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Youth Without Youth -- opens Friday, December 14th

Youth Without Youth, writer/director Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, opens in select US cities on December 14th. Based on a novella by the Romanian author Mircea Eliade, the film is "a love story wrapped in a mystery. Set in Europe before WWII, a timid professor is changed by a cataclysmic event and explores the mysteries of life."

The film features original music by Osvaldo Golijov, with additional orchestrations by Ljova. Moreover, Ljova's composition "Middle Village" (originally available on Ljova's debut CD), was re-recorded especially for Youth Without Youth, featuring Ljova on viola, and Hungarian cymbalom virtuoso, Kálmán Balogh!

(The song "Middle Village", with new lyrics by Sarah Gancher, will appear on the upcoming CD by Ljova & the Vjola Contraband and featuring Ljova's wife, the vocalist Inna Barmash, slated for release in spring/summer 2008. While you wait, there is a video of a live performance, here.)


YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH links:
-- Main IMDb page with cast and crew info
-- Showtimes in your area
-- Trailers
-- the Soundtrack CD is available for sale on Amazon.com

Enjoy the film!

(FFC, Osvaldo Golijov, Anahid Nazarian, Ljova, and most of the music recording team.)

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Reviews

This self-released debut recording from 27-year-old Russian-born Lev Zhurbin (aka Ljova), one of New York's fastest-rising composers and instrumentalists, is something special... Ljova continually delights
---Anastasia Tsioulcas, Billboard

Rustic dances and evocative soundscapes, all crafted from ... the gorgeously grainy purr of his fiddle.
---Steve Smith, Time Out New York

Eclectic with an ear for texture...Throaty melodies supported by pizzicato rhythms, lush chordal figures and counterpoint.
---Allan Kozinn, New York Times

Though he was born in the string quarry of Russia and refined in the purifying precincts of Juilliard, Zhurbin turned out to be a lover of gritty hybrids. The music he writes and plays is full of Brahmsian tone, Bartók lines, hiccupping Hungarian rhythms, Klezmer soul and the sexy plaintiveness of tango and the blues.
---Justin Davidson, Newsday

Best of June 2006 New Releases
---John Schaefer, host of WNYC's New Sounds and Soundcheck

Like many younger musicians, this leader has absorbed a panoply of music and gleefully undermines rigid notions of genre.
---Sean Patrick Fitzell, ALL ABOUT JAZZ

From the poignant to the jolly... a superb player and composer, a Brilliant Debut. (Top 10 Jewish Records of 2006)
---George Robinson, THE JEWISH WEEK

No barriers...Fluid stylistic grace...
---Ken Smith, GRAMOPHONE Magazine

The off-kilter rhythms he favors ... tug and pull at you in strange and mysterious ways, as do Ljova's melodies, which have the tuneful, emotive quality of good pop.
---Alexander Gelfand, JAZZIZ Magazine

Proves that an integration between seemingly different cultures is possible, inevitable, and fruitful
---Osvaldo Golijov, composer