Monday Lieder Interlude

I was listening to Frau R’s Portraits CD this afternoon. It made me think of the first recital recording of hers I heard – by the end, the intensity of it left me with a pleasant feeling of exhaustion. This recording has the same quality; you get to the end with an awareness of the distance you traveled between the Schubert songs and the Wolf and Strauss. Also, those few bars in “Gretchen am Spinnrade” at about 1.30 (“sein hoher Gang . . .”) where she and Martineau draw out the tempo just a little with the growing drama in the text are one of the best moments in this. I think my colleagues can hear my music through the office walls – I know I can hear theirs sometimes – so my colleague who likes indie rock and alt-country was subjected to about ten minutes of Gretchen on a loop, for which I absolutely refuse to apologize.

And thanks to my mom, a massive box of Haydn string quartets turned up on my doorstep yesterday, along with a toy for Finn. So Finn chewed on his new ball and I listened to Haydn, which for all practical purposes I can do indefinitely; this is probably a good thing, because Haydn wrote 19 CDs worth of string quartets and I haven’t been in the mood for sitting down and listening to much opera lately. This is indicated by the fact that I watched the Decker production of Verdi’s Otello last weekend, and my sole critical reaction was that it seems that Venice was populated primarily by Lord and Lady Whiteadder.