From Peter Glushanok’s 1958 film version for WQED Pittsburgh. Dancers are Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Revivalist, Matt Turney as The Pioneer Woman and Yuriko, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter and Miriam Cole as The Revivalists’ Flock. The stage design is by Isamu Nogochi.Aaron Copland's original scoring.
Via Orchestra21, the blog of conductor Jason Weinberger
Radio stations will be blasting Domingo in Italian opera and Wagner today. But there’s a role I rather like him in that gets much less play: Herman* in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Aka Pique Dame, aka Pikovaya Dama, aka Пиквая Дама.
As Act III begins, Herman is reeling from his semi-accidental killing of the Old Countess, the grandmother of the woman he loves. (See, he was trying to learn her rumored secret of three winning cards, JUST so he could afford to marry Liza. He’s not obsessed with the cards or anything.) Since Liza practically caught him in the act, Herman’s understandably afraid she’ll hold the whole thing against him. But Liza’s caught up in her own obsession and sends a letter offering a second chance. Great! Except the Old Countess’s ghost decides to pay Herman a little visit of her own and she’s ready to talk card games. Wanna bet what happens next?
Hint: this is an opera by Tchaikovsky, based on a scary story by Pushkin. I’m not putting my money on a happy ending.
*The guy’s name is “German” with a hard G in Russian because there is no H sound in that language. (Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s name actually begins with a “Kh” sound in case you were wondering.)
I guess I can keep an open mind. A Borg Queen of the Night is plausible. Neelix makes a GREAT Papageno. But Seven of Nine as Pamina? Can’t see it.
We originally advertised “What to Listen for in Music” for this Saturday, January 15, 2011.
The actual seminar is “Introduction to Music Literacy.”
Information and registration are here:
https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/php/offering.php?oi=5826
What’s the difference? This music literacy seminar introduces attendees to basic music theory and notation terminology, providing the basics of reading music. You’ll learn about such things as scales, keys, clefs, chords, etc. “What to Listen for” is more about music style and form without the technical stuff.
HK regrets the error.
For the Wagner class especially, there are probably hundreds of interesting books, recordings, video and memorabilia class members may like.
To simplify everything, Bonnie created a little Amazon store for the class here:
http://astore.amazon.com/ichdank-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=5
This link is also on the home page of holdekunst.com
Pick the opera for which you’d like to buy something and you’ll see it’s organized by format: books, audio recordings, DVDs, Blu-ray, etc. For some of the operas there’s also a gift section with nice prints of opera posters and other things. Bonnie says she found Parsifal underwear and this proves opera is indeed getting hipper, but she decided not to include it.
This is an Amazon store — it includes all the customer reviews without all their page-slowing marketing stuff. If you buy something from this store you do pay Amazon and it helps us out just as much as if you use one of our direct links here on the site.
John Gibbons