Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Hi everybody!

I hope you enjoyed Christmas as much as I did. Mostly because this year my family and I didn't have enough time to argue, although we managed to carry on other traditions. Moreover, this year the Christmas tree didn't have a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve. And I ate so much that I can't even describe it. Shame on me.

Now I'm preparing for the New Year's Eve, which means that I do everything to get some rest so that I not fall asleep before midnight (as I did last year). And I was wondering if you've already made some New Year's resolutions. I used to make lots of them and then I had no chance to keep them because I always lost the list on the New Year's Eve party. What about you? If you're curious about other people's resolutions, watch this monologue by Ellen Degeneres (who I truely adore). 

Happy New Year!


Monday, December 21, 2015

Hi! Christmas is coming! That means that the majority of vegans will have to endure big amount of tiring questions from carnivorous. 'How can you celebrate Christmas and not eat fish?' or 'Are dumplings vegan? What about wafer?'. So, I decided to share with you a very funny video by Buzzfeed, which I really love and which is the main reason of my backlog of work and studying. 

Enjoy!


Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Hi!

Some of you already know that this week I'm more musician than philologist, spending whole days on rehearsing and practicing for the concert of Chamber Strings Orchestra of the Academy of Music in Poznań. I suppose that most of you have already read my post about the details of the concert on Facebook, so I decided to put here only some additional information that you might find interesting before (or even after) the concert.

The programme of the concert includes three pieces: 'Trzy utwory w stylu dawnym' by Krzysztof Penderecki, Violin concerto in d minor by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Serenade for strings op. 48 by one of my favourites composers, Peter I. Tchaikovsky. 

The first piece is the only composition of Penderecki written as a soundtrack for a film - 'Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie' (1964) directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has. Although the music of Penderecki appears also in other films (for example, in 'Katyń' directed by Andrzej Wajda or in Stanley Kubrick's 'The shining'), it wasn't composed to be used as soundtrack - it had already existed before it was taken, unlike the piece we'll play on Thursday. 

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is well-known among the violinist because of his Violin concerto in e minor, also very easy to recognize for non-musicians. But the Violin concerto in d minor is hardly known and it had remained totally unknown until the 40s of 20th century, when it was finally discovered and edited by Yehudi Menuhin, a very famous American violinist. Why? I haven't found it out yet, but I'm sure that it wasn't because of its quality - the concerto is really nice, even though Mendelssohn composed it when he was... 13.

The last part of the programme is a composition of Tchaikovsky, whose biography has been equipped with lots of strange stories about his alleged habits. It is a fact that he suffered from depression, but he is also supposed to be hypochondriac with strange obsessions. For instance, probably he never drank unbottled water, what was actually not a bad idea, given the epidemic of cholera in Russia in the 19th century. On the other hand, he was diagnosed with cholera which, probably, caused his death at the age of 53. But according to some other theories, Tchaikovsky committed suicide by poisoning himself with arsenic. It's not decided what was the real reason of his death, but it's also impossible to reject the theory of the suicide after listening to the music of Tchaikovsky, full of pain, suffering and longing. 

I hope you'll enjoy the concert as much as I do enjoy preparing for it. 

By now, here's one of my favourites Tchaikovsky's piano pieces:






Sunday, December 6, 2015

I don't know if you missed my commentaries or you didn't even notice that I wasn't here for such a long time. I won't try to justify it, despite of the fact that the truth is that once again I realized that I don't live in accordance with Mars's solar day. And it... is not very nice ;)

Tonight I'd like to share with you some thoughts about one of the most particular European cities: Berlin. Now I'm in Polski Bus, going back to Poland and trying to stop thinking about my poor violin that has been forced to travel in the hod of baggage instead of sleeping on my tired arms, and I'm thinking about some features that makes Berlin so special.

When you look around the streets, you realize that it's impossible to be 'different' there. You can see people from all around the world, people of all religions, all nations, all political beliefs, all appearances... The best thing about it is that nobody feels strange there. Strange as a stranger and strange as a different one. What I'm trying to say is that there are so many foreigners (strangers, xenos) that you don't feel like you don't fit there because of your mother tongue and origin. At the same time, you don't feel strange because of your clothes, your haircut or who you're going out with. There will be always someone like you or someone far less ordinary than you.

Is it only because of the fact that Berlin is one of the biggest 'multiculti' society? Is it impossible for more homogeneous communities to be more like this? I don't know it yet. I only know that Berlin is a unique place on the European map. And that I wish that some part of Polish people wouldn't feel so uncomfortable being themselves in their own country. That they wouldn't feel strange there where they're not strangers.