Word: ulvaeus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When he was honored at London's Grosvenor Hotel with a Music Industry Trust Award in November 2008, he was feted by some of the biggest names in the business. Bono and the rest of U2 presented the award, Take That performed, and Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the male half of ABBA, tried to outbid British rock band Snow Patrol in the fundraising auction that followed. (See the top 10 Michael Jackson songs...
...Where have Benny and Bjorn been? Well, their music has been on Broadway, eight times a week for the past eight years, and in theaters around the world. Mamma Mia!, the show based on Andersson and Ulvaeus' ABBA songbook, has been the major theatrical hit of the past decade and an international blockbuster of a movie. But those tunes are old; ABBA burst on the scene in 1974 by winning the Eurovision competition with Waterloo, and the quartet - Andersson, Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad - lasted eight more years, breaking up in 1982. Then what? The lads did what...
...Bangkok," "Nobody's Side" and "I Know Him So Well" - and impressed many listeners as having the richest score of the decade. Or, he added defiantly, any decade since. Andersson, who had shown a mastery of the pop idiom as composer of the music for the ABBA songs (Ulvaeus wrote the words), tapped a symphonic romanticism that wedded Richard Rodgers to the brassier modern idiom. The Andersson-Ulvaeus partnership was poised to dominate Broadway. (See TIME's top 10 plays and musicals...
...Instead, they went home, where Andersson had an even more ambitious idea: to compose Kristina fran Duvemala (Kristina from Duvemala) as a sung-through national epic, in a style that would span folk tunes, symphonies and musical theater. Ulvaeus, adapting the Moberg novels - which had served as the source for two popular Swedish films in the '70s, The Emigrants and The New Land - also had a radical notion: for the first time in his career, he'd write his lyrics in his native language...
...containing a staggering 39 songs, the piece was staged in Stockholm in 1997 and ran for nearly four years. The three-disc CD topped the local charts but was never issued abroad. Herbert Kretzmer, who had anglicized the French musical Les Misérables, worked with Andersson and Ulvaeus on an English translation, yet despite the seismic success of Mamma Mia!, the new show never left Sweden...