For your festival contemplation, here are some truly unforgettable moments of live performance, including Jon Vickers’ indelible response to a persistent cougher.
Some may be familiar but they lose nothing in the retelling.
Enjoyed that? There’s more here.
The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham…
He is already music director of the Metropolitan…
The conductor continues his agitation for a new…
The Berlin Philharmonic chief conductor Kirill Petrenko has…
Session expired
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.
I was so hoping to hear Menuhin trying play Paganini in the 1960’s, which was actually more painful than the Miss America example, or Cortot’s traversal of the Chopin B-Flat Minor Sonata in the mid ’50’s, but these compilations range from the “shooting fish in a barrel” of amateur musicians having terrible difficulty to page-turning problems–way too many of the latter in any case. The two best moments were the benign way MTT handled a missed trumpet entrance and the awful way Bohm handled a very exposed horn clam. Those were worth the price of admission but the others: “not so much”.
I love page turning mishaps. Reminds me of Victor Borge’s routine on that.
I can hear the pianist thinking, “you’ve got one job to do and…”
This first excerpt (Strauss) is from a 1974 Columbia LP (KC 33049), Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics, so one must presume that the end result met producer Brian Eno’s expectations.