A number of opera’s golden-age stars have passed away in recent years, but none quite so sadly as the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano who officially died yesterday, but whose life was effectively ended more than three years ago when, at the age of 83, he was beaten during a robbery at his Kenyan villa. He had been on life support in a Milanese hospital ever since, incapacitated by severe head injuries.

Di Stefano’s operatic career was comparatively short, starting in the late 1940s, hitting its stride in the 1950s, and effectively ending in the mid-1960s, but he did continue to sing in public in a limited capacity until the early ’70s. Di Stefano’s voice did not age well, arguably due to his choice to sing heavier dramatic repertoire that wasn’t suited to his essentially lyrical gifts, but in his prime he was one of the finest Italianate voices on the international scene. His 1953 recording of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas in the title role and Victor de Sabata conducting is his most recognizable recording, and it was his continued partnership with Callas that cemented his status as a leading tenor. Ironically, or perhaps just fittingly, appearances with Callas on her farewell tour in 1973-74 — when both singers were suffering severe vocal decline — marked the official end of di Stefano’s public career.

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It’s a bona fide senior moment when a package arrives and you have no memory of ordering what’s inside (Amazon Marketplace has a longer memory than some of us, apparently…), but such was the case this weekend with a copy of the surprisingly-hard-to-find Favorite Spirituals by the great tenor Roland Hayes. It was perfect timing though, because the weekend when America’s first front-running African-American candidate for president was winning primary contests and Jazz/R&B artist Herbie Hancock was pulling off an upset at the Grammy Awards was ideal for getting re-acquainted with one of the trailblazers of African-American concert music.

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Pianist Spencer Myer’s new album, Preludes & Variations, thrown into the CD player without so much as a glance at the track listing, triggered a furious mental game of “Name that Tune” recently. Not that the first piece on the album, a set of variations from the early-mid 20th century, was familiar; I definitely hadn’t heard it before. But that hauntingly disjointed and modal-sounding opening melody…was it something from Debussy? Mussorgsky? One of the European modernists like Arthur Honegger? Nope. At around the three-minute mark, a simple statement of the tune with nothing but a single line of counterpoint to accompany it () suddenly washed the taste of the 20th century away and revealed the truth. The melodic basis for the opening track (which, after the CD cover was finally consulted for confirmation, turned out to be composed by Ellis B. Kohs) is in fact one of the oldest popular songs still widely known by its name: “L’homme armé” (The Armed Man), likely written sometime during the Hundred Years’ War (1330s to 1450s) and familiar to most students of classical music from its frequent use as a cantus firmus in the many Renaissance-era masses of Dufay, Josquin, and Ockeghem, among others.

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This past weekend, Bowling Green State University, in conjunction with the Eastman School of Music and its director of Early Music, renowned lutenist Paul O’Dette, mounted the first staged performances of Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli’s opera La virtù de’ strali d’Amore (The Power of Love’s Arrows) since 1642. Aside from rescuing a groundbreaking, funny, and musically appealing work from total obscurity, the production was a refreshing example of creative risk-taking and collaboration in a university setting. Musicologist Vincent Corrigan prepared the new performing edition, Ronald Shields directed, O’Dette conducted from the lute, and harpsichordist Kevin Bylsma prepared the more than 30 solo singers.

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Even if you’re an avid collector of art song recordings, you may have missed this item from 2001 on the Icelandic ‘Smekkleysa’ label: Söngvar: the Complete Songs of Jón Leifs. 40 years after his death, Leifs is still arguably Iceland’s most accomplished composer, credited with melding native folksong traditions with a jagged, block-chord-based brand of modernism that he felt reflected the harshness of the north Atlantic island. Leif’s songs exemplify that fusion; they sound like a latter-day, less tonal Max Reger in an especially stentorian mood, and yet the influence of folk melody is always audible.

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Lately, the intersection between classical music and the gaming world has been growing, so it was gratifying, but not too surprising, to see the new commercials for the launch of Halo 3 which feature music by Fryderyk Chopin! (the famous “Raindrop” prelude, to be exact…). It was surprising, though, to stumble across AllGame’s entry for Eternal Sonata…a trippy little role playing game that places you inside the imaginary…and decidedly weird…world of Chopin’s deathbed hallucinations — where you can help characters with names like “Allegretto” and “Polka” complete their adventures. The entire soundtrack consists of Chopin’s music, and the fan art gallery on the game’s official website already contains at least one anime-influenced portrait of the composer.

Downloading. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Few music-related subjects have generated as much discussion in recent years. Most of that discussion has been about two things: declining CD sales, and thorny questions of intellectual property rights and ownership. There are lots of smaller story lines, too: the growing ubiquity of ear buds in public spaces, the increasing commoditization of music as it is leveraged to sell gadgets and services, the triumph of the “little guy,” who can now afford to distribute his/her/their music online for little or no cost, etc.

But there is less discussion about the actual use of downloaded music, or the role it plays in the lives of those who access it, largely because those things haven’t changed very much — at least not yet. Music has been portable for several generations now (someone out there still has a Sony Walkman™ or a boom box in the closet…admit it); changes on that front are largely of degree. Young people have been trading pirated, copied, mixed, and altered recordings since the advent of the tape deck (don’t tell me I’m the only one who copied his best friend’s older brother’s copy of Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show/La-di-da-di” back in the day…); and regardless of format, mainstream music consumers are still hungry primarily for the newest releases by the most popular artists — the very things served up readily by download services.

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