|
|
Post by evergreen on Mar 26, 2023 21:30:02 GMT
I've been watching the tenor Yonghoon Lee sing Nessun Dorma. I saw him earlier this afternoon in a Live Cinema performance of Turandot by the Royal Opera House - he was very very good, totally believable in the character and a very powerful voice.
In the same production was the soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha. Apparently she won the "Song Prize" in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2021 and I've been watching her performance in the finals. A very worthy winner with a wonderful voice.
Love the music of Turandot, but the plot leaves a lot to be desired...
|
|
|
|
Post by keff on Mar 27, 2023 7:57:10 GMT
Many of the YT videos made by Benjamin Zander.
|
|
|
|
Post by Zi on Mar 27, 2023 8:56:20 GMT
Love the music of Turandot, but the plot leaves a lot to be desired... It's seems quite often the case that plots are 'peculiar'. I find that the case in drama - which I know rather better. Othello hinges on a hankie. Lear believes everything his dreadful daughters say. Hamlet comes to illogical conclusions. Oedipus never puts brain in gear. And Medea is somewhat excessive. I could go on. I always presume that the plots (in drama) are little more than metaphor and don't hold up to close scrutiny. Maybe opera is much the same. |
|
|
|
Post by pavane on Mar 28, 2023 9:10:42 GMT
Indeed it does, yet is nowhere near as bad as the plot in many operas. I have met several people who think the introduction of surtitles giving a tranlation of the lyrics is one of the worst things that has ever happened to opera, for precisely this reason. For me, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is a great example of this. I love the music, and just assumed that the world class singers warbling away in Italian were expressing something deep and meaningful, yet the opening lyrics turned out to be banal in the extreme. That's before they get into the dressing up as other people and so forth - we have to believe that an experienced "man of the world" can't tell the difference between a woman he's pursuing and a man dressed up to look like her. Hmmm... (apologies if I've got the wrong opera here - it seems to happen in lots of them).
It's all a bit like the thing of deconstructing music - maybe it's better to simply listen to it.
|
|
|
|
Post by pavane on Mar 28, 2023 9:28:13 GMT
To answer the original question: I'm listening to Autobahn by Kraftwerk. I don't actually like what I'll loosely call electronica but Autobahn was a big thing in my student days (I've still got the single somewhere) and I have recently been reminded of this by one of those odd little circles of coincidence. I have just bought (yet another!) clarinet, and it turned out that it was owned by Florian Schneider, who was one of the founders of Kraftwerk. He had quite a large collection of musical instruments which are now being sold off (he died a few years ago). That's not why I bought it, I didn't know at the time, just one of those things.
Not sure if I could find the single very quickly, but even if I could, I have no way of playing it, having long since sold my last turntable. Interesting that vinyl is making such a comeback - I was in the car yesterday evening and the record of the week on the programme I was listening to was Seong-Jin Cho's The Handel Project on vinyl. You can buy it on CD at about half the price, but the record company (DG) obviously thinks there will be sufficient people willing to pay double for the vinyl edition that it's worth producing it.
I used, via work, to have a vague connection with digital forensics and evidence storage and, contrary to what people generally think, CDs and DVDs don't last forever. Last time I tried any of my LPs they seemed to play as well as they ever did, yet all are at least 40 years old. However, buyers aren't buying LPs for their longevity, at least not as far as I am aware, but for their mystical audio quality. Which is particularly interesting in the case of the Handel because, apparently, the recording and processing was all handled digitally, and the final result was pressed onto vinyl. No further comment!
Incidentally, the clarinet is really unusual - I will post something about it in due course.
|
|
|
|
Post by evergreen on Mar 31, 2023 17:43:19 GMT
Some of Animusic's videos. "Pipe Dream" is still my favourite.
|
|
|
|
Post by pavane on Mar 31, 2023 18:18:21 GMT
Brilliant! Never seen that before - thanks for posting it.
|
|
|
|
Post by Zi on Oct 26, 2023 13:31:17 GMT
Not sure if this is interesting to anyone else but Paul Harris's book has renewed my interest in early-ish music. This vid is of a couple of recorder players, playing some Tudor music. They play a range of early instruments but here it's just recorders. Pearl in the Egg |
|
