Month: December 2010

One Meatball for Christmas

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What aspiring opera composer wouldn’t love to see a nice libretto under the Christmas tree? Well, my friend who likes to send me ideas for opera scenarios (such as this) sent me a link to this “soundie” from the 1940s:

which led to some research on the origin of the song, which led to this - one nicely aged libretto to go, hold the bread. The English version is by James Russell Lowell, no less, and there is an Italian version as well, plus a prefatory answer key listing arias from which to steal in case you are too tired to make up your own tunes. To get the sense of how the tale will unfold with an operatic cast, try this:

The last intriguing detail is that the composer of “One Meatball” also wrote this.

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Postings will be sparse to non-existent till sometime after the New Year - good wishes to all, see you in ’11.

Fleming’s Composers Redux

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Having previously written with some questions about Renée Fleming and her composers, I was interested and pleased to read that Ms. Fleming, who has taken a position with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, wants that company to do a new opera in coming years. According to the New York Times:

Ms. Fleming said she brought a number of ideas to the table, including the programming of a new opera for the 2015-16 season. She said she is working on identifying a composer. “I have a spreadsheet of 100 composers,” she said.

This is welcome news. 100 composers is a pretty big number - can you think of 100 composers who would be plausible candidates for a Lyric Opera commission? It is a lot easier to think about the implausible ones, of course.

More about Ms. Fleming here and here. (picture: M. Spencer Green/Associated Press)

Grammy vs. Oscar

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Patrick Goldstein asks here why the Grammy nominees are so much more populist than Oscar nominees. Big selling records win Grammys; not-so-big-selling “serious” movies - critical favorites - win Oscars.

One reason might be that there is less aesthetic distance between Katy Perry and Arcade Fire than there is between “Jackass 3-D” and The Kids are Alright”. To put it crudely, smart pop music is more similar to dumb pop music than smart movies are to dumb movies.

The real question is why a discussion of Grammy nominees is exclusively confined to pop music. Of course the award will seem more “populist” if you only have pop music on your mental map and you eliminate the top shelf stuff - the jazz and classical nominees - from the discussion.