Yes, I'll really get my entire CD and tape collection played by forty if I insist on playing the same eight CDs over and again. Seven of them are, in case you're in the slightest bit interested:
- The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace - Karl Jenkins: one of the two astonishingly great pieces of British music of the 21st century, the other being Thomas Ades' The Tempest
- Wagner Love Duets - Plácido Domingo and Deborah Voight: for all you Wagner-haters out there, this is incredibly sexy music, featuring Act 2, Scene 3 from Siegfried and Act 2 Scene 2 from Tristan und Isolde
- The Very Best of Maria Callas - fabulous!
- The Very Best of Plácido Domingo - utterly wonderful, but it's a bit early to decide what is the very best (!)
- Renee Fleming's Greatest Hits - ooh she's wonderful and gorgeous
- Italian Opera Arias - Rolando Villazon - everytime I play this I am amazed at how good it is, and wonder just how much better he is going to get!
- Beethoven's 5th and 7th, but mainly 5th - Carlos Kleiber and the Wiener Philharmoniker - can this be any more perfect?
The final one is Beethoven's Christus am Olberge - Plácido Domingo, Luba Organasova, Andreas Schmidt, Rundfunkchor Berlin and Deutches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kent Nagano - this is Beethoven's one and only oratorio, and I didn't even know until a few weeks ago that he even wrote an oratorio (in youthful idealism I declared oratorio to be the most perfect form of music; perhaps I still believe that...). It's quite fascinating, because he was clearly influenced by Handel and Haydn, and blatantly stole Mozart's one-and-only tune. I particularly adore the Terzetto, or Trio.
O Menschenkinder fasset
dies heilige Gebot:
liebt jenen, der euch hasset,
nur so gefalt ihr Gott!
Dylan Moran says there's a lot of poetry in German if you have extensive dentistry, but even I can see the poetry in that, without dentistry and without speaking a word of German...
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