Diamanda Galás (USA)
27/11/2009 20:00 - In the 1990s the singer and pianist was enthusiastically received by Czech audiences on several occasions. After a prolonged absence, she finally returns to Prague. As part of the STIMUL Festival she will perform on November 27 on her “home” stage at the Archa Theatre.
Of Greek origin, born near the Mexican city of Tijuana and growing up in San Diego, Diamanda Galás was raised on European classical music. At the age of 14 she accompanied orchestras at concerts of Liszt and Beethoven, but she soon decided to focus on her own works and to seek out extreme forms of expression.
Her impressive voice (with a range of three and a half octaves) has over the years become her trademark. In addition to her own recordings, she can be heard in various more or less expected places. In 1979 she performed in an opera by avant-garde composer Vinko Globokara Un Jour comme un autre where she sang several vocal pieces by another famous Greek, Iannis Xenakis. The director Francis Ford Coppola used her voice to create the sounds of the demon women in his adaptation of Dracula, and she has also lent her voice to Wes Craven’s horror movie The Serpent and the Rainbow. Though Diamanda Galás has become a favourite among fans of gothic and industrial music, she is also closely connected with the world of jazz, mainly in its wilder forms. In 1986 John Zorn invited her in honour of Ennio Morricone’s The Big Gundown, and in the same year she performed with Peter Brötzmann’s and Bill Laswell’s radical freejazz band Last Exit. In the sphere of electronic pop she began collaborating at the turn of the millennium on the Recoil project with Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode and with Barry Adamson.
Diamanda Galás’ solo performances and recordings always combine intense sound and radical social and political opinions. Her 1980s albums tackle the subject of AIDS, which in those days was seen as a problem unique to homosexuals. Her concert in New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, which was released under the name Plague Mass, caused a minor riot. In abstract forms in the 1990s she combined vocals and electronica in the albums Vena Cava and SchreiX, while also developing other musical lines. These reflected her love of blues, chanson and other song genres. She selects a repertoire from these with a feeling for context and in seemingly ordinary songs emphasizes conflicting themes and the fates of their authors. It may be a “Hungarian suicide song” Gloomy Sunday, I Put A Spell On You, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or her own musical rendition of a text by director Pier Paolo Pasolini. She arranges her songs into a concert program in which the songs are connected with specific thematic lines. Her latest album is Guilty Guilty Guilty, released under the Mute label.
In recent years she has performed only rarely on the piano and has moved away from her earlier models, which has transformed her concerts into fantastic rituals that make use of special sound and light effects (or total darkness). But she remains true to her music. This year she issued a series of recordings sold through the internet, which includes the cycle entitled Cleopatra Set. Though she is currently working in a more “conservative” format, Diamanda Galás’ expressiveness has not been blunted or softened. The same is true of her opinions, which she vents in her lyrics and interviews. She doesn’t spare anyone: men, the Church, Greeks, Turks, Americans, pop music… Let’s hope that she won’t spare the audience at her Prague concert either.
Links:
http://www.diamandagalas.com
http://www.myspace.com/songsofexile
TICKETS:
Numbered seating:
1st price category CZK 990 / rows 1 - 7
2nd price category CZK 890 / rows 8 - 15
Standing CZK 690
ARCHA CLUB discount 30%
Tickets also available at TICKETPRO and TICKETPORTAL outlets (subject to a booking fee).
