Sunday Classics

The end of the Sextet in the Off-Monroe Players' 2010 production of PatienceGILBERT and SULLIVAN: Patience: from the Act I finale, Lady Saphir, "Are you resolved to wed this shameless one? . . . Sextet with Chorus, "I hear the soft note"

Yet until the shadows fallover one and over all,sing a merry madrigal!by KenI'm not going to identify tonight's madrigal tonight, but I also haven't attempted to conceal its identity. I mean, I could have identified Yum-Yum as "Lady 1" or "Bride" and Nanki-Poo as "Man 1" or "Bridegroom" and so on.

Pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Salvatore Accardo, violist Antonine Tamestit, and cellist Gautier Capuçon play the gorgeous third-movement Andante of Brahms's C minor Piano Quartet, at the 2008 Verbier Festival.by KenAs I wrote when I brought up the subject of the third of Brahms's three piano quartets, and wound up presenting only his Second Cello Sonata, the performance of the C minor Quartet I heard in Ian Hobson's New York Brahms piano series, with violinist Andrés Cárdenes, violis

Arnaud Sussmann, Jonathan Vinocour, Michael Nicolas, and Orion Weiss play the Scherzo of the Brahms Third Piano Quartet at the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, July 29, 2012. (Not much snorting and grunting here, not to mention inward restlessness or inward propulsion.)by KenOr, to be more accurate it's a Brahms intermezzo and two scherzos, though the Intermezzo in question clearly functions as the scherzo, or at any rate scherzo-equivalent, of the work in question.

Plácido Domingo and Adrienne Pieczonka as Siegmund and Sieglinde at the Met, April 2009by KenThis week I want to finish up with my contention that that extraordinary depth of pain we hear coming out of Wotan, first in Act II of Die Walküre and then, of course, in the his final farewell to his cherished daughter Brünnhhilde at the end of the opera, is tempered by our knowledge that most of this pain is self-inflicted.

Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and husband Daniel Barenboim play the third-movement Allegro passionato of the Brahms F major Cello Sonata, the movement we heard in this week's preview.by KenFor this week's preview I seized on a quote included by the program notes for the performance of Brahms's Second Cello Sonata I heard recently, with the fine young cellist Dmitry Kouzov, in

[A][B][C]"I'd like to hear you yourself play the scherzo, with its driving power and energy (I can hear you snorting and grunting in it!). No one else would succeed in playing it as I imagine it: agitated without rushing, legato, yet inwardly restless and propulsive."-- from a letter to Brahms by pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg,who had been playing the composer's new piano-and-cello sonataby KenThe music is the third movement of Brahms's Second Cello Sonata in F, Op.

Ildar Abdrazakov as Don Giovanni and Andrew Foster-Williams as Leporello, in Washington last October

On last week's White Collar episode, "Out of the Frying Pan," Mozzie (Willie Garson) and Neal (Matt Bomer) planned a caper.