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The Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, captured in a 1968 portrait. He turns 70 years old today.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

The Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, captured in a 1968 portrait. He turns 70 years old today.

There must be something pianistically felicitous about the 5th of January, because today not only marks Maurizio Pollini's 70th birthday, but it's also Alfred Brendel's 81st. And it would have been Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli's 92nd birthday today had he not passed away in 1995.

To celebrate all that virtuosity, here are three video clips that embody the artistry of these keyboard titans.

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Will the Queen of Soul point the way to opera's next big talent?

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

Will the Queen of Soul point the way to opera's next big talent?

American Idol, The Sing-Off, The Voice — there's no shortage of over-the-top, glitzy, ratings-driven music competitions on TV. And now Aretha Franklin is getting in on the singing contest circuit, but she's turning her searchlight on the world of classical music. That's right — the Queen of Soul is searching for the next great opera singer.

"Some of the older classical singers like Jessye Norman, Leontyne [Price] and Barbara Hendricks are retiring, they're not singing anymore, and I'd like to see some younger singers come along and take their place," Franklin says. (Actually, Price retired from the opera stage in 1985.)

If she likes what she hears, Franklin will sign one, two or maybe even three performers to her label, Aretha's Records, and help them get established in the world of classical music.

The competition itself is decidedly low-tech. Franklin is asking interested 18- to 40-year-olds to send their demos — via CDs or cassettes — to her directly. There's no studio audience and no toll-free number for you to call or text your vote. Just your demo, an 8-by-10 head shot and a resume. And no original songs allowed.

If you're interested, the address is:

Aretha's Records
c/o Thav, Gross, Steinway & Bennett
30150 Telegraph Road
Bingham Farms, MI 48012

"I'd like to hear them sing the classics," Franklin says. "Things like 'Nessun Dorma.' " Giacomo Puccini's aria from his opera Turandot is what Franklin herself famously sang when she filled in for Luciano Pavarotti at the 1998 Grammy Awards.

Franklin says she's seeking "just the classical aspirants, just the people who are actively studying," someone she describes as a person "who is very close to being accomplished."

And Franklin herself will be the judge. "If they're a new artist who's really got it, I'd like to hear them," she says.

But Brian Carter, a singer who is wrapping up his doctorate degree studies in vocal performance at the University of Michigan, is leery of Franklin's idea: "My reaction to that is, if someone asked me to judge who was going to be the next big R&B person, I'd be equally wary." Carter says that he doesn't mean to question Franklin's credentials, but that he hopes that "if she's going to do this right, that she's going to get good people who are going to help her make the right decision, and that the person they get really is a serious opera singer and not a pop-culture version of a good opera singer."

Carter contends that singers should be "peer reviewed" by real opera professionals, not "pop reviewed" like the singers on shows like Britain's Got Talent, where amateur singer Paul Potts won for his rendition of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."

Mezzo-soprano Sarah Nisbett, 29, says pop review or peer review doesn't matter; she definitely plans to audition. She thinks the blending of pure classical with something a little more funky and popular is exciting.

"Anything that can bring opera into a more mainstream world I think is great," Nisbett says. "I think it could be good to have a 'pop music' chaperon to say, 'Hi, everybody, I'm pop music, you might enjoy my friend opera!' "

Nisbett's so excited about the competition that one might even say she's hallucinating — like the other day, when she got an email from a friend telling her about Franklin's open auditions. Nisbett says that as she was reading it, "My phone starts ringing, and it's a 313 area code so I know it's Detroit, and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, she knows I'm reading it, she's already selected me!" Nisbett laughs.

Well, a girl can always dream.

Enlarge Ellen Appel/courtesy of the artists

The Takacs Quartet, continuing to conquer the music of "Papa" Haydn.

Ellen Appel/courtesy of the artists

The Takacs Quartet, continuing to conquer the music of "Papa" Haydn.

For string quartet lovers, a new release by the Takács Quartet is always reason to celebrate. In recent years, their vividly intense recordings of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, not to mention Bartok and Beethoven, have continued to garner the huge acclaim that has become the nearly default critical response over some three decades.

"Papa" Haydn's genial string quartets might seem to offer a tad less sturm und drang than much of the music at which the Takacs excel. But this album offers brilliance — with a bite.

This recording of the Op. 71 quartets was released simultaneously with the Takács' album of Haydn's Op. 74 quartets. It's not overdrive — this is a pairing that makes a great deal of progamming sense. Despite their different publishing numbers, Haydn wrote the three quartets of Op. 71 and the three of Op. 74 as one group, and all were commissioned by one Count Anton Apponyi.

The six "Apponyi" quartets were composed in 1793 in Vienna just after Haydn made his first visit to London — where, for the very first time, the composer heard his music played for the public, rather than in performances restricted to invitees of the Esterházy court. Haydn — knowing that he had to do perhaps a bit more "selling" of his works for a broader public — responded with flashier writing and even more catchy tunes than what he wrote for his royal audiences:

The Takacs Quartet Plays Haydn

Hear The Takacs Quartet Play Haydn

• Artist: Takács String Quartet
• Album: Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 71
• Song: String Quartet No. 54 in B flat major, Op. 71/1, H. 3/69 [Vivace]

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• "String Quartet No. 54 in B flat major, Op. 71/1, H. 3/69 [Vivace]"
• Album: Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 71
• Artist: Takács String Quartet
• Label: Hyperion
• Released: 2011

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There's so much sunniness to these works, but the Takács Quartet deepens the musical flavor with a hint of acidity, just as adding lemon juice to a cooked dish adds a tart, bright note without disturbing the harmonious balance of flavors. The energy this foursome creates is both fierce and joyous, and the way they play with both effortless buoyancy and absolute clarity is a total delight.

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In a double-blind test by professional violinists, most couldn't determine — by sound alone — which violin was an original Stradivarius and which was a modern instrument. Above, a 1729 Stradivari known as the "Solomon, Ex-Lambert."

Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

In a double-blind test by professional violinists, most couldn't determine — by sound alone — which violin was an original Stradivarius and which was a modern instrument. Above, a 1729 Stradivari known as the "Solomon, Ex-Lambert."

In the world of violins, the names Stradivari and Guarneri are sacred. For three centuries, violin-makers and scientists have studied the instruments made by these Italian craftsmen. So far no one has figured out what makes their sound different. But a new study now suggests maybe they aren't so different after all.

OK, here's a test. Clip one is a musical phrase from Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. Clip two is the same phrase. The same musician plays both. But one is on a Stradivarius violin, the other on a violin made in 1980. See if you can tell the difference.

It's a tough choice. But a professional violinist could tell the difference, right?

Well, a research team recently tried to find out. They gathered professional violinists in a hotel room in Indianapolis. They had six violins — two Strads, a Guarneri and three modern instruments. Everybody wore dark goggles so they couldn't see which violin was which.

Then the researchers told the musicians: These are all fine violins and at least one is a Stradivarius. Play, then judge the instruments.

Enlarge Andrei Tchernov/iStock

Learning the conductorly art of shaping music with your body.

Andrei Tchernov/iStock

Learning the conductorly art of shaping music with your body.

• How exactly does a conductor conduct? New York magazine critic Justin Davidson steps on the podium to find out after an intensive fall of coaching by Alan Gilbert and James Ross who co-lead Juilliard's conducting program. "Lifting the baton feels a little like getting ready to push off from the top of a ski slope, in that I'll move in the right direction whatever I do, and also because fear will cause disaster. Neither fact is comforting."
• Claudio Del Monaco, an occasional opera director and son of tenor Mario Del Monaco, is now in stable condition with damage to his heart, liver and diaphragm after his third wife, Daniela Hermann Werner, allegedly attacked him with a bread knife. "My wife stabbed me. She's crazy," he told emergency personnel. (link in Italian)
• What happens when a soloist has to call in sick? Often, an "all-points bulletin goes out to artists' management companies and to orchestra administrators." To this end, legendary Juilliard piano pedagogue Veda Kaplinsky tells her students to have lesser-known concertos in their repertoire to increase their chances of getting summoned from the bullpen.
• Bassoonists, rejoice: A New York musicologist has discovered four lost measures of the bassoon part in Ravel's ballet Ma Mere l'Oye. Apparently, there was an error that went undetected for 100 years.
• There's only one city in America that still employs a civic organist: San Diego. This year, citizens rose up to save her job.
• Remember how last week Opera Boston closed its doors very suddenly? Well, it seems that at least six of the company's 17 board members were not present at the meeting in which a vote was taken to disband the company.
• Says The Boston Globe: "It's both a strange and sad outcome ... the roughly $750,000 deficit and liabilities weighing down the company struck few experts as insurmountable in a city of Boston's size and cultural tastes. While some of the opera company's powerful board members may have grown tired of their commitments, they could have found a way to exit the stage without dismantling the company." (The Globe also says Boston mayor Tom Menino was "shocked" when he heard the news, and that "no one had sought help from him or the city's office of arts and culture to drum up support for the opera company.")
• Along the lines of those anonymous donors paying off people's layaway items at Kmart, a "secret Santa" contributed $25,000 to pay off a line of credit debt that has been plaguing the local symphony in Helena, Mont.
• In the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini presents "another way to occupy Lincoln Center" — go to free and low-cost performances.
• And within his year-end list of 2011's best performances for The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, "Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system."
• Ross' comment is a (credited) riff on Seth Colter Wall's post-Satyagraha/Occupy Wall Street protest column for The Awl earlier this month, which earns my nomination as 2011's comment of the year: "This persistent fiction of 'elitism,' and contemporary classical music's supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongside a 3D screening of 'Transformers 3."
• Dodging the year-end column doldrums, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's James Lileks imagines a classical-centric fracas at Minnesota's Mall of America between Abbado and Barenboim partisans: "Mall officials were stunned by what some are calling the worst outbreak of music among middle-aged, classical-music fans in the city's history ... 'These two dudes, they're dressed for trouble, the tails, the white scarf, everything, they start sneering at each other, and then the other stands up and sniffs dismissively, and then one dude gets out some opera glasses and looks down his nose at the other, and the other dude says "So's Yo-Yo Ma," and it was on."' The video, available on YouTube, shows the rioters throwing wadded-up napkins at each other, screaming insults in Italian, and picking up chairs and putting them down forcefully a few inches away." (N.B.: NPR tote bags are swung in the free-for-all.)

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Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Enlarge courtesy of the artist

Countertenor Andreas Scholl.

courtesy of the artist

Countertenor Andreas Scholl.

It's hard to think of a singer of any type who performs with more color and clarity than Andreas Scholl. The Times of London has called the German countertenor a "storyteller supreme, daring his audience to stay fully engaged for every compelling second."

Recently honored with a Grammy nomination for his album of music by Henry Purcell called O Solitude, he's just wrapped up a run of Handel's opera Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera performed with soprano Renee Fleming. And he's just released a new album of Bach arias with the Kammerorchester Basel and conductor Julia Schroeder.

When Scholl was in Manhattan for his last Rodelinda appearances, we invited him into our New York bureau for a different kind of storytelling. We asked him to share his favorite music with us, no genres barred. He came back with an amazing range of choices, from jazz to Irish folk tunes to a song from a contemporary Israeli singer/songwriter to his own — yes, his own — dance club tune, which he wrote, sang and recorded after a very unfortunate encounter with Slovenia's national airline.

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Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) in the second installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

Warner Bros.

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) in the second installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

Last night, I was at the local multiplex to take in Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, the latest installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

While this is not exactly a great film, it's pretty good fun for an escapist evening. And what's quite refreshing in the case of Sherlock Holmes is that — for once! — it's not just the villain who loves classical music. Usually, one of the trademark signs of a baddie is his creepy, mincing fondness for the classics. Just think of Hannibal Lecter's taste for Glenn Gould's Bach, or Norman Bates in Psycho playing Beethoven. (And in contemporary films from Die Hard to Bowling For Columbine, Beethoven almost always signals Nazism, as Michael Broyles demonstrates in his recent book Beethoven In America.)

Through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes adventures, we know the detective is a violinist. But classical music proves particularly pivotal in Shadows. In their contests of wits, we discover that both Holmes and his nemesis, the sneering Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), love Schubert songs, so much so that "Die Forelle" ("The Trout") becomes a major point of reference. (By the way, that's Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake on the soundtrack.) And I won't be giving anything away to say that Mozart's Don Giovanni also has a bit more than a cameo in this winter-break flick. There's also Hans Zimmer's clever score, which absorbs everything from Strauss waltzes to Romany fiddling.

Blockbusters like the Iron Man series notwithstanding, Game Of Shadows isn't the only recent Robert Downey Jr. movie that involves classical music. He also played real-life journalist Steve Lopez in the 2009 adaptation of the Los Angeles Times staffer's book The Soloist, about a homeless, mentally ill, Juilliard-trained musician.

Shadows composer Hans Zimmer has said in interviews that it was Downey who wanted to give classical music such a star turn in the film: "From Robert I kept hearing, 'We're going to have the Schubert,' 'We're going to have the Mozart.'"

So is a trope turning at last? Is it possible for a film's good guy to be steeped in classical music? On the other hand, it's not as if Detective Holmes is a contemporary hero. Does a character have to be a steampunk throwback for his love of classical music to be believable in the first place?

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A view of the 16th-century Shirvanshakhs palace in Azerbaijan's capital city, Baku.

Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

A view of the 16th-century Shirvanshakhs palace in Azerbaijan's capital city, Baku.

The folk music of Azerbaijan pervades the very rarely heard symphonic works on this album. A winning synthesis of East and West, these pieces — mostly for piano — feature five of the country's most celebrated composers, including Farhad Badalbeyli, who's also the principal piano soloist.

The disc opens with the three-movement Concerto for Piano and Orchestra after Arabian Themes by Fikret Amirov, probably the best known Azerbaijani composer. Written in 1957 in collaboration with pianist-composer Elmira Nazirova, it's an enjoyable pastiche of exotic Eastern melodies served up in Western concerto form.