Wham! amicably in 1986 with the ambition, later described in his own words, to “set myself the challenge of getting up there on the American level with Madonna and Jackson, that circle of people—that was my goal.” He reached that goal with his debut album Faith, which included a title song that pushed into new acoustic territory. (The queer afterlife of the song “Faith” can be found in the 2002 film The Rules of Attraction, in which two boyfriends jump on a hotel bed in the buff while lip-synching the tune.) Aside from Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey,” Michael’s “Monkey” is the greatest simian song of the era that, with a cheeky sense of humor, asks “Why can’t you do it?/ Why can’t you set your monkey free?” He could be addressing either the Wicked Witch of the West or a lover who can’t free himself of his personal demons.

The album Faith would announce many of the themes that unify Michael’s solo career: faith, love, patience, and, as is par for the course of pop superstardom, sex. It was the last of these that generated his most notorious single (released only months after his duet with Aretha Franklin), “I Want Your Sex.” For all the press it received, it was not the strongest entry into the pop charts due to a sleazy beat and awkward lines that sound like a parent giving his kid “the talk”: “Sex is natural/ Sex is fun/ Sex is best when it’s one on one.” Despite the fact that it celebrated monogamy, the song (aided by a steamy video with Michael’s then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung) didn’t fail to generate controversy: deejay Casey Kasem refused to utter the song’s title on his national broadcast, saying instead “George Michael’s latest hit is up five notches this week,” and many radio outlets censored the song by replacing the “s” word with the four-letter word “love.”

Having peaked in the late 1980s, Michael followed the likes of Jackson, Boy George—and, we now know, Prince—by dissolving into substance abuse and fodder for the tabloids. The year 1998 proved that Michael was pursuing new kinds of public exposure. He was arrested in Will Rogers Park in Los Angeles for cruising a bathroom and exposing himself to an undercover policeman on so-called “potty patrol.” Michael, who was essentially entrapped by the Beverly Hills PD, would later tell MTV, “It was a stupid thing to do, but I’ve never been able to turn down a free meal.” He then transformed the embarrassment into an up-tempo song called “Outside” that satirized the incident. In it, he celebrated sex al fresco and gave new meaning to his cover of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which had sailed to the number one spot on the UK and American charts seven years before. More importantly, the incident forced the artist to confront what he had known since he was 26 but had kept secret. Back in England, he referenced his mother’s death as a factor in his depressed state of mind and told talk-show host Michael Parkinson: “The day I knew I was gay was when I knew I was in love with a man. … [T]he press knew I was gay, but until they could get something nasty, they were playing the game.”

When the game ended, George Michael’s career grew even more interesting in its emotional intensity. A song like “Amazing” is proof that he never abandoned his faith in love’s power to redeem—“I never thought my savior would come”—but it’s found on his fifth and final solo album, 2004’s Patience, when his best days were already behind him. A vocalist with astounding flexibility, Michael could hold his ground when sharing the microphone with the likes of Elton John, who revered Michael’s songwriting skills, and Aretha Franklin (on 1987’s “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)”), which provided the Queen of Soul with her first number one song in the UK. Michael acted as a bridge between the thoroughly closeted acts like Liberace and Freddy Mercury, whose flamboyance he appropriated and honored (he stole the show at an AIDS fundraiser and tribute to Mercury after the Queen frontman’s death in 1991) and fully out acts like Adam Lambert and Rufus Wainwright (whose indictment of American exceptionalism, “Going to a Town,” George Michael covered on 2014’s Symphonica). Rivaled only by Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” “Freedom! 90” has become a coming-out anthem in the GLBT community.

What will be Michael’s legacy? Thematically, the song “Faith” is a great complement to the Madonna classic, “Like a Prayer” (minus the burning crosses); it, too, blended spirituality and sexuality in irreverent ways that outraged and obsessed mainstream America. Michael’s “Faith” (released two years before Madonna’s hit song) opens with a church organ, then the randy lyric: “Well I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body/ I know not everybody has a body like you.” In addition to the gospel choirs on the song “As,” there’s a bossa nova tune called “Jesus to a Child,” reportedly written for Michael’s lover Anselmo Feleppa who died of AIDS in 1993. After Michael’s death, the founder of ChildLine disclosed that Michael had contributed all of the song’s royalties to her charity.

To millions of fans, George Michael will remain the “father figure” of which he sang with a blend of lust and longing, and for that, we can collectively say: Wham, bam, thank you, Georgios Panayiotou—or, as you will be forever loved and remembered—George Michael.

By Colin Carman, The Gay and Lesbian Review, March 2017

Be My Baby_The Ronettes

Once I heard a music critic on Radio 3 saying that, if an extraterrestrial were to ask him what pop music was, he would simply play them Be My Baby, the Ronettes all-time classic (produced by Phil Spector). That would do. 
Watch, listen to and enjoy this unforgettable 1965 live TV recording. Oh, the way they move, their smiles, their big hair, the lyrics they sing, the choreography! Awesome!

The night we met, I knew I needed you so

And if I had the chance, I'd never let you go.

So won't you say you love me,

I'll make you so proud of me.

We'll make 'em turn their heads every place we go.

So won't you, please, (be my, be my baby)

Be my little baby, (my one and only baby)

Say you'll be my darlin', (be my, be my baby)

Be my baby now, (my one and only baby)

Wha-oh-oh-oh.

I'll make you happy, baby, just wait and see.

For every kiss you give me I'll give you three.

Oh, since the day I saw you

I have been waiting for you.

You know I will adore you 'til eternity.

So won't you, please, (be my, be my baby)

Be my little baby, (my one and only baby)

Say you'll be my darlin', (be my, be my baby)

Be my baby now, (my one and only baby)

Wha-oh-oh-oh.

So come on and, please (be my, be my baby)

Be my little baby, (my one and only baby)

Say you'll be my darlin', (be my, be my baby)

Be my baby now, (my one and only baby)

Wha-oh-oh-oh.

(Be my, be my baby), Be my little baby.

(My one and only baby), oh,

(Be my, be my baby), oh,

(My one and only baby), wha-oh-oh-oh-oh.

[Repeat & fade]

Grace Jones: Slave to the Rhythm

It’s both curious and revealing that the false rumour still persists that Grace Jones is actually a transsexual man. A quick online search is enough to discover that Jones is a mother and was born a woman, although others would say she was born a goddess. A capricious nature gave her a personality and a body that broke all the moulds and assumptions of her time. Turning sexual and racial conventions on their head, she became one of the most important icons of the 1980s. Model, actress, singer, a holy trinity of fame. Jones was successful in all three roles, but always in her own very individual way. She was foremost a model, heading to Paris in search of a market where her features would be found even more exotic. There, she shared an apartment with Jessica Lange, and soon fell in with illustrator Antonio López, who helped her to obtain her first covers for Vogue and Elle. Having made a name for herself, she returned to New York, the city she had first made her home, after abandoning her strictly religious Jamaican family and her studies. In Manhattan she rapidly became the epicentre of a new scene - disco music - which turned her into its latest diva. Helped by Andy Warhol, and with Tom Moulton and Richard Bernstein responsible for the music and artwork on her first singles, it didn’t take Jones long for her to become one of the most desired women on the New York gay scene. She was Madonna before Madonna. Her visits and performances in Studio 54 and other nightclubs were notorious, and her intention was anything but to go unnoticed. She would turn up semi-naked, on skates, riding a motorbike and surrounded by men in bathing costumes. Anything that took her fancy. Although the golden age of disco music had an expiry date, she foresaw its climax and recycled herself to become a pop artist, and one with an incredibly captivating aesthetic image. ‘Warm Leatherette’ (1980) and ‘Nightclubbing’ (1981) (the man responsible for her iconic album covers was the artist Jean-Paul Goude, the father of her son Paulo) were clear evidence that she was more than a simple Nubian mannequin, transforming her into one of the essential figures of a post-disco transition. She was never short on personality, either as a model, singer, or in her new guise as actress. Arnold Schwarzenegger even complained about her being too tough in the scenes they shared in the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer. And although it was more than toughness that earned her a Saturn Award and a Grammy nomination, there are a number of anecdotes about her indomitable character: on one occasion she slapped a presenter live on British television for turning his back on her, and on another she was removed from a performance in Disneyland for showing a breast. You can’t help wondering what Disney was expecting from a woman that fought tooth and nail to outshine the domineering personalities of the 1980s, driven by her insatiable hunger for fame and her overpowering personality; an ebony goddess who seemed capable of crushing any man with her vanity, a living sculpture, made of body and of art.

Cappuccino Grand Papier, volume 7