Moon music on YouTube

I've picked out some YouTube clips to go with today's Star article on moon-inspired music.

First up, "Song to the Moon," from the opera Rusalka, by Antonin Dvorák. Tell me, who can perform it better than Renée Fleming? Here she is singing it at the Richard Tucker Gala at Avery Fischer Hall in 1991, in a simple, unaffected way:

The first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata is so overplayed and over-quoted that it's easy to dismiss it entirely. That's a mistake, especially when you hear an old master like Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) play it with such quiet restraint. I have no information on this clip but, based on the Hamburg Steinway, it's likely a European recital. My guess it's from the late-1970s:

There are not a lot of recordings available for Joseph Haydn's Il mondo della luna. Fortunately there was a production mounted by the Teatro Colón company in Buenos Aires last year that is true to the buffa spirit aesthetically. Here's a clip from Act I which deals with the subterfuge of the telescope. It's a lot of fun, even if the audio isn't great:

Then, on the other side of the aethetic-value continuum is Stephen Edwards' 2007 musical creation, Moon Landing. You be the judge: