“Have you heard about our Easter Monday tradeetions?” asked my Slovak colleague Eva. It was the Thursday before Easter 1991, my first year as an English teacher in her country, and we were getting ready to leave for the four-day break.

“No.”

“Oh, there eez much exciting. The boys chase the girls weeth wheeps.”

“With whips?”

“Yes, weeth wheeps.” She gathered the last of her belongings. “Have nice weekend. Hope you see some action.”

She hurried out the office door, eager to get to her family’s cottage in a nearby village, leaving me with mental impressions of teenage guys cracking bullwhips. A mock threat, I hoped. They didn’t actually lash the girls, did they? I felt like Captain Kirk following Mr. Spock to his home planet to witness the Vulcan mating ritual. Slavic Europe sometimes seemed like another world.

The housemother at our school’s dorm had invited me to spend the weekend in her family’s cottage. There, I was relieved to discover that the “wheeps” turned out to be braided willow branches with bright red, green and yellow ribbons tied to the tapered ends. 

“It’s called a korbačík,” said Ľubomír, the housemother’s twenty-something son.

“It means ‘little switch’,” said his girlfriend Anna.

“Yeah, and here’s how you use it.” Ľubo pulled one out of the vase on the coffee table and swung. Fwiiisshhhh. Anna nimbly moved her butt out of the way at the last instant.

“Not till Monday morning! Besides, Tuesday, the girls switch the boys.”

“That’s not true!”

“Well, you just better watch out.” She shook a finger at him.

Monday morning he did chase her down for a few playful thwacks as she giggled in response. Strange as it was, I suddenly wanted to take part in this ritual.

Sarah Brightman is taking musical travel to new heights. She's scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz rocket Sept. 1, visit the International Space Station for 10 days and become the first professional musician to sing from orbit. She'd announced these plans back in 2012, but since she's been training in Star City near Moscow, it's been back in the news lately. Here's a good article on the project.

Her ex-husband, Andrew Lloyd Weber, is helping her find appropriate music to sing, and there's some consideration of having someone back on earth accompany her. Maybe David Bowie can join her on some of his Major Tom stuff.

Selfie tourism is getting out of control. Seoul, South Korea has recently banned the selfie stick. U.S. parks are getting stricter, especially since one New Jersey hiker was mauled to death by a bear who apparently didn't like being included in the shot. Amazingly, a British man was fined last summer - lol - in Pamplona - snort, snicker - for taking one during the Running of the Bulls. Condé Nast Traveler has a recent article on the trend here.

Finally, I'm sharing this clip of the "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The clip was made last may in Odessa, Ukraine. It's a satirical presentation--the announcer says that Swan Lake always appeared in Soviet media during a change of power (to crowd out any serious speculation on the succession struggles--see this article here) and expresses his hope that Putin's aggression in Ukraine was a fatal mistake.

The Sound of Music marks its fiftieth anniversary this year, and I’ve already had the opportunity to hear two “new takes” on the familiar tunes. As someone who’s been to Austria numerous times, including Salzburg twice, I’d like to add some relevant thoughts on this music/travel blog (but I’m saving the travel aspect for a later post).

In her Sound of Music medley at the Academy Awards, Lady Gaga refrained from revamping anything and simply let her stunning voice carry her straightforward interpretation.

Some critics were disappointed. Rae Alexandra at San Francisco Weekly, had hoped for something more transgressive and pined away for the “arrive-in-an-egg Lady Gaga of old.” I think such reviewers should consider the earlier Stefani Germanotta in this video. 

Outlandish costumes may have boosted her to superstardom, but she’s talented enough to nurture her career in a simple but elegant white gown. And intelligent enough to know that one can be thoroughly creative by working within more traditional “confines” and refining old material to new artistic heights. Exactly what she did at the Oscars. She also had the humility to spend six months on extra vocal training to get things just right. 

Her reward: the audience loved it, and a teary-eyed Julie Andrews came out to congratulate and hug her. Elisabeth von Trapp, granddaughter of the original Maria and probably the best judge, called the performance “exquisite.” 

If there’s someone who does have artistic license to do non-standard interpretations of songs from the movie/musical, it is precisely von Trapp. I had the privilege of hearing her perform Sunday at Hungar’s Parish Church in Bridgetown, Virginia, an Episcopal church which dates from the 1740s. Light flooded in from the ten huge windows that line the sides of the building and the wall behind the altar, illuminating the white interior, adding a magical touch to an afternoon of poetry, singing and guitar playing. Her personal story telling enthralled the audience of over a hundred in the colonial-era box pews.

Von Trapp opened with a guitar-and-voice arrangement of Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled” and continued with a performance marked by Sound of Music tunes interspersed with stories of her childhood, and how screenwriters embellished and re-wrote things. “You can’t go over those mountains into Switzerland,” her father, Werner – represented in the film as Kurt – told her when she was a little girl. Actually, you’d end up in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the resort in Bavaria. Actually, the family never “escaped” into Switzerland, but took a train for a concert tour into Italy first, as she recounts in this recent column (also cited above).

She recounted the von Trapp journey from exile to new homeland as a lead-in to “Immigrant Eyes,” Guy Clark’s homage to his grandfather, from which she segued into “America.” Later, in “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” she sang an emphatically singular “land where my father died”—an appropriate reminder we’re not all nth-generation Anglo-Saxons. She transitioned from that song into Edelweiss, then back into “let freedom ring.”

She performed other poetry put to music, including Frost’s “A Minor Bird” and an a cappella haiku of her own. She ended with “I’ll Be Seeing You” leading into a “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” medley.

Her guitar playing – which included her harmonizations of traditional English-language hymns – was replete with dissonant or jazzy chords. Her vocals were sweet and versatile; she glided through difficult phrasings with apparent ease.

Not only does she “own” these songs as a von Trapp, she has even played the part of Maria in productions of the musical, so she’s had to learn the lyrics and spoken lines by heart. With that background and level of mastery, she has the license and the ability to deviate significantly from the familiar Rogers and Hammerstein arrangements.

Both Elisabeth von Trapp’s stylizations and Lady Gaga’s “less inventive” versions of the familiar Sound of Music numbers are fitting tributes to the now-classic film.




For more information about this performer, including tour information, see her website at http://elisabethvontrapp.com/.