Thursday, 26 June 2008

Canadian Idol Top 24: Tetiana Ostapowych









Tetiana Ostapowych, 25
Toronto, ON


Trying out for Canadian Idol is nothing new to some hopefuls who have stood in the audition room before.

Tetiana Ostapowych, 25, of Toronto gave the singing competition a shot in Season 1 six years ago, but  wasn�t lucky enough to get to the gold-ticket round.

�I auditioned for Idol the first season, so I was quite young, but still in college and I wasn�t as prepared and knowledgeable as I am now, so I completely blew it,� she says. Since then this Top 24 competitor has done some songwriting for other musicians while recently living in Los Angeles. Her musical influences range from John Mayer and Peter Gabriel to Betty Rice and Nina Simone.

�I was in L.A. this past year and I was doing a bunch of songwriting for other people. I haven�t really done so much for myself as an artist, so I�m starting to do that,� she says.

Ostapowych, who admits she used to line up her teddy bears and sing to them when she was a kid, says the journey to this point in the competition was challenging, but it helped having two friends by her side for support who have also made the Top 24 � Oliver and Sebastian Pigott. The three friends all know each other from their time at Etobicoke School of the Arts.

�I had a big crush on Oliver in high school, I used to sneak out of the house and go and watch his shows,� says Ostapowych. �They�re both so talented � and I�ve been gaining a lot of confidence myself just from hanging out with them.�











See Also

Monday, 16 June 2008

Michael Nyman

Michael Nyman   
Artist: Michael Nyman

   Genre(s): 
Instrumental
   Rock: Instrumental
   Soundtrack
   Other
   



Discography:


The Very Best Of: Film Music 1980-2001 (CD 2)   
 The Very Best Of: Film Music 1980-2001 (CD 2)

   Year: 2001   
Tracks: 20


The Very Best Of: Film Music 1980-2001 (CD 1)   
 The Very Best Of: Film Music 1980-2001 (CD 1)

   Year: 2001   
Tracks: 19


The Claim   
 The Claim

   Year: 2000   
Tracks: 15


Wonderland   
 Wonderland

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 11


And Do They Do - Zoo Caprices   
 And Do They Do - Zoo Caprices

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 13


Wonderland   
 Wonderland

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 11


The Suit and The Photograph   
 The Suit and The Photograph

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 13


The Claim   
 The Claim

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 15


Concertos   
 Concertos

   Year: 1997   
Tracks: 20


After Extra Time   
 After Extra Time

   Year: 1996   
Tracks: 26


The Kiss and Other Movements   
 The Kiss and Other Movements

   Year: 1995   
Tracks: 7


Noises, Sounds, and Sweet Airs   
 Noises, Sounds, and Sweet Airs

   Year: 1995   
Tracks: 20


Six Days Six Nights   
 Six Days Six Nights

   Year: 1994   
Tracks: 16


The Piano   
 The Piano

   Year: 1993   
Tracks: 19


The Piano   
 The Piano

   Year: 1993   
Tracks: 19


Time Will Pronounce   
 Time Will Pronounce

   Year: 1992   
Tracks: 4


The Essential Michael Nyman Band (Compilation)   
 The Essential Michael Nyman Band (Compilation)

   Year: 1992   
Tracks: 12


Prospero's Books   
 Prospero's Books

   Year: 1991   
Tracks: 14


Prospero's Book   
 Prospero's Book

   Year: 1991   
Tracks: 14


The Draughtsman's Contract   
 The Draughtsman's Contract

   Year: 1989   
Tracks: 7


The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover   
 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

   Year: 1989   
Tracks: 5


The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover   
 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover

   Year: 1989   
Tracks: 5


Cook, Thief, His Wife and Her Lo   
 Cook, Thief, His Wife and Her Lo

   Year: 1989   
Tracks: 5


A Zed and Two Noughts   
 A Zed and Two Noughts

   Year: 1989   
Tracks: 12


The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat   
 The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

   Year: 1988   
Tracks: 21


Drowning By Numbers   
 Drowning By Numbers

   Year: 1988   
Tracks: 13


Carrington   
 Carrington

   Year: 1987   
Tracks: 19


The Draughtman's Contract   
 The Draughtman's Contract

   Year: 1982   
Tracks: 7


The Fall Of Icarus CD 2   
 The Fall Of Icarus CD 2

   Year:    
Tracks: 5


The Commissar Vanishes CD 1   
 The Commissar Vanishes CD 1

   Year:    
Tracks: 5


Michael Nyman Live   
 Michael Nyman Live

   Year:    
Tracks: 16


Gattaca   
 Gattaca

   Year:    
Tracks: 24


Balanescu Quar   
 Balanescu Quar

   Year:    
Tracks: 22




Celebrated for his modular, repetitive style, minimalist composer Michael Nyman was among experimental music's most high profile proponents, charles Herbert Best known in connexion with his film rafts for director Peter Greenaway. Born in London on March 23, 1944, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College, London, under communist composer Alan Bush and Thurston Dart, a musicologist specializing in the English Baroque. Under Dart's care, Nyman was introduced to sixteenth and 17th-century English rounds and canons, their repetitive, contrapuntal lines highly influencing his possess later act upon; Dart also encouraged him to journey to Romania in the interest of seeking out the country's native common people music traditions. Upon graduating during the mid-'60s, Nyman establish himself disconnected from both the drink down music of the multiplication and the school of modern composing heralded by Stockhausen; as a result, from 1964 to 1976, he worked non as a composer only as a music critic, writing for publications including The Listener, New Statesman, and The Spectator. In a review of British composer Cornelius Cardew, he first base introduced the countersign "minimal art" as a means of musical description.


During this same period, Nyman did stay playing, appearing with artists ranging from the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia to Steve Reich and the Flying Lizards. In 1974, he wrote the influential quran Experimental Music -- Cage and Beyond, an exploration of the influence of John Cage on a generation of composers and performers. Perhaps its most profound wallop was on Nyman himself, world Health Organization through writing the al-Qur'an seemed to attain his have muse; in 1976 he recognised an invitation from Harrison Birtwistle, Director of Music at the National Theatre, to format a identification number of 18th-century Venetian popular songs for a production of Goldoni's Il Campiello. Nyman's arrangements consisted of medieval instruments -- rebecs, sackbuts and shawms, bass drums, soprano saxophones, and the like -- designed for maximum volume to create a distinctive instrumental color; when the output complete, he began composition original music only to keep the same grouping of musicians together. Originally an acoustic building block, when rechristened the Michael Nyman Band in the early '80s, gain became essential to their artistic.


Nyman's showtime major success came in 1982 with the score to the Greenaway film The Draughtsman's Contract; his subsequent collaborations with Greenaway on pictures including 1988's Drowning By Numbers, 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and 1991's Prospero's Books stay among his most high profile industrial plant, their notoriety advent at the peril of overshadowing his forays into opera, chamber music, vocal music, and dance heaps. The signatures of Nyman's ferment include non only when his habit of propellant repetition, only too a palette of idiosyncratic instrumental touches -- clunk keyboards, "rude" bass clarinets, and barytone saxophones, and extreme high school and low-down octave doublings. Mozart was a central influence in practically of his work out, including 1976's In Re Don Giovanni and 1983's I'll Stake My Cremona to a Jew's Trump; Schumann, meanwhile, was the major stirring behind the acclaimed 1986 chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, piece Bartok shades 1988's String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for the Indian terpsichorean and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh.


In 1990, Nyman composed Six Celan Songs, a work based on the poems of Paul Celan, for the German nightclub vocaliser Ute Lemper, with whom he first-class honours degree worked on the scotch for Prospero's Books. His most emotional compositions to date, they served as the clear impulsion for his score to Jane Campion's 1992 plastic film The Piano, easily Nyman's best-known work; like so many of his compositions, he obsessionally reworked the music to The Piano time and time over again, the haunting melodies reappearing arranged for standard piano concerto, for 2 pianos, for chamber ensemble, for soprano saxophone and strings (Lost and Found), and for soprano and string quartette (The Piano Sings). While 1992's The Upside-Down Violin reflected Nyman's continuing captivation with traditional ethnic musics, 1993's MGV, or Musique a Grande Vitesse, returned to the propulsive sounds of the Michael Nyman Band. Other major whole works include 1992's Time Will Pronounce, 1993's Yamamoto Perpetuo (a composition for unaccompanied fiddle scripted for Alexander Balanescu), 1994's solo cembalo work Tango for Tim, and 1995's String Quartet No. 4. Among Nyman's plastic film heaps: 1995's Carrington and 1997's Gattaca.






Friday, 6 June 2008

Walliams completes swim to Africa

Little Britain star David Walliams and Olympic rower James Cracknell today completed their swim to Africa in aid of the UK charity Sport Relief.
The pair crossed the 12-mile Strait of Gibraltar in four hours, 36 minutes.
They set off from Tarifa, southern Spain, and finally reached dry land at Punta de Cires in Morocco.
36-year-old Walliams was overcome with sickness during the swim but carried on, and the duo also encountered a pod of whales.
They were cheered on by Cracknell's wife, TV presenter Beverley Turner, and 'Dragons' Den' star Theo Paphitis, who arrived in a yacht to lend his support.
The journey was the final stage of Cracknell's Cross-Continent Challenge.
The 35-year-old had already rowed 22 miles across the Channel and cycled 1,395 miles through France and Spain to reach today's starting point.