Intermezzo

A Dame to remember

This 1990 portrait of Dame Margaret Price is in German, but don't let that put you off. All musical excerpts (starting with her justly-celebrated Isolde,  recorded with Carlos Kleiber) are allowed to run their course without BBC-style interruption, and the talky bits should be fairly easy to follow.

Thank you to reader Adam for uncovering.

Dame Margaret Price remembered

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to score a ticket to the memorial concert for Dame Margaret Price at Wigmore Hall.

This is the sort of thing the Wigmore does well, as the apposite selection of Mozart, Strauss, Schumann, Britten and Verdi proved.  Singers were mostly drawn from the younger generation: Sally Matthews, Leigh Woolf, Stephan Loges, Jonathan McGovern and Gerard Collett. But it was the veteran Dennis O’Neill who stole the show with Ah Fede ? Quando le sere al placido from Luisa Miller, his remarkably well-preserved tones ringing round the hall.

There were also fascinating tributes from Sir John Tooley and William Lyne, heads of the Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall respectively during most of Dame Margaret's career. The dog-loving, Munich-based singer apparently once tackled John Major (then Prime Minister) at some official do on the quarantine laws with "You wouldn't lock your children up for six months!".

Above, Margaret Price sings Ave Maria from Verdi's Otello in Paris, 1976.