The pure-voiced soprano Teresa Stich-Randall has passed away at the age of seventy-nine. I have a weakness for her strangely "white," detached, almost neo-Baroque reading of the Four Last Songs, as heard on an old Westminster LP.... The Santa Fe Opera has scored a coup in signing Edo de Waart, a perennially undersung musician with keen instincts for the new, as its next chief conductor. He will lead Billy Budd there next summer. The outgoing director is, of course, Alan Gilbert, moving on to the New York Philharmonic. None other than Opera Chic happens to be reporting live from Santa Fe this week.... For Stylus Jayson Greene has written a fun piece on classical samples in hip-hop. That's Cheryl Evans singing the Queen of the Night on Kelis's "Like You." I didn't know about The Streets's manipulation of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. Where's The Rite of Spring in all this? If it's good enough for Charlie Parker (see ex. 11)....
Update: Nora Renka advises that the Beastie Boys' video for "Intergalactic" makes use of "Glorification of the Chosen One." It doesn't count as a hip-hop sample, and it uses only 4/11 of the 11/4 bar, but it's fun. Seeing the Beasties play this song at the 1998 Reading Festival from fifteen or twenty feet away was one of the better things I've experienced in life.
Further update: Angus Batey, at the Guardian music blog, points out that Kool Keith aka Dr. Octagon's "Blue Flowers" makes use of the Bartók Second Violin Concerto.
Yet another update: Cheryl Evans, who has been seen at the New York City Opera in Il viaggio a Reims, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and, of course, The Magic Flute, wrote in to report on her collaboration with Kelis. The sessions were recorded under somewhat top-secret conditions, she says; she didn't know what the sample was for. It was sped up on the CD, so that her high Fs ascended to A-flat. "I enjoy seeing where it pops up," she says, "like at a Louis Vuitton runway show from earlier this year."
