The Cold Song from Henry Purcell's King Arthur

For Silke's formation musicale class at the conservatory, she has to sing the cold song from Henry Purcell's musical theatre work, King Arthur.  She had already learned it, but wanted to see some performances of it.  So we looked it up on youtube.  My goodness but there are wildly different interpretations!  Here are three of our favourites.  If you don't like Baroque opera music, and not everyone does, than skip this post.  You regularly-scheduled Paris-related posts will return after this interruption.

The first is the most straight-forward performance, by the countertenor Andreas Scholl.  The orchestra is playing on period instruments, in an authentic style.  Silke's comment on this one, "I can't believe how good that is."  She listened to it a lot.

The next one, sung by Nanette Scriba, is what Silke and Jerome call the "Spaghetti Western" interpretation.  Not because of the visuals or the singing, but because the tangy guitar, especially in the intro, sounds like it could be the opening score for a Sergio Leone movie.  In this performance, the original English lyrics are translated (loosely) into German.

And the last one is wild and wacky and fun!  No credits on the youtube video (arg!), but your music sleuth (me) has identified it as a 2005 production by Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor.  The cold song starts at 2:15.

What all these performances have in common is that they are German productions.  (OK, the last is Austrian).  You can laugh at them - we did - in fact there may have been some danger of someone here dying of laughter - but at the same time they are three really great and daring performances that show what you can do with Baroque music today.  I don't think it's not just coincidence that these are German productions.  More than once now I've heard someone here introduce a musical project by way of explaining they were attempting something that exists in Germany, but up until now hadn't existed in France.  Who knows why that is?  Maybe it's something in the water, or maybe it's critical mass, or maybe it is, as I've heard ventured, that artists can actually afford to live in Berlin.

Addition: The New York Times recently printed this article about music in Berlin: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/arts/music/classical-musicians-too-make-berlin-their-capital.html?smid=pl-share .