Welcome

This blog was created as part of the Erasmus Mundus Crossways in Cultural Narratives Masters programme, which is the only one of the EU approved and funded Erasmus Mundus Masters programmes to specialise in traditional humanities with a modern languages background. The Crossways Consortium comprises 6 top-class European universities.

For further information, please check the programme's official website and the universities' websites on the Useful Links section on the left. If you wish to have a specific question answered, please click on Email here and submit your query.

Mundus students, here you will find regular posts regarding the universities of the consortium, tips, activities, events, pictures, etc. Apart from checking it regularly to keep yourself up to date, a good way to use the blog is through the search device. We already have a significant amount of information on some universities of the consortium, so if you want to find information on a specific city, type its name in the search field (top left). You will then see all posts related to that specific city (because each post title contains the city's name in it). You can also type "General" in order to find information concerning everybody.

Saturday, 18 April 2009

Lisbon: Bach in Belém

Extraordinary 3-day event: Concerts in Belém

In this third edition of the Music Days in Belém, we will follow in the footsteps of this Baroque master, disclosed by the influence his music had in other composers. This major composer - Johann Sebastian Bach - not only took up and transformed music made in the past, just as he influenced indelibly all future generations of composers until the present day. [...]

During three days, the Centro Cultural de Belém will turn into the country’s musical heart. More than 400 musicians will take the stage at the seven music halls, all running simultaneously. Foreign orchestras such as The King’s Consort, the English Chamber and the Ukrainian Symphonic will meet Portuguese orchestras such as the Metropolitana, the Algarve Orchestra, the Divino Sospiro, the Portuguese Chamber Orchestra and theOrchestrutopica. Besides great names from the international scene such as Huseÿin Sermet, Matthew Halls, Pieter Wispelwey, Sa Chen, Fazil Say, Patrizia Kopatchinskaja and Simone Dinnerstein, the CCB will host quite a great deal of top-class Portuguese musicians, such asJorge Moyano, Miguel Henriques, Luísa Tender, Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro, Bruno Borralhinho, Pedro Carneiro, Otto Pereira or João Aboim.

Regarding improvised music, the cast is outstanding. Musicians such as
Uri Caine and Jacques Loussier (the CCB will celebrate the album’s 50th anniversary - Play Bach), will share the stage with the famous Mário Laginha, Bernardo Sassetti, João Paulo Esteves da Silva, and the double bass players Carlos Bica and Carlos Barretto, who will premiere their project Bach Bica Barretto.

As if it was not enough, the CCB made two commissions:
António Pinho Vargas was given the challenge of composing a second tempo for the Brandenburg Concerto nº3, and João Madureira ventured in a rearrangement of The Art of the Fugue. Furthermore, the project Bach Well Tempered will premiere small commissions by Portuguese composers, always with Bach in the background.

Complementing the
Music Days programme, there will be chats and conferences, pianos spread all around the CCB (so everyone may join the party), free concerts in the space Música Livre (Free Music), concerts by music school students from all around the country (in a collaboration with the Ministry of Education) and, of course, a programming especially conceived for kids, seniors and for the rest of the family, at the Fábrica das Artes, where the legacy of Bach will assume astonishing outlines."

For more information, please check Centro Cultura de Belém's official website.

No comments: