This is a delicious winter salad, the wonderful combination of beetroot, potatoes, pine-nuts gherkins, feta cheese and capers has me hooked. At the moment I am cooking this once a week and everybody who tries it loves it!
Ingredients
Four or five Beetroot
Baby new potatoes (roughly equal quantity to the beetroot)
Two good hands full of runner beans,
half a block of Feta cheese,
a handful of chopped gherkins,
a tablespoon of capers,
two or three spring onions
table spoon of pine-nuts.
oil and vinegar
Method
Peel the beetroot , cut into bite sized pieces and boil till tender. While the beetroot is cooking, boil the new potatoes in their skins. Boil the runner beans till tender. Drain all cooked veg and cool a little meanwhile toast the pine nuts in a pan and chop gherkins and spring onions. Cut up the feta cheese into small cubes and combine with the other ingredients in a salad bowl. Toss with a mix of good Balsamic vinegar, white wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.
Serve warm. If you want you can add a couple of chopped hard boiled eggs.
In France the artists and the technicians of show without a fixed employer can receive a supplementary indemnification besides their wage, for the days of the month in the course of which they did not work, and it during 243 days. To be able to benefit from this allocation poured by organism in load of unemployment, they have to prove that during a period of ten months, they worked at the very least 507 hours, that is every hour of repetition, recording or show must correspond to a wage and impressing social security contributions.
The main advantage of this social status is that he allows the artists to dedicate himself to their profession and to be available without having to look for an extra payment.
On the other hand, the artists have no material security beyond 9 months, therefore their financial standing is very fragile if they cross a too long period without having official job.
Nowadays French social policy is influenced by Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and therefore one always takes a new look at this social status of the artists and the technicians of show with as objective to abolish it and to transform artist’s job into liberal occupation.
Spring has come to Upsala, since a week or so, I’ve finished redecorating my living room, and I’ve composed a new piece – All the little Chinamen. For nyckelharpa, of course.
Going away again. This time I´m going to Settle, England to help two danceteachers at a danceworkshop with swedish dances. I´m going to play and they all going to dance the whole weekend. I´m gonna be allright there feet are going to bleed. It´s gonna be great!!
Su-a our wonderfully low tech musical saw player represented la banda Europa on the Guardian newspaper’s techie podcast today. I’m not sure when it goes on line but you should be able to find it at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/04/guardian_tech_weekly_podcast_1.html It was a great morning for networking when Su-a’s saw playing prompted all sorts of questions from the techie crowd who went appreciatively silent when she played applauding her performance of Somewhere Over The Rainbow. From there I went to meet Sandy Finlayson, lawyer and bagpiper , who agreed to come on La Banda Europa’s board of directors. Sandy is senior partner at http://www.mbmcommercial.co.uk and we are very lucky to have him take on the role of company secretary. All sorts of great new developments are on the cards for La banda…..watch this space!
Slainte
Jim
Yes. Tomorrow I´m going to Germany to play a concert at the 2 week long festival Nordfra in Leipzig. I´m playing with the band Nordic. Anders Löfberg (cello) and Magnus Zetterlund (mandolin). Of course I play the typical swedish instrument nyckelharpa. Please visit us at www.nordicmusic.nu if you want some nice swedish vibes!!
We are working on a La Banda Europa Youth Orchestra at the moment and intend to base the first summer camp in Aberdeen in August 2009. This will take the form of a three week summer camp including forays into the local community with a grand performance at the end of the three weeks.
We plan to site the youth orchestra and summer camp in a different European country each year over a three to five year cycle. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to tour the Youth orchestra/summer camp in this way?
La banda Europa is committed to increasing the number of people participating in and enjoying music in Europe and are developing developing a youth music education programme. We have educators on the team from all over Europe…. within La Banda, there are two music professors, the Head of a degree course in English folk music, the Head of the Scottish piping degree course in Glasgow, three university tutors, five members who teach at secondary school level and several workshop leaders with community education experience.
We are developing a workshop program that explores and compares indigenous European instruments and musical culture. The programme will offer workshops and master-classes on individual instruments including playing techniques and history.
(have a look at this quote from one of our board members)
Citizenship
“A key challenge for the European Union is to develop a common sense of a common citizenship which is enriched by cultural difference. Music – making it, performing it, listening to it – is potentially a unique way of constructing such an inclusive yet diverse civic identity. There is much talk about education for citizenship in the new Europe. Learning citizenship by making music could have a distinctive contribution to make to this process. In this sense, citizenship is the outcome of creative activity rather than the starting point for educational practice.” Ian Martin, Reader in Adult and Community Education, University of Edinburgh
I just arrived in Edinburgh from Inverness, last night with my car on the back of a recovery vehicle in the pissing rain. I was was immediately cheered up to find that we have had 42 views of the blog on our first day online!
I’m delighted to tell you that one or two members of the band want to contribute to this blog. So far you can expect to hear from Pascal lefuevre (France), Dick Lee (Scotland), Paco Blasco (Spain), Rory Campbell (Scotland) and Eric Rydvall(Sweden), Anne-Lise Foy (France). People will write in their own languages as well as English.
I know that other band members will also want to contribute. Expect to see regional European recipes and wine recommendations as well as music talk.
Music is an obsessive compulsive disorder. At least that’s the way it seems to me especially where La Banda Europa is concerned.I started thinking about creating a pan European orchestra when I was working on a movie called Festival by Annie Griffin. The music brief was to create the atmosphere of an international festival…Annie had been given a CD of a Semana Santa band from Seville and she had the idea that I should write a score to incorporate one. These Semana Santa bands are made up of Cornetas ( kind of single valve bugles dating back to the beginning of the 20th century) Fiscornos (flugel horns)and drums. Chris Young, the films producer, was keen to incorporate bagpipes into the score so it seemed obvious to me that I had to try to combine these two ideas. I wrote a score and we flew the Kirkliston Drambue pipe band over to Seville and recorded them along with the 80 piece Semana Santa band, La Banda Tres Caidas. It wasnt easy what with the language issues and the pipers love of whiskey but it was incredibly rewarding. The resulting combination set me off on the journey I am now on with La Banda Europa, currently a 35 piece pan European orchestra. Take a look at the ABOUT section for details of la Banda Europa.
In March 2006, I was awarded the ‘Creative Scotland Award for artists of distinction’. It is one of the richest arts awards to an individual in Europe. This allowed me time to begin research into available musicians and instruments and to write the music for this dream orchestra that could make the unique sound of Europe.
Before the Wolf
Working together with UZ Events, ideas were developed for a show BEFORE THE WOLF, incorporating such an orchestra. Over the winter of 2006-07, I started putting La Banda Europa together and writing the music. This was to be a large-scale, theatrically presented outdoor production.
As well as La Banda Europa we incorporated a thirty piece choir, a twenty piece drumming group and two boy sopranos from the Vienna Boys’ Choir into the production. The production itself was directed by Hilary Westlake (previously with Lumière and Son, and more recently Euro Disney).
Marseille residency
In December 2007 La Banda Europa was offered a week-long residency in Marseille, by Lieux Publics, France’s National creation centre for performances for public spaces. The residency involved rehearsals, master classes and conference.
This was a great opportunity to forge and reinforce strong bonds across national borders as well as nurturing and sustaining our developing cultural collaboration. The residency was such a success that it has become an objective of La Banda to organize residencies more often. The intention is to hold two or three residencies a year for small sub-groups of La Banda and one residency a year for the full band.
Celtic Connections
This concert at Celtic Connections, Glasgow in January 2008 included two new pieces especially commissioned for the event. The concert was fantastically well received by an audience of 1200 people who treated La Banda to a five minute standing ovation at the end. Both the Scotsman and the Herald five star reviews! BBC2’s Culture show invited La Banda onto its programme as a result of seeing the concert.
We are currently working on funding and sponsorship for future projects with lots of interesting ideas on the go. I’ll do my best to keep this blog going as well as opening it up to members of the band to make their own postings.
Watch this space!
Check out this youtube video of La banda europa in action
