Where did all the music come from?

Weeks can go by when there isn’t a single classical music concert that really grabs my attention. Then suddenly there are so many that difficult choices have to be made. March is going to be one of those months. There are top orchestras, big names, great music, and sometimes a combination of all three, on offer.

The choice at the Bozar in Brussels this week includes the world-renowned Budapest Festival Orchestra, which is acting as a cultural flagship during Hungary’s EU presidency. For a different Hungarian flavour, there’s also an evening of Liszt’s music and words focusing on his musical settings of poets as well as his own writing.

Another name to jump out of the March offerings is Russian violinist Vadim Repin, who in 1989 became the youngest-ever winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. He’s playing Sibelius’s violin concerto this Friday and then Grieg, Elgar and Franck sonatas later in the month.

Always keen to hear chamber music, I noticed that there are two well-known quartets playing in Belgium this month: the Pavel Haas quartet in Ghent and the Hagen Quartett in Brussels.

And this selection doesn’t even include the Bozar gala concerts, whose programmes always have big musical names. The March concert boasts Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra dell' Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Boris Berezovsky playing Liszt’s concerto for piano and orchestra No. 1. The only downside to this series is the number of “VIPs” who are there as much for the networking as the music (cue more chatter, coughing and mobile phones than usual).

While the Bozar is the venue for a large proportion of the classical music concerts in Brussels, there are of course other places and a good selection can be found here. That said, when there’s a bumper crop of offerings like there is in March, the incentive to go hunting elsewhere is limited.

Only When I Dance: Rio Teenagers Pursue Their Dreams

Only when I dance is a documentary that follows two teenagers from rough, working class areas of Rio de Janiero striving to attain their dream of becoming professional ballet dancers - unsurprisingly it has been dubbed the Brazilian Billy Elliot. I enjoyed Billy Elliot; I loved Only when I dance.

The key to the film’s appeal lies in its two stars, 18 year-old Irlan Santos da Silva and 17 year-old Isabela Coracy. Director Beadie Finzi chose to follow these two dancers not because she could somehow tell where their lives were going to lead, but because of their personalities. 

Speaking in Brussels yesterday evening, Finzi explained how she was immediately drawn to these two particular dancers and could tell from their body language that it was going to work well. True, Finzi knew these two had a lot of potential to succeed in the world of dance, but so did other students. She chose Irlan and Isabela because she could sense their magnetism and warmth - worthwhile characteristics not just for the film, but also because Finzi and her crew were going to spend a year, on and off, with the two dancers and their families, filming the ups and downs of their lives.

Both dancers attended the Centro de Dança Rio, a school set up by former Brazilian ballerina Mariza Estrella in order to give the next generation a chance to succeed in a city where too many young people succumb to the easy temptation of drugs and crime. Mariza acts as the link between the poor neighbourhoods of Rio and the bright lights of New York and other western cities where the young dancers dream of working.

On the one hand the stories of Irlan, who lived with his family in Rio de Janiero’s most violent favela, the Complexo do Alemão, and Isabela, from a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Rio, are a million miles away from those of us watching the film yesterday in Brussels. That was part of the documentary’s appeal, an insight into another world, another way of living.

Yet for all the differences, the story had universal appeal because it was a tale of two children striving to realise their dreams and their parents doing everything within their means to help them. The human emotions, real warmth and sense of truth in the film were what made it. It was impossible not to be moved by the film. And because it was a film about real people and real lives, it was all the more compelling.

Of course a documentary chooses to include only certain elements of the characters’ lives and leave out others, to follow one particular narrative more closely and leave another undeveloped. These are the essential choices made during production in order to condense the real lives of two families filmed over a year into a work lasting less than an hour and a half. I accept that a documentary uses techniques that you find in a fictional film, but for me there’s something about the truth and the reality of a documentary that I find irresistible and inspiring. Only when I dance certainly fell into that category.

The Brussels screening of Only when I dance was organised by the United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe.