FLASH: Want to see 'n' hear Seiji Ozawa conduct Mendelssohn's Elijah for free? Act now!

We're also going to hear (right here!) Seiji conduct Beethoven's irresistible Choral Fantasy with its great champion Rudolf Serkin

The Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall is honoring Seiji Ozawa with free access to the performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah -- built around a commanding assumption of the crucial title role by baritone Matthias Goerne -- recorded on May 17, 2009. But I don't know how long it'll be free!

AN APOLOGY: This is really inexcusable. There's no good reason why I couldn't have gotten this "FLASH" up Monday, but here it is Sunday (well, actually, Monday again by the time this is posted), and .*nbsp. . . In one source I saw something like "On demand through February 29, but I didn't know if that was a legit cutoff date for free access. I dithered. The good news is that the 2009 and 2016 interviews shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Sorry!

by Ken

For once, I heard that clock ticking and punched up the 2009 Seiji-Berlin Elijah right away, and watched the whole thing. It took me a long time to come to grips with the piece, but I did, and it occupies a special place in my affections. I was especially happy to discover how strong Matthias Goerne's performance of the title role is, because without a strong Elijah the piece kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. But there's still a serious burden on the conductor, because a fair amount of the piece really does need a major effort of motivation-defining, and this is the sort of thing Seiji was so good at: helping his co-performers feel the importance of what they're performing in the moment and how it relates to a piece's grand design.

There's also some important history embedded in the Elijah performance, as I came to understand from watching the 2009 and 2016 interviews in the Digital Concert Hall archive. Onsite they're described as "conversations," and they truly are -- with a member of the orchestra, sometimes even in English, and always with subtitles even if they aren't. It turns out that the Elijah, owing to what I recall him describing in the 2016 "conversation," with his countryman Daishin Kashimoto, as "my mysterious illness" (all week I've been thinking I should really rewatch the 2016 conversation to pin down his exact words; this'll have to be close enough), would be his last Berlin appearance until he was finally able to return in 2016 to conduct an all-Beethoven second half of a concert that began with a conductorless performance by elite winds of the Berlin Phil of Mozart's stupendous Gran Partita Serenade, K. 361.


MORAL: DON'T OVERLOOK THE INTERVIEWS!