Prima la musica, poi le parole

Monday morning music

Having spent the last couple of weeks in sighing paroxysms of delight over Joyce DiDonato's Elmira in Handel's Floridante (on which more soon), you can imagine my squeals of excitement to discover on Monday that I'm on her blogroll!! Turns out Glorious Joyce keeps a journal at her website; she also posts the entries in a blog entitled Yankee Diva. I don't think I've ever been as unbelievably thrilled — not to mention starstruck — to be on any blogroll as I am to be on this one. In such illustrious company, too: Maury, ACB , AUV and La Cieca and others besides. And, degrees of blogseparation aside, the blog is well worth reading — thoughtful, hilarious and totally fascinating. As if the outrageously fabulous singing weren't enough.

Another Monday morning discovery. I had half an hour to fill and decided to try something different. I went to my CD shelves, closed my eyes and chose a disc at random. I managed to get it out of the cover and into the player without seeing it. And pressed play. Expecting, naturally, to recognise whatever emerged. But instead I found myself suddenly in the midst of something I'd never heard before — Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Can you imagine? I bought this CD months ago but had never played it — laziness combined with lack of emotional fortitude — so Fate, it seems, decided to take a hand. A revelatory recording in any context, of course — but when it was something it hadn't even entered my mind to expect, the effect was just indescribable, and perfect somehow. I listened to them again in the evening. And in between, revisited Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Neruda Songs. I know it might sound like a mournful day's music but in truth it was just the opposite, a sustaining and strengthening kind of heartbreak. 

I forgot last night to mention one other thing about Howard Goodall's documentary which guaranteed him my good opinion forever. He finished up talking about equal temperament by mentioning some of its flaws, and comparing it to Chinese music which uses a system much more closely tied to sounds produced by nature. But, he said, the flaws of our twelve note system are surely absolutely made up for by the beautiful beautiful music it has made possible. And he could think (as no doubt we all could) of single pieces that in themselves justify the system. "And this, in my opinion, is one of them," he said. It was Richard Strauss' 'Im Abendrot'- sung by none other than the always wonderful Lucia Popp.