Self-indulgent Friday
I can't imagine why I woke up needing to hear the Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song from Iolanthe. It was a hellacious week, but they all are, aren't they? At least we got to see Pelosi symbolically rip the Orange Ogre a new one. Even Mr. Sam never went there.
Anyway, YouTube seldom lets me down, and I quickly found a version by Todd Rundgren. It was better than not bad, though the explosion at the end seems gratuitous. Better than the Pearl Fishers duet sung by Rufus Wainwright and David Byrne. I admire their guts -- that's a tough sing for the likes of Nicolai Gedda and Ernest Blanc, which I'm hearing right now. I heard Gedda in recital once, Dichterliebe in cavernous Avery Fisher Hall, and he looked very tense though he sang beautifully. The second half, Rachmaninoff songs, was considerably warmer and more relaxed, maybe because he and his accompanist, Alexis Weissenberg, had recorded all this music.
Now we've moved on to the same duet in German, with Fritz Wunderlich and Prey (gotta love the 'Tube). I never heard this before, but Fritz could sing the Munich phone book, as they say, and it would be gorgeous. "O Gott, welche Perfektion," swoons one commenter, and I can only add, "Ja, ja." Like the Marschallin.
Where is this going? Now it's excerpts from Barber of Seville, still Prey and Wunderlich in German and with video, apparently a televised stage production from 1959. YouTube is always skimpy on details. All right, on to "The Ring Without Words," Lorin Maazel and some orchestra traversing Wagner's end-of-the-world romp in 75 minutes. What would the Master say? Another of his raving anti-Semitic screeds or would he just be glad of the royalty check?
You know what I miss? Conductors who didn't give a damn, who made arrangements to suit themselves and show off their orchestras, Stokowski's Bach, Beecham's Messiah with harps and cymbals. Blasphemous in this time of musical correctness, all those John Eliot Gardiner recordings with no vibrato and no life. I hope the "original instruments" fad is nearing its end. We can never hear the Eroica as the revelation it was in 1805 because we've heard everything written since then, from Schubert to Sgt. Pepper, and there's no erasing it. Make music for 2020 ears.
Creeping theme-park-ism, I call it. There's a facsimile of the Globe in London where they try to do Shakespeare as it was done the first time, outdoors in the afternoon with the actors addressing the audience. An audience who arrived in buses and cabs and on the tube, cellphoned and freshly bathed, trying to impersonate groundlings when they aren't checking their messages and looking for the toilets and drinking wine from plastic bottles. Is this bringing them any closer to solving the mystery of Hamlet? I wonder.
There's so much stuff on YouTube, it's exhausting. All the Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich symphonies, Bach cantatas, Chopin piano music, complete operas in many versions, every scrap of popular music ever recorded, some of it very scrappy indeed. Not to mention people reading the King James Bible, Ulysses, The Republic, Middlemarch, the novels of Jane Austen, Kafka, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, does anybody buy anything? And the miscellaneous gems -- the other night I heard Amos Oz talk about Israel and Palestine, an interview with Gore Vidal, and an economist named Allen Sanderson explaining why Chicago was going to get the 2016 Olympics. (Oh, well.) It's oddly irritating when something I really want isn't here, like the off-Broadway show Alec Wilder, Clues To a Life. It never made it to CD but I have the LP. Maybe I'll buy a turntable just to hear Keith David sing "Blackberry Winter" again.
Maazel and his big band are finished, and we have segued into "Rhapsody in Blue." See what I'm talking about?
The liar next time. Yeah, I have to, the Senate failed us again.
Anyway, YouTube seldom lets me down, and I quickly found a version by Todd Rundgren. It was better than not bad, though the explosion at the end seems gratuitous. Better than the Pearl Fishers duet sung by Rufus Wainwright and David Byrne. I admire their guts -- that's a tough sing for the likes of Nicolai Gedda and Ernest Blanc, which I'm hearing right now. I heard Gedda in recital once, Dichterliebe in cavernous Avery Fisher Hall, and he looked very tense though he sang beautifully. The second half, Rachmaninoff songs, was considerably warmer and more relaxed, maybe because he and his accompanist, Alexis Weissenberg, had recorded all this music.
Now we've moved on to the same duet in German, with Fritz Wunderlich and Prey (gotta love the 'Tube). I never heard this before, but Fritz could sing the Munich phone book, as they say, and it would be gorgeous. "O Gott, welche Perfektion," swoons one commenter, and I can only add, "Ja, ja." Like the Marschallin.
Where is this going? Now it's excerpts from Barber of Seville, still Prey and Wunderlich in German and with video, apparently a televised stage production from 1959. YouTube is always skimpy on details. All right, on to "The Ring Without Words," Lorin Maazel and some orchestra traversing Wagner's end-of-the-world romp in 75 minutes. What would the Master say? Another of his raving anti-Semitic screeds or would he just be glad of the royalty check?
You know what I miss? Conductors who didn't give a damn, who made arrangements to suit themselves and show off their orchestras, Stokowski's Bach, Beecham's Messiah with harps and cymbals. Blasphemous in this time of musical correctness, all those John Eliot Gardiner recordings with no vibrato and no life. I hope the "original instruments" fad is nearing its end. We can never hear the Eroica as the revelation it was in 1805 because we've heard everything written since then, from Schubert to Sgt. Pepper, and there's no erasing it. Make music for 2020 ears.
Creeping theme-park-ism, I call it. There's a facsimile of the Globe in London where they try to do Shakespeare as it was done the first time, outdoors in the afternoon with the actors addressing the audience. An audience who arrived in buses and cabs and on the tube, cellphoned and freshly bathed, trying to impersonate groundlings when they aren't checking their messages and looking for the toilets and drinking wine from plastic bottles. Is this bringing them any closer to solving the mystery of Hamlet? I wonder.
There's so much stuff on YouTube, it's exhausting. All the Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich symphonies, Bach cantatas, Chopin piano music, complete operas in many versions, every scrap of popular music ever recorded, some of it very scrappy indeed. Not to mention people reading the King James Bible, Ulysses, The Republic, Middlemarch, the novels of Jane Austen, Kafka, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, does anybody buy anything? And the miscellaneous gems -- the other night I heard Amos Oz talk about Israel and Palestine, an interview with Gore Vidal, and an economist named Allen Sanderson explaining why Chicago was going to get the 2016 Olympics. (Oh, well.) It's oddly irritating when something I really want isn't here, like the off-Broadway show Alec Wilder, Clues To a Life. It never made it to CD but I have the LP. Maybe I'll buy a turntable just to hear Keith David sing "Blackberry Winter" again.
Maazel and his big band are finished, and we have segued into "Rhapsody in Blue." See what I'm talking about?
The liar next time. Yeah, I have to, the Senate failed us again.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 1:20 PM
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