Verdi

Tenor James Johnston's "Comfort ye" recording was aninspiration to me, but we're still not going to hear it."I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal the wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.

Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland sing the "Brindisi" from Act I of Verdi's La Traviata, with Richard Bonynge conducting, at the Met in October 1970.

Can you imagine a more ravishing musical attention-getter?London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Mackerras, cond. Philips-Mercury, recorded July 1961by KenWhat we hear above is really and truly a preview; we're not going to hear any more of this piece until tomorrow's Ghost of Sunday Classics post.

How many "Rataplan"s can you count in these 33 seconds?

Aa Act II ends, Otello (Jon Vickers, right) swears vengeance and Jago (Cornell MacNeil) swears his support (all with subtitles), one of the most thrilling and most appalling moments you'll encounter on a stage -- with James Levine conducting, at the Met in September 1978.by KenWe've been dealing with the sisterly or at least cousinly kinship between Verdi's Luisa Miller and Desdemona, and in case it wasn't in obvious in

by KenWe tried something a few weeks back, listening just to a tiny bit of music, which turned out to be the brief orchestral prelude to Act IV of Verdi's Otello, with the (hopefully) suggestive question of what mood or moods it suggested ("How would you describe the atmosphere? Austere? Melancholy? Solitary? Foreboding?").

Desdemona receives an outpouring of love from the adoring Cypriots in Act II of Cape Town's 2013 Otello.by KenLast week we listened to the opening scene of Verdi's Luisa Miller, as I tried to make my case about the kinship between Luisa and her Verdian cousin Desdemona in Otello, heroines who (to quote myself yet again) --

NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA-BMG, broadcast performance from Studio 8-H, July 25, 1943Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded 1976RCA Italiana Orchestra, Fausto Cleva, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded June 1964Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Riccardo Muti, cond. Sony, recorded Sept.

Rome Opera Orchestra, Tullio Serafin, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded July-Aug. 1960Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond.

In Act II of Verdi's La Forza del destino, Leonora (Jennifer Maines) meets the kindly but ineffectual Padre Guardiano (Marek M. Gasztecki), at Innsbruck's Landestheater, September 2013.by KenAnother ghost-of-a-post idea, and one that may require some eventual fleshing-out. It was born of conjoined images from two different operas that suddenly started playing together in my head.