Kats-Chernin's music on TV advert attracts listeners
Kats-Chernin's music on Lloyds TSB advert attracts listeners
Elena Kats-Chernin has been attracting new listeners to her music through a high profile new advertising campaign for the bank Lloyds TSB, screened on TV in the UK since 4 February.
The series of six adverts introduce a linked sequence of original and touching contemporary 3D animations by animator/director Marc Craste, perfectly matched by Kats-Chernin's haunting music. As soon as the TV campaign was launched, Lloyds TSB was inundated with requests for the music, and the first adverts have been streamed off a number of video websites: on www.kontraband.com there have been 113,500 views of the first advert For the Journey, and 64,000 of the second advert Save the Change, while there have beeen 13,500 views of For the Journey on www.YouTube.com.
The music heard on the adverts is a version of Eliza Aria, drawn from Kats-Chernin's ballet music for Wild Swans, created with choreographer Meryl Tankard for Australian Ballet in 2003. The ballet was based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, and the fairytale atmosphere is much in evidence in the extract used so successfully for the advert.
Kats-Chernin's Wild Swans Concert Suite, containing a voice and orchestra version of Eliza Aria, is available on an ABC Classics CD, also featuring her Piano Concerto No.2 and Mythic. The CD will be reissued in May with a new cover illustration from the Lloyds TSB advert, and the track heard on TV is now available as a download from iTunes.
To buy the CD from Amazon please click here
To download the music from iTunes click here
Boosey & Hawkes has published a special edition of the music heard in the advert, in an arrangement by the composer for piano with guitar chords. Other versions will follow in the coming months.
To purchase the sheet music please click here
The first TV ad follows Lloyds TSB's ‘Black Horse’, a high-tech green and blue liveried locomotive, which transports a young couple on their journey through life. The viewer travels with them from their first meeting on the train, to their marriage, the purchase and extension of their home and the birth of their daughter who, after school and university, continues her own journey, ultimately meeting another stranger on the train. As the ad draws to a close, the now elderly couple settle into retirement. The closing sequence features the legendary Lloyds TSB Black Horse and the new strapline ‘Lloyds TSB, for the journey…’
Elena Kats-Chernin is one of the most cosmopolitan composers working today, prolific across a wide variety of genres. She was born in 1957 in the Uzbekistan capital Tashkent and received intensive training from an early age in both figure skating and music. At the age of 14 she chose music as her career and left her home in the Volga riverside town of Yaroslavl to embark on a course of study at the Moscow Academy. In 1975 her family emigrated to Australia and she had to rapidly acquire a new language to continue her studies. She graduated from the New South Wales Conservatory in 1981 and was awarded a DAAD (German academic exchange) grant to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover. She remained in Germany for 13 years, returning in 1994 to Australia where she now lives in Sydney.
> Further information on Work: Wild Swans
Photo: image from the new LloydsTSB advert 'For the journey...'