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Conductor Jane Glover reads from her book Handel in London in five 15 minute episodes currently posted up on BBC 4's Book of the Week website.

Kevin Puts' Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night, which has been touring houses in the worldwide operatic hinterlands and had quite a spectacular production at Glimmerglass this past summer, is posted up on the BBC Radio 3 website in Opera North's recent concert outing. This young opera has already had multiple productions, but look for Tomer Zvulun's especially breathtaking one at an opera house near you.

Gauvin radio alert

This Sunday WCRB runs Handel's La Resurrezione from last year's Boston Early Music Festival, with Karina Gauvin, Teresa Wakim, Aaron Sheehan, Christian Immler, and Kelsey Lauritano. WCRB usually archives these things for a while, so no worries if 7pm ET is way past the witching hour for your part of the planet. Click on the Read the program notes link and scroll down if you need the libretto.

suspected luters

in which we get a bit non-linear

You all may have noticed that 2017 was something of a slack year for blogging here on the Third Floor. A lot of that has to do with a complicated upping of sticks to the Second Floor, a tenacious bug that nixed a lot of concert plans, and the Greifenklau saga. But that's not to say I didn't get to some things and write about them, so as I go through drafts I may toss a few in the hopper that may still be of interest to people, especially if there's a coda down the line. As is the case with this one, from last November:

Boston Early Music Festival's plan to increase the number of available commercial recordings of Almira by 100% shifted into high gear with two concert performances over Thanksgiving weekend of this opera -- Händel's first -- that was the fully-staged centerpiece of BEMF's 2013 festival. The cast was largely the same as then, with soprano Amanda Forsythe (Edilia), tenors Zachary Wilder (Osman) and Colin Balzer (Fernando), and bass Christian Immler (Consalvo) all reprising their roles from 2013. New this round were soprano Sherezade Panthaki in the role of Almira, Queen of Castile; baritone Jesse Blumberg as Raymondo, Mauritanian Man of Mystery; soprano Teresa Wakim as the Princess Who Will Definitely Need To Be Rescued In The Sequel; and tenor Jan Kobow in the buffo role of Tabarco, Orange-Suited Dogsbody.

The opera itself is a complicated array of love and power interests that, of course, all turn out for the best in the end, and also [spoiler alert] nobody dies. As Händel wrote it in Hamburg, it has the there-and-then-not-uncommon feature of being in two languages, with recits and some arias in German, and the rest of the arias in Italian. People nowadays find this weird, but what the hey. And there is a reason for it, but I forget what it is.

There were some judicious cuts to the score for this concert outing from the previous staged version, some of which left plot details hanging, but which moved things along briskly and contained the whole in two acts. Much of what remained, musically, was prologue to Händel's later work in Rome and England -- an instrumental that would mutate into Lascia ch'io pianga, some power chord experimentation that rears its metal head again with the arrival of the Witch of Endor in Saul, and, as the delegation's non-resident Methodist chaplain and chorister was faster to suss than I, a bit of incipient Messiah.

As with 2013, when soprano Ulrike Hofbauer was given an emergency field promotion to Queen from Second Princess due to the star soprano bailing at the last minute, Sherezade Panthaki parachuted in to replace an ailing Dorothee Mields, and did the role creditable service in spite of a few notes going wide. (Post-game analysis at Pizzeria Uno afterward yielded speculation that the role is cursed. This is Boston, you know.)

Tenor Zachary Wilder was reported to have a cold, but it wasn't detectable in any way other than that (I gather) some of his arias were cut to give him a break. So Osman's interest in Bellante was perhaps a little more abrupt than I remember, but the fabulous snark-trading between his Osman and Amanda Forsythe's Edilia remained intact.

Despite the title of the piece, Händel gave all the home-run arias to Edilia, and Amanda Forsythe fired them off with her customary mad coloratura skillz.

The rest of the large cast was as evenly excellent, as was the orchestra (per usual), and we're just going to sit here and hope they do a live-stream concert when they get to Bremen as they did with their last two projects. (please please please...)

Update: As far as I know they didn't, but I guess the thing is in the can, so we may keep the whinging to a minimum.

virtual turntable

sundry Messiahs

On the off chance that you, the splendid readership of this joint, need an extra Messiah or three this year, Trinity Wall Street -- the way downtown Manhattan church with its own baroque orchestra -- is live videostreaming all three of its performances next week somewhere around here. That's Dec. 15, 16, and 17 at 7:30pm ET. Singers TBA, but the band is not to be sneezed at.

Moreover, as Dr T has just pointed out below, WCRB is presently running Boston's venerable Handel & Haydn Society performance from last week, and that should be showing up here pretty soon. (Scroll down and you'll find a Semele while you wait.)

Gauvin alert

WCRB is running has archived Campra's Le carnaval de Venise from this year's Boston Early Music Festival, with Karina Gauvin and Amanda Forsythe.

sundry items

Just a reminder that the opener for the new Met Rosenkavalier will be streamed on the Met website on Thursday, April 13, starting at 7pm ET.

While you wait, here's Boston's Handel & Haydn Society doing the Monteverdi Vespers at the Temple of Reverb Dendur.



Or there's one of Eliza Carthy's big band projects live in Hull, with a rather killer opening set from Olivia Chaney, right here.

excavations

One of the benefits of spring cleaning: opening boxes of tapes untouched for years. One of the benefits of Judicious Old Technology Retention: you still have something to play them on.

From an Independent review of a 2003 Proms Concert: "If Christine Brewer, Mark Wigglesworth and the London Philharmonic shrank the Royal Albert Hall to the size of the Wigmore a fortnight ago in Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder, von Otter, Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre turned it into a smoky, film noir, torch-song dive of the kind that probably ceased to exist in the mid 1950s."

A smoky dive where the dance band plays Rameau and the torch song is Scherza infida...



and for the record,

game on!

The forces of Boston Early Music Festival, with Amanda Forsythe, Colin Balzer, Christian Immler and Emoke Barath, decamp to Bremen for an envy-inducing Steffani program.

Russell Oberlin 1928 - 2016

For anyone who came to baroque vocal music back in the days when Vinyl was King, Russell Oberlin was an interesting feature of the landscape - a gesture toward HIPness in an age when Bach usually meant Big Technicolor Orchestra. He was out there planting the flag largely on his own, but perhaps the developments of the last twenty years made him feel fantastically vindicated. NYT obituary here. (Margalit Fox really should update her CT discography, tho.)

Uncommon Instrument Day PDX

A Toyota, three racketts, and a tartold

more from the LOC Box

wonders of LOC

The Library of Congress, that Cultural Bat-cave of America, has just posted up their Amanda Forsythe & Apollo's Fire concert from last November to the 'tubes, and we heart them for it.

Saturday Posting from the Ministry of Noise

O Solitude

amicus curiae

This is really ancient history, but in the matter Spirit v Zeppelin:



versus



On the other hand, all those acoustic players Page lifted from were inventing a style out of whole cloth and history, so yes, everything is ultimately traceable to American Blues players and a bunch of Elizabethan lute dudes.

continuously variable transmission

If the object of having a car stereo is to regale the residents of every intersection with (the bassline of) your playlist, sometimes only a hybrid makes this even remotely possible. Anyway this seems to be the only thing on my road playlist these days. All Rens'wijk shall bow before the awesomeness of this theorbo accompaniment...



Oh hey look, spotify thinks I might also like this. Let's find out!

Tuesday Night Posting from the Ministry of Noise

As Dr T was so kind to point out, and with an album and a tour to follow (because Poughkeepsie!)

coming down the Pike

Broadcasts of the Monteverdi operas from last June's Boston Early Music Festival take up WCRB's Sunday Night Opera program for three Sundays in September, schedule as follows:

September 13: Orfeo

September 20: Ulisse

September 27: Poppea

I'm guessing those will be about 8pm ET. WCRB's livestream is accessible here.