This Week’s 8 Best Classical Music Moments on YouTube

[lennygoran]

The NYTimes seems to be compiling lists these days-here's their latest. Regards, Len

This Week’s 8 Best Classical Music Moments on YouTube

In addition to reviews, features and news during the week, our critics and reporters collect the best of what they’ve heard: notes that sent shivers down their spines, memorable voices, quotations that cut to the heart of the story. This week, we’re offering a glimpse into the research we’ve done for stories on YouTube.



I’ll be one of the lovers of Bellini heading to the Caramoor Festival on Saturday to hear a semi-staged performance of “Il Pirata.” The cast is headed by the superb soprano Angela Meade, who proved a remarkable Bellini singer in an acclaimed “Norma” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013. “Il Pirata,” an important early success for Bellini, mostly languished during the early decades of the 20th century, but a 1958 La Scala production starring Maria Callas brought it international attention. A thrilling video from a 1959 concert performance in Hamburg presents Callas at her peak, singing Imogene’s intense final scene. Catch the moment halfway through when Callas’s Imogene realizes that the renegade pirate she still loves has been condemned. Her eerie silence and wild-eyed look is chilling. ANTHONY TOMMASINI



Marc Blizstein’s breakthrough opera, “The Cradle Will Rock” (1937), was dedicated to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht — who, as the work’s origin story goes, challenged Blizstein to write about not just one prostitute, but all the “prostitutes” in society, even artists. While doing research for an article about a coming production of “Cradle” at Opera Saratoga, I found countless homages to Weill (in the orchestration) and Brecht (in the libretto’s epic structure). For example, the simple score and cynical lyrics for the song “Joe Worker” could have been come straight from Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”: “Joe Worker just drops / Right at his workin’ he drops / Weary, weary, tired to the core / And then if he drops out of sight / There’s always plenty more.” JOSHUA BARONE


As I worked on a profile of the soprano Anja Harteros — a star who, because of family issues, can seem like a secret to much of the world — I particularly relished this commanding yet vulnerable performance of Leonora in Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” filmed in 2013 in her home base in Munich. I love how she floats "E su nel cielo è scritto” (“And in heaven it’s written”) — the tone radiant with memories of her love for Alvaro and chilled in her belief that she’ll never be reunited with him. ZACHARY WOOLFE



Of the many classic recordings of Schubert’s great song cycle “Winterreise,” I especially love the 1963 account by the tenor Peter Pears and the composer Benjamin Britten, who was also a sensitive pianist. Five years later these towering artists, then in their late 50s, discussed and performed excerpts from this grim Schubert masterpiece. That fascinating, informal session also offers a portrait of a loyal domestic partnership in a time of legal prohibitions against homosexuality in England. Listen to Pears sing the final phrase of “Frühlingstraum,” when the tormented wanderer asks when will the leaves grow green at the window, when will he hold his beloved in his arms. The combination of despair, confusion and tenderness is unbearable. ANTHONY TOMMASINI


While Blizstein was paying homage to Brecht and Weill’s brazen theater of Weimar Berlin, Weill was in the process of settling down in the United States. He had arrived from Europe in 1935, and among his first theatergoing experiences was seeing George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” Weill, with an ever-attentive ear, took in the folk opera and works by other American composers as he redefined his musical voice for Broadway. In this aria from Weill’s 1947 opera “Street Scene,” which had a libretto by the poet Langston Hughes, you can hear a bit of Gershwin — the opening bars alone recall Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2. JOSHUA BARONE



Ms. Harteros and the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann have made a potent pair in recent years, starting with this 2009 “Lohengrin.” I love how she colors the words here, infusing an overall innocence with nuances and darkness. Notice a single word, “raubt” — the verb “rob” — as her Elsa promises that she would never rob Lohengrin of his believability. ZACHARY WOOLFE


While the Aix Festival in France is currently presenting a radically rewritten production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, a group of emerging young singers, under the guidance of coaches from the Martina Arroyo Foundation, is presenting a more traditional take on the opera this weekend at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. I grew up with the classic 1951 recording starring the great Risë Stevens. Here she is, that same year, in a television performance of the “Habanera.” Though this is an old-fashioned approach to the gypsy temptress, Stevens’s stylish, charismatic singing is matchless, from the first slowly plunging melodic phrase. ANTHONY TOMMASINI


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/arts ... collection

[lennygoran]

The NYTimes seems to be compiling lists these days-here's their latest. Regards, Len

I had a chance to listen to some of their recommendations--I looked at some of their choices on you tube-this lohengrin left me cold--as someone wrote-not for traditionalists! Regards, Len

Published on Jun 3, 2012

Wagner

Lohengrin

Decca

Cast: Evgeny Nikitin - Der Heerrufer Michaela Schuster - Ortrud Anja Harteros - Elsa Von Brabant Jonas Kaufmann - Lohengrin Wolfgang Koch - Friedrich Von Telramund Christof Fischesser - Heinrich

Conductor: Kent Nagano

Bavarian State Opera Orchestra, Bavarian State Opera Chorus

Amazing singing! I don't think you'll find anything better on any dvd or cd.
Not for the traditionalists.
His `` Elsa `` at 5:10 gives me goosebumps.