Countermelody

This is an episode I have been planning for years now! This past August 15, the great French baritone Robert Massard turned 98 years old. As many of my listeners know, I have a thing for baritones in general, and I have devoted episodes to artists of the baritone persuasion from world-renowned to virtually unknown to somewhere in-between. Just think of it: Gérard Souzay, Jorma Hynninen, Eugene Hol...

A year ago, I posted an episode entitled “The Haunted Opera House” that featured a wide range of spooky, witchy, Halloween-appropriate 20th century operas from Prokofiev to Penderecki. This year I focus in on one of the works from that episode, Ottorino Respighi’s 1934 masterpiece La Fiamma , based on a 1908 play on witch hunts and witchcraft in 16th century Norway by the novelist and playwright H...

Another episode featuring orchestral songs, these arrangements by the French composer Joseph Canteloube AKA Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret (1879 – 1957), of elaborately orchestrated folk songs from the Auvergne region of France. From the 1960s an beyond these songs have become favorites of sopranos seeking engaging works for voice and orchestra. Canteloube made orchestral arrangements of five...

Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of Edith Piaf, the greatest singer in the history of French popular music. She died on the eve of my third birthday, and since I have always allowed myself to indulge in a favorite singer or topic for my birthday episodes, I am focusing on La Môme Piaf , whose uniquely powerful voice and interpretations have been of central importance to me since the firs...

Today I revisit the artistry of the great Patricia Neway (1919-2012), a singer of extraordinary versatility, dramatic power, and musical sensibility. She is no doubt most famous for two of her Broadway creations: the role of the beleaguered Magda Sorel in Gian Carlo Menotti’s tragic opera The Consul , first produced on Broadway in 1950, and of the Mother Abbess in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final m...

This week (inspired by an 10-inch LP in my collection of his songs performed by Anton Dermota and Wilma Lipp, both stalwarts of the Wiener Staatsoper in the 1950s) I present an introduction to the Lieder of Austrian composer Joseph Marx (1882 – 1964). His songs are most frequently compared to Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf and are distinctly post-Romantic in style and harmony, but they also exhibit...

This week’s episode offers music of both mourning and consolation performed by treasured artists, many of whom celebrate significant anniversaries this fall, and all of whom died before their time. Thus we hear singers Maria Callas, Jessye Norman, Fritz Wunderlich, Kathleen Ferrier, Judith Raskin, Arleen Augér, and Lucia Popp, and pianist Dinu Lipatti performing music of Bach, Schubert, Fauré, Bel...

Today I begin a series of interim episodes which will lead up to the debut of Season Five of the podcast in January 2024. These episodes will be shorter, but will still be chock full of interesting singers and subject matter. Today I present the African American soprano Ellabelle Davis (1907-1960) who during the late 1940s and early 1950s was greatly celebrated as a concert singer and who appeared...

A week ago the extraordinary Hungarian-German soprano Julia Varady turned 82. As she is one of my favorite sopranos, I have presented her a few times on the podcast, but never on an episode devoted exclusively to her. There is no time like the present to rectify that situation. Varady had an exceptional and unusual career, centered mostly in Europe, where she was celebrated first as a Mozart sopra...

Ian Partridge, the quintessential English lyric tenor, celebrated his 85th birthday in June. I may be a few weeks late in celebrating that event, but my enthusiasm and admiration for this singer has remained at a consistent level ever since I first discovered his voice on a recording of songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Partridge, in fact, has left a vast recorded legacy, including work as both a s...

This past week the opera world was plunged into mourning over the sudden death of Renata Scotto. Originally I had intended this week’s episode to be devoted to her memory. But I can’t even speak her name without bursting into tears. In other words, I need more time as I try to come to terms with her demise. I have decided to feature the matchless singing actor in the first episode of Season Five....

Anita Cerquetti (13 April 1931 – 11 October 2014), the subject of today’s episode, possessed a one in a million voice, enormous, but with prodigious flexibility, and of an immediately recognizable timbre and style of text projection. She skyrocketed to world fame when she replaced Maria Callas in the title role of Bellini’s Norma in Rome in January 1958. Before that, the young soprano, still...

Inspired by my holiday in Denmark last week, today I inaugurate a new series on Countermelody called “Nordic Tracks,” featured music from Scandinavia and the Nordic countries. There has always been a wealth of vocal music from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and in this episode I focus exclusively on orchestral songs, a genre which I also featured in a special episode last fall. Of...

From a very young age I was interested in today’s birthday celebrant, the great Gundula Janowitz, at least partially because of a similarity between her first name and my last name! But even more than that, I was drawn to the ethereal purity of her voice, possessed of an immediately identifiable timbre unlike that of any other singer. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Janowitz was the reigning que...

Today’s episode is first and foremost a tribute to a forgotten African American trailblazer, the pop singer Henry Wright, born in 1933, who, in the late fifties, claimed Italy as his adoptive country after touring there as a vocal soloist with Lionel Hampton. With a voice as suave and seductive as any of the great crooners of the 1950s and 1960s, Henry Wright first came to international prominence...

Jerry Hadley (16 June 1952 – 18 July 2007) is regarded by many as the most gifted American lyric tenor of the late 20th century. Last month he would have celebrated his 71st birthday. And today is the sixteenth anniversary of his untimely death. I knew Jerry well in the early 2000s when he was dating one of my best friends. Our friendship developed separately from that: in those years in which he...

Eileen Farrell (13 February 1920 – 23 March 2002) was one of the finest and most versatile singers that the United States has ever produced. She began her career as a radio singer, the star of her own program, Eileen Farrell Sings , which ran from 1941 to 1945, which offered a wide range of music from the pop songs of the era to opera. In the 1950s and early 1960s Farrell was involved with the leg...

Posting a few days early in celebration of the Fourth of July and in further recognition of the beloved American soprano Roberta Alexander, whose birthday we celebrated on Countermelody last March. Ms. Alexander has made a number of exquisite recordings over the years, many of them for the small Dutch label Etcetera. Many of these releases feature songs by the greatest American composers: Charles...

Today’s Pride 2023 episode focuses on two pathbreaking pop artists from the 1960s and 1970s, who were undervalued or even reviled at the time in which they were active, but whose contribution, importance, and influence on today’s pop music scene is indisputable. In reverse chronological order, Bruce Wayne Campbell (1946–1983), a brilliant if emotionally unstable pianist, composer, and singer, was...

Today’s episode celebrates the life and legacy of lyric baritone William Parker (05 August 1943 – 29 March 1993), the finest American recitalist of the late twentieth century and one of the most beautiful baritone voices I have ever heard. His mastery of the German, American (and, especially for me, French) song repertoire sends one scrambling back to the earlier days of recorded sound to find sui...

Today’s episode explores the lives and loves of two of the most significant figures in twentieth century music: Benjamin Britten, the dean of British composers and the tenor Peter Pears, his partner, lover, inspiration and muse for nearly forty years. When as a lost young gay boy I first encountered their music-making I intuited that these two men were lovers, that they represented a way forward f...

Today we observe a significant event in the history of Countermelody , namely, our 200th episode! I decided that there was no better way to celebrate than to devote a full episode to the great Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976), who vies with Claudia Muzio as one of my two favorite singers of all time. Lehmann was originally a conservatory flunkie, but somehow got her act together to become one of the most...

If you’re like me (and I hope that, at least in this way, you are!) you have adored Tina Turner since you first became aware of her. In my case, it was circa 1971, seeing her perform “Proud Mary” on television. At the time I was a pretty snooty (and snotty) kid much more prone to Mahler and Britten than I was to pop music. But something about Tina got to me. And when, against all odds, her star ro...

Today’s episode celebrates the Italian tenore di grazia Cesare Valletti (18 December 1923 – 13 May 2000), perhaps the last in a lineage of Italian lyric tenors. Valletti studied under his illustrious predecessor Tito Schipa and rapidly conquered first the Italian opera houses, and then the world stages, with his small-scale but superbly produced voice and his spontaneous yet exacting musicianship....

I’ve been plotting an episode on the subject of Dreams for a while. Given the profusion of music that references that altered state of consciousness, my challenge was narrowing down the topic. I chose to focus today on theater music (opera, operetta, and musicals) that references actual rather than figurative dreams. Even within these parameters, there was a plethora of material and as usual my re...