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Fedor Chaliapin sings “Song about a Flea” (Mussorgsky)
Today I’m introducing you to a recording of one of the greatest Russian opera singers, Fedor Chaliapin. He was a man of multiple talents: a gifted drawer, oil painter and sculptor; he was very good at writing, showing a lively mind, power of observation and wit. His legacy would be enough to fill several biographies. Chaliapin performed 70 bass roles, about 400 romances and songs; he played violin and cello, directed and conducted operas, starred on stage and in films; he was also the author of newspaper articles and feuilletons, a caricaturist, and a lyricist. Rachmaninoff wrote about Chaliapin, “I’m in love with Fedor like a college girl! He possesses unlimited talents in everything he puts his hands on…”.
Shirley Verrett sings Lady Macbeth’s aria (Verdi)
Today I’d like to present one of my favorite recordings of opera repertoire. It is the aria of Lady Macbeth from Verdi’s opera, sung by Shirley Verrett. The recording was made at La Scala, Milan, in 1975. I view this performance as not just one of the best embodiments of this heroine, but also as an outstanding model of vocal technique, artistry and incredible stage presence.
Pelageya sings “Under Willow”
When I was asked to write a blog about my favorite vocal pieces I had some doubts: Am I a good story teller? Is my English good enough to tell it the way I’d like? How do I choose just four pieces out of so many favorites? Actually, what are the criteria anyway … ?
The only certain thing was—if I do it, I will start with a Russian folk song. Because folk songs are the reservoir of Russian vocal treasure and because they are personal to me. My first steps into the world of music and singing were made with folk songs.
Gabriela Lena Frank: El Nascimento de Cifar
Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea is the setting of an epic poem by Pablo Antonio Cuadra. The protagonist, a sailor named Cifar is destined to sail the greatest lake in Nicaragua. All his life lessons, challenges, and triumphs are a result of his life on the water. It all begins with Cifar’s birth. Here is “El Nascimento de Cifar” by Gabriela Lena Frank. Andrew Garland is the excellent baritone. Warren Jones is at the piano.
Barbara Strozzi: Lagrime mie
Hildegard von Bingen is a tough act to follow for anyone. But about 500 years...
Hildegard von Bingen: Canticles of Ecstasy
This week we’ve been talking about and hearing from women composers. Women composers are achieving mixed success in entering the male dominated world of classical composition. I think that the quality of one’s work tends to carry the day, and help establish a compositional voice and career, but it has traditionally been the dearth of recognition, and lack of opportunity that has held back talented women.
Tom Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes: Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar
Following yesterday’s post about Gabriela Frank and Anne Ronell, I started thinking about Clarice Assad. She is a wonderful pianist, composer and vocalist. If you hear her in concert, you will probably be swept away by her virtuosic Brazilian scat singing. But being Brazilian, she owns Brazilian music and is one of the upcoming keepers of the traditional flame as well as a creator of the next music in the Brazilian musical lineage.
Ann Ronell: Willow Weep for Me
Here’s one of my favorite jazz standards. Not too many songs found in the Fake Book are by women, but Ann Ronnel wrote this (music and lyrics) in the early 1930’s. She was a contemporary of Dorothy Fields and Kay Swift, and a friend of George Gershwin, working as his rehearsal pianist. Leonard Bernstein met his future wife Felicia Montealagre, at a party in Ann’s Manhattan apartment. Here’s a young Sarah Vaughan in a live performance. Listen to the end and you’ll hear a great example how to handle a screw up with grace and humor.
Dorothy Fields and Morton Gould: A Cow and a Pough and a Frau
On the Dorothy Fields’ website, “A Cow and a Plough and a Frau” is described as the low point of Fields’ career as a lyricist, which naturally sent me scurrying to find a recording. Luckily the original cast album CD of Arms and the Girl, from which the song comes, paired with Up in Central Park goes in and out of print with regularity, and isn’t hard to find. The show itself is little remembered. It’s one of at least five Broadway musicals about the American Revolution (the most recent being Hamilton of course, the earliest being Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest Enemy). But until I found the CD, that was the extent of my knowledge.
Ervin Drake: No Restricted Signs
Gospel music and the Civil Rights movement have often aligned, especially beginning in the late ‘50s when Reverend Martin Luther King became the face and voice of the movement. Back in the ‘40s, however, the link was not so clear. That didn’t deter lefty Jewish songwriter Ervin Drake (who later went on to write the score for What Makes Sammy Run and a few Sinatra standards) from creating a piece of special material in 1946 for The Golden Gate Quartet, four close-harmony specialists who mostly sang spirituals. Their sound is pretty irresistible, and they can even be seen on camera accompanying Dick Powell and Mary Martin singing Arlen and Mercer’s “Hit the Road to Dreamland” in 1942’s Star Spangled Rhythm. True, they are playing Pullman Porters, but such were the times. Ervin Drake, however, had bigger things in mind.
Randy Newman: Gainesville
Among pop singer-songwriters Randy Newman stands out in many ways, but most especially in his ability to write for characters nothing like himself. The protagonists of his songs are a rogues’ gallery worthy of Charles Dickens or Ring Lardner. They don’t know who they are, but through Newman’s penetrating portraiture, we get to hear them reveal themselves without being aware of it – and they are by and large a frightening lot. Bigots, boobs, self-indulgent whiners, stoners, petty thieves, politically and ethically benighted – there is not a lot to admire in most of them, save their humanity, which also, in a strange and almost indefinable way always seems to come through somehow. It makes it difficult to judge them as harshly as we want to, because some part of them always manages to seem like us. There’s a kind of genius in that.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: Idol with the Golden Head
NYFOS’s well-known motto is “No Song Is Safe From Us”, but I sometimes wonder if there are some songs from which NYFOS should be kept safe. Case in point: Leiber & Stoller’s “Idol With the Golden Head.” recorded by The Coasters in 1957, just as the rock and roll rebellion was putting down permanent roots.
Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler: As Long As I Live
My love affair with Harold Arlen’s music began back in the ‘70s when I was barely out of college and read Alec Wilder’s extraordinary American Popular Song, probably the first great treatise on the American Songbook. Wilder was certainly controversial, and not short of opinions; one of them was that Arlen was Gershwin’s equal and, in many ways, his superior. This didn’t sit well with lots of Gershwin fans, and I’m not sure it’s true, but it got me started on a life-long exploration of Arlen’s music and career, and I must say that in some ways – particularly his manner of tucking blue notes into places you don’t expect them while Gershwin so often puts them right where you know they’re going to be – I’ve come to partially concur with Wilder.
Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians play “Auld Lang Syne”
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Guy Lombardo plays “Winter Wonderland”
No better way for getting in the mood for the holidays! This recording takes me back to my earliest memories. It was made in 1946 but it was still very much played in the McKay household at Christmas time in the mid to late 50’s and through the 60’s. As much as I love the Andrew sisters and their incredible harmony, it’s the instrumental segment that really gets me. Lombardo and his orchestra had such a unique sound, one that completely filled my childhood for years and one that I will never forget.