Remembering...

Last night, my wife and I went to Celebration at the Station in Kansas City.  And it was so incredibly awesome, that we have decided to make it an annual tradition.  Essentially it was a classical patriotic concert, with over 60,000 people packing a quarter-mile swath from the amazing Union Station, to the National WWI Museum.  Plus, the weather was nice!   I really can't describe it, or how big it was, but it was certainly the largest outdoor classical concert that I've ever been to.  And, it made me very proud to be in Kansas City.  The music culture of this place is great.  This was a huge event after all; I only see PBS specials like this from Vienna, New York, or Washington D.C.  The architecture is amazing; we visited Union Station for the first time and it's beautiful - certainly in the same kind of majesty as New York's or D.C.'s Grand Central Stations.  Plus the WWI monument is great as well.

As you watch this, you cannot really tell the distances between the stage and WWI monument because of a small cliff in the middle of the lawn, but they are a quarter-mile away from each other.  Below is the playing of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.  Some musicians think this piece is corny (the canon firings in this piece are actually written in the music) but I think it is incredibly exciting!  Oddly enough, it is a piece glorifying Napoleon's defeat to the Russians.  It has nothing to do with America.

It is of course Memorial Day.  Please sit up in your chairs, take your Brunhilde horned helmets off, and observe a caesura in remembrance of the opera stars who have been chosen by the Valkyries to spend the afterlife in Operatic Valahalla.

In chronological order beginning Memorial Day of 2010. (Age at death)

Giuseepe Taddei (93), Christine Johnson (98), Giacinto Prandelli (96), Maureen Forrester (79), Peter Sliker (86), Cesare Siepi (87), Luo Pinchao (98), Laszlo Polgar (63), Dolores Wilson (82), Ulrik Cold (71), Richard T. Gill (82), Shirley Verrett (79), Peter Hofmann (66), Gianna Galli (75), Armando Chin Yong (53), Antonin Svorc (77), Robert Tear (72), Donald Shanks (70), Anthony Rolfe Johnson (69), Dame Joan Sutherland (83), Roxana Briban (39), Hugues Cuenod (108), Frances Ginsberg (55), Solange Michel (98), Helen Boatwright (94), Dame Margaret Price (69), Sona Aslanova (86), Vincenzo La Scola (53), Alda Noni (95)

Deaths of note - how appropriate for opera

Roxana Briban (39) - Romanian opera singer, committed suicide.  She was a very famous soprano, who starred on many of the main stages in Europe.  Her death was also a world-famous tragedy that played out on facebook.  On the day of her suicide she posted to her facebook page a disturbing youtube clip of herself singing "Addio del passato" (so closes my sad story) from Traviata. It is Violetta's aria right before she dies from disease. Click Here to Watch.  But that's not the shocking part, her last facebook profile picture was a picture of her bloody hand (from an opera production I'm assuming). Click Here to See.  She died several hours after posting this by cutting her wrists.

Dame Joan Sutherland (83) - Australian soprano, died of heart failure. One of the most celebrated opera singers in history.

Hugues Cuenod (108) - Swiss tenor.  He was the oldest person to debut at the Metropolitan Opera when he sang the role of the Emporer in Turandot in 1987.

Vincenzo La Scola (53) - Italian tenor, died of a heart attack.  He was one of the world's leading operatic tenors who sang at most of the world's most prestigious houses including the Met and La Scala.

TODAY IN OPERA HISTORY - May 29

Happy Birthday to little known opera composer, Isaac Albeniz, who was born in Spain on this day in 1860.

Today is also the birthday of one of the least known super-geniuses of music, Erich Korngold, who was born into a Jewish family in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1897.  His most famous opera, Die Tote Stadt, was written when he was only 20 years old!  It was his third opera!  Anyway, it is beautiful, just listen to the first few minutes of the opera, can you believe how gorgeous it is?  This opera (The Dead City) was very popular in Germany after WWI, as it captured the feelings of deep grief as Germany lost millions and millions of people during the war.



The first of the "Russian Five", Mily Balakirev, died on this day in 1910.  He didn't compose any operas but he had a major influence on the other four of "The Five": Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin - all of whom were prolific opera composers.  Balakirev brought the group together to try to make a new "Russian sound", one that was authentically Russian.  Balakirev hand picked "the Five" who in their own right are some of the greatest composers in history; he did not include Glinka nor Tchaikovsky - who in many ways were more famous and important to music history.  Glinka wasn't included because he was almost dead, and Tchaikovsky wasn't included because he favored the more traditional of Glinka's operas.  "The Five" generally liked Glinka's more radical operas.  And if you didn't already know, many people attribute the bad blood between Tchaikovsky and The Five to Tchaikovsky being gay...but there's not much evidence to this.  Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky got the last laugh, as his Nutcracker ballet and the 1812 overture are certainly two of the most famous pieces of music in all of music history.

The prolific teacher and little known opera composer, George Rochberg, died on this day in 2005.

Happy Birthday to Wisconsin (1848) and Rhode Island (1790).  Rhode Island has the distinction of being the only state in the US that hasn't had someone visit my blog!  That will surely change after I post this (fingers crossed).

Stravinsky's ballet, "The Rite of Spring" made its debut on this day in 1913.  It is likely the most famous music debut in all of history.  The sounds were so radical at the time that the crowd booed and stormed the stage.  Stravinsky escaped the riot unharmed, but this piece ended up being one of the most important pieces of music in all of history.  It lead the way to all kinds of crazy stuff in the 20th century.  Take a listen to the iconic beginning, I'm sure you've heard it before.  This was made famous in popular culture by Disney's Fantasia - make sure you at least watch several minutes until the iconic dance begins (you'll know it when you hear it - it's the volcano part in the film).



"White Christmas" was recorded on this day in 1940 by Bing Crosby.  It is the best-selling single of all time, selling over 50 million records.  Here is a clip of him singing it in the film "Holiday Inn", the film that the song was written for.



Famous French composer, Iannis Xenakis, was born on this day in 1922.  He didn't write any operas, but he's so famous that I had to mention him.

Happy Oak Apple Day to all the English!  It's a day of thanksgiving celebrating when the future Charles II of England escaped an invading army by hiding in an oak tree.  I suggest you all go out and break off a branch of oak to wear, in remembrance of Charles II heroic flight up the tree to hide, because if you don't, tradition says that kids will "pelt you with birds' eggs or thrash you with nettles".