Krakow/Berlin (dpa) – British star violinist Nigel Kennedy (65) recorded a piece by Japanese composer Ryūichi Sakamoto for refugees from Ukraine and other crisis regions. Kennedy, who became world famous in 1989 with his recording of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, has been living for years in a small village east of Kraków – about 200 kilometers from the Polish-Ukrainian border. The situation of the refugees at the border and the immediate vicinity are very depressing, he told the German Press Agency in Berlin.
The current situation has now led Kennedy to record a short version of Sakamoto’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”. The music is from the 1983 anti-war film “Furyo – Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”, in which David Bowie played a British soldier in Japanese captivity.
Kennedy linked the campaign to the organization “Violins Not Violence”, which provides young people with musical instruments. In this case, Kennedy commented on his recording that Ukrainians or refugees from other war-torn regions should be connected to instruments and the integrating, healing properties of music. Many fleeing musicians could not take their instruments with them. Kennedy therefore called for donating musical instruments to refugees.
The accompanying video that has now been released begins with the English version of a quote by Bertolt Brecht from the Svendborg poems that Brecht wrote in exile in Denmark in 1939: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? There will also be singing. About the dark times .”
Kennedy can then be seen recording the three-and-a-half-minute piece in his studio with cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska. Also shown is Kennedy making a border sign related to “Violins Not Violence,” which Kennedy, known for his unconventional demeanor, wears in a parka and jogging pants and, violin case in hand, leaves in the snow at the edge of a forest above a small town.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:220322-99-620142/3
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