Business: CIBC's new Boss says "Yeah Mon"

The sitting US President may have raised the bar when it comes to mastering greetings in the Jamaican vernacular, but new CIBC First Caribbean boss Gary Brown, being a musician in his former and even present life, was ceding no ground when he took the podium at a welcome reception at the Terra Nova in his honour.

Preceded by a robust jazz suite from Harold Davis and Friends (Paul Madden -bs; Warren Harris -sx; and Andrew "Pregs" Thompson -dr), Brown adopted the now universal two-word greeting "Yeah mon" which elicited the expected peals of laughter from the clients, friends and well-wishers gathered in the hotel's Venetian room.

Based in Barbados, Brown arrives ata fortuitous time for the bank, which has seen strong capital gains over the past six months.

Brown confirmed the sentiments of other speakers thatthe bank's real growth prospects lay in the retail segment of the business, which it intended to make its presence felt, backed by the considerable resources and stability of its Canadian parent.

The gathering was also reminded of CIBC's strides i nthe digital banking space, including its online portal and its mobile app.\

Scoring Bolivar

Alberto Arvelo entrusted the film score for “The Liberator,” Venezuela’s Oscar entry, to a young composer who’d never before written music for film — but it was a pretty safe gamble on the part of the director, because the first-timer happened to be Gustavo Dudamel, the musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and one of the most vital and exciting figures in the world of classical music.

His presence at screenings and events certainly helped raise the profile of the epic film, in which actor Edgar Ramirez plays the South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar. And when the nine-film foreign-language shortlist was announced on Dec. 19, “The Liberator” was perhaps the most surprising to make the cut – as well as a movie that qualifies Dudamel in the Best Original Score category, too.

Both native Venezuelans, Dudamel and Arvelo had been close friends for more than a dozen years, and the maestro originally came to “The Liberator” as a musical advisor. “My wife was pregnant and we were expecting the baby soon, so I cleared my calendar for a month,” he told TheWrap. “I was there with the family, but at the same time I had a piano and I was reading the script. So I started writing a few little things.

“I played him some things and said, ‘I’ll give you these ideas, and then you can talk to somebody who can write the score,’” he added with a laugh. “And he said, ‘No, you are the composer.’”

All of those initial themes, he said, ended up in the score, which he completed from hotel rooms on the road a year later, while touring the United States with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. The Bolivar orchestra, a former youth orchestra that Dudamel has been conducting since he was a teenager, recorded the score.

“When you are coming from my world, where you are used to interpreting all of the great composers, you see the genius of the orchestration and the power of the phrase,” said Dudamel. “But you have to be very careful what you give to a movie. You should bring a color, an atmosphere—but if the music becomes a main character, it is too much.

“I might come from the world of Wagner and Mahler and big orchestrations, and I started out writing full symphonic things. But in the end what I wrote was very simple.”

from TheWrap.com