The great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers died today. My most memorable evening in the theater was seeing him, Renata Scotto, and Cornell MacNeil at the Met in the Zeffirelli production of Otello. (Seems to me that Otello is that rarest of creatures that is actually better than its Shakespearean source.)
Here is Vickers in the final scene of Verdi’s opera. Art just doesn’t get any better than this.
Richard Bowker 
WKCR the Columbia University radio station cancelled all their regular programming and had a 24 hour memorial which just concluded with Die Winterreise. I saw him at the Met in Otello, Pagliacci, Fidelio, Parsifal, Bartered Bride and Peter Grimes. At Tanglewood the first act of Die Walküre and Winterreise. In an era that included Pavarotti and Domingo he was quite simply the greatest.
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