Elizabeth Bishop Legacy Recording Update – We Still Need Your Help!

I’m excited to report that the recent session for the EB Legacy Recording was a great success. It means that the settings by composers John Plant and Christos Hatzis have been recorded. The Alasdair MacLean and Emily Doolittle settings will be done later in the fall. Suzie, the musicians and the technicians say that they are really pleased with how things went. They found St. David’s a wonderful venue and will probably use it again in the fall.

You can see them hard at work in this action shot of Blue Engine String Quartet (with Dinuk Wijeratne and Suzie LeBlanc on the right), taken by John Adams (Stonehouse Sound):

You can also see them here, happy after all their hard work, also taken by John. From left to right: Conductor Dinuk Wijeratne, Suzie LeBlanc, Christos Hatzis. How wonderful that Christos came down from Toronto to be at this session!

We are really hoping to have some video to post of the sessions, and other things, soon.

If you check out the EB Legacy Recording site (www.eb100legacyrecording.blogspot.ca) you can see that we are making progress with the fund-raising campaign. We still need your help to make this beautiful music come to life again so that we can bring it to the world. We have some wonderful perks for your contributions and are cooking up some more ideas, which we’ll be putting up very soon – stay tuned!

On Thursday, 23 August, the Elizabeth Bishop Legacy Recording project and fund-raising campaign will be featured in the Colchester Weekly News (part of the Truro Daily News outfit (http://www.trurodaily.com/). The piece will appear in the newspaper itself and will also be online for awhile. Thanks so much to Sherry Martell who did the piece. Her interest and support is greatly appreciated.

Thanks to all of you who have contributed – we are most grateful – but as you can see, we are still some distance from our goal. With economic times as they are, artists are needing to find new ways to raise money and support their creative endeavours. Crowd source fund-raising is one of those ways. It means that anyone can be part of the team and help bring amazing art into the world because all it requires is a small contribution. Of course, we’d love to have and would be grateful for big contributions, but, truly, it is lots of people helping in any way they can that builds the support we need.

Around Elizabeth Bishop there is an amazing community of readers, artists and scholars, across the globe. In Nova Scotia, that community has grown amazingly because of the EB100 celebrations in 2011 and the work of the EBSNS since 1994. All the creative projects that were done in Nova Scotia last year happened because of a strong, vibrant arts community. There are countless worthy projects out there to support, but we believe this one is a real winner! Its reach will be far and wide. The music is so beautiful (I can say this enthusiastically as a member of all the audiences for the performances in 2011, all of which were utterly memorable.) We hope that you, too, will support this project. Become part of the Elizabeth Bishop community – it is a welcoming place and Bishop’s art will enrich your life!

We look forward to hearing from you.