Up there is a rocky little glimpse of Salzburg — the town in Austria where the world’s leading music festival is held. I’ll get to that in a moment. Here, though, is a music podcast. It’s called “Horne-o-rama.”
Lena? No, Marilyn. They were great friends of each other, by the way. They would say to each other, “We’re sistahs under the skin.”
I had a long sitdown with Marilyn Horne, the great mezzo-soprano, in June. My piece about it is here. And now I’ve done a podcast to accompany the piece. I have tracks of music that we talked about, etc. What can beat hearing, right?
Anyway, a Horne-o-rama: everything from the first song she ever sang for her legendary teacher, Lotte Lehmann, to her favorite folk song. (The first of those songs: “Die junge Nonne,” by Schubert. The second: “Shenandoah.”)
About the Salzburg Festival, I will have a piece in the forthcoming National Review — a piece about the festival and Mozart in particular. (Salzburg is Mozart’s hometown.) In the meantime, I’d like to throw a few posts at you.
This one reviews Yefim Bronfman in recital. (He is a pianist, and one of the best ones on the scene.) This is an unusual post — it describes a rehearsal of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The VPO was conducted by Riccardo Muti, the venerable Italian.
Maybe I could paste the last couple of paragraphs:
I would like to end on an actuarial note — but not a macabre one, I don’t think. I had a thought when Muti was conducting the children’s choir. A few of them will live into the twenty-second century. And then will be able to say that they sang under Muti, born in 1941 — some of whose teachers were born in the nineteenth century.
The continuity of music: a blessed thing.
Finally, a post about a production of Aida, the opera by Verdi. Maybe I could paste the last few paragraphs of that one, too:
. . . I suppose I think that people ought to write new operas, on any subject they like, rather than rewrite other people’s operas.
The Met has a production of Rigoletto — yet another Verdi masterpiece — set in the Las Vegas of the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, et al.). I think an opera about the Rat Pack in Las Vegas is a splendid idea. Someone ought to write one. Rigoletto belongs to the Mantua of long ago.
Thus endeth my dinosaur song.
A dinosaur in politics. A dinosaur in the arts. But I like to think I’m more of a Rex than one of those plant-eaters.