Music in Denkovas and Staviskis final show?

Paariolio · Apr 9, 2004

Hi!
Does anyone know what music Denkova and Staviski were using in their final show at Dortmund World figure skating championships? The name of the song might have been "In heaven" , but does anyone know the name of the artist (and album). I got to have it! Please help me! Desperate...

tdnuva · Apr 9, 2004

You know what? I asked Maxim yesterday... first he couldn't remember and then he answered with the help of someone else (not Albena btw) the composer is Klaus Nomi. I couldn't find out anything about the music title though.

And I still think that this is basically the same music that Grishuk & Platov used in 1998 which was then Memorial by Michael Nyman. Maybe this is only a text version of that Nyman composition.

hockeyfan228 · Apr 9, 2004

Thank you so much for the info tdnuva! I looked further and it's called "Cold Song," and it appears on two of the late counter-tenor/performance artist Klaus Nomi's albums:

Klaus Nomi.
Eclipsed, Best of Klaus Nomi. Here's the amazon link from which you can hear a short sample (scroll to bottom).

The whole time it was playing, I though maybe it was Brian Asawa, but Asawa was at most a wee lad when Nomi was performing.

Andrew Horn made a film about Nomi; here's a link to the film's website The page opens with the following description:

The man-on-the-street has probably never heard of Klaus Nomi, and possibly never will. Nonetheless he provoked a minor riot at an arts festival in Bordeaux and caused a sensation in Paris, accompanied David Bowie on American network television, and was himself accompanied by a full symphony orchestra on German TV. He was featured in an ad campaign for Jaegermeister liqueur and was the subject of a contemporary chamber opera by Eberhardt Schoener. His fans include such diverse personalities as Catherine Deneuve, Morrissey and counter tenor opera star Joachim Kowalski. It’s been said that as a child, Sean Ono Lennon used play Klaus’ records to torture his little pals, while today Rush Limbaugh, America’s notorious right wing radio commentator, uses Klaus’ music as the theme for his monthly Anti-Gay report.

tdnuva · Apr 9, 2004

... which still leaves room for the thesis it's based on Nyman's Memorial. Anybody can confirm or deny? I mean - it seems Nomi sang it, but who composed it.......

hockeyfan228 · Apr 9, 2004

This is what else I've found so far:

According to this lyrics website and The Estate Project website, the original music was composed by Henry Purcell, which (duh) sounds like music to which Mark Morris would (or already has) choreograph. Here are the lyrics:

(Henry Purcell)
What Power art thou
Who from below
Hast made me Rise
Unwillingly and slow
From beds of Everlasting Snow!

See'st thou not how stiff
How stiff and wondrous old
Far, far unfit to bear the bitter Cold

I can scarcely move or draw my Breath
Can scarcely move or draw my Breath
Let me, let me, let me freeze again
Let me, let me freeze again to Death
Let me, let me, let me freeze again to Death

Then on
Michael Hyman's website are posted Waldemar Januszczak's sleeve notes for Memorial from the album, "After Extra Time" (1996):

Flicking back to this weekend we see a name more recently associated with Purcell, the name of Michael Nyman, whose neo-Purcellian score for The Draughtman's Contract established his reputation in France though not, I'm told, in Rouen where the film only lasted a week in the town's one art cinema...It is not often that composers name their work out of a sense of shame but that is what Michael Nyman has done in dedicating his new peice -a collaboration with the painter Paul Richards- to the Brussels football tragedy and calling it Memorial.

The football tragedy mentioned occured in 1985, and according to Nyman's own sleeve notes to the movie soundtrack for "The Cook, the Thief, the Wife, and her Lover," in which "Memorial" was used, he was working on the piece in another form as a collaboration with Richards at the time of the tragedy:

Yet Memorial was, and for me will remain, indissolubly tied not to a fictional film death but to the death of 39 Italian citizens at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, witnessed throughout the world on TV on the evening of 29 May, 1985. At that time I was working on a commision from the Festival d'Été de Seine Maritime in Rouen for a large scale work, lasting around an hour, to be performed in an electricity generating station at Yainville made redundant, silenced by nuclear power. The building retained its potency, however, in its enormous scale, its permanent collection massive generators and turbines and its vast window at the far end. All these features, coupled with a reverberation time of around ten seconds suggested, indeed dictated, a slow, powerful, processional composition in which the harmonic overlapping brought about by this extremely live acoustic would be organised in such a way as not to be disruptive. Switching on a television set that Wednesday evening expecting to see a football match between Liverpool and Juventus, I witnessed a massacre. In the following few days newspaper photographs of the grieving families made such a profound impact on me that the composition, previously abstract, purposeless and title-less, gently transformed itself into a memorial for the dead football fans.

This would seem to date "Memorial" to circa 1985; there's no mention that he was working on the piece before or that Klaus Nomi would have heard it before then. "Cold Song" was released in 1982. Both the timeline and that Nomi used opera as the basis for much of his work indicate that most likely he was influenced by the original source. It is possible that Nyman had heard Nomi's version and was influenced by it when writing "Memorial," although as a "neo-Purcellian" in all likelihood he would have been aware of the original. They could have been friends or aware of each other's work, but I don't see anything on the web that mentions this.

Isn't Google grand?

Olenska · Apr 9, 2004

I always thought that song was "The Cold Song" by Henry Purcell. And Klaus Nomi was a rather famous interpreter of the particular piece. It's from and opera, Dido and Aeneas, I think?

hockeyfan228 · Apr 10, 2004

Olenska said:
It's from and opera, Dido and Aeneas, I think?

It's from King Arthur (See #7)

Paariolio · Apr 10, 2004

Thank you so much tdnuva (for asking Maxim!!) & hockeyfan228 for getting me the correct info! I´m so happy now!! I was almost starting to loose my hair because I couldn´t find the right names.

In Finland, when I was watching the show from TV, I think they gave complitely wrong name for the music.

Again, thousand thanks to you!!!
I mean it.

: )

tdnuva · Apr 10, 2004

Paariolio said:
In Finland, when I was watching the show from TV, I think they gave complitely wrong name for the music.

.. which is nothing unusual for tv commentators (and for the ISU bios) according to my experience ..

Olenska · Apr 10, 2004

Yes! King Arthur! That's it! Thanks, hockeyfan!

Music in Denkovas and Staviskis final show?

Paariolio

tdnuva

hockeyfan228

tdnuva

hockeyfan228

Olenska

hockeyfan228

Paariolio

tdnuva

Olenska

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