Superconductor: From Mahler to Meat Loaf

Superconductor: From Mahler to Meat Loaf: "Rock's Roots in the 19th Century Art Song" Thanks Superconductor for this great spotlight! The interactions of popular music with classical material are worth a lifetime of study.

Opera Spotlight: The Mikado

Hear this week's opera at http://www.wfmt.com/streaming. Times:

PREFEED:  Friday, June 17, 2011 - 1500 ET

LIVE FEED: Saturday, June 18, 2011 - 1300 ET

Also, check out: Washington WETA (thanks Michelle!) 
http://www.weta.org/fm/listenlive

Bastille Opera's performance of Francesca da Rimini (by Zandonai)
June 18, 2011, 1:00 pm


Chicago Lyric's broadcast this week features the beloved Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado. With a native English-speaking cast (more about that in a minute) featuring James Morris and Stephanie Blythe, I anticipate a great performance experience. I've seen Morris live (as Filippo II at Tanglewood, my first live opera) and he is a very handsome, charismatic performer whose voice has a real growl to it.

G & S operettas were part of my introduction to opera (chorus roles in Pirates of Penzance and Patience) and I saw Mikado performed live at the Portsmouth Music Hall in 2003. The satire of these works is wrapped in marzipan music and is still valid today, as the bureaucrats and "nobility" Gilbert lampooned in the Victorian era still walk among us. Mikado features one of my favorite tenor pieces, "A Wand'ring Minstrel I" and many other favorite excerpts. Here's a decent (though more Broadway than G & S)  recording of Simon Gallaher from YouTube.

Finally, a word about native speakers. I  have nothing against artists performing roles in a foreign language, and some of my favorite artists would never have become world-famous if they had been restricted to operas by composers of their nationality. (Sad but true: there are many excellent composers from Bulgaria, for instance, and Bulgaria gives the world many truly excellent singers like Vesselina Kasarova, Nicola Ghiuselev, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, but the big opera houses such as Covent Garden or the Met are not very likely to feature a Bulgarian opera when pieces like Tosca pay the bills.) BUT my caveat: I recently listened to a recording in mono from the 50s of Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmelites sung by a French cast - and it was a mind-blowing experience. French is a beautiful language and when sung by a native-speaker cast, the attention to detail and deep understanding of the sounds and associations of the vocabulary is amazing. Here's hoping this week's Mikado is at least half as idiomatic and fluent as that recording!

History through the Operaglass

When I found this book, about 4 years ago, I was thrilled that one of my favorite subjects had been addressed and compiled at such length. Opera tends to tap the most dramatic of stories, so there are plenty of fictional or mythological plots, but many librettists have seen dramatic potential in real stories. That is not to say that "historically based" operas are always accurate: sometimes they can have more legend in them than those based in myth.George Jellinek guides the reader through approximately 1800 years of opera plots, from Giulio Cesare to Tosca and many others in between. Google Books also has a preview and e-book available.

Perhaps someday this book will be updated to the modern era.

And so this is Christmas

almost. But the song I want to explore today is never out of season: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Happy Christmas (War is Over)." Like most Christmas songs worth a second hearing, this one has been covered by various artists, and their new takes can add to the overall beauty and community of the song. The harmonic progression of “Happy Christmas" is fairly simple but effective. Dissonances in the accompaniment and melody highlight the song’s attitude of hope in the face of the world’s concerns.

sung by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

One of the most touching moments of the song, whether rehearsed or candid, is Lennon and Ono’s whisper of Christmas wishes to their children before the music starts.  “War is Over", the song’s subtitle, is sung to the countermelody during the chorus. The theme of peace and hopes for a better world echo “Imagine,” released 2 months earlier in 1971. Lennon never stopped hoping for peace and this song, though beloved as a Christmas standard, is an eloquent protest of the war in Vietnam and war anywhere.

sung by Maroon 5

Of all the covers I have heard for this song, Maroon 5 makes the most interesting counterpart to Lennon's version. In contrast to most of the others I looked at (Celine Dion, U2, Sarah Maclachlan), their version begins plainly with the lead singer solo and a piano playing a single line, and does not get much more decorated with that. All the rest choose to begin with guitars strumming and perhaps add tambourines for rhythm, a stylistic choice which echoes Lennon's original recording.  The significance of the instrumentation here reflects the different emotional content in each version. Lennon and Ono are joined by a children's choir, and take the song up and up the scale through modulations, perhaps in a gesture of joy. Maroon 5 skips the upward modulation and chooses to keep the song in a medium-low vocal register for the majority of the song, which keeps the atmosphere intimate and hushed, nothing like the exuberant but deep emotion of Ono singing "war is over/if you want it."

The single line played against the soloist is the countermelody, later used in the chorus with the words “War is over/if you want it/now” with “nota cambiata” non-harmonic tones. The starkness of the piano line makes every dissonant interval in the countermelody stand out, and the vocal line is changed minutely to add emphasis to these dissonant notes. Instead of the tender and hopeful atmosphere of Lennon's version, Maroon 5 seems bittersweetly nostalgic and perhaps more world-weary than optimistic. At 2:55, the lyrics "let's hope it's a good one" are given a bitter cast by the dissonance in the melody over a minor chord (ii), which resolves to a major chord through passing notes in the bass. These notes are harmonized and brought out by strings, which have been added as the song gains momentum. In each repetition of the chorus the chords resolve in the same pattern, but the addition of the strings and the emphasis on the IV chord, bright and sunny, twists this chorus unexpectedly into optimism. Perhaps the singer does not really believe war is over, but by the end of the song we feel it may be possible.

Opera on the Air: free broadcasts

In 2006 when I first got "the opera bug," I made extensive use of online and radio broadcasts to record (to cassette) and hear new operas. Between the Met and WFMT, there is a broadcast nearly every Saturday of the year.

http://www.operainfo.org/ The Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, carried by many public radio stations. This site also contains background info on the operas of the current and previous seasons, with score examples, photos, and recording clips.

http://www.metoperafamily.org/stream.aspx 
Every week during the Met season (approximately August to May) one performance is streamed live online, through RealPlayer.

http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=12,10 WFMT fills out the year in between Met seasons (May-August), with broadcasts from Chicago and San Francisco's opera houses. Radio coverage can be supplemented by online streams from stations in the WFMT network.

http://www.npr.org/programs/world-of-opera/
Depending on your location, you may hear World of Opera, NPR's opera highlights program. If like me, this is not available to you on air, the website archives "hit singles" and sometimes whole operas.


I will be working on a recurring spotlight on available broadcasts with background on the operas featured.

Moondance

We've all heard Van Morrison's jazz tune "Moondance." How do the covers measure up?

Original version by Van Morrison, with lyrics

The verse is mostly made up of the same A A’ phrase, but Morrison’s feel for the music makes these repeats anything but repetitious. He allows the words to shape the lines in terms of intensity and momentum. Morrison’s voice in this song (both as an instrument and as “author”) is confident and casual, and retains its “rock” timbre while singing convincingly in a jazz style. He sounds like he has the whole night to spend on song and romance, and conveys a laidback yet eager attitude.
Covers for this song are not hard to find, and I heard many of them in between listening to the singers I already knew (Buble, McFerrin, Morrison).

sung by Catherine Reed

Reed does a decent job of varying the phrases, but as noted in comments, her decision to drop her voice at the end of each phrase makes the words less than audible. In a song like “Moondance,” attention to little details make the whole piece more passionate – you can’t rush over any words (even repeated sections) and come across convincingly. Also, her choice of timbres for contrast occasionally strike my ear as odd. Reed’s voice becomes big where the song could be interpreted as soft, etc.

sung by Grady Tate

According to Wikipedia (unsourced, unfortunately), Morrison was pleased by Tate’s cover. Tate changes the melody in little ways, making it his own and increasing the intensity, and in general sings a higher-energy “Moondance” than Morrison. In the first verse, the brushes on the drum sound like the leaves Tate, an excellent drummer, mentions in the lyrics.

sung by Kai McKenzie

McKenzie is called in the caption for this video “the top UK Michael Buble tribute act.” He has a very clean voice; in my opinion his version is way too clean. Every word, even when the song really gets going before the break (2:00), is chopped neatly into place (though the attacks themselves are scooped in a very pop-music style) and the timbre barely varies from the first verse to the end.

sung by Michael Buble

Here’s Buble himself, at the Verizon Wireless Arena of my home state. Singing this live, he brings as polished an approach to the overall song as if he were in the studio. As with Reed, some of his phrases seem “hard” where they could be softer and more tender (such as 3:17 “make some more romance”); this seems to be his way of sounding forcefully romantic or dramatic, not something Buble is known for. Like Tate’s version, he raises the intensity of the song overall from Morrison’s original and it works, especially live.

sung by Charlese

This version strikes me as more idiomatic than the Catherine Reed version, though uneven overall. Charlese uses a great variety of vocal color, and patterns the intensity of her phrases on the text like Morrison. Her voice gets breathy at times in an awkward way, but overall she has plenty of feeling and a free but intense approach to the song.

sung by Bobby McFerrin

Saving arguably the best artist for last, here is Bobby McFerrin. Son of an opera singer, he is a consummate musician and sings the “instrumental” solo at the beginning of this track. McFerrin changes the melody right from the beginning and interpolates new wordless solos, while sticking to the low, calm atmosphere of Morrison’s Moondance. Because the repetitive elements (vocal melody, guitar accompaniment, rhythms) in the song are carefully rearranged and varied, McFerrin manages to make his version even more laidback and precisely romantic than Morrison’s. A similar, live version is linked below.

sung by Bobby McFerrin (recorded live)

in response to "A Gay Girl in Damascus" blog/hoax

When I read the post reporting Amina's disappearance at http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/, I was deeply saddened that the "bad guys" might have won and that her voice might be silenced. But when I heard that Amina was rumored to be a hoax, my feelings of support and solidarity did not change. Whether fictional or not, the voice was authentic and even more importantly, a minority all too often silenced.
I support Tom MacMaster and I hope he finds time one day to write Amina a book. Her story is worth reading and I would gladly buy any such book. Most of all, I support all dissidents who dare to defy parental expectations, state society, and tradition in defense of their own moral compass.