Metropolitan Opera Lohengrin

[jsswadley]

I had a chance to hear a really splendid performance of Lohengrin (Wagner) last Thursday in NYC. Of course the entire orchestra plays extremely well, but the brass were a special highlight of this performance. The bass aria "Mein Herr und Gott" is the bass singer with the brass alone. Despite an indisposed singer the Met brass were spectacular. The prelude to act 3 was massive and precise, just the way you would imagine it. Congratulations to Christopher John Hall and the entire Met orchestra. Now that the Saturday broadcasts are back we'll be listening. John

[iiipopes]

I love the music from Lohengrin. I must share this story: when I was in grad school, about the first sunny warm day before spring break, everyone in the dorm opened their windows, and one by one started trying to out-do the next person with the volume on their stereos on their favorite songs, whether records, tapes, or radio. Now a side note: in the Beatles movie "Help!" the Prelude to Act III is used in one of the chase scenes, and it was included on the American Capital Records version of the album, which, being an avid Beatles fan, I, of course, have a copy. Second digression: we had a concert band arrangement of it in high school I loved to play: bom bom bom booooom bom ba bom bom.... I was lucky enough to have a "real" stereo for the early 1980's, including a Yamaha 960II stereo amplifier (the one Carver made Yamaha quit making due to patent infringement) and a pair of Genesis II+ speakers. (one of the first perfected designs of a passive radiator to augment the woofer, with a ferrofluid tweeter, before subwoofers with satellites became the norm) So, I opened the window and door to my dorm room as well, put one speaker in the doorway to go down the hall, and the other in the window to play to the front of the dorm, and set it to mono so everything would come out both speakers, and absolutely cranked 100 watts of clean power that could be heard all the way across campus. After the Prelude played out, I shut it off. Funny, everybody else had given up and shut theirs off as well. Yes, I won the battle of the stereos with Lohengrin!