Sunday Classics

Martyn Green (b); Lehman Engel, cond. Columbia, recorded 1953John Reed (b); Sir Malcolm Sargent, cond.

Princess Ida's three "hulking brothers" are bested by Prince Hilarion and his friends Cyril and Florian in Act III of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players' Princess Ida.

With update, in which I actually include the texts and music for the meeting of the two Bad BartsCarole Round in the 1999 SavoyNet Performing Group Ruddigore

Dame Hannah (Maya Stroshane) tells the impressionable young village bridesmaids the story of the Witch's Curse in Brown University Gilbert and Sullivan's 2010 Ruddigore.by KenWe first pondered "The Witch's Curse," though at the time I wasn't able to enable you to hear it, in a June 2007 post called "'Laws?

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

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) --

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

MENDELSSOHN: Notturno from A Midsummer Night's Dream (incidental music), Op. 61Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded Dec. 2-4, 1957Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Broadcast performance, May 23, 1969by KenA much-loved little piece latched onto my brain this weeko. It was the "Nocturne" from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music, and it really still hasn't let go.

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.