Sunday Classics

Plus: Since the world needs music, I'm tackinga bit on at the end of this post. Here's a tease:Nobody could be more surprised than your humble author to find himself a practicing Zoomer.-by Ken I imagine that Howie and Noah have covered this by now.

10pm ET UPDATE: We have Yevgeny Onegin audio files!Anneliese Rothenberger and Nicolai Gedda as Constanzeand Belmonte in Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio,from the cover of their 1966 EMI recordingMOZART: The Abduction from the Seraglio: Overture and Belmonte's entrance aria, "Hier soll ich dich denn sehen?"

by KenFor this new year, I thought I'd bring back a Sunday Classics triple toast (with trimmings) I whipped up for last New Year's, with assists from assorted participants in that greatest of operettas, Johann Strauss Jr.'s Die Fledermaus, beginning with this immortal (if hard to translate-in-song) pearl of wisdom:Richard Leech (t),

The first part of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos, with Paul Schoeffler as the Music Master and Sena Jurinac as the Composer, staged by Günter Rennert and conducted by Karl Böhm, filmed at Salzburg in 1965 -- the remaining four parts are also on YouTube.by KenIt was along, arduous path from conception to ultimate creation, the strange entertainment concocted by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his librettist on two previous, wildly different operas, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, in collaboration with the great stage director Max Reinhardt, who had collaborated with them on Rose

Virgil Fox at the console of RiversideChurch's grand Aeolian-Skinner organby KenSomehow I wound up with at least two and maybe three copies of a CD reissue in the "RCA Living Stereo" series: the album of Encores recorded January 27-30, 1958, on the grand Aeolian-Skinner organ of Manhattan's Riverside Church by that master showman of the organ

Leonard Warren as Simon Boccanegra

Lauritz Melchior sings Otello's monologue (in German, in a 1930 HMV recording) maybe better than I've heard anyone else sing it. (Note: We've got English texts coming up in a bit if you want to jump ahead to them.)by KenI first heard about the Melchior performance of Otello's monologue in Conrad L. Osborne's 1963 High Fidelity magazine discography of Otello.

Violinist and conductor Tátrai (1912-1999)Symphony No. 31 in D (Horn Signal) (1765):i. AllegroSymphony No. 73 in D (La chasse) (The Hunt) (1782)iv. PrestoHungarian Chamber Orchestra, Vilmos Tátrai, cond. Hungaroton, recorded 1965by KenSo I noticed this CD lying atop one of the millions of piles of CDs I've finally been trying to organize, and it didn't instantly ring a bell: a pair of D major sort of hunt-themed Haydn symphonies -- the Horn Signal, No.