Sarah Boesveld | 13/09/12
World peace is a challenging goal, but you can’t accuse employees at the United Nations of ignoring new ways to achieve it. Their latest effort? Corral a group of diplomats to sing some Michael Jackson and Bob Dylan. This week, the UN dropped the Ambassadors Sing for Peace album, a compilation of kumbaya songs — One Love, Imagine and What a Wonderful World are among them — performed by five ambassadors, including Canada’s own permanent representative in New York, Guillermo E. Rishchynski, appointed to the position in August 2011. The disc, directed by Emmy Award-winning composer, arranger and choral conductor Gary Fry, will benefit The Friendship Ambassadors Foundation’s youth assemblies. Ambassador Rishchynski spoke with the National Post‘s Sarah Boesveld, a day after performing Mr. Jackson’s Heal the World at the record launch.
Q: The UN is tasked with tackling the world’s biggest problems — poverty, international security, human rights, democracy — and five of you had the time to record a CD?
A: Well, we did it on Saturday afternoons. We did it on our own time, it certainly didn’t take us away from our duties, because we’re all pretty busy representing our countries here and doing what needs to be done at the UN. That’s why the project took so long — it started in February and didn’t get launched until September. (More Below Video)
Q: Some recording artists are in for a couple of weeks and they’re out again.
A: We don’t have that luxury, believe me.
Q: You’ve said that cutting this record was hard work. How?
A: Aside from two of the members who’ve had some sort of professional background in singing — the ambassador to Romania [Simona Miculescu] and the ambassador to Cape Verde [Antonio Pedro Monteiro Lima] — the other three of us were amateurs in every sense of the word. I’d never been in a recording studio before.
Q: You’ve just been a shower singer, right?
A: Well, no, but in the car. We had to pick songs, we had to learn songs, we had to rehearse and we had to go through the various takes and work with the musical director, so it was a project that took a lot of time and one of the things we commented on was that it was hard work for us to be able to do this project and it takes equally and probably a hell of a lot more work to be able to achieve peace.
Read More + See More Videos: http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/12/music-should-unite-people-canadian-diplomat-joins-un-ambassadors-to-sing-for-peace/
Source: nationalpost / MJ-Upbeat.com
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