My son just sent me a link to this video of a very young Leontyne Price singing one of my favorite arias. I’m still partial to Beverly Sills’ performance, but isn’t this wonderful! Also, try the links at the end of the video for some other fine performances.
Nimm sie hin, denn, diese Lieder . . .
Just a quick post so that my few readers will know I’m not dead.
I keep getting comments on this post. The Paul Robeson video has attracted four pages of fan comments at YouTube. You can read them here. And it’s even more surprising to me that I’ve attracted no anti-labor comments or rants from Robeson haters.
My post about Mack Harrell also continues to draw comments. In going back to it I discover that YouTube has removed the short Fauré Requiem excerpt. By way of turning the other cheek, here’s some more Mack Harrell, a recording I didn’t know about (and that I will be looking for) of “An die ferne Geliebte.” I’m especially glad to have discovered it because this song cycle was the first thing I studied with Mr. Harrell and the first piece I ever performed as his student.
I said maybe I would tell some stories. Here are a couple. As serious as he was about his vocation, Mr. Harrell was funny too—like the day we started working on the “Schöne Müllerin,” when he came in the studio in a straw hat with a stalk of grass in his teeth. I never called him Mack as some others of his students did; I noticed early on that they only did that behind his back. I also recall that he took a phone call from Rudolf Bing in the middle of one of my lessons once and told Bing that he wouldn’t return to the Metropolitan Opera for the next season, saying he had decided to “forgo opera.” I didn’t know that day that he already knew he was dying.
But the best memory I have is this one. I had failed to get an opera role for which I had auditioned, and I was depressed. When I arrived for my lesson the next day, Mr. Harrell played and sang for me a Schumann song, “Stirb Lieb’ und Freud’.” In it a young woman decides to take the veil, and her lover must reconcile himself to losing her forever. It’s a strophic song, beautifully simple and sublime, refining the emotions of which it treats and rendering them monumental. “We need to remember when we lose things,” Mr. Harrell said, “that there are still lots of good songs left in the world.” I remembered that in the summer of 1959 at Aspen, when he sang a group of Mendelssohn songs he had never sung before.
you pick your crap . . .
Here’s Alan Simpson objecting to what?
I’ve been under the weather for a bit and hadn’t seen this video until today. My guy appointed this man to the fiscal commission currently meeting periodically in our nation’s capital. Shame on them both.
To my mind, the reference to “lesser people” that comes near the beginning of the interview is hardly the worst of it. Check Paul Krugman’s view of Simpson’s contributions to the fiscal commission’s deliberations here. The video is fairly long. Watch all of it to get the full benefit of Simpson’s view of the world.
Anger management, anyone?
It’s a bird! it’s a plane! No, it’s the new Dodge Challenger, flags a-flying, mowing down a column of hapless redcoats as Americans in powdered wigs get cars and freedom right. You Betcha!
And to think it was only yesterday the American taxpayer, via the despised American government, bailed Chrysler out of the hole its enlightened free-enterpriser managers had dug for it. Chrysler ought to be a poster child for the economic failures of the past thirty years, sleaze upon sleaze. And now here’s more.
But it isn’t just Chrysler. There’s a trend, and where there’s a trend there’s an advertiser trying to take advantage of it. It’s the American way. According to a Washington Post story today,
Spokeswoman Dianna Gutierrez declined to say whether the Challenger commercial — which the company timed to appear during the World Cup soccer match between the United States and England — was aimed at buyers who are sore about the bailout.
But, sensitive to the fact that taxpayers helped pay for the slick new ad, she said Chrysler saved money by using costumes left over from an old Mel Gibson movie.
The same story puts the amount American taxpayers have paid Chrysler at “more than $7 billion.” A recent ABC News story under Diane Sawyer’s byline puts the figure at $22 billion. That’s a lot of “more than.” How interesting that management at Chrysler now seeks to exploit free-floating anger. Maybe the next thing will be pre-installed gun racks as standard equipment in Dodge pickups or other exploitation of more targeted forms of rage. There’s plenty of good stuff in Mel Gibson’s trash, after all, real tea party stuff.