Maybe I’m a little elitist. Maybe I just appreciate classic talent and believe it should be patronized.
As I’ve begun to recover my faculties, I’ve looked for things I knew I did prior to really starting to loose myself, and see what I should re-adopt. As I’ve done this, I’ve looked back 5 and 10 years, there are things there that deserve to come back and be remembered.
I have always loved orchestral movie scores. Recently, I realized that few of the scores I love are truly masterpieces. Some are excellent, some are simply better than their peers, and some are simply nostalgic for me.
Which means that many don’t need to be listened to again. Essentially all movie scores are evocative of Romantic-era music, and therefore perhaps I should pursue a deep familiarity with original works of that era, and not simply imitations of that.
(I would like to point out, this is not necessarily a commentary on orchestral score as an art form, nor as a way of making a living. It may be a commentary on the unfortunate misalignment of incentives that prohibit potential artists from developing deeply meaningful art, but in general I mean to only point that perhaps we ought to consider drinking at the well of the original masters (the true geniuses), rather than their (often poor) imitators.)
And so, in searching through Mozart compositions, I had an inkling to hear the entirety of Die Zauberflote, an opera with one of the most insane, technical arias ever penned.
Although the Queen of the Night in that particular performance was good, I was completely blown away by the man playing Papageno, Simon Keenlyside.
I have since gone down the rabbit hole, spending time learning about him, roles he’s played, and much more about opera, in ways I have done with film previously.
I like opera. Oh, yeah. I knew that. I’m glad to repent and bring it back into my day to day.
Here, this might be a concert version, but it’s still very fun.