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
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
