DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
Last Friday and Saturday evening, at La Scala, Riccardo Muti made his return to the theatre he dominated for 19 seasons, after having been away for 12 years. He wasn’t conducting the La Scala Philharmonic but his own Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he has been its Artistic Director since 2010.
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So how do you get the attention of the Spotify editorial team? Well, the old “who-you-know” methods still apply: connected publicists, managers, labels, distributors, digital promotion experts, etc. — people in the industry that have the ear of a Spotify playlist curator or two.
But there’s another way, one that doesn’t require you to have connections or a big promotion budget: start DIY, get your songs onto lots of smaller playlists, and begin teaching Spotify’s algorithm to be on the lookout for more song activity from you.
The more activity your songs get, and in particular, the more your songs are added to playlists, the more likely it becomes that Spotify’s editorial team will take notice.
These are Spotify playlists managed by third parties, such as Pitchfork, or major-label playlists such as Topsify.
Just what they sound like: you create them, you promote them, and (assuming you’re verified) you feature them on your artist discography page!
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Keaton’s latest film sees him starring as Ray Kroc, the controversial mastermind behind McDonald’s national (and later global) expansion. Keaton spoke to Variety about how he got into the character of a man whose corporation has fed billions of people over the last several decades.
Keaton highlights that one of the most important aspects of playing a real-life individual is to “lock in” on that person’s essence. He says, “Really, from what John [Lee Hancock, director] started to tell me and what the writer had given me. I watched a documentary on Ray and I wasn’t into it long — seven or eight minutes — and I went, ‘I got it.’ It’s not like, ‘Oh, I got it, I understand everything.’ It was that I locked into what I thought the essence of the guy was. It immediately put me on the general highway. Then I had to narrow it down, and narrow it down and winnow it down, and get into the details. You never do an impression, and yet I felt somewhat obligated to kind of simulate his attitude and his sound. You know, that Illinois-ish, not quite Chicago-ish Midwest kind of thing. Then once you start looking in his wardrobe and then you start to put on the wardrobe.”
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The part as actually written to be just a day’s work: It was the funeral scene at the beginning of the movie where there are some Amish men and boys walking through a cornfield, down to the farm where Kelly McGillis’s character’ family lives. It was a funeral for her husband. I think I had one word in German and that was it. It’s funny, the same day that I was offered the Witness job in Pennsylvania — I was living in New York at the time — I was also offered a part in a production of Shakespeare in the Park for that summer. That was the thing to do obviously, I thought, but my rep, Bill Treusch, said, “Not so fast. It’s not often that you have someone like Peter Weir coming through town and casting a movie. You can do a play anytime. Trust me, just go down and do this thing.”
So I took the train down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, did the day’s work and at lunch Peter Weir came over to the table where I was sitting with some of the other actors and asked, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I felt like maybe I said the thing in German wrong! He looked very serious. He says, “What are you doing the next six weeks?” I said, “I don’t know, nothing?” He said, “I was looking at [co-star] Alexander Godunov and I think I will make you be his brother if you are willing to hang around. Wherever he is, especially when he’s interacting with Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford, you are sort of the audience’s eyes watching and seeing their relationship develop, and your brother get jealous. I can’t tell you what you will be doing, but we will figure it out as we go along.” I worked once or twice a week at most, mostly just background. That movie gave me the absolute wrong idea of what filmmaking is like because the director was polite and there was no yelling, and everything ran smoothly and professionally.. [Laughs.] Work always finished on time or a little before. It was like, “Wow, what a great business!” Then it took me another 20 years to have another experience like that.
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Much to her mother’s delight, Davis did decide to veer towards the stage, making the change after graduating from University College Dublin with a degree in English Literature, when she applied for a Masters in Singing at DIT’s Conservatory of Music and Drama. At that point, opera was as foreign to her as the many languages she’d be required to learn – but mastering Russian, German, French and Italian opened up a whole new way for the soprano to explore emotion.
‘Through another language you find a different kind of expression, it’s something quite remarkable. I’ve found Russian to be the most beautifully expressive language, containing such specific words for relaying emotions, and I wouldn’t have ever known that if I hadn’t learnt to sing it,’ she says.
Davis’s love of literature has put her in good stead; of all the heroines in the repertory, she sees herself to be most like the bookworm Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugine Onegin – an opera adapted from the novel by Alexander Pushkin.
‘I read a lot and I think that informs me as a performer. I think you’re more open to directors and speaking about different characters if you have a big frame of reference. I believe we are singing actresses,’ she says.
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