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that decisive moment

A Touch of Madness: This Week’s Eight Best Classical Music Moments on YouTube

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The pianist Vikingur Olafsson, whose interpretations of Philip Glass's music render the score sculptural.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

In addition to writing reviews, features and news during the week, our critics and reporters collect the best of what they’ve heard: notes that sent shivers down their spines, memorable voices, quotations that cut to the heart of the story. This week, we’re offering a glimpse into the research we’ve done on YouTube for articles.

Read the rest of our classical music coverage here.


AT 2 MINUTES 29 SECONDS

While preparing for an interview with the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who is making his New York recital debut this week at the Mostly Mozart Festival, I fell down a rabbit hole of both his thoughtful playing and the works of Philip Glass. Mr. Olafsson referred to Mr. Glass as “the Mondrian of music,” and added, “He’s taking primary colors and really exploring what that means.” I would take the visual art comparison even further: In Mr. Olafsson’s hands, Mr. Glass’s music is sculptural. Repeated phrases are never clones, in large part because Mr. Olafsson seems to see the score in three dimensions. It is as if he were circling the notes, examining and re-examining them in search for new meaning and hidden surprises. JOSHUA BARONE

AT 35 SECONDS

Barbara Cook, the Broadway star who became a peerless concert and cabaret singer, died this week at 89. Ms. Cook taught us what really matters in singing. Listen, for example, to “I Got Lost in His Arms” from Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun.” In the show, feisty Annie Oakley describes the moment she realizes she was in love. The way Ms. Cook sings it here, you realize that getting “lost” in this man’s arms is exciting, yes, but also terrifying. Ms. Cook makes the next line, “It was dark in his arms and I lost my way,” seem almost a cry for help. Then there is an extraordinary video of Ms. Cook in concert singing Sondheim’s “Anyone Can Whistle,” a reflection on why it’s so difficult to let go and trust someone. When Ms. Cook first sings the lines “What’s hard is simple/What’s natural comes hard,” the phrase offers a bittersweet observation on life and love. To me, it could also be a comment on the art of singing. No one practiced it better. ANTHONY TOMMASINI


AT 1 MINUTE 48 SECONDS

William Billings was the most prominent American composer active during the lifetime of Alexander Hamilton. Although the musical “Hamilton” does not feature any of Billings’s work, it is very much worth exploring. While “Chester” is his most famous song, it isn’t quite as musically compelling as Billings’s Revolutionary War-era “Lamentation Over Boston.” Composed in the wake of the British occupation of Boston, the hymn paraphrases Scripture in order to conflate Biblical suffering with that of the New England patriots. It is as stirring as some of the most impassioned moments of “Hamilton.” Listen to the intricate but also distinctly unconventional counterpoint — Billings had no formal musical training — toward the middle of the hymn, when the voices repeat the phrase “Weeping for Boston.” As the musicologist Richard Crawford wrote, “The music is calculated at every turn to intensify the delivery of the words.” WILLIAM ROBIN

AT 1 MINUTE 37 SECONDS

I have been thinking a lot about the accordion this week — words I never expected to say. The Latvian virtuoso Ksenija Sidorova appeared in “A Little Night Music,” the Mostly Mozart Festival’s late-night concert series, and her performances were revelatory. They displayed not only her abundant musicianship and that of the masters whose music she presented, but also the continued development of the instrument itself, which now enables the player’s left hand to roam far and free beyond an oom-pah bass. The repertory consisted mostly of catchy miniatures, but if you want real substance, try this transcription of the opening movement of Bach’s French Overture in B minor, and watch it catch fire in the fugal section. JAMES R. OESTREICH


AT 33 MINUTES 1 SECOND

As the story goes, Brahms took well over a decade (possibly two) to write his First Symphony, which comes to the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center next week. It would be difficult for any German composer to follow the legacy of Beethoven — can you imagine writing in the shadow of Beethoven’s Ninth? — and Brahms’s famously self-critical nature didn’t help the matter. Indeed, the symphony still carries traces of Beethoven’s magnum opus, most noticeably in the finale. Listen to the simple, hummable melody introduced by the strings, then developed by the entire orchestra: It seems the “Ode to Joy” was an earworm for Brahms, too. JOSHUA BARONE


AT 1 MINUTE 40 SECONDS

Among the many excellent quartets of the new generation, the Danish String Quartet stands out. These four collegial Scandinavians consistently bring comprehensive skills, penetrating musicianship and interpretive daring to their performances. Alas, I could not make the ensemble’s recent doubleheader appearance with the Mostly Mozart Festival on Thursday. In the second program, they played selections from “Wood Works,” their 2014 recording of Nordic songs arranged for string quartet. A video from that year, recorded at a festival in northern France, shows them introducing and then performing a set of three Danish wedding songs. About two minutes into the subdued first song, the violin lifts a wistful melody backed by quizzical, hazy harmonies in the other strings. Does this wedding song date from the Middle Ages? It almost sounds so, as played here with such mysterious allure. ANTHONY TOMMASINI


AT 10 MINUTES 18 SECONDS

The opening concert of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in Lenox, Mass., on Thursday evening offered mainly music by living Americans, predominantly vocal and prevailingly clever and sardonic. But it took the work of two European veterans, Gyorgy Kurtag and Sofia Gubaidulina, to inject needed emotional weight and ultimately spirituality into the affair. Ryne Cherry, a baritone, gave gripping performances of two of Kurtag’s unaccompanied Hölderlin Songs, including the last, “Tübingen, January,” a miniature mad scene sung by Kurt Widmer and set to a poem of Paul Celan, documenting Hölderlin’s harrowing mental decline. JAMES R. OESTREICH


AT 52 SECONDS

Last week, a video of the great soprano Lucia Popp’s sublime concert performances of Dvorak’s “Song to the Moon” from the early 1980s got me searching for more from this much-missed singer. For example, here is the younger Popp, in 1969, in the Queen of the Night’s demonically brilliant aria (“Der Hölle Rache”) from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Popp’s combination of effortless technical accuracy and gleaming sound is uncanny. At the end of the first long strand of leaping coloratura passagework, with the high F’s nailed, Popp has enough breath remaining to sustain the final note for its full rhythmic value. Amazing. ANTHONY TOMMASINI

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