RIP Gian Carlo Menotti

[ben.]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-02-01-menotti-obit_x.htm?csp=27

Amahl and the Night Visitors was the first piece of music to literally move me to tears. Also my first opera attendance. Coincidentally, Faure's Requiem was already playing when I saw the news.

[DRBILL]

I got to sing in a local production of Amahl in 1957. It was a life-changing experience for amost every person who worked on the production. He will be missed.

DRBILL

[Parrot]

I still remember hearing the 1951 mono version in elementary school. The teachers used to play it for us on one of those heavy portable record players, once a year in our classroom, for two or three years in a row. The 1963 stereo recording I have is much better sonically but its the 1951 cast that still does it for me. Beautiful stuff and it still makes tears well up in me.

Monotti wrote this opera in 1951, expressly for a TV broadcast at Christmastime.

[Woodog]

I had the opportunity to meet him in 1976 (or 77??) when he came to Camden, SC to promote the (then new) Spoletto festival in Charleston, SC. The occasion was a small group of movers and shakers (i.e. $$$$$$$) of the community who had gathered to hear an all-Beethoven concert on a restored Broadwood piano-forte that had been donated to our church. My mother was the music director there, my college piano instructor at the time was giving the concert, and those two reasons are why I could attend. I was certainly not a mover or a shaker.

Handsome, sharp, impeccably dressed, the man seemed to be a giant.

Woo

[Parrot]

Now playing, Menotti's The Medium. My brother wrote me the other day: "He had a unique voice and was not afraid to be romantic in our musically non-romantic era."