Present glory, and past | The New Criterion

“To say it immediately, Nadine Sierra proved herself a great singer at the Metropolitan Opera last night.” This is how I began a review of La sonnambula two weeks ago. And I include Sierra—singing from that opera—in my new Music for a While, here.
 
There is a lot of nostalgia in the musical realm, as there is in others. This should not blind us, or deafen us, to glory in the present.
 
On this podcast, I say, “I missed Callas, Sutherland, and Caballé. Well, I heard the last two very late in their careers, and that doesn’t count. I am very glad to be hearing Sierra, in her prime.”
 
I proceed to ask the question, “Where were you on the night of August 6, 1840?” Well, it would have been good to be in Leipzig, in St. Thomas Church, where Mendelssohn gave an all-Bach organ recital. This was one of the events that occasioned the Bach revival in the nineteenth century. Recently, Paul Jacobs duplicated this program in Manhattan.
 
Accordingly, I have a little Bach on this podcast—Bach for organ.
 
Was he at his best, composing for this instrument (which he himself played so well)? Yes. As he was when composing for all the other instruments . . .
 
It is an old theme: the universality of music. I have some of Yunchan Lim on this podcast. He is a pianist from South Korea, twenty-one years old. I have him playing an arrangement—his own—of a nineteenth-century Russian waltz-song. In it, he is so Old World.
 
The human ability to absorb and assimilate is amazing.
 
Frequently, I have quoted Leontyne Price, who sang recitals all over the world. She sang virtually every kind of song, in a variety of tongues. At the end of her program, she would habitually sing spirituals—songs she had learned as a girl in Mississippi.
 
She once explained her practice as follows: “I have sung your songs, now you will hear mine.”
 
At encore time, singers often sing songs from home. Victoria de los Ángeles used to bring out a guitar and accompany herself in a Spanish folk song or two. In our present era, Elīna Garanča will offer something from Latvia.
 
Last month, Pene Pati sang a recital in New York. His final encore was from Samoa, his native land. I end this latest Music for a While with him singing such a song (accompanied by his brother on a percussion instrument).
 
Music has a knack for being particular and universal at the same time. Probably it is so with all art.