Moscow Nights & Black Orpheus - Geza Hosszu Legocky & The 5 DeViLs - Live from Bologna 2009

Recorded live from the Teatro Manzoni
Bologna " Italy " February 2009

Geza Hosszu Legocky - Violinist & Leader of the Band
Laly Sarkozy (Sarközi Lajos Jr.) - 2nd Violin & Guitarre
Csaba Lukacs - Clarinet
Istvan Bango - Cimbalom
Gyorgy Szucs - Bass
Zoly Varady (Váradi Zoltán) - Viola

Biography

Geza was engaged in a closing concert of the second edition of the Martha Argerich Project, presenting himself for the first time as a leader and a founder of the ensemble "5 DeVils". As a result of an instantaneous success, their performance was released by the EMI Classics. Since then, 5 DeVils were broadcasted all over the world by the Radio 3, BBC etc. In 2005 The DeViLs was invited to participate in two concerts in the celebrated Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and was honored with starguest as pianistes Martha Argerich and Gabriela Montero. Shortly after the success in Teatro Colon, the National Argentinian Television invited the 5 DeViLs to perform in a Broadcast Show for one and half million TV watchers. Some of the following engagements included concerts in Brussels (Belgium) at the Four Season Music Festival, at the Aegina international Music Festival in Greece, and in Livorno, Teatro Mori (Italy), Grado, Palazzo ala Congressi (Italy), and the last performance at the Teatro Manzoni in Bologna (Italy).
The DeVils symbolize an astonishing virtuosity, spontaneity, and an extraordinary ability to transmit the music to the heart of the listeners, playing the repertoire from miniatures of Paganini, or Boulanger, to dazzling Hungarian, Romanian or Balkan traditional folk tunes, to the attractive Django's swing.


First Song:

"Moscow Nights" or "Midnight in Moscow" is one of the most famous Russian songs outside Russia.
The song was originally written as "Leningradskie Vechera" ("Leningrad Nights" in English) by two well-established authors, composer Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy and poet Mikhail Matusovsky in 1955, but upon the request from the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the song title was changed to "Podmoskovnye Vechera" ("Moscow Nights" in English) and the original lines of the song were also changed.
Under this new title, Podmoskovnye Vechera ("Moscow Nights" or, more correctly, "Evenings at Moscow Riverside"), the song was recorded by Vladimir Troshin, a young actor of the Moscow Art Theatre, for a sports documentary about the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the RSFSR, for a scene where the sportsmen rest in Moscow suburbs (Podmoskovye). It went unnoticed there, but gained a significant popularity after radio broadcasts.
In 1957, the song won the first prize and the international song contest during the World Festival of Youth and Students held in Moscow that year, quite unexpectedly for the authors. After that the song spread around the world, gaining particular popularity in China. In 1958 the song was noticed by Van Cliburn, whose performance significantly contributed to the popularity of the song abroad.
In the Soviet Union, the tune was the time call sounded every 30 minutes at the Mayak music and news radio station since 1964. The shortwave radio station Radio Moscow's English-language service played an instrumental version of "Moscow Nights" before every hour's newscast after informing listeners of frequency changes.
The British jazz group, Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, had a hit with the song in 1961 under the title "Midnight in Moscow" [1], and film exists which shows them playing it at a concert in Moscow. This version of the song peaked at #2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in early 1962; it also spent three weeks at #1 on the American "Easy Listening" chart, which would later become known as the Adult Contemporary chart.

Second Song:

Black Orpheus "Manhã de Carnaval" (trad. En: "Morning of Carnival"), is the title to the most popular song by Brazilian composers, Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Maria. The song appeared in the 1959 Portuguese-language film Orfeu Negro (English titled: Black Orpheus), by French director Marcel Camus based on a play by Vinícius de Moraes. Specially in the USA, the song is considered to be one of the most important Brazilian Jazz/Bossa songs that helped establish the Bossa Nova movement in the late 1950s. Manhã de Carnaval has become a jazz standard in the USA, while it is still performed regularly by a wide variety of musicians around the world in its vocalized version or just as an instrumental one.
The song is also known in the USA by the English text version titled: "A Day in the Life of a Fool," or simply as "Carnival" and in Spanish text by the name of "Manãna de Carnaval". All versions of foreign texts were written by different people using Bonfá's original music. In France the song is also known as "La Chanson D'Orphée" ("Orpheus' song").