Most memorable performance

[smitty1931]

Which concert, opera or ballet was the most memorable to you? For me it was Callas singing Lucia at the Met. Nureyev and Fonteyn dancing Giselle in D.C. and Stravinsky conducting his opera the Nighingale in D.C. In all three of these performances the audience went wild!

[Heck148]

Mahler Sym #5 - 3/70 - Solti/CSO @ Carnegie Hall. amazing...

the Shostakovich Sym#8 @ Boston Sym Hall in late '80s - same performers, was really special, as well..

[Chalkperson]

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - London 1974

[bombasticDarren]

July 2009 - Royal Albert Hall

Mahler - Symphony No.9 (Bernard Haitink, London Symphony Orchestra)

[rogch]

I don't live in a country with plenty of world class orchestras and famous artists. But i have been to a couple of concerts in Berlin and Pierre Boulez conducting the Berlin Philharmonic is definitely the best concert i have been to. The works were Boulez' own Explosante-fixe and Stravinsky's The Nightingale.

[Ted Quanrud]

Oct. 20, 1986: Jessye Norman, accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by James Levine, sings Strauss's Four Last Songs in Chicago's Symphony Hall.

[stenka razin]

Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin.

Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann.

Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler's Symphony #2.


I could go on and on, but those were my first thoughts.


Regards,
Mel

P.S. On second thought, one more.........Karajan at The Met with Nilsson and Vickers in 'Die Walkure'.

[Ricordanza]

Hard to narrow it down to one, or even two or three, but one concert stands out in my memory because it took place in an unusual venue and it was the first time I heard this particular performer. On June 9, 1996, Marc-Andre Hamelin performed in Tower Records Classical Annex on South Street in Philadelphia. His program, as best I remember, consisted of three pieces: Liszt's "Norma" Fantasy, Rachmaninoff Sonata No. 2, and a Scriabin sonata. His playing was magical, the view was great (I stood about 15 feet from the keyboard), and I've been a fan of this pianist ever since and attended several memorable recitals and concerto appearances by him in the years following--in more conventional venues, however.

[maestrob]

Most memorable: that's a long list!

Ormandy/Philadelphia/Academy of music:

Mahler X
Shostakovich IV, X, XIII, XIV
Rachmaninoff Symphonies
R. Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra
Prokofiev IV, V, VI & Violin Concerti w/Isaac Stern

Bernstein/Chicago/Avery Fisher Hall: Shostakovich VII

Leontyne Price/Levine: Forza del destino/MET

Matti Talvela: Boris Godunov/MET

MET 100th Anniversary Concert/Levine: I was invited as a guest of Kurt Baum, who was a client of mine at the NYAC (he lived right there on Central Park South).

Two mishaps at the MET are memorable:

1) In a 1980's performance of La boheme at the MET, the stove in Act I caught fire accidentally: they had to stop the performance when a stage hand came out with a fire extinguisher to put out the flames: big ROAR of applause and laughter! The next day, Mario Sereni, who was the Marcello & a client of mine and had actually taken off his jacket to help snuff out the flames, came into the store proclaiming "Wasna me! Wasna me!"

2) In the debut performance of Ewa Podles at the MET in 1984 (IIRC), with Marilyn Horne as Handel's Rinaldo, Horne was to enter on the moving prow of a 20 foot tall ship, singing her aria with much gusto. Unfortunately, the ship was improperly anchored, and fell backwards onto the stage. Amazingly, Horne held on as the ship went over, and emerged from behind the now flattened prow, wielding her sword and belting out her runs and trills all in good form, to wild applause!

This list doesn't include performances in which I was a participant, which is an entirely different topic.

[John F]

Talking about unhappy memories, I was at a Met performance of La Traviata when a member of the audience had a heart attack shortly after Germont's entrance in Act 2. After a bit the performance ground to a halt, the curtain closed and the lights went up, the house doctor did what he could until the emergency medical service people arrived with a gurney to take the unfortunate man out. Then the lights went down and the performance resumed. We read in the paper the next day that he died in the hospital. A memorable performance for the wrong reason.

Far too many happy memories over the last 55 years or so even to begin to list them.

[jbuck919]

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - London 1974

You mean you preferred it to the LP?

[Chalkperson]

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - London 1974

You mean you preferred it to the LP?

Yup, and it was just released on CD and YouTube, it was a stunning Show, more Jazzy and fifteen minutes longer, try for yourself...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqeGnHtbehM

I was also at the Press Launch of DSOTM, held at the London Planetarium...that was pretty far out, as they used to say

[josé echenique]

1. Teresa Berganza in recital at the Aix-en-Provence Festival 1982. Singing in excelsis, just too good to be true. Janet Baker was in the concert. She was the first to stand up and applaud like crazy.
2. Herbert von Karajan conducting Beethoven´s Missa Solemnis at the Salzburg Festival 1986.
3. Kirill Kondrashin and the Concertgebouw in Rimsky-Korsakov´s Shehérazade 1979. Pure magic.
4. Plácido Domingo singing Otello in his absolute prime Mexico City 1979. Star quality performance.
5. Renata Scotto in a verismo arias concert. 1977. A taste of what a larger-than-life prima donna used to be like.
6. Carlos Kleiber conducting Beethoven´s Fifth (what else?) with the Vienna Philharmonic. 1980.
7. Maurizio Pollini playing a Schumann/Chopin concert at the Salzburg Festival.
8. Gérard Lesne singing a Handel recital with Il Seminario Musicale at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. 1999. A superb singer.
9. Claudio Arrau playing an amazing Emperor in 1975 here in Mexico City. I actually heard all 4 performances he gave. Beethoven was his thing.
10. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Hugo Wolf at the Salzburg Festival. He was a little past his prime, but he still was the greatest Lieder singer ever.

[RebLem]

Four Chicago Symphony concerts I attended in the 1970's stand out.

One was a Kubelik concert; I even forget the first half of the program. But after intermission, they played the greatest Brahms 4th I have ever heard.

A Giulini concert which included the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition just before his recording of it with the CSO was done that was even better than that on the recording, especially the number about the little chicks in their shells, which, to me, is the heart of this work.

Third was a Giulini performance of the Mahler 9th just before he made his recording of that work with the CSO.

The fourth and last was an all-Prokofiev concert conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky: The Bolt, and Alexander Nevsky.

And, finally, a concert from 1970 by the Grant Park Orchestra conducted by Aaron Copland with Coretta Scott King as narrator in the Lincoln Portrait, only two years after the assassination of her husband. Absolutely unforgettable.

[stickles]

Kissin playing Brahms PC 1 with CSO/Dutoit a few years ago had the most impact on me recently. This was after Andras Schiff's heartaching redition of the 3rd mvmt of Schumann's Fantasy in a recital a few month before.

Opera wise, Billy Budd at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2002 in a McVicar production with Gunn, Begley and Ramey left me speechless.

The other end of the spectrum, my last CSO concert in 2011 was Salonen conducting Mahler 6. Played nearly to perfection technichally, but it was all wrong. The tempi, the dynamics, the phrasing. I will always remember this one as how bad it can be even if you had done everything correctly and perfectly!

[Steinway]

The recital at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in 1960 by Sviatislav Richter in 1960, leaving me with an indelible impression of what a masterful artist he was.

Never attended a recital since that equaled that special night.