sex, death, and foreign policy for Monday

Tomorrow puts us in the unusual quandary of having to choose between Jerry Springer: The Opera the first [ahem] Presidential Melee Bar Brawl Halloween Frat Party Debate or the Met's opening night Tristan. You can find the latter here, along with the season schedule for the free, once a week webcasts on the Met website. (If you'd like more than that, SiriusXM Radio's online streaming service is your destination.) Met festivities begin at 4:30, because red carpet blah blah woof woof.

easter eggs

Sundry Bayreuth 2016 archived audio, as we find them:

Parsifal via BR-Klassik (and the video here, which was still working in the US as of two seconds ago)

Das Rheingold via BR-Klassik

Die Walküre Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 via Radio Clásica

Siegfried Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 via Radio Clásica

Götterdämmerung Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 via Radio Clásica

Der fliegende Holländer via BR-Klassik

The BR-Klassik archive has muy cherno sound, but their website wins the Lord Franklin Prize for Unnavigability -- if you get lost, remember seal meat is delicious and nutritious.

If you're looking for tomorrow's Tristan, once again Bucharest has your back at 9:50am ET.

sundry items

arte liveweb has Bayreuth's RW 200 concert with Eva Maria Westbroek, Johan Botha, Kwangchul Youn, and the Bayreuth orchestra all dressed up in their winter gig clothes, under the direction of Christian Thielemann.

Paul O'Dette discusses his new album of lute tunes of Francesco da Milano on the Gramophone Mag podcast.  I particularly like the tidbit of information he imparts about period payscale for Brilliant Lutenists, and think we would do well to emulate.

And speaking of, it's two weeks to Boston Early Music Festival, a whole week of staged opera, semi-staged opera, official concerts, fringe concerts, master classes, lec-dems, petting zoo, and guerrilla sidewalk period bagpiping. If you've dreamed of dropping a fiver in a busker's theorbo case, there may be no better opportunity.

music to keep away from impressionable teenagers

sundry items

NPR interviews Jonas Kaufmann about his new Wagner disc.  The Archive's copy is due in this week with Real World's Sevara Nazarkhan reissue, so that'll be an eclectic noise day at the Borg Cube.

Getting a jump on the Easter rush, Arte Live Web's got a Matthaeus Passion with Karina Gauvin.

WQXR has archived January's Renee Fleming / Susan Graham Carnegie Hall recital.  (Read review at Opera Obsession.)

Also from January, the Boston Symphony's Verdi Requiem, with Cedolins, Gubanova, Neill, Colombara, cond. Daniele Gatti. 

lenten entertainments

No point in giving Wagner up for Lent, the next free (audio only) webcast from the Met is the Parsifal we've all been waiting for, on Friday, Feb 15 at 6:00 pm ET. (That's Kaufmann, Dalayman, Mattei, Nikitin, Pape, in case you're wondering just why we've all been waiting.)

Medici.tv has today's Teatro Real world premiere of the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American, with Christopher Purves and David Pittsinger, available for viewing to non-paying registrants for the next 88 days. (Non-paying registrants means it'll play for a couple of minutes and then ask you to log in or register. There's no fee for registration -- you only pay them if you want access to the archives...which actually might be worth doing as there's some really cool stuff in there.)

Audio of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra's recent Beethoven 9th at Carnegie Hall may be found here. That's with a pick-up quartet of soloists who happened to be in town for other stuff -- (ahem) yeah, Diana Damrau, Kate Lindsey, Piotr Beczala and Rene Pape.

Arte Live Web (de) has Joseph Calleja doing his Mario Lanza thing currently working on the main page, but not from its own, so if you're so inclined, follow the link to the main page and pick it off the right-hand menu.

If you're not giving up Wagner for Lent, don't give up Shakespeare either. Four hour-long episodes here, with all sorts of interesting people, but here's the thumbnail:

Watch Trailer: Shakespeare Uncovered on PBS. See more from Shakespeare Uncovered.

Paper trail of the Old Wagnerite

At some point in his season ticket-holding career, Grandad started snipping cast lists from his programs and pasting them into his Met libretti, no doubt so his archaeology-minded grand-offspring could find them and be envious. So here's what he was up to in late December, 1945:

sundry items

arte live web, wishing to keep us all out of the bars, has video of Charpentier's David et Jonathas (Christie, Les Arts Florissants), Marriage of Figaro (Petibon, Ketelson, Byström, Szot, Lindsey), La Finta Giardiniera (Layla Claire), and George Benjamin's Written on Skin, all from Aix; plus Carmen from Lyon (Lo Monaco, Lee) and Don Giovanni from Stuttgart. Tomorrow they add Lully's Phaeton from Beaune, under Christophe Rousset. Update: If you access any of these and get an error message, try going to the "Classique" page and picking from the sidebar menu.

Glyndebourne has its Fairy Queen up till August 7th. That's the Jonathan Kent production with the nsfw bunny scene.

Meanwhile, the Proms continue on BBC Radio 3, and when they're not doing that they're broadcasting from WOMAD this weekend (currently Hugh Masekela and Seth Lakeman).

And of course it's Bayreuth time.

And I haven't even finished watching Les Troyens yet.

Olympics? What?

done that

For the argument that the use of projections is a great innovation in the Ring Cycle, ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1972.

ping

Alex Ross posts a quote from Miss Evans -- okay she'd have been referring to herself as Mrs Lewes by then -- on the problem of judging new music by its criticism. If memory serves, she herself thought the third act of Tannhäuser dragged, when in fact we now know it is the first.

the slippery slope

The Telegraph's Sameer Rahim ventures into the Great Opera Unknown, and promises to tweet what he finds there.

And speaking of long-form adventure, the next free audiocast from the Met is the new Götterdämmerung, tomorrow at 6pm Eastern, at the usual place. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the previous episode:

Watch Jay Hunter Morris: A New Siegfried for the Ring on PBS. See more from SundayArts.

pinch hitters

The Met streams the Siegfried opener here tonight at 6pm EST, with Siegfried 3.0 Jay Hunter Morris in the title role and Conductor 2.0 Fabio Luisi in the pit.

A bit of JHM in SFO Ring here, with Stemme.

mob rules

Two mob scenes, both alike in...well, not at all alike, really. Love the unhinged horns here that signal everything going completely apeshit:



and this, (sorry, embedding disabled), the reverse of Grimes, packing a heavy punch at the outset and then diffusing and mutating under the influence of Soprano Power and woodwinds.

further stemming the awful tide of productivity

Radio 4 Netherlands has been creating an interesting cache of long form videos on Youtube. So if you were needing a concert performance of Parsifal with Klaus Florian Vogt and Katarina Dalayman to keep you out of the bars and laundromats, quest no further.

In eigner Fessel

Not to rain on the recent parade or anything, but Stephen Greenblatt weighs in here on Wagner, Milton, and the notion of marital bliss.

Update: Oops! Never mind, I was handed the paper version, and didn't realize when I linked to the online version that they stuck the meat of the article behind the damn paywall.  It's in the June 23rd issue of The New York Review of Books, should you wish to access it at the library.  If there are still such things as libraries where you are. 

verweile doch...

Here's the Glyndebourne Meistersinger, up until the weekend. Catch it before it all turns into a pumpkin.

Update: It has all turned into a pumpkin. We await the DVD, because this was, even with a couple of weak links, a surprisingly fabulous performance. And Act II was a set-dresser's dream (or nightmare). And I loved the way McVicar dealt with the shortness of space in the final scene by ditching onstage pomp & circumstance for general unrehearsed public event confusion of who's supposed to be sitting in what chair. Note perfect.

Die Meistersinger von Glyndebourne

A reminder that The Guardian is webcasting Meistersinger from Glyndebourne this Sunday at 2:45pm GMT (so whatever that translates to wherever you're at).

Wes Herd dies auch sei...

It's Wagner night, here in the Wagnerite Republic of West Thirdflooria. The Japanophile Republic of East Thirdflooria is away at an anime con, and who cares about the neighbors, they have a subwoofer and they know how to use it until two o'clock in the morning playing video games that sound like they involve the smell of napalm in the morning.

I hate The Ride of the Valkyries, can I just say?  It's the hugest cliche in opera and the only thing everybody knows of this one, to the obliteration of all else -- all the really cool, inexplicable-to- mass-cultured-outsiders things -- causing the entirety of the Ring Cycle, and possibly the Wagner canon as a whole, to disappear under its weight. This annoys me no end.  So while Brünnhilde and her sisters are doing their thing, collecting and trading war-dead like so many Magic: The Gathering cards, I'm reading the obituary for Hazel Dickens in the NYT.  If you don't know her, she sang the graveside hymn in Matewan, the John Sayles film about the West Virginia coal field wars.  That kind of singing was the tradition she grew up in, but she went on to become, as her old record label dubbed her, one of the Pioneering Women of Bluegrass.  I read in her obituary that Alison Krauss, as a member of that younger generation of women Hazel influenced as performer, songwriter and trailblazer, was chosen to preside at her induction into the Bluegrass Hall of Honor (they like that better than Fame, because they're realists).  

Anne Sofie von Otter is an Alison Krauss fan. I read that somewhere in an interview, back in the days of her Elvis Costello project.

But actually I hit upon Hazel's obituary while looking for the words to The Famous Flower of Serving Men, which is one of those traditional ballads about women cross-dressing to exact revenge, or get out of dodge, or just to have something of a life.  And this because there was recently a really fine article in The Guardian about Martin Carthy on the eve of his 70th birthday, who put that skewed and excellent tune to those words.  

"I remember...playing to fourth-form kids...and it didn't work at all; then we played to the sixth form and they were agog, hanging on to the narrative... Carthy recalls "another time, in Manchester, these kids came up and said: 'You're Martin Carthy, aren't you?' I said yeah and they said: 'You must sing Famous Flower of Serving Men...And there they were, sitting right in front of me on the floor, listening. It amazed some of the older people there, but the song galvanised them, and they certainly galvanised me."

Opera is not the only medium to be cursed with an aging audience.  Like all what might be termed cultural special-interests, it faces down enormous market forces arrayed against it -- or rather, completely indifferent to its presence.  But the internet has proven to be a marvelous leveler in many ways, and among these is the dissolution of cultural pigeon-holes designed by the marketing departments of once-powerful major labels for maximum cash extraction.  So kids can show up at Martin's shows with special requests and attention spans intact. Or kids can show up at the Met HDcasts, and I can point them to the Shrek line, and they can politely but enthusiastically show me the error of my assumptions (as happened once and I hope will happen again).

Opera is also not the only medium that relies on words and music to tell a story -- but perhaps the ballad tradition long ago solved the problem of later today by not being bound by either the music or the words, but only by the gist of the narrative. There was a lady in the north / west / east..., but it depends on whom you ask.

What has this to do with Wagner, you might be wondering, if you're still reading this. That's yet a longer story, though perhaps it's also a review in itself of last night's fun. In any case, the Republic is going to see it in the house, so will save its review for then. (But hey, Met sound people, the sound last night was flatter than usual.)