Post by davidhr on Mar 20, 2012 11:14:53 GMT -5
Lara finished her week of concerts in Eastern Europe, and rightly deemed it a great success. These were countries where she had never before appeared, and we know that there is a Lara ‘syndrome’ – the first time one sees her in concert, one is overwhelmed. That seems to have happened in the Czech Republic, Moldavia and Romania, where she was treated as a Queen on her arrival (with big press conferences) - "Jurnalul National", the most prestigious newspaper in Romania, announced Lara Fabian "Person of the Day" in connection with the ‘madness’ of her Romanian fans - and as a God afterwards , as one can tell by reading the comments on her FB page. The press reports were equally glowing, often commenting as well on the fervor of the fans. In her own video on her FB site, she discussed how transported she was by the performances and the interaction with the audience. Heaven will pale after this for Lara .
She looked quite pretty and her voice was in fine shape, quite powerful. She talked about her inspirations, about angels and reincarnation in discussing the meanings of the various songs. “Pas sans toi”, at the end, was dedicated to her daughter and a special person, who she said had a connection and meaning through this music. At the end in Romania, she said, “I love Bucharest”, in French and English [hopefully, that won’t inspire anti-Romanian people to boycott her… ].
The set list was pretty much as described last week, except some different English language songs kept showing up (Broken Vow, Do You Know Where You’re Going to, Angel). Lara said in one of the press conferences that she was going to sing her old hits and some songs that were homages to women (hence the EWIM components). Noticeably absent were Mme. Zhivago songs, which seem to have joined the group that she doesn’t consider ‘hers’ (like ‘I Will Love Again’ and ‘The Last Goodbye’) – even though, unlike those two, she did write the lyrics. Nothing is so abandoned as those songs, often never to see the light of day again. Of course, in this case, it probably includes the MZ CD as well.
In that respect, when asked about her future plans, Lara mentioned that in addition to her concert in Israel in June, she will be appearing in Venice in May…but outside of that she will be concentrating on her new album ‘Le Secret’, hence she said there will be no tours. It looks like she will thus also be skipping her annual summer stop in Russia (where she might face awkward questions), even though one of the news reports said she would be following up these visits with concerts in the Ukraine and Russia. It may be that that phase of her career is over (one also doesn’t hear anything more from her about having a home in Kiev or Moscow – though she did say she has ‘stylists’ from the Ukraine accompanying her). As for the Mlle. Zhivago film, Lara wasn’t asked about it, and seemed to avoid mentioning it when asked what she had been doing for the past 18 months.
This strategy might appear reasonable, except that she turned to the Russian market when her career in France took such a hit with the TLFM album, and when she realized she could raise her voice and sing powerfully as long as she wasn’t in France. Apparently she is hoping that the new album will cure these problems. It will be interesting to hear how she sings on it – in the MZ mode, or like on ‘Neuf’. During at least once of the concerts, she thanked Giora Linenberg for his writing of ‘Le Secret’, and repeated that he knows just how to write for her. The song itself provides hope for the album – it brings Lara back to lyrics with depth, mood and meaning, one thing that has been largely missing since ‘Nue’. If all the songs are of this quality, fans will be very satisfied, but whether there is still a market in France for her combination of poetry and ‘singer of voice’, time will tell. An English translation of the lyrics is provided in an accompanying thread.
Several events of note occurred during these concerts, especially in Bucharest, where the Romanian fan club was very active on her behalf. During the first concert there, some 4000 people held up a sheet of paper on which was written (in French) “We have missed you” as Lara began ‘Je t’aime’. You can see this, for example, at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=skmUuHkaY3s
The other side of the paper had the lyrics for Je t’aime, encouraging people to sing along with it (which they did).
Reprising Lara’s incident with Nana Mouskouri, a small girl was left to get on stage with a bouquet, and Lara embraced her and asked her in English "What's your name?". "My name is Bianaca" she said into the microphone and the whole room erupted in applause.
At the news conference preceding that show, she was asked what had she heard about Romania. To everyone’s surprise, Lara responded that she knew it had been called ‘Transylvania’ and was the home to Count Dracula! She also said she knew it might be a myth, but she hoped that it wasn’t, because she wanted the old stories to have some validity. This prompted a follow-up question of the nature of whether she believes everything negative she hears about a country. Lara said that every country has both positive and negative things said about it, and they should be ignored unless they touched you literally [and Count Dracula did ‘touch’ people ]. Lara’s people were so happy with this press conference that they’ve included it on her FB page wall…(I wonder what the Romanians felt about that answer).
It’s also interesting that Lara is pretty unaware of the capabilities of the internet, even though she mentioned she ‘surfed’ it. At her concert in Bucharest, she indicated she was singing ‘Le Secret’ for the very first time (so the fans should ‘take it easy on her’); but we know that it was all over the web by then, due to her performances of it in the two previous countries. She has yet to learn one can’t get away with anything anymore (reminiscent of her trashing women in France while giving an interview in Montreal, which of course showed up on the web, leading to her official website being bombarded by outraged French women).
There are many videos from these shows available on the web, of varying video quality but generally good sound. (The complete concert from the 17th linked by many sites is currently listed as ‘private’ although it didn’t used to be – so if anyone was fortunate enough to get it, perhaps they could place it on some download site). The Romanian fanclub has many pictures of Lara in Romania, available at
www.facebook.com/laramademoiselle
Lara’s schedule has nothing further until an appearance in ‘the countries to the east’ in April. As noted previously, this may have been her busiest public week of the year.
David
ps - Happy first day of Spring (in the NH, at least).
She looked quite pretty and her voice was in fine shape, quite powerful. She talked about her inspirations, about angels and reincarnation in discussing the meanings of the various songs. “Pas sans toi”, at the end, was dedicated to her daughter and a special person, who she said had a connection and meaning through this music. At the end in Romania, she said, “I love Bucharest”, in French and English [hopefully, that won’t inspire anti-Romanian people to boycott her… ].
The set list was pretty much as described last week, except some different English language songs kept showing up (Broken Vow, Do You Know Where You’re Going to, Angel). Lara said in one of the press conferences that she was going to sing her old hits and some songs that were homages to women (hence the EWIM components). Noticeably absent were Mme. Zhivago songs, which seem to have joined the group that she doesn’t consider ‘hers’ (like ‘I Will Love Again’ and ‘The Last Goodbye’) – even though, unlike those two, she did write the lyrics. Nothing is so abandoned as those songs, often never to see the light of day again. Of course, in this case, it probably includes the MZ CD as well.
In that respect, when asked about her future plans, Lara mentioned that in addition to her concert in Israel in June, she will be appearing in Venice in May…but outside of that she will be concentrating on her new album ‘Le Secret’, hence she said there will be no tours. It looks like she will thus also be skipping her annual summer stop in Russia (where she might face awkward questions), even though one of the news reports said she would be following up these visits with concerts in the Ukraine and Russia. It may be that that phase of her career is over (one also doesn’t hear anything more from her about having a home in Kiev or Moscow – though she did say she has ‘stylists’ from the Ukraine accompanying her). As for the Mlle. Zhivago film, Lara wasn’t asked about it, and seemed to avoid mentioning it when asked what she had been doing for the past 18 months.
This strategy might appear reasonable, except that she turned to the Russian market when her career in France took such a hit with the TLFM album, and when she realized she could raise her voice and sing powerfully as long as she wasn’t in France. Apparently she is hoping that the new album will cure these problems. It will be interesting to hear how she sings on it – in the MZ mode, or like on ‘Neuf’. During at least once of the concerts, she thanked Giora Linenberg for his writing of ‘Le Secret’, and repeated that he knows just how to write for her. The song itself provides hope for the album – it brings Lara back to lyrics with depth, mood and meaning, one thing that has been largely missing since ‘Nue’. If all the songs are of this quality, fans will be very satisfied, but whether there is still a market in France for her combination of poetry and ‘singer of voice’, time will tell. An English translation of the lyrics is provided in an accompanying thread.
Several events of note occurred during these concerts, especially in Bucharest, where the Romanian fan club was very active on her behalf. During the first concert there, some 4000 people held up a sheet of paper on which was written (in French) “We have missed you” as Lara began ‘Je t’aime’. You can see this, for example, at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=skmUuHkaY3s
The other side of the paper had the lyrics for Je t’aime, encouraging people to sing along with it (which they did).
Reprising Lara’s incident with Nana Mouskouri, a small girl was left to get on stage with a bouquet, and Lara embraced her and asked her in English "What's your name?". "My name is Bianaca" she said into the microphone and the whole room erupted in applause.
At the news conference preceding that show, she was asked what had she heard about Romania. To everyone’s surprise, Lara responded that she knew it had been called ‘Transylvania’ and was the home to Count Dracula! She also said she knew it might be a myth, but she hoped that it wasn’t, because she wanted the old stories to have some validity. This prompted a follow-up question of the nature of whether she believes everything negative she hears about a country. Lara said that every country has both positive and negative things said about it, and they should be ignored unless they touched you literally [and Count Dracula did ‘touch’ people ]. Lara’s people were so happy with this press conference that they’ve included it on her FB page wall…(I wonder what the Romanians felt about that answer).
It’s also interesting that Lara is pretty unaware of the capabilities of the internet, even though she mentioned she ‘surfed’ it. At her concert in Bucharest, she indicated she was singing ‘Le Secret’ for the very first time (so the fans should ‘take it easy on her’); but we know that it was all over the web by then, due to her performances of it in the two previous countries. She has yet to learn one can’t get away with anything anymore (reminiscent of her trashing women in France while giving an interview in Montreal, which of course showed up on the web, leading to her official website being bombarded by outraged French women).
There are many videos from these shows available on the web, of varying video quality but generally good sound. (The complete concert from the 17th linked by many sites is currently listed as ‘private’ although it didn’t used to be – so if anyone was fortunate enough to get it, perhaps they could place it on some download site). The Romanian fanclub has many pictures of Lara in Romania, available at
www.facebook.com/laramademoiselle
Lara’s schedule has nothing further until an appearance in ‘the countries to the east’ in April. As noted previously, this may have been her busiest public week of the year.
David
ps - Happy first day of Spring (in the NH, at least).