We need music! Now, I was thinking about Mahler's "Die zwei blauen Augen," the last of the four Wayfarer Songs --

Plus: We have a special musical bonus at the end!

Want a hint? I'll go you one better: Here's an audio tease --



Now could we have a post (of some sort?)


Irmgard Seefried sings Richard Strauss's "Morgen!," Op. 27, No. 4, in the composer's own orchestration, with Piero Bellugi conducting the Orchestre National de l'ORTF in Paris's Salle Pleyel, Jan. 20, 1965. Note -- as the camera does! -- the soloist playing the violin solos around which Strauss built his orchestration of the song. Isn't it interesting that in January 1965 the Orchestre National, at least for this concert, had a female concertmaster?

by Ken

This is a time, it seems to me, when we need more music. So that's pretty much what we're going to do today.

WHERE WE ARE NOW, BLOG-WISE?

Yes, I know we've got a growing tangle of loose threads, and I hope gradually to work our way through them. I'm even adding a couple of more. Last week's two-item "Rita Gorr sings Gluck" mini-compendium led me to want to listen to her performances of those two arias (Orfeo's "Che farò senza Euridice?" and Alceste's "Divinités du Styx") in context with other singers', to get a better sense of why Gorr's mean so much to me. As I've played with this, the project has become more and more intriguing, as to what makes these arias work and not work, so I still want to pursue this.

What's more, the SC vault has a good helping of Gorr as Saint-Saëns's Dalila, and a couple of snatches of her Walküre Fricka, which I want to bring out. And considering that I made particular reference to these roles along with Verdi's Amneris, I'd like to add some samples of that to what shapes up as yet another post.

AS FOR TODAY, WE NEED MUSIC NOW, DON'T WE?

Like it says up top, during the week I found myself thinking about, and hearing in my head, "Die zwei blauen Augen, the last of Mahler's four Songs of a Wayfarer, a song to which we once devoted a good deal of attention, icluding most of a post of its own (see below). I vaguely recalled that I had the Wayfarer Songs on a DVD of some sort, and finally tracked it down to an extremely miscellaneous one that EMI issued in its "Classic Archive" series, which they couldn't find a better way of titling than:

Schwarzkopf    Seefried
Fischer-Dieskau

Which is (let the record show) absolutely accurate. We get soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in an October 1961 staged-for-TV excerpt from her most famous role, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, giving us the final chunk of Act I, starting in the middle of the Marschallin's great monologue, at "Kann ich auch an ein Mädel erinnern"her sudden, haunting recollection of her innocent younger self, "fresh from the convent," with mezzo Hertha Töpper (who died just a week ago Saturday, a few weeks short of her 96th birthday); then soprano Irmgard Seefried is seen in two orchestral song groups via French TV: five by Richard Strauss from January 1965, including the "Morgen!" performance atop this post, and three by Mahler; and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau singing -- yes! -- Mahler's Wayfarer Songs from Japan's NHK, October 1960, with an outstanding Mahlerian, Paul Kletzki conducting. (There's also a Fischer-Dieskau "bonus": four core-repertory Schubert songs from 1959, with the great Gerald Moore at the piano.)


I WOUND UP WATCHING EVERYTHING ON THE DVD

A cluster of explosive young talents explode in "On the Town"

For the 1960 recording, Betty and Adolph reprised their
1944 roles, anthropologist Claire de Loon and sailor Ozzie

BERNSTEIN, COMDEN, and GREEN: On the Town:
Act I, "Carried Away"

Betty Comden, Claire; Adolph Green, Ozzie; 1960 studio cast recording, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony


by Ken

On a daily basis we're assaulted by so much slop and slime that I worry about insufficient attention being paid when we're given worthwhile stuff. So it has been on my mind to call your attention, as I mentioned last night, to a really outstanding piece in the November issue of Vanity Fair called "Innocents on Broadway," in which Adam Green gives us a richly and beautifully detailed portrait of the early life and early career of his father, the great lyricist (and sometime actor) Adolph Green, which also includes similarly rich portraits of a band of remarkably talented people whose rising careers were intertwined with his -- notably his eventual writing partner of 60 years, Betty Comden; his best friend, Leonard Bernstein; and the amazing actress Judy Holiday.

"This year would have been my father’s 100th birthday," Adam G writes early on,

and it would have made him indecently proud to see it marked by productions of so many of the musicals that he and his partner, Betty Comden, wrote in their 60-year collaboration: a stage adaptation of their 1953 MGM movie, The Band Wagon, as part of the Encores! series at New York’s City Center; a live broadcast on NBC of their 1954 version of Peter Pan; the first Broadway revival of their 1978 screwball operetta, On the Twentieth Century. Most of all, though, he would have been thrilled to see the ebullient revival, also on Broadway, of On the Town, their 1944 musical, about the amorous exploits of three sailors on 24-hour shore leave in the big city, which introduced the phrase “New York, New York, a helluva town” into the American lexicon and announced the arrival of a new generation in the American musical theater.

"ON THE TOWN WAS A LANDMARK"

Preview: Every day is a good day for an auto-da-fé

In the course of his travels, Candide finds himself in Lisbon just in time for both an earthquake and an auto-da-fé, the "act of faith" that was the Inquisitorial Church's patented mode of festivity built around the burning of heretics. Composer Leonard Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in this famous July 1982 concert performance of Candide, with Clive Bayley (Bear-Keeper), Neil Jenkins (Cosmetic Merchant), Lindsay Benson (Doctor), Richard Suart (Junkman), John Treleaven (Alchemist), Adolph Green (Dr. Pangloss), and Jerry Hadley (Candide). We're going to hear the start of a less jolly theatrical auto-da-fé.

by Ken

Lately we've heard some orchestral introductions that not only set the scenes for the memorable operatic scenes they introduce, but grab the listener's imagination unforgettably. For example, in February 24's "In Boris Godunov, the Russian people do just as they're told" we heard the introductions to the two scenes of the Prologue to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (heard here in Rimsky-Korsakov's edition).

MUSSORGSKY: Boris Godunov (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov):
Prelude

Opening of the Coronation Scene

Alexei Maslennikov (t), Prince Shuisky; Sofia Radio Chorus, Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded November 1970

Here are three equally vivid and equally contrasting musical introductions, to consecutive events:
[1]

[2]

[3]

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1965-66


No. [2] AT LEAST SHOULD SOUND FAMILIAR