A Little Midsummer’s Night Music
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Benjamin Ivry August 12, 2010
Even as summer winds down, classical CD releases continue apace.
A pellucid live performance on DVD from VAI Music of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” from the 1964 Salzburg Festival is one of the season’s best choices. It’s conducted by the Hungarian Jewish maestro István Kertész, who died in a swimming accident at Herzliya beach in 1973. In Salzburg, Kertész already possessed the required wisdom for Mozart’s profound score. The American Jewish coloratura soprano Roberta Peters incarnates a nightmare Jewish mother as the berserk Queen of the Night.
Another Jewish diva of a different genre is Hungarian pianist Márta Kurtág, wife of the composer György Kurtág. An unsurpassed interpreter of her husband’s music, which she has recorded for the Budapest Music Center (BMC) label, Mrs. Kurtág is one pianist unimpressed by commercial considerations. She studied Beethoven’s rambunctiously finger-busting “Diabelli Variations” for a half-century before recording the piece in 1999, and that thrilling, soulfully sonorous recording is only now available on CD from BMC.
Moving away from the keyboard, the online CD vendor ArkivMusic.com has reprinted a program of modern guitar music played by Todd Seelye titled “Sheer Pluck,” after an amusingly quirky work by American Jewish composer Milton Babbitt, which is a highlight of the CD. “Sheer Pluck” also includes the uncompromisingly inventive, yet graceful, “Five Intermezzi” by Berlin-born Jewish composer Ursula Mamlok.
Listeners in search of Old Testament exotica will want to hear another ArkivMusic.com reprint, of Arthur Honegger’s biblical oratorio, “King David,” led in 1961 by the underrated Greek-born Jewish conductor Maurice Abravanel and starring the dulcet-toned Israeli soprano Netania Davrath. As a deliciously wicked Witch of Endor, Madeleine Milhaud, the wife — and cousin — of French Jewish composer Darius Milhaud, is a delightfully fiery spirit.
So is the violin virtuoso Ida Haendel in her soaring 1957 live performances of concertos by Beethoven and Sibelius conducted by the ardent podium giant and Auschwitz survivor Karel Ančerl, which have just been released for the first time ever by the Czech label Supraphon and are must-hearing not just for summer, but for all seasons.
Watch Roberta Peters bring down the house in the “The Magic Flute,” at the 1964 Salzburg Festival:
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
