I hope all is well with you and you are quite ready for the coming spring! First of all, today is Chopin’s Birthday (he was born on March 1, 1810) and I would like to remind you that the premiere of “CHOPIN: A LETTER THROUGH THE PARISIAN YEARS” is taking place at the Grand Salon of the Foundation of the United States in Paris, France, on April 1, 2016 at 8:00 pm! The admission is FREE (reservations are recommended through Weezevent).
Naturally, I would love to thank all the donors who have supported the Chopin in Paris crowdfunding project campaign!
Nathanaël Bez and I have a few updates about our work that we would love to share with you! We have been rehearsing now for a while, and things are unfolding beautifully. I have completed my visual shooting in locations such as Parisian addresses of Chopin (9 Sq d’Orléans, 12 Place Vendôme, the Père Lachaise cemetery), streets of Cité Bergère along with some interior views, a number of others places in Paris and went to Poland (Warsaw and Żelazowa Wola) in order to shoot places of Chopin’s birth and childhood/youth.
We are very grateful to the following organizations for collaborating with us: The Foundation of the United States in Paris, Association Chopin à Nohant, The Polish Library in Paris, Hotel Chopin Grands-Boulevards Paris and Friends of Chopin Australia. Without assistance from these institutions it would be impossible to have anything done.
We have a list of good news: first of all the Foundation of the United States is lending us their projector for the visuals completely free of charge, in addition to letting us use the venue for free!
The next great news is that Ed Akselrud is now our projection technician and video manager, who will be flying over to Paris from New York City at the end of March to join us for the DVD filming, and all the projection work! We also gained a visual effects assistant Shahin Alirkan, who is working on the compositing of the entire visual part, as well as helping with additional film shooting! He is also based in New York and works with us long-distance.
However, this is not all: Iryna Kyshliaruk, a very prominent Ukrainian soprano currently based in Paris and Leipzig, will be performing one of Chopin’s songs with us on stage!
And our newest team member is the Parisian lighting director Lionel Harkas, Sono Concept, who will create magic with colors, lights, and shadows!
It is incredibly exciting to be working together with such unique and talented artists. It feels very uplifting and inspiring and we CANNOT WAIT to share our work with you! We are also accepting invitations for future performances of this project – if you happen to have ideas or know someone possibly interested in organizing such an event (perhaps as part of a festival), please be in touch!Once more, we are very grateful to ALL the donors who are helping us. Every donation means a world to us, really. However, we are still quite far from our goal and the time is going by very quickly… So we do need YOUR support. You can donate to our project at our GoFundMe campaign page and we will make sure to thank you.
MERCI !