Peabody Consort on NPR; A Harp and Saxophone Duo; Events

Back to local musical developments, here's a message from Mark Cudek, director of early music at the Peabody Institute:

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I have great news: The Peabody Consort will be broadcast on NPR on the nationally-syndicated program Harmonia the week of December 7-13. The program is carried on one hundred stations in the U.S. and in the Philippines and will be available the following week world-wide on streaming audio file! The show will feature excerpts of the July 19, 2009 performance at the Indianapolis Early Music Festival. The program "If Music be the Food of Love" was a collaboration between the Peabody Consort and actors from the Indiana Repertory Theatre and was given the following mention by the Indianapolis newspaper Nuvo: "Soprano Elizabeth Hungerford proved outstanding among the four singers, while recorder player Andrew Broadwater also greatly impressed. The program showed careful preparation, delighting from start to finish."

For more info on Harmonia please go to this link provided by Cudek or copy this URL: http://indianapublicmedia.org/harmonia/
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Going from early music to what I like to call late music, harpist Jacqueline Pollauf sent a link for a new harp and saxophone duo: Pictures on Silence. There were two concerts this week which I couldn't attend, and sorry I missed posting about them. Pollauf also plays for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and had a previous harp and saxophone duo called Duo Apres.

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Here's my previous post about events I'm anticipating today, tomorrow and in coming weeks with related links.

"If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain."

That title from American jazz and blues singer, Annette Hanshaw, could have come from the mouth of a Hindu sage. My copy of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues arrived in the mail yesterday (along with the gorgeous print I also ordered). For about an hour and a half last night I was under the spell of Paley's genius and the story of the Ramayana. A clue in the end titles reveals the juxtaposed modern story as autobiographical. Something about archetypes -- themes common to every culture -- is here, but maybe someone else can tell me more about that.

Apparently, you can watch the movie for free on the site linked above, if you have the bandwidth, or you can order a DVD, as I did. It's also available on Amazon.com, which leads to an observation on the copyright controversy over Paley's use of the Hanshaw recordings: When I searched for the movie on Amazon, the search-tracking bots showed that customers who bought Paley's movie also bought Hanshaw recordings. Everybody wins.

The soundtrack also includes recent or newly composed Indian music, another delight for me.

Prokofiev's "War and Peace" Next March

In the middle of all the opera going on now, I must make a note of the Mariinsky Opera's next visit to the Kennedy Center. Prokofiev's "Voyna i mir" will be fully staged, plus there will be concert performances of other Russian operas. The card that came in the mail this week (for WNO subscribers) indicates that this is the same War and Peace production design which the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) used at the Met a few years ago.

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September 1981, the Kremlin Palace of Congresses in Moscow: A group of us from my class went to see a Bolshoy Opera performance of "War and Peace". I can still see Aleksandr Vedernikov as General Kutuzov in his eye patch and making a stately Orthodox sign of the cross during Kutuzov's aria.

Dragon's Blood Wearing Off; Anticipated Events

Music from Wagner's "Gotterdammerung" last Sunday at the Kennedy Center still rings in my mind. Gidon Saks' Hagen summoning his vassals...Irene Theorin as Brunnhilde holding the stage alone for the Immolation (and in that other-worldly sparkling black gown)...What was Jon Fredric West's clowning Siegfried up to? Making up for the lack of scenery? He sounded good, though, and he was serious when he had to be.

...and throat lozenge wrappers.

Excuse, please, if I don't post links here, but these events can be found in the links in the blog margin.... I'm going to the Peabody Opera's "Cosi fan tutte" this Saturday night (it opens on Thursday) and hope to make it to part of an audition session at Opera Vivente that afternoon. (OV's director, John Bowen, has invited the public to come and hear OV auditions during National Opera Week this week.).... Then I have a ticket to the Monument Piano Trio at An die Musik on Sunday afternoon.... Baritone Ryan de Ryke and pianist Daniel Schlosberg also return to AdM on Monday for a recital of Schubert songs. (I'll try to make it to that, but it comes right after a weekend of opera and monumental chamber music.) A note from Schlosberg says that they'll perform the same program at the Phillips Collection in DC on Sunday afternoon (Nov. 22).... Wish, also, I could make it to Baltimore Concert Opera's "Don Pasquale" at the Engineer's Club this week.

I'm keen on klezmer, so I have my eye on Charm City Klezmer at An die Musik on December 12 (the day before the Monument Piano Trio's December recital).

I'm excited that the Baltimore Consort is coming back to Baltimore for a Christmas concert at the Basilica, another An die Musik event, on December 21.

Here are some important links after all:

BaltimoreOpera.com for a calendar of operatic events
An die Musik's calendar
hearing auditions at Opera Vivente

link: Wellsung on Gotterdammerung

Here is Wellsung's post about Washington National Opera's Twilight of the Gods.

I had dropped most of "Die Meisterblogger von New York" from my blog roll for various reasons, but I'll get Wellsung back in there. It's a team blog by Alex and Jonathan that centered on opera in NYC, but it seems that Alex has moved to the DC area. I only found out about this through Ionarts yesterday. My Google blog searches on WNO's Gotter have not been turning up Wellsung (at least not in the first few pages of results, which is still a surprise).

Mission Gotterdammerung

I'm just back from the Kennedy Center after seeing Washington National Opera's concert performance of Wagner's "Gotterdammerung". ("Goetterdaemmerung", if I must account for the German umlauts without the proper symbols.) My mission wasn't all about seeing if I could make it through the five hours (which included two generous intermissions) of the performing time so I could call myself a Wagnerian -- any way, it probably takes more than that to be considered a Wagnerian. No, instead I wanted to experience for myself how great the WNO orchestra can be and how a cast of singers restricted to the concert format can come so close to the excitement of a full staging. Maybe some day I'll get to see how they can make a conflagration that consumes the abode of the gods and then make a river burst its banks and wash everything away on the opera stage. Until then, today's cast and orchestra under the baton of guest and star conductor Philippe Auguin made it all happen with some powerful singing and music.

I think the audience had a taste of the dragon's blood, like Siegfried, and for about five hours today we understood what the birds were singing. After I recover, I might post something more about today's WNO performance.

links: a guitarist's hot new site

Benjamin Beirs, one half of the Duo Transatlantique classical guitar duo, has a new personal site. It's so hot, it crashes my outdated browser, but not so quickly that I can't at least get a look at the home page. (I've added it to the music links on one of my extra pages.)

Here is Maud Laforest, the other half of Duo Transatlantique. Ah! Laforest's site does not crash my browser. (And I'll have to add it to the links, too.) I've heard Transatlantique at An die Musik in Baltimore a couple of times, but I haven't hear these two guitarists individually. (It so happens that I'll have to miss a recital which Beirs is giving at the Light Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore tomorrow, Sunday, November 15. Just saw that on Facebook. It might be on his site's calendar, too.)