Music world

The Polaris Music Prize is a music award yearly given to the finest full-length Canadian album based on artistic merit, regardless of genre, sales, or record label. The award was established in 2006 and includes a C$20,000 cash prize. The Polaris Music Prize is sculpted after the Mercury Music Prize, which is handed to the best British or Irish album.

And this year Montreal francophone rockers Karkwa were awarded the 2010 Polaris Music Prize for their album Les Chemins De Verre. And they came out with a $20,000 purse, and is handed out annually to the best Canadian album of the year, regardless of sales or genre.
Karkwa’s win marks the first time in the Polaris’ five year history that the award has been given to a non-English band.

The band – singer Louis-Jean Cormier, keyboardist Francois Lafontaine, drummer Julier Sagot, drummer Stéphane Bergeron and bassist Martin Lamontaigne – was formed in 1998 and have released three albums prior to Les Chemins De Verre, including Les Tremblements s’immobilisent, which won a trio of Felix Awards in 2006.

The complete cast of the 1965 Oscar-winning film reunited on the Oprah Winfrey Show for the first time in 45 years. The show also featured show by the real Von Trapp great-grandchildren.
Nicholas Hammond, who played the eldest boy Friedrich in the movie, said the “kids” are still close and are at present working on a new project together.

“We realised that we have got this riches trove of memorabilia that we have kept (from the shooting of the movie) our home movies and photos and all of the matter and we are doing a book, the seven kids, and answering all the questions that everybody has asked,” Hammond said. “We thought now was our chance to kind of give that back to all the magnificent fans around the world.” The book is expected to be out next year.

The actors recall about filming the movie and shared private anecdotes during the one-hour show with Winfrey. Noting that the movie “made my career,” Andrews, 75, said, “It was that big a movie, and we had no idea really at the beginning that it was going to be that huge.” Andrews was 28 and a new mom when she headed to Austria to shoot for her role as the nun-turned-governess ‘Fraulein Maria.’ Andrews also spoke of her throat surgery in 1997, an operation that left her renowned voice permanently damaged.

“It was not a successful operation, and tissue was removed. I didn’t have cancer, I didn’t have nodules, I didn’t have anything. So, sadly, I had to work to deal with the loss of a voice because it just didn’t come back.” Plummer, who played the strict widower Captain Von Trapp, admitted having “fallen in love” with Andrews after seeing her on Broadway in ‘My Fair Lady’ a few years before.

Plummer said he was not thrilled with the role of Captain Von Trapp at first. “I wanted to do a musical, and that was what paying attention it to me. But the part as written was not accurately Hamlet… There was not enough humour in it.” ‘The Sound of Music’, which captured the real life Von Trapp family’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, won five Oscars counting for Best Picture. Songs from the movie like ‘My Favorite Things,’ ‘Climb Every Mountain’ and ’16 going on 17′ are one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.

A remastered 45th anniversary DVD and Blu-ray set, counting sing-alongs, a map of filming locations, quizzes and a full length documentary, goes on sale on November 2.