Quasthoff is a god. I've had the good fortune to hear him half a dozen times in concert, despite my living in the provinces, and he's enthralling, like Proust-rhapsodizing-over-Berma enthralling. New York Unfoggetarians: he's singing at Carnegie Hall Wednesday and Saturday, and you should really go hear him.
I just couldn't let this post go without comment. You can get back to Tia's sex life now.
Comment threads with only one comment are just so unutterably sad.
(Wiping away tears) Oh M/tch, I can't tell you... I was so all alone.
Then again, this thread was all mine -- mine! -- until you showed up.
I consider this to be tell-the-grandkids stuff: I've heard him sing "Die schöne Müllerin," "Die Winterreisse," "Schwanengesang," a bunch of Wolf's Mörike-Lieder, songs of Brahms and Strauss, Mozart arias and covers of Sinatra hits. Any one of those concerts surpasses even my first-ever arena show, which featured Stevie Ray Vaughn, Peter Tosh, Talking Heads and the Police.
I mention that not to boast or to beef up the thread, but I should point out that getting to 1000 is going to be pretty slow going at this rate.
If the lieder thread gets to 100, I'll be surprised and a little bit weirded out. That's an amazing list of concerts, though, J McQ.
OK, I'll post on the lieder thread. I heard a recorded performance of "Erlkonig" once in music class, and it was really scary.
So during one of these performances, does the audience get a translation of the lyrics, or a synopsis of what each song is about, or is it strictly just a musical performance?
Herr Quasthoff mentions how he tries to fit the tone of his voice to the actual varying content of the lyrics more than other singers.
You generally get translations (and background in program notes), but it's hard to follow as you're listening, so I assume the audience has a varied experience. German speakers can just listen, people who know the repertoire well -- possibly the majority of the audience at a typical lieder recital -- rely on their knowledge of the texts, others can try to follow along with the translation, and some just listen to the sound. The whole point of text setting is to express meaning in music, so this last option should be perfectly valid, but on the level of individual words, obviously not so much.
Lubow is totally right about Quasthoff's use of tone color; he has such amazing range and control that he basically erases any distinction between singing and acting. In Schubert's Die Doppelgänger (part of the last song cycle, Schwanengesang), which I heard him perform in a recital, there's this haunting bit where the narrator, abandoned by the woman he loves, sees his tormented double. The way he sang it, there was a chilling sense of abjection, as though he were singing from his experience (which on some level he had to have been). On the way out after the recital, I overheard a woman say, "He's so sexy."
'Die' s/b 'Der.' Corrections are, of course, thread padding.
The part about modern music's strain on the voice was especially interesting:
Quasthoff chooses his repertory carefully, with the desire to preserve his voice a paramount concern. “I have been doing this for 30 years, and I think my voice is sounding relatively fresh,” he says. “I never sang repertoire which was overloading my voice.” He does not perform much contemporary music, partly because he finds it vocally taxing. “A lot of modern composers don’t know anything about voices,” he says. “I am not ready to sing at my vocal limits. If other people want to do it, fine. We will see whose voice is singing longer. I think me.”
I know zilch about the subject, but I'm curious whether anyone else has an opinion. Is Quasthoff right?
Also, I have to wonder about the Schopenhauer quote:
Quasthoff quotes what he calls “the still-worthy maxim” of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “I think the singing homunculus has long been aware. . .[that] under the given circumstances a place on the stage is always better than a subscription in the orchestra.”
"Homunculus" looks like a horribly comic translation here ....
Singing "Der arme Peter". The text. Note that Peter, after gazing on Hans and Grete, happy lovers, goes off and "wankt vorbei".
Praise you. Those were fantastic.
Among the ensemble in the Sinatra set I heard him do was the hornist Richard Todd, who's as versatile a jazzman. I never imagined that French horn could be as flexible as trumpet in a jazz setting.
11: Few modern composers write idiomatically for voice (the same is said of Bach, but he wasn't pushing limits in the same way). Jake Hegge is one exception; lots of singers love him, but I think he's a bore.
A great introduction to the art of Lieder singing is the Fischer-Dieskau documentary Autumn Journey, by the same guy who made one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.
Cool, but those weren't the blues he was singing.
Ogged: he was singing a blues, though.
Shall I wait for you to go back and edit 12, then?
Please keep this up. I promised FL I'd get this thread to at least 100.
Check out 6 and 7. The promise seems to be implicit.
So implicit as to be nonexistit.
Ben's just not good at reading subtext.
JMcQ, loving your new pseud, but comments like 18 keep tripping me up. When did w-lfs-n get so religious?
I know what you mean. It sounds like B-Wo and and teo are having a revival.