Mir Ist So Wunderbar

Posts have been getting pretty silly lately. So here's one of the all-time great opera moments: Mir Ist So Wunderbar from Beethoven's Fidelio. Features one of the great sopranos of the 20th century - Elisabeth Soderstrom - as Leonore, disguised as a man named Fidelio who is hiding as an assistant jailkeeper in a Spanish prison to find out what happened to her husband, Florestan, who is being kept in the darkest dingiest cell in the jail for political reasons. Soderstrom died about a month ago, and I still want to do a post about her at some point.

...And yes, once I feel like I have the technique for it, the Collegium will have an arrangement of it.

Emo Lincoln

Suicide: By Abraham Lincoln

Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!

Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never know;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?

To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.

Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.

Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!

Sweet steel! come forth from your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!

h/t Huber. Yes, it's really by Lincoln. Written shortly after his original fiance Ann Rutledge died. Though recent evidence shows that his heartbreak may have come from an entirely different source... Either way, I can't help but imagine a 26-year-old Abe wearing a too-tight sweater and designer jeans that he bought for $150 with rips already made. Probably liked Weezer too until they went all commercial.

Oh Holy Night

h/t Charles Downey. There has to be some kind of award for singing like this. I mean, the testicular fortitude it takes to get in front of an audience and sing like the Florence Foster Jenkins of lounge lizards requires a level of bravery that few war vets could ever summon. So let it be known, I would sell most of my prize possessions for a ticket to see this man sing at Carnagie Hall.

Hallelujah Chorus Done On Kazoos

h/t Charles Downey. Done by the Northwestern University Kazoo Choir.

Christmastime for the Jews

Video gets better every year.

It never ceases to amaze how quickly you can get people you don't want to talk to out of a room by putting on a CD of Atonal Music.

Happy 239th Ludwig Van (STOP CELEBRATING BIRTHDAYS!)

Classical music's obsession with celebrating birthdays and death days is one of the weirdest, and most disturbing, qualities of our business. Only a completely moribund genre would identify its most important dates by the things we find in the first line of an encyclopedia entry. And so it's a given that anniversary years of births and deaths will cause the kind of performance glut that makes audiences say "Oh shit, not him again." Poor Mahler is coming up not only on his 150th birthday but also on the centenary of his death. By 2012, the world might be so sick of his music that the prestige of his work will probably fall as precipitously as it rose fifty years ago when the double anniversary made him regarded as the greatest symphonist since Beethoven. One solution, though not a great one, would be to celebrate anniversaries of the world premieres of the greatest music.

So let me propose what I think is the best solution: NO MORE ANNIVERSARIES! Let's play music we like and music we think the public ought to hear. If we want to put a large focus on a composer, let's do it because we love his music, not because it's his 250th birthday (or 100th) birthday. Eventually this anniversary obsession screws over just about everybody: here is a partial list of anniversaries just for this year.

2009: Mendelssohn (200th birthday), Handel (250th anniversary of death), Purcell (350th birthday), Elgar (75th anniversary of death), Ravel (75th anniversary of death), Delius (75th anniversary of death), Holst (75th anniversary of death), Barber (100th birthday), Harrison Birtwhistle (75th birthday), Peter Maxwell Davies (75th birthday), Alfred Schnittke (75th birthday), Louis Andriessen (70th birthday), Ernst Bloch (50th anniversary of death), Mario Davidovsky (75th birthday).

It's a tough year to be a composer.

Max Weinberg's Mormon Chanukah

Their emissary is the senior senator from Utah. Ours is the drummer from the E Street Band. If it matters, I think we won.

Jerusalem Flash Mob

This 150 person flash mob on Ben Yehuda Street was partially choreographed by the sister of an old friend, who is actually in Israel doing the exact same program than I did. Obviously her time has been put to better use (I really mean that. I just played a lot of jazz fiddle and found the Negev desert the world's least inspiring place to write music). And for your information this was apparently the #1 youtube video in Israel for two weeks.

Riccardo Muti Rant

(What kind of career would Riccardo Muti have if he were bald and as badly tailored as James Levine?)

Just listening to Riccardo Muti conduct the New York Phil on the radio makes me pissed off. It's one thing to hear him give an all-flash performance of excerpts from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, since this is one of the better pieces by a composer whose work has always seemed like flash and hot air to me. But to butcher Elgar's In the South, one of the great underrated pieces of Late Romanticism, and turn it into the kind of shapeless late-Romantic soup that's turned people off of Elgar for a century, that just makes me depressed. And this is the man who is being given the keys to America's musical kingdom.


In The South. Pretty cool, no?

The truly great maestros of his generation were smart to stay out of America: Claudio Abbado stayed away from America, so did Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink (until his dotage), Charles Mackerras, and both Mariss Jansons and Daniel Barenboim left America in a huff, swearing never to come back. They all knew the truth of the matter, which was that post-60's American classical music was a place where innovation and challenge went to die. Exaggerated? Yeah, but who cares.

The only true greats of that generation to succeed in America were Christoph von Dohnanyi, Herbert Blomstedt and James Levine. All three are the sort of all-substance no-style conductors that succeeded in America during those postwar years when it seemed that half the conductors in America were Hungarian Jews. As in so many other areas of life, Europe destroyed itself only to rebuild itself

Iron Maiden on the Harp

In case you've always wondered what Iron Maiden would sound like on the harp. I know I have. h/t Mazur and Sam.

Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company

h/t Zmora. Morgan Freeman is remembered now as though it's amazing that a regular from the second-most-famous children's television show of the 70's is now a star. But regulars on the show also included: Bill Cosby, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers, Rita Moreno (she's the girl in this) and Mel Brooks(!) So if you think it's weird to see Morgan Freeman in this, wait until I find some of the other stuff from this.

Midsummer Night's Dream Overture on 4-hand Piano

Martha Argerich performs it with a young pianist I've never heard of named Cristina Marton. I have a feeling we'll be hearing more from Marton before long. As for Argerich, she's now 67. Still got it, no?

All Long Days End Best With Marriage of Figaro

Just Sayin'...

Messiah in German

It almost works better than the English. Handel was never a masterful English speaker, as anybody who ever looks at the text of Messiah for more than two seconds can tell you. But like most Germans of his era, he was probably taught to memorize whole passages of the Gutenberg Bible from birth. We tend to think of Handel as the most international composer (until Stravinsky): German-reared, Italian-trained, career made by the English and beloved by the French. But a passage makes us realize just how close to the soundworld of all those German contemporaries he truly was. Not just Bach, but Telemann, Pachabel and Kuhnau too. And it's all conducted by Karl Richter in that hilarious yet strangely spellbinding fashion of his which turned Bach cantatas into something that sounds like a Bruckner Mass....To think that once upon a time this guy was thought of as the world's greatest interpreter of Baroque music. It kind of boggles the mind.


(This is the way Bach used to be done.)