Tonight I videotaped the recent performance of Bach's St. John Passion by
the Berlin Philharmonic and the outstanding RIAS Kammerchor with Sir Simon
Rattle conducting, plus the soloists Juliane Banse, Michael Chance, Ian
Bostridge, Reiner Trost, & Thomas Quasthoff (140 minutes).
In similar fashion, Good Friday television (repeat: TELEVISION) will pipe
these musical didbits into my humble abode:
Bach's "Musical Offering" (performers not named; 60 minutes);
Bach's St. John Passion with Michael Gielen conducting the Baden-Baden
Radio Symphony and the Bad Tölz Boys' Choir, plus soloists including
Christoph Prégardien & Quasthoff;
the St. Matthew Passion from Bach's own St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig
(where he lies buried), with his present-day successor as Thomaskantor,
Georg Christoph Biller, conducting arguably the world's finest boys' choir
and Leipzig's superb old Gewandhausorchester, plus soloists including the
baritone Olaf Bär (175 minutes);
the "Dies irae" movement from the Verdi Requiem, with Claudio Abbado
conducting the Berlin Philharmonic plus Angela Gheorghiu, Daniela
Barcellona, Roberto Alagna, and Julian Konstantinov (40 minutes);
the children's opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" by Viktor Ullmann, murdered
by the Nazis in Theresienstadt concentration camp, as performed in the
memorial site at the former Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria (60
minutes);
a repeat of the St. Matthew Passion (see above); and
the St. John Passion from Baden-Baden.
I should porbably have my head examined for even thinking about making this
offer, but it tears my heart out merely thinking about all my poor musically
deprived fellow Americans as victims of the continuing and apparently
unstoppable disappearance of good music throughout the Land of Unlimited
Possibilities, the richest country in the whole damn world, so if anyone
reading this feels moved to take on the office of central stateside
converter-distributor, in a manner that will relieve me of as much as
possible of the burden at this end beyond putting the master cassette(s)
into the mail, let me hear from you.
Paul Moor (Berlin)
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Telefon: (030) 8639-5784
Telefax: (030) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 27 2002 - 13:43:17 PST