U2: No Line on the Horizon
It's been a busy week in music. On December 18, classical music fans across the globe celebrated the would 150th birthday of Giacomo Puccini, a church organist before he embarked on a stunning stretch of composition that yielded his many operas. Puccini's sesquicentennial might best be celebrated with good headphones and the superlative Tosca. [Tosca quiz included here, at no extra charge]. If it's your first foray into this peak experience, the time-tested favorite is the remastered 1953 recording with Maria Callas. Please drop word if you can find it vinyl.
Grammy buzz continues unabated, but behind the nomination brawn of Lil' Wayne and Coldplay, there's very cool news in the Recording Academy's intent to give a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award to the Blind Boys of Alabama. Go tell it on the mountain! It's been 70 years since this seminal musical institution began, and the boys are more than deserving of this nod. (There's a very cool interactive historical timeline of the group here.)
Finally, to piggyback on Renata's post from a week or so back, we've got a lot more detailed picture of U2's new album, No Line on the Horizon. Slated for no less than five unique versions, the album is due out March 9, 2009, and produced by Brian Eno, Danny Lanois, and Steve Lillywhite. No Will.I.Am, it seems, despite what Kanye said. Er, whew!
And now for some holiday nonsense!
Merry Christmas from snowbound Seattle...
--Jason Kirk
wench wear on May 29, 2010 at 10:10 AM
U2 is back! and i'm really loving it!
Jason Kirk on December 30, 2008 at 02:56 PM
GEMM has a few copies, but they're either not the recording I'm looking for or not the remastered version, which I'm beginning to fear may not have seen vinyl release. Thanks, Meg...
Oh, and Marla, I wasn't trying to foist a full-on "tribute" (your word, not mine). Assuming we aren't all able to find a running performance of Tosca in our towns right now, nor (as I've discovered) to find the 1953 Callas recording on vinyl for a proper social get-together at home, my headphone suggestion was just that, a well-meant suggestion in a sort of limited field of play. As well, while you're right that Puccini's 12 operas don't render him prolific by all standards, that's still not a bad repertoire, particularly when they're of this quality. I've only managed one so far. Anyway, sorry to offend...
Meg on December 30, 2008 at 02:37 PM
Did you try GEMM or eBay?
Marla on December 29, 2008 at 05:22 PM
This is the single flattest "tribute" I've encountered for the Puccini anniversary. Could you really not even take a look at wikipedia to come up with something slightly more inspired than a career "that yielded many operas"? (Puccini was, by the way, hardly known as a prolific composer.) Oh, and he was an OPERA composer--you really think the best way to celebrate that is to bury your ears in headphones??