Post by davidhr on Jul 6, 2021 6:45:33 GMT -5
Two items vie for the most recent news, opposite in their implications. As indicated in Lara’s special announcement last week, she is currently “off-line” vocally, as her ENT suggested a period of at least two weeks of silence to deal with vocal cord problems. Since then there have been several stories in the press concerning this, but each simply repeats Lara’s announcement, so silence on the condition has indeed reigned. It caused her to miss the “Lights on Canada” festival, which was being broadcast to all of Canada.
In addition to the obvious fear that this condition might have lasting implications, what is also disappointing is it meant that was once again, Lara had no opportunity to make her presence and abilities known to the rest of Canada, i.e., the English speaking part. Her last engagement with them was during her tour for the French speaking album, “Ma vie dans la tienne” in 2016; a tour which in English speaking Canada was sparsely attended and (by the comments of one of her following managers) was so mishandled that it was impossible to find promoters in places like Toronto and Vancouver for the subsequent English language album “Camouflage”. It goes largely unnoticed that Lara’s “World Tour” may go to Europe and Asia but omits the majority of the population in what is now her home country, Canada. It’s now not obvious that anything about this will change.
Vocal cord problems are an understandable occupational hazard for singers, and rest is often the solution. Let’s hope that is the case for Lara. Fortunately, she doesn’t have any listed singing or known public engagements coming up, so she won’t feel pressured to end her silence too soon. And she obviously has a good vocal teacher to watch over any reconditioning.
Perhaps as an antidote to her fans, or perhaps coincidentally, on the other end of the spectrum, Lara and her team released the following (in both French and English):
-----------------------------------
Dear friends,
The "50 World Tour" tour is now over and as previously announced the concerts scheduled for June 2021 are postponed. I'll be back on stage in 2022 with "The Best of Lara Fabian World Tour" - to finally see you again.
New dates have been added and are on sale from today at 10 a.m. (CET) [July 2] and all previously bought tickets will be valid for the new dates.
Also, I have something special for you that I’m working very hard to organize and I cannot wait to share with you… thank you all for your patience and understanding. More info coming soon.
Sending love to all
🙏✌️❤️ Lara
-----------------------------------
The dates for this tour are shown in the following picture:
www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=376110537206579&set=a.259330805551220
or
As expected the tour has been postponed until the fall of 2022. A number of points to note:
**It has been renamed as “The Best of Lara Fabian World Tour”. Since it would now come almost three years after her 50th birthday, it would make no sense to keep calling it the 50 World Tour. And with that name, we’ll see what ‘best’ means in this context; if it means ‘most popular', there really doesn’t have to be much change in the setlist, since the 50 World Tour highlighted those songs anyway.
**The concerts in Odessa, which has been rescheduled for October 20 and 21 – and links provided to them on Lara’s “larafaiban.com” URL - are now cancelled, their place being taken by concerts in Budapest and Belgrade. One wonders whether Lara’s experience with the ‘crooked promoter’ who originally booked those shows factored in; arguing against that, is that the Odessa shows were rescheduled after the problems with him had been unearthed. Maybe too she is concerned with the political situation in the country. [Unless there is some subsequent announcement, those tickets will have to be refunded, although that may be held up by any court proceeding].
**Some concerts in France, such as Lille (which many people in the north of France particularly regretted) and Bordeaux are also no longer on the schedule. There are however six new dates listed, including a second show in Geneva. It’s likely that her team took into account the interest that was generated by the initial list of shows, and in some cases doubled down on those cities (with new second shows also in Lyon and Marseille). It’s somewhat surprising that there is such interest in Switzerland.
**Lara going to Strasbourg is a nice new feature; maybe Germany will be next
. Conversely, Charleroi is the only city in Belgium.
Tickets for all these shows have links on Lara’s URL, larafabian.com .
Regardless of whether this is purposeful, announcing these concert plans while Lara is currently vocally incapacitated serves to reassure her fans that the current affliction is assumed to be temporary. And the concerts are more than a year away, so this is (hopefully) likely to be true in that time frame. Of course, these arrangements were probably finalized before her recent problem.
As for what the ‘special’ thing Lara mentions might be – one can only speculate, but it raises the issue of what will happen with Lara’s new French album, which presumably will include more of her ‘old-fashioned’ intense ballads. Will that be presented in a tour? If she’s already started working on it, the fall of 2022 would seem to be the time for its unveiling. Lara also mentioned that she’d like to sing with a big orchestra, as she did on the Star Academie; maybe such an event will come to pass (vocal conditions allowing). Or maybe it will be another very interesting video show to accompany her tour, as she’s done recently.
Finally, although this tour can be explained as Lara’s fulfilling a promise to make-up the concerts suspended by COVID, it is exactly the opposite of what she has been saying about wanting: a more modest touring schedule, with just 15 days a year. Perhaps this will then be the last of the big tours; or, maybe it’s easier to think about quitting in favor of a more sedate life than it is to actually do it.
Back to the “Lights on Canada”: as it was an attempt to join the television viewing (and music appreciation) of English and French Canada, it’s interesting to see what that really means with regard to how diverse they really are. An article about that can be found at (https://www.world-today-news.com/usa-tv-from-english-canada/). [Note – outside of a brief mention of ‘Star Academie’, this is really off-topic].
------------------------------
USA TV from English Canada
One country, two television solitudes. While in Quebec, the top 10 most watched shows each week is made up entirely of Quebec productions, in English Canada, it almost exclusively includes American titles.
While we have just underlined July 1, this observation confirms that in terms of listening habits, the beautiful province diverges sharply from the ROC (Rest of Canada).
Numéris’ weekly data reveals that during the 2020-2021 calendar, only one Canadian program appeared regularly in the leading pack: the CTV Evening News. With an average of around 1,600,000 viewers, the newscast (airs Monday through Friday at 6 p.m.) saves the day for the Canadian offer.
Fiction series from the United States largely dominate the rankings. The Good Doctor appears at number 1 with 2,500,000 followers. Titles like 9-1-1, Grey’s Anatomy, Lone Star, Station 19, New Amsterdam, NCIS and This is Us, which can rally 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 viewers. The top 10 includes only one reality show: The Masked Singer, including the Quebec adaptation (Masked singers) will be presented at TVA this fall.
Some Canadian productions are making their presence felt a little further in the standings, such as the Maple Leafs hockey games (around 1,200,000) and Murdoch Mysteries, CBC’s veteran crime drama, which typically retains its million regulars. And this winter, Big Brother Canada was regularly in the top 20. But that’s it.
2/30 in Quebec
In Quebec, only two foreign titles regularly carved out a place in the weekly top 30 of the most popular shows last winter: The good doctor (French version of The Good Doctor) and Talent to spare (America’s Got Talent), both broadcast on TVA.
The rest of the ranking was made up of local productions like District 31, Les beaux malaises 2.0, Star Académie, Live from the universe and All the life.
To give up
The voracious appetite of English Canadians for the American offer does not date from Sunday, underlines the director of the School of the media of UQAM, Pierre Barrette.
“It’s been like this for several years. Canada’s most popular channel, CTV, broadcasts American content almost through and through. It’s a bit as if TVA were showing 70% of foreign series at prime time. “
The absence of a language barrier, combined with the imbalance of budgets, explains – in part – why the English-speaking provinces prefer American TV.
The attitude of ROC broadcasters is also fueling this major trend. “It looks like they have resigned,” comments Pierre Barrette. Against the big American guns, they put out documentaries, shows that did not cost much … It is as if they thought it was lost in advance.”
Even more unsubscribes to ”Rest of Canada”
Canada is also divided over the churn phenomenon. On the English-speaking side, one in five viewers have abandoned their pay television service. In French-speaking Quebec, we are talking more about one in seven viewers.
This is what emerges from a study by the Media Technologies Observer (OTM), published on June 24.
What is more, 23% of Anglophones currently subscribing to traditional cable say they are “very” or “somewhat likely” to cancel their subscription and join the group of “cord cutters” (cord cutters). Among Quebec television viewers, we are talking about a proportion of 16%.
Cord cutters are usually active on the internet, young and educated. Another interesting detail: 71% of them subscribe to two or more video-on-demand services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.
Not surprising
These figures come as no surprise to Pierre Barrette, director of the UQAM Media School.
Platforms streaming offering much more content in English than in French, they are more likely to interest the ROC.
But beware, the language barrier is not the only reason behind this gap. It would also be reductive to think the opposite.
“Quebec television has succeeded in gaining the loyalty of its audiences by presenting quality programs,” indicates Pierre Barrette. It has developed programming that is not modeled on the American spirit. It has its own flavor that people spontaneously identify with.”
-----------------------------------------------
So if Lara has any desire to be known in the rest of Canada, she will have to do it in live concerts – or appear on American TV.
Interesting photo(s)/video(s) of the week:
The Lara Fabian multimedia youtube site posted a video of the studio recording of I Am A Wa (from the Le Secret album); it appeared in the segment "Les Coulisses Du Secret" on the DVD bonus of the Limited Edition of the album Le Secret (2013), and can be seen at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKLdLox918A
This wonderful song in English is just another of the many pieces that Lara never does in concert; perhaps her concert ‘surprise’ will be to bring them to people’s attention (don’t bet on it ).
One of the more unusual photos of Lara, from the Lara Fabian America FB site,
www.facebook.com/larafabianamerica/photos/a.390576794773579/1160098441154740/
Mysterious, as in this photo, is not one of the adjectives one normally associates with Lara, as she is quite transparent.
A nice montage, from the Instagram site of larafabian_fanpage_ :
In honor of Lara’s planned return to giving concerts, albeit many months away, here is a greeting from the fans that Lara received in the past, courtesy of the ‘larafabian the voice’ Instagram site.
And for a full-fledged celebration of Lara’s coming concerts, the following is a link to a high quality version of her concert in Greece for the Camouflage album (the English one that she did not give in English speaking Canada). Thanks for the link go to the ‘Lara Fabian Lockdown Sessions’ FB site, and for the video itself to Tasos Dimitropoulos:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4S3iOhLWig
We are now fully into summer, when Lara may or may not be free to go see her father in Belgium, and/or Gabriel’s family in Sicily. Currently, travel from Canada to Belgium is allowed without restriction. However, travel to Italy is more complicated, as it is still in a state of emergency. Canadian citizens are now allowed to enter without having to complete quarantine if they meet the following equivalent Italian Green Pass conditions – proof of vaccination, proof of recovery from Covid or negative test within 48 hours of departure. If you cannot prove these conditions a 10 day quarantine applies. Extra documentation is required for Sicily (such as indicating where you’re going). And, in addition, Lara now has to worry about staying silent. A bummer…
Keep save everybody.
David
In addition to the obvious fear that this condition might have lasting implications, what is also disappointing is it meant that was once again, Lara had no opportunity to make her presence and abilities known to the rest of Canada, i.e., the English speaking part. Her last engagement with them was during her tour for the French speaking album, “Ma vie dans la tienne” in 2016; a tour which in English speaking Canada was sparsely attended and (by the comments of one of her following managers) was so mishandled that it was impossible to find promoters in places like Toronto and Vancouver for the subsequent English language album “Camouflage”. It goes largely unnoticed that Lara’s “World Tour” may go to Europe and Asia but omits the majority of the population in what is now her home country, Canada. It’s now not obvious that anything about this will change.
Vocal cord problems are an understandable occupational hazard for singers, and rest is often the solution. Let’s hope that is the case for Lara. Fortunately, she doesn’t have any listed singing or known public engagements coming up, so she won’t feel pressured to end her silence too soon. And she obviously has a good vocal teacher to watch over any reconditioning.
Perhaps as an antidote to her fans, or perhaps coincidentally, on the other end of the spectrum, Lara and her team released the following (in both French and English):
-----------------------------------
Dear friends,
The "50 World Tour" tour is now over and as previously announced the concerts scheduled for June 2021 are postponed. I'll be back on stage in 2022 with "The Best of Lara Fabian World Tour" - to finally see you again.
New dates have been added and are on sale from today at 10 a.m. (CET) [July 2] and all previously bought tickets will be valid for the new dates.
Also, I have something special for you that I’m working very hard to organize and I cannot wait to share with you… thank you all for your patience and understanding. More info coming soon.
Sending love to all
🙏✌️❤️ Lara
-----------------------------------
The dates for this tour are shown in the following picture:
www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=376110537206579&set=a.259330805551220
or
http://instagram.com/p/CQ0TBAfhhn8
As expected the tour has been postponed until the fall of 2022. A number of points to note:
**It has been renamed as “The Best of Lara Fabian World Tour”. Since it would now come almost three years after her 50th birthday, it would make no sense to keep calling it the 50 World Tour. And with that name, we’ll see what ‘best’ means in this context; if it means ‘most popular', there really doesn’t have to be much change in the setlist, since the 50 World Tour highlighted those songs anyway.
**The concerts in Odessa, which has been rescheduled for October 20 and 21 – and links provided to them on Lara’s “larafaiban.com” URL - are now cancelled, their place being taken by concerts in Budapest and Belgrade. One wonders whether Lara’s experience with the ‘crooked promoter’ who originally booked those shows factored in; arguing against that, is that the Odessa shows were rescheduled after the problems with him had been unearthed. Maybe too she is concerned with the political situation in the country. [Unless there is some subsequent announcement, those tickets will have to be refunded, although that may be held up by any court proceeding].
**Some concerts in France, such as Lille (which many people in the north of France particularly regretted) and Bordeaux are also no longer on the schedule. There are however six new dates listed, including a second show in Geneva. It’s likely that her team took into account the interest that was generated by the initial list of shows, and in some cases doubled down on those cities (with new second shows also in Lyon and Marseille). It’s somewhat surprising that there is such interest in Switzerland.
**Lara going to Strasbourg is a nice new feature; maybe Germany will be next
. Conversely, Charleroi is the only city in Belgium. Tickets for all these shows have links on Lara’s URL, larafabian.com .
Regardless of whether this is purposeful, announcing these concert plans while Lara is currently vocally incapacitated serves to reassure her fans that the current affliction is assumed to be temporary. And the concerts are more than a year away, so this is (hopefully) likely to be true in that time frame. Of course, these arrangements were probably finalized before her recent problem.
As for what the ‘special’ thing Lara mentions might be – one can only speculate, but it raises the issue of what will happen with Lara’s new French album, which presumably will include more of her ‘old-fashioned’ intense ballads. Will that be presented in a tour? If she’s already started working on it, the fall of 2022 would seem to be the time for its unveiling. Lara also mentioned that she’d like to sing with a big orchestra, as she did on the Star Academie; maybe such an event will come to pass (vocal conditions allowing). Or maybe it will be another very interesting video show to accompany her tour, as she’s done recently.
Finally, although this tour can be explained as Lara’s fulfilling a promise to make-up the concerts suspended by COVID, it is exactly the opposite of what she has been saying about wanting: a more modest touring schedule, with just 15 days a year. Perhaps this will then be the last of the big tours; or, maybe it’s easier to think about quitting in favor of a more sedate life than it is to actually do it.
Back to the “Lights on Canada”: as it was an attempt to join the television viewing (and music appreciation) of English and French Canada, it’s interesting to see what that really means with regard to how diverse they really are. An article about that can be found at (https://www.world-today-news.com/usa-tv-from-english-canada/). [Note – outside of a brief mention of ‘Star Academie’, this is really off-topic].
------------------------------
USA TV from English Canada
One country, two television solitudes. While in Quebec, the top 10 most watched shows each week is made up entirely of Quebec productions, in English Canada, it almost exclusively includes American titles.
While we have just underlined July 1, this observation confirms that in terms of listening habits, the beautiful province diverges sharply from the ROC (Rest of Canada).
Numéris’ weekly data reveals that during the 2020-2021 calendar, only one Canadian program appeared regularly in the leading pack: the CTV Evening News. With an average of around 1,600,000 viewers, the newscast (airs Monday through Friday at 6 p.m.) saves the day for the Canadian offer.
Fiction series from the United States largely dominate the rankings. The Good Doctor appears at number 1 with 2,500,000 followers. Titles like 9-1-1, Grey’s Anatomy, Lone Star, Station 19, New Amsterdam, NCIS and This is Us, which can rally 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 viewers. The top 10 includes only one reality show: The Masked Singer, including the Quebec adaptation (Masked singers) will be presented at TVA this fall.
Some Canadian productions are making their presence felt a little further in the standings, such as the Maple Leafs hockey games (around 1,200,000) and Murdoch Mysteries, CBC’s veteran crime drama, which typically retains its million regulars. And this winter, Big Brother Canada was regularly in the top 20. But that’s it.
2/30 in Quebec
In Quebec, only two foreign titles regularly carved out a place in the weekly top 30 of the most popular shows last winter: The good doctor (French version of The Good Doctor) and Talent to spare (America’s Got Talent), both broadcast on TVA.
The rest of the ranking was made up of local productions like District 31, Les beaux malaises 2.0, Star Académie, Live from the universe and All the life.
To give up
The voracious appetite of English Canadians for the American offer does not date from Sunday, underlines the director of the School of the media of UQAM, Pierre Barrette.
“It’s been like this for several years. Canada’s most popular channel, CTV, broadcasts American content almost through and through. It’s a bit as if TVA were showing 70% of foreign series at prime time. “
The absence of a language barrier, combined with the imbalance of budgets, explains – in part – why the English-speaking provinces prefer American TV.
The attitude of ROC broadcasters is also fueling this major trend. “It looks like they have resigned,” comments Pierre Barrette. Against the big American guns, they put out documentaries, shows that did not cost much … It is as if they thought it was lost in advance.”
Even more unsubscribes to ”Rest of Canada”
Canada is also divided over the churn phenomenon. On the English-speaking side, one in five viewers have abandoned their pay television service. In French-speaking Quebec, we are talking more about one in seven viewers.
This is what emerges from a study by the Media Technologies Observer (OTM), published on June 24.
What is more, 23% of Anglophones currently subscribing to traditional cable say they are “very” or “somewhat likely” to cancel their subscription and join the group of “cord cutters” (cord cutters). Among Quebec television viewers, we are talking about a proportion of 16%.
Cord cutters are usually active on the internet, young and educated. Another interesting detail: 71% of them subscribe to two or more video-on-demand services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.
Not surprising
These figures come as no surprise to Pierre Barrette, director of the UQAM Media School.
Platforms streaming offering much more content in English than in French, they are more likely to interest the ROC.
But beware, the language barrier is not the only reason behind this gap. It would also be reductive to think the opposite.
“Quebec television has succeeded in gaining the loyalty of its audiences by presenting quality programs,” indicates Pierre Barrette. It has developed programming that is not modeled on the American spirit. It has its own flavor that people spontaneously identify with.”
-----------------------------------------------
So if Lara has any desire to be known in the rest of Canada, she will have to do it in live concerts – or appear on American TV.
Interesting photo(s)/video(s) of the week:
The Lara Fabian multimedia youtube site posted a video of the studio recording of I Am A Wa (from the Le Secret album); it appeared in the segment "Les Coulisses Du Secret" on the DVD bonus of the Limited Edition of the album Le Secret (2013), and can be seen at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKLdLox918A
This wonderful song in English is just another of the many pieces that Lara never does in concert; perhaps her concert ‘surprise’ will be to bring them to people’s attention (don’t bet on it
).One of the more unusual photos of Lara, from the Lara Fabian America FB site,
www.facebook.com/larafabianamerica/photos/a.390576794773579/1160098441154740/
Mysterious, as in this photo, is not one of the adjectives one normally associates with Lara, as she is quite transparent.
A nice montage, from the Instagram site of larafabian_fanpage_ :
http://instagram.com/p/CQ4KGO3MD89
In honor of Lara’s planned return to giving concerts, albeit many months away, here is a greeting from the fans that Lara received in the past, courtesy of the ‘larafabian the voice’ Instagram site.
http://instagram.com/p/CQ81A0kJGbX
And for a full-fledged celebration of Lara’s coming concerts, the following is a link to a high quality version of her concert in Greece for the Camouflage album (the English one that she did not give in English speaking Canada). Thanks for the link go to the ‘Lara Fabian Lockdown Sessions’ FB site, and for the video itself to Tasos Dimitropoulos:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4S3iOhLWig
We are now fully into summer, when Lara may or may not be free to go see her father in Belgium, and/or Gabriel’s family in Sicily. Currently, travel from Canada to Belgium is allowed without restriction. However, travel to Italy is more complicated, as it is still in a state of emergency. Canadian citizens are now allowed to enter without having to complete quarantine if they meet the following equivalent Italian Green Pass conditions – proof of vaccination, proof of recovery from Covid or negative test within 48 hours of departure. If you cannot prove these conditions a 10 day quarantine applies. Extra documentation is required for Sicily (such as indicating where you’re going). And, in addition, Lara now has to worry about staying silent. A bummer…
Keep save everybody.
David
