radio dial

WCRB has posted last May's Saul from Boston's Handel & Haydn Society, with Iestyn Davies, Jonathan Best, Joelle Harvey, et al. We recognize that not everybody is a fan of this oratorio, but we think it shows Handel at the peak of his metal phase (C'mon! Witch of Endor! \m/).  Moreover, as with many Jennens librettos when combined with less than pristine choral diction, it's a great Mondegreen generator.


Meanwhile, WQXR has Ian Bostridge's Winterreise from Carnegie Hall, with luxury accompanist Thomas Adés, from last Sunday afternoon, to celebrate the cold, wet, raw, dreary end of our bright sunny days.

because Schenectady

grouse

Ian Bostridge has a piece on Winterreise in the Guardian. I like Ian Bostridge, and what he says here is mostly fine, I guess, whatever, except leaning on this old stereotype is about as weak as talking about opera singers by their excessive weight:

"The simple classical delivery of a folk song by a “trained” voice may sound uptight and artificial to an audience used to hearing “Barbara Allen” or “O Waly Waly” in the nasal twang that has become associated with an “authentic” folk voice."

Since he doesn't bother to illustrate this notorious folk twang on Waly Waly (and seriously, dude, are those the best trad songs you could come up with, or just the only?), we'll do that for him:



Perhaps if he'd asked someone, they might have told him that the problem is with the word "simple". Also, I get the whole Schubert/Dylan thing, but doesn't it sort of add insult to injury to make the other pole of this argument the guy famous for lifting tunes off those nasally folk singer records and recording his own even more nasally versions of them without any attribution whatsoever?

Meanwhile, here's a couple of unskilled Leiermänner droning on and on with another irritating folksy tune.



Somebody once asked in an internet forum how a beggar could afford to own a hurdy-gurdy, given how complicated the instruments are in construction, and thus how expensive. I put the question to a guy who owned the most kick-ass instrument I ever heard -- a simple box design made in Hungary out of what appeared to be old barn siding -- and he thought for a moment and said "Long winters." There's unskilled, and there's unskilled.

I guess this article has annoyed me more than I thought. So in closing here's a video for Child Owlet made by seven-year-olds. Barbara Allen, pfffff. Weak.

Child 170

In honor of my new downstairs neighbor, whom I haven't yet met but who was just singing an iteration of this song -- the Dáithí Sproule version, probably filtered (slightly anachronistically) through Inside Lewin Davis, but hey, we'll take it.

infernal machines

Afternoon agenda: Tannhäuser, Moby Dick, Hercules, Rosenkavalier.  What would it sound like to have them all playing at the same time? Let's find out.

Moral: It's a beautiful Spring day, so stay the hell away from operacast.

Update: That was fun. Though I think I already had two of the four, so clearly a spreadsheet is overdue.

Addendum: Remember that St John Passion at Carnegie Hall, the one awhile back with Bostridge, Gauvin, et al?  The audio is archived here.

day job addendum

Mark Lawson interviews Ian Bostridge on Front Row (@ 19min, after John le Carré) on music, magic, and having something to fall back on if your academic career doesn't quite make it down the slipway.

And here he sings some stuff with Harry Bicket and the English Concert.

And here he writes about Britten's War Requiem.

Previous post concerning his new book is here.

day job

The Guardian interviews Ian Bostridge on his latest book, A Singer's Notebook, presently forthcoming. It stands a good chance of bumping a few things down a peg in the To Be Read stacks of the Thirdfloorian Library, as soon as we can get our mitts on a copy. (Currently Amazon (US) is only listing his dissertation on witchcraft, which has its own temptations but also an institutional price tag. [sigh])

Update: Yay Powell's, as always.

Singer's Notebook
by Ian Bostridge