Tu crois le tenir, il t’evite

Yup. Back to work time again...

Aaaargh! The bloody alarm has gone off, for the first time in seventeen days, and Mama's not a happy bunny.

I'd much prefer to be in Regent's Park, having fun with "the gang" at our Grand Picnic:

To ease my confused head and semi-concious state, let's celebrate a centenary, shall we? Alongside a raft of fellow celebrants that includes the late, dearly missed influential DJ and music expert John Peel, as well as Cameron Diaz, Capability Brown, Raymond Massey, Denis Healey, Antony Gormley, Muriel Gray, Timothy Bottoms, brewer Samuel Whitbread, Fred MacMurray, Joan Blondell, Mary Shelley, Ernest Rutherford, Radio 4's Sue MacGregor and out-gay politician Ben Bradshaw, one hundred years ago today the fantabulosa opera diva Regina Resnik was born!

[click any pic to embiggen]

Resident diva at New York's Metropolitan Opera for almost forty years, she started out in dramatic soprano roles in the likes of Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Die Walküre, and eventually re-trained (as her voice matured) as a mezzo-soprano, with leading roles such as Carmen, "Mistress Quickly" in Falstaff and "Klytemnestra" in Elektra - as well as a notable turn as "Madame Armfeldt" in Sondheim's A Little Night Music [see here].

She even attempted to bring a touch of class to the USA's favourite variety showcase The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968:

Regina Resnik - Habanera [from Carmen by Bizet]

Now, that woke me up!

Well, almost...

Have a good week, dear reader. I won't.

Classical bitchery

click to embiggen

I found this quite fun - who knew how catty all these great composers could be about each other?

• "He has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour." - Rossini on Wagner
• "After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?” - Wagner on Rossini
• “A composer for one right hand.” - Wagner on Chopin
• "He composes by splashing his pen over the manuscript and leaving the issue to chance." - Chopin on Berlioz
• “A regular freak, without a vestige of talent.” - Mendelssohn on Berlioz
• “A tub of pork and beer.” - Berlioz on Handel
• “He’d be better off shovelling snow than scribbling on manuscript paper.” - Richard Strauss on Schoenberg
• "He is no longer of any interest to me, and whatever I may have learned from him, I am thankful to say I misunderstood." - Schoenberg on Strauss
• "Such an astounding lack of talent has never before been united to such pretentiousness." - Tchaikovsky on Strauss
• "He can’t compose a single note without someone’s help.” - Tchaikovsky on Borodin
• ""What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius." - Tchaikovsky on Brahms
• “Hygienic, but unexciting.” - Liszt on Brahms
• “Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?” - Stravinsky on Villa-Lobos
• "Bach on the wrong notes." - Prokofiev on Stravinsky
• “He wrote marvellous operas but dreadful music.” - Shostakovich on Puccini
• "A man of great talent who lacks the essential quality that makes great masters." - Bizet on Verdi
• "A very tolerable imitation of a composer.” - Vaughan Williams on Mahler
• “If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.” - Ravel on Saint-Saëns

Miaow!

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Composers in the collage:

First row - Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedrich Händel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven;
Second row - Gioachino Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi;
Third row - Johann Strauss II, Johannes Brahms, Georges Bizet, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák;
Fourth row - Edvard Grieg, Edward Elgar, Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Gershwin, Aram Khachaturian

Brassy

Just last week, I made an effort to inject some "class with a capital K" into this blog [courtesy of VOCES8]. Here's some more...

Bizet by a brass band? Who'd have thought that would ever work? But it does:

Mike Lovatt's Brass Pack - Carmen Suite

Fab!