Gratuitous Peter Mattei Friday (again) – Once in My Life

OK I've resisted Spotify for a long time (I hate signing up for more stuff online), but it is a good way to share some music now and then. And there are more and more classical/opera selections that I want to listen to before (or instead of) buying. 

And then I found this: 

On one hand, Peter Mattei wouldn't be my first choice to sing the great (mostly) American songbook. On the other hand, listening to Peter Mattei sing anything is pretty  wonderful. 

This album is a nice throwback to the great pop vocalists and legit Broadway voices (before everyone got amplified and started yelling)—and PM is backed up by some really nice Nelson Riddle-ish orchestrations. 

PM does a really nice job of not sounding too operatic. About the only non-idiomatic quibble I have so far is a dropped "g" in Some Enchanted Evening, which would work in somthin’ from Carousel or Oklahoma, but not so much in South Pacific. And he really handles the jumpy rangy Cole Porter melody in Night and Day. (More Cole Porter on the follow-up album, please! And maybe some Rodgers and Hart?)

But really, when Peter Mattei is singing, who cares about a dropped consonant or slightly odd vowel. I mean if he were singing in Swedish or Finnish (or many other languages), I’d never know the difference—nor would I care. Anyway, the point is, this is a fun program. Go listen. Then buy it. 

Thomas Hampson Takes Over @JuilliardSchool

1. The Juilliard School ‏@JuilliardSchool  10m10 minutes ago

   @thomashampson You've been quoted in my #Storify story "Thomas Hampson Takes Over @JuilliardSchool" http://sfy.co/c0Bwh 

   Details

Under the hash tag #ThomasAtJulliard, Thomas Hampson took over Julliard's Twitter feed for about 30 minutes this morning, giving fans an opportunity to ask follow up questions on his master class yesterday. If you're on Twitter, you can search the hashtag and find all the questions, answers, and comments.

If you're not on Twitter, or you simply find it a royal pain to sift through all the tweets under the same hashtag (which was used widely during the streaming of the class yesterday), you can read the conversation in order, without the crosstalk, here at Storify. 

Thomas Hampson Master Class Today at Julliard – Live Stream

Thomas Hampson Master Class, January 28, at 4pm

...and it probably will be archived later at YT or on the Julliard site.

Following Earwormopera Around on YouTube

Lately it seems that every third interesting opera video I click on is posted by none other than the blogger known as Earwormopera, under the nom d'Tube musicalpunchlines. 

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a very good thing*. Clearly, Earworm and I have very similar tastes. In fact, many of my readers may know that I was greatly inspired by the Earworm to start my own blog. (Fans of this blog can thank Earworm. Non-fans can...well, non-fans can do whatever you want—so long as it's not illegal or immoral.)

Since I've been kind of stuck in Don Giovanni-land lately, I'd like to share one of my (many) favorite clips from the Claus Guth production in Salzburg, featuring one of Earworm's and my all-time favorite sopranos: Dorothea Röschmann.

*In fact, the only thing better would be if there were even more clips on the musicalpunchlines channel! (Hint, hint!)

This Don is gone...

...but definitely not forgotten. A few clips can be found if you look around a bit:

and here's another chunk of Act 1:

These are from the Mezzo TV broadcast, which to me, look and sound like a different performance than the official La Monnaie webcast. Can there please be a commercial DVD release of this (he asked, hoping against hope)?

Meanwhile, for Mezzo Elvira fans, here is her awesome Act 2 aria (sadly, audio only):