You may already know the French verb Venir, which means “to come”. But, have you encountered its trickier neighbour, “Venir de”? We’ll explore its different meanings in today’s lesson, and I’ll show you how to use it in everyday French conversation. Take care and stay safe.
😘 from Grenoble, France.
Géraldine
There is no doubt that most of us, in our childhoods and later in life, heard all about the stories and legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. For many, the stories of Arthur and his exploits were the integral part of growing up, and they continue to be the central aspect of what is a quintessentially British identity. But today, we won’t be focusing on King Arthur. Instead, our story shifts to one of his closest companions – a knight equally dashing and brave, whose legend is the central part of the Arthurian legend: Sir Lancelot. Depicted as one of the most gallant and brave of all the Knights of the Round Table , Lancelot of the Lake is considered the epitome of that traditional, chivalric romance that served as an inspiration and an ideal to many over the centuries. Continue reading “Sir Lancelot: Exploring the History Behind the Legend”
At 22, the young actress is an international star thanks to her role in “Adèle H” by François Truffaut and has just shot her first film in the United States, “The Driver”.
A 22 ans, la jeune actrice est une star internationale grâce à son rôle dans “Adèle H” de François Truffaut et vient de tourner son premier film aux Etats-Unis, “The Driver”. Avec maturité, éloquence, et naturel, Isabelle Adjani se confie à Christian Defaye sur ses débuts dans “Le petit bougnat”, son passage à la Comédie-Française, les rôles qui l’ont marquée, son travail de comédienne. Cet entretien événement fut exceptionnellement diffusé à 20h20, avant le film de la soirée, le 13 décembre 1977 dans Spécial Cinéma.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo has approved a $304-million plan to pedestrianize the city’s famed Champs-Élysées avenue by 2030 after the Olympics
The ambitious restoration project, proposed by the local community and first unveiled in 2019, will overhaul the 1.2-mile-long central street in of the French capital that connects the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde into what Hidalgo refers to as an “extraordinary garden” in Le Journal du Dimanche.
Frustrated by the alienating effect that the luxury stores and expensive restaurants had on the locals, the Champs-Élysées committee has been campaigning for the redesign since 2018 and proposed the now approved project in 2019. The scheme was designed by PCA-Stream, a French architectural firm based in Paris. PCA-Stream principal and founder Philippe Chiambaretta stated that his goal was to convert the boulevard into a space that would be “ecological, desirable and inclusive.”
Lately, the “world’s most beautiful avenue,” as it’s sometimes known, has fallen on hard times and hosted several consecutive crises thanks to its prominent location in the heart of the French capital: After the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protests, strikes, and high-end retail gentrification over the last 30 years, the scheme looks to return the street to local residents. The committee, headed by Jean-Noel Reinhardt welcomed the mayor’s good news.
PCA-Stream’s scheme seeks to close half of the street’s eight lanes to cars and insert pockets of greenery or “planted living rooms.” According to Chiabaretta, this will improve the air quality of a street that sees up to an average of 3,000 cars per hour. The revitalization will also introduce food kiosks and meeting spaces in an attempt to attract locals back into the area and return it to a space closer to its original purpose of fostering open-air comingling.
The avenue was originally conceived by André Le Nôtre, King Louis XIV’s landscape architect, in 1667 as an extension to the gardens at the Tuileries Palace to the southeast on the bank of the River Seine. In 1709, the finished boulevard took its name from the Greek Elysian Fields, an outdoor paradise for the righteous to frolic in for all eternity. The new renovation be delivered in two stages; the work at the Place de la Concorde, Paris’s largest public square, will be completed before the Olympic games in 2024 with the rest following, with a completion date set for 2030.
Source: Paris’s Champs-Élysées will get a pedestrian-friendly green overhaul
Few of the French film music composers have been awarded an Oscar. Gabriel Yared is part of this very small circle, which also includes Maurice Jarre, Michel Legrand , George Delerue, Ludovic Bource and Alexandre Desplat . The audience-less concert offered by Radio France, with Gabriel Yared at the piano and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Dirk Brossé, offers listeners a glimpse of the French composer ‘s broad musical palette.
The contemplative and romantic scores, tinged with a deep melancholy, hold the high part of the program. The music of Camille Claudel (film directed by Bruno Nuytten in 1988) strongly influenced the own admission of Gabriel Yared by the Tenth Symphony of Mahler and Transfigured Night by Schoenberg , leads the listener into a heightened lyricism, which tormented the treble violins interact with the dark bass of cellos. In the soundtrack of The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), it is the comforting brass that comes to support the passionate strings, all guided by a melancholy bassoon.
The performed excerpts also reveal the influence of jazz in the work of Gabriel Yared. This is particularly true of the score of 37 ° 2 in the morning (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986), where Lewis Morison’s saxophone, with its intense and sensual sound, plunges into a jazzy atmosphere, which would perfectly suit the images of a sunrise over Manhattan. The sounds are also felt, although in a more discreet way, in the soundtrack of L’Amant , a delicate page relating the birth of the amorous passion, from which emerge, in the middle of a delicate harp and cottony layers of violins , some jazzy piano notes.
A great lover of classical music, Gabriel Yared does not hesitate to pay tribute to his masters in his works. This is the case in The English Patient , for which he composed an elegant prelude in the style of Bach , or even in the score of the ballet Raven Girl , choreographed in 2013 by Wayne McGregor , a light refrain in which the influence is felt. by Mozart , played here with malice by the pianist Suzana Bartal, offering a nice moment of complicity with the orchestra.
A composer without borders, Gabriel Yared ventures into Argentinian music with La Lune dans le gutter (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983). Here he performs a tango for large orchestra, where Juanjo Mosalini’s mysterious and lascivious bandoneon dialogues with a solo violin, performed with passion by Nathan Mierdl, with almost Gypsy accents.
The concert is also an opportunity to discover new pages. Like this excerpt from the soundtrack of Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), a big budget Hollywood peplum, for which the composer’s music was ultimately not chosen. A surprising decision when listening to this excerpt, supposed to accompany the bag of the city of Troy, martial page in which the brass warriors sound the attack, supported by thunderous percussions. A page at the antipodes of another unpublished piece, Adagio for an unreleased film , a serious and majestic passacaglia inspired by Bach .
For her two interventions, the young soprano Héloïse Poulet, spotted a few years ago by the composer, delivers a successful performance, without suffering from the comparison with the two singular voices that preceded her on the screen. In “Lullaby for Cain”, lugubrious and melancholy lullaby initially sung by Sinéad O’Connor for the film The Talented Mr. Ripley(Anthony Minghella, 1999), the crystalline and delicate voice of the soprano subtly alternates moments of great sweetness and fury. It begins with an almost imperceptible thread of voice, on the edge, picking up the high notes with a touching fragility. But very quickly the instruments were carried away, and the voice was overwhelmed by the orchestra, only succeeding in extricating itself from it fully during the apotheosis of the piece, the pronunciation of Cain’s name, in a heart-rending cry.
Héloïse Poulet makes the stylistic splits for her second stint on stage, where she performs “La Complainte de la vieux salope”, a humorous song interpreted by Catherine Ringer in Tatie Danielle (Étienne Chatiliez, 1990), a large demonstrative number which is more similar from the world of opera. The soprano delivers a performance that is certainly less bombastic than the singer of Rita Mitsouko, who played the diva to their heart’s content on this piece, but this allows the interpretation to gain in elegance and vocal power. Héloïse Poulet shows great dramatic expressiveness and a beautiful length of breath, proudly showing off her piercing highs and her laughing vibrato, offering splendid vocalizations.
So many musical pages that allow us to grasp the universe of Gabriel Yared, carried here by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France , under the precise and passionate direction of Dirk Brossé, whose musicians prove once again that they are capable of anything play, recalling the many bridges between classical music and film music
Source: Gabriel Yared in the spotlight at Radio France: 40 years of film music – news – Ôlyrix
Pas De Merde 