This is not the kind of music I normally find appealing, being atonal and deeply, deeply strange. It’s from Thomas Adès’s recent opera of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. This aria belongs to Ariel, an airy spirit, and is sung here by Audrey Luna. It’s positively (and appropriately) unearthly.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPkEj3B9KKI&w=560&h=315] Continue reading
As promised, I return from the opera gala with something to amuse you. This aria was sung by a very handsome young baritone with a beautiful voice, a gleam in his eye, and a copy of Vanity Fair, to which he referred at salient moments, to illustrate the ladies in question. This particular recording, by Erwin Schrott, is much in the same spirit, and leads one to believe that the singer is in fact detailing (and revelling in) his own conquests, not those of his master. In my mind, it immediately became ‘the notches on the bedpost aria’, because I’m vulgar like that. See what you think…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM-2CA47L_A&w=420&h=315] Continue reading
I know, I know, it’s all church music all the time around here, but what can I say? I spent most of yesterday singing in services to celebrate the 350th Anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer (and I now know much more Anglican church history than I used to – ask me hiw. You’re just lucky I’m not inflicting Stanford’s Te Deum (and all its manifold top Fs) on you. My ear-worm-prone brain is still inflicting it on me…
Instead, here, have some equally British Byrd.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fubfWcilbE&w=420&h=315] Continue reading
I was going to do something light and funny for Friday, but it’s been a very long week and I’m tired and headachey and in the mood for something soothing.
Hence, we have this rather unusual interpretation by the Ensemble Planeta of an aria from Telemann’s German Magnificat. They’ve slowed it right down, given the tenor solo to a soprano, and transformed the bouncy string accompaniment into a trippy, drifting vocal one – it’s the Magnificat, Telemann, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it… And just to make it more gorgeous, someone has added a collection of medieval illuminations to the music. It’s possibly the prettiest thing you will see on YouTube this year.
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Bach is not a composer known for his lively sense of humour (unless you like obscure mathematical jokes involving making codes out of people’s names and setting them to music, in which case you’ll probably find him an absolute scream). Indeed, the first allegedly humourous piece of his that I heard was an obscure cantata using Greek myth to express the fact that he was a much better musician than one of his rivals, who pretty much had donkey’s ears. This sort of thing is extremely amusing, when your name is Johann Sebastian…
But he was, apparently, capable of more generally intelligible light moments, and he wrote, as it happens, an entire cantata about coffee. What could be more appropriate for a Monday morning?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keTwmdQakMc&w=420&h=315]
I’ve only discovered Quilter recently, mostly because there was a book of his art song available at the Allans sale a few weeks ago and I was seduced by the prospect of singing Shakespeare’s poetry. My friendly salesperson, who is a fellow lover of Purcell and 19th century French opera, eyed my choice with disfavour. “Well… it’s very… pretty,” he finally said, clearly attempting diplomacy. And so it is…
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This is truly beautiful.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4nSurzfGuQ&w=420&h=315] Continue reading
I was going to start this blog off tomorrow with a very beautiful recording of ‘Music for a while’, that being my tagline and all, but as I was wandering around YouTube looking for my own stuff, I stumbled across this deeply strange, beat-boxy version of Dido’s Lament.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FSPJ5f9CWI&w=420&h=315] Continue reading
This is how it goes:
I see an email on a mailing list seeking chorus members for a performance of Tosca in a few days time. Naturally, I’m agog to sing in some bona fide opera (I’ve been singing church music for the last decade, and have only discovered opera recently), so I write back immediately, and spend the next two evenings in rehearsal, merrily switching voice parts according to need.
It’s amazingly good fun.
And at the end of it, one of the soloists asks for my business card, which is when I realise I don’t have one.