Sunday Classics

A cheery thought from Roz Chast in the May 12 New YorkerIRVING BERLIN: Annie, Get Your Gun: Overture and "There's No Business Like Show Business" (plus "They Say It's Wonderful")Mary Martin (Annie Oakley), John Raitt (Frank Butler), 1957 NBC TV Cast ensemble. Capitol-EMI

[Click to enlarge]Agustin Anievas, piano. EMI, recorded in London, June 1975Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Praga, recorded live in Prague, Feb.

Ferruccio Furlanetto (at the Met last year) as the sleepless King Philip in his study -- with the fateful jewel box

by KenI've thought of another loose end I'd really hate not to tie up: our gradual traversal of the great scene in King Philip's study in Act IV (Act III of the four-act version) of Verdi's Don Carlos.We've already covered the Spanish king's bleak pre-dawn monologue ("Verdi's King Philip -- a man in crisis," January 2013), where he makes clear that he knows his young wife

by KenI'm just about to leave for a chamber-ensemble concert devoted to, of all composers, Mahler -- comprising, in reduced-orchestra form, the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, the Songs of a Wayfarer, and Das Lied von der Erde.As some of you out there will recall, we still have a "complete" Das Lied under Sunday Classics promise, and I've done a fair amount of performance-sorting and thinking, but I still don't know what I want to say. Maybe nothing more.

The Atos Trio plays the beautiful third-movement Andante cantabile of Beethoven's Archduke Trio in Berlin's Joseph-Joachim-Saal, December 2011.by KenAs I mentioned in last night's preview, a piece dear to my heart popped into my head yesterday, and it was extremely welcome, because I think of it as, for want of a better way of putting it, a "good new" piece. I love it end to end, but I especially love that magisterial opening given to the piano.

Piano Trio: i. Allegro moderato -- openingArthur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violin; Emanuel Feuermann, cello. RCA-BMG, recorded in Holllywood, Sept. 12-13, 1941Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Lynn Harrell, cello. EMI, recorded in New York, c1979

Baritone Matthias Goerne sings "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n" ("Now will the sun rise just as brightly"), the opening song of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, with Jonathan Nott conducting the Mahler Youth Orchestra, at a Proms concert in the Royal Albert Hall, Sept. 4, 2009.

For the final stanza of "In diesem Wetter," the last of the Kindertotenlieder, Mahler switches from minor to majorThomas Hampson, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, October 1988

[As I explained at the top of Friday night's preview, this is the second part of a three-part Bruckner series, begun December 6-8 with "Bruckner's Fourth Symphony -- four stories for four movements," a reprise of a January 2010 post I've always been fond of.