No music preview tonight, just a down payment on a remembrance of Maureen Forrester

by Ken

A bit slow on the uptake, I'm tinkering at a tribute to the great Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester, who died June 16 at 79 after an evidently grim last decade or so, in which the descent into Alzheimer's seems to have been even rougher than the landing. Somehow Fourth of July doesn't seem the right time to deal with that, so it's penciled in for next week, or possibly the week after -- I've got some material coming that may not arrive in time. (In the NYT, Tony Tommasini managed a surprisingly decent obit; the mistake that she recorded Das Lied von der Erde with Bruno Walter is one of those slips any of us could make.)

For now, here's Forrester's next-to-last recording of Mahler's "Urlicht," from the Second (Resurrection) Symphony. (Some of you will recall that we saw the very first of her recordings of the song that I'm aware of, the 1957 CBC performance with Glenn Gould conducting -- yes, conducting!)

MAHLER: Symphony No. 2 in C minor (Resurrection): iv. "Urlicht"


Maureen Forrester, contralto; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, cond. Telarc, recorded Oct. 10 and 12, 1982

Okay, maybe just one more selection: an encore from a 1981 Toronto recital, Brahms's "Lullaby."

BRAHMS: "Wiegenlied," Op. 49, No. 4


Maureen Forrester, contralto; John Newmark, piano. Recorded live, 1981


TOMORROW, SUNDAY, and MONDAY --

We have our first-ever Sunday Classics "encore presentation," as the Car Talk guys might call it: an all-American rerun, though with some new material added, in honor of Fourth of July.


UPDATE: THE MAUREEN FORRESTER REMEMBRANCE

DID FINALLY HAPPEN

Preview: Maureen Forrester -- one of the least replaceable singers of my time
Remembering Maureen Forrester, Part 1: A bulwark of the baroque revival
Remembering Maureen Forrester, Part 2: Mahler


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The current list is here.

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