Friday, September 24, 2010

Rolando who?

You remember when Joshua Bell played almost unnoticed in one of the Metro stops in Washington DC, and made only $32 for 45 minutes of play? (here is the link to YT)

Rolando Villazon made an extra step and sang a tune from his new CD on a Paris Métro train, in front of the numerous commuters. All that happened last Monday during rush hour... and despite his star-status in Paris, Rolando was completely ignored. Here is proof:



What do you conclude from this?

Ed: Above video contains only 45 sec of full material suppressed from both WAT and DailyMotion portals.

13 comments:

  1. The Parisians have better taste than I thought.

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  2. Que ce soit dans le métro de New York ou à Paris, la même indifférence, le même challenge, courir travailler, pas le temps pour la musique, ni l'art.
    mais cela n'a pas empêche Joshua Bell de faire une carrière internationale !!!!.

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  3. They probably thought "oh, another manic depressive homeless guy singing on the train. Better to just ignore him."

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  4. I conclude it's time for him to get a new publicist.

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  5. @Anonymous-es: I was playing with all kinds of possible conclusions but these two were not on my playground :) Thx
    I wonder however if this is bad PR. You can argue it both ways.

    @schmup53 This is very probably true too. Especially during rush hour ;)

    @Danièle C'est ça ! Toutefois c'est étonnant que personne n'a applaudi [c'est filmé dans le métro sur la ligne 1, ou les voitures ne sont pas séparées].

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  6. I suspect they were afraid he was going to pass the hat around to anyone who showed any interest.

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  7. I just don't see why people who are intent on doing something should be expected to be yanked out of that to pay attention to something else. Even something artistic and presumably wonderful (although who sounds wonderful in a subway station?). Give these poor commuters a break. They've got jobs and lives and thoughts in their heads. And other music.

    Lily

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  8. That opera is not for those, who was sitting there. But it's worth to appreciate that nobody said to him "Excuse me, you're insane!"

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  9. I thought a few of the passengers looked as if they did recognise that this singer's voice was a cut above, perhaps even suspected more. Maybe they were too polite to stare at him.

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  10. The truth is that most people are not interested in classical music and any opera singer is a completely unknown person to them.
    Villazon annoyed them.

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  11. The truth is that he doesn't look like a respectable world class opera singer at all. He looks just like a drunk bum who is about to puke at any moment.

    At 0:36 and 0:42 somebody says "just a moment!" What was that all about??

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  12. His voice is not especially pleasant. Opera singers nowadays have careers because they can hit notes and project them loudly enough over an orchestra in a big hall, not because they have pleasant voices.

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