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700 museums open their doors for Long Night event

Night owls and culture vultures can explore over 700 of Austria’s museums from 6pm to 1am on Saturday, courtesy of the ORF’s Long Night of Museums event.

700 museums open their doors for Long Night event
The hare with amber eyes. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband/Michael Harvey

Many museums are offering special events or exhibitions for the occasion. One ticket covers all the museums in the city where you are based and costs €15 (or €12 for concessions). Children aged 12 can enjoy the event for free. Tickets can be purchased at the Museum Information Point in every state capital (in Vienna this is located at Maria-Theresien-Platz), and in the museums themselves.

As well as the bigger museums we recommend checking out some of the smaller, quirkier offerings – such as the Museum of Funeral Services in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, Vienna's Urania Observatory, or the Alpen Verein museum in Tyrol. 

Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) also happens to be celebrating its 125th anniversary and to mark the occasion it’s showing the famous ‘hare with amber eyes’ miniature sculpture. The sculpture inspired a family memoir by the British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. His family, the Ephrussis, were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris.

They lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis seized their property, including priceless works of art. However an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures was miraculously saved, and tucked away inside a mattress by a loyal maid at the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the war years. It will be the first time the ‘hare with amber eyes’ has been displayed in Vienna. Netsuke are beautifully crafted decorative buttons made of ivory or wood, which were traditionally attached to a man’s kimono.

An exhibition of Edmund de Waal’s work opens at the KHM on October 11th, and will feature further works which were recovered from the Ephrussi collection.

More information on the Long Night of Museums on October 1st at: https://langenacht.orf.at/

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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