A few months ago, David and I paid a visit to Zurich. The weather was glorious, we ate well, saw interesting theater, and I found a great used record store that was probably the one inexpensive place

At Countermelody, this April Fools Day begins with a dirty musical joke, and a great one! The episode continues with nearly a centurys worth of performances of risqu songs, most but not all of them

Here finally is my long-promised and long-overdue episode on great Ukrainian singers. Because I am so historically oriented, I begin the episode at the dawn of recorded sound and present singers from

This weeks episode is a counterpart to my ongoing exploration of the practice of performing opera in translation which includes the Verdi auf Deutsch [www.countermelodypodcast.com/index.php/2021/10

Today in honor of Womens History Month and the people of Ukraine, I present a compendium of eight different Liedersngerinnen singing Franz Schuberts song cycle Winterreise, set to poems by Wilhelm

This is the second part of my final episode of Black History Month 2022, continuing the exploration of the legacies of more than two dozen mostly underrecorded African American artists. Each piece of

I bid a lingering farewell to Black History Month 2022 with the first of a two-part episode featuring singers, each of whom left a relatively small but invaluable recorded legacy. I begin with soloist

How often it happens that, even when an artist produces an august and varied body of work, that they are remembered only for a tiny fragment of their output? Such is the case with Brock Peters (1927

The great African American coloratura Reri Grist was born on leap year 1932. We celebrate her upcoming 90th birthday with a tribute featuring many of her greatest roles and recordings. After appearing

Leslie Hutchinson (1900-1969), known universally as Hutch, rose from his beginnings in Grenada, to become the biggest music star in London in the 1930s. Though he is but little remembered today, he pe