LomaAlta has proposed the “Top Ten Songs of the 1950s” with his numbers 7-10 listed here. While I don’t disagree with his list (“Top Ten” may well reflect popularity as much as musical worth) and I do agree that his list of songs contain pop songs of some worth, I’d have a different list. Yeh, even in my home with three sisters and a brother, I was the really odd one out. Their 50s (and later 60s) pop music didn’t appeal to me much. Frankly, during those early years, I was much more enamored of instrumental music, particularly classical (which did include some Classical,Romantic and Baroque)–very little contemporary music penetrated my hearing until my college years… when, strangely, my studies were focused on classical music training.
So, my list of songs–50s or othewrwise–is very different to LomaAlta’s–or most folks’ for that matter.
I’ll just my top five:
Number 5:
Of this performance… *sigh* I dislike some of Alastair Miles’ vowel choices, but the Baroque trumpet is just as nearly perfect as one could hope for, and my quibbles about Miles’ vowels are just that: quibbles. Definitely belongs in my top five best songs.
Number 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pQ8cIi1Gpk
What list could be complete without Rogers Covey-Crump’s performance of Purcell’s “first” setting of, “If Music Be the Food of Love”? Most counter-tenors sound awfully artificial, but Covey-Crump captures this wonderful lil song almost to perfection (His “the’s” thud on the ear, but that’s a small price to pay for the rest of the performance). BTW, Purcell’s other settings of this text are also worth listening to, IMO.
Number 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJCnqJJ9uRs
Bryn Terfel’s performance here is my favorite YouTube performance of this stunningly beautiful aria from Xerxes. Yes, another song by Handel. He really knew how to write a melodic line.
Number 2:
Regular readers here have already seen and heard this video multiple times. While the entire Die Winterreise song cycle stands as the single greatest collection of great songs for solo voice, in my opinion, and makes choosing just one an exercise in frustration, this song just grabs me more than any of the rest. Stunning. And, of course, Der Lindenbaum sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau–INarguably, the greatest baritone of the 20th Century, accompanied by Alfred Brendel, well, breathtaking is the least praise I can extend.
But what could edge that out? How about The Last Great Song ever written? *heh* Yep. From the 1926 hit opera, Turandot: Nessun Dorma , sung by the only guy who could squeak by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for the number one spot as “greatest voice of the 20th Century”–Jussi Björling.
Number 1:
While none of these performances are “perfect” (Fischer-Dieskau, for example, was in his 60s and well past his prime in the performance above), all are great songs, performed by some of the best (and in the last two examples, THE best) voices of the 20th Century, well worth being included in anyone’s “ear conditioning” collection.
I probably have a few hundred other “best” or great songs floating around in my mind’s ear, but these might help put some of the “music” being pushed out to deaden folks’ ears today into some sort of perspective. BTW, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte is pretty much devoid of great songs, but of you can get your hands on a recording with Fischer-Dieskau in the role of Papageno, you’ve found a treasure. Oh, it’s not rare; the treasure’s in Mozart’s music and the wonderful voice of Fischer-Dieskau.