Very briefly - Gardiner's second recording of Bach's Cantata 51 with soloist Malin Hartelius, a favorite!

"Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen"


"Wir beten zu Tempel an"


"Höchster, mache deine Güte"


"Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren"


"Alleluia"

guess who?

can you guess who this is?

Instead of Penelope or Fevroniya

I had been planning (for some time) to write on either Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (one of my favorite favorite operas -- and Wolftrap is putting it on this summer!) or Сказание о невидимом граде Китеже и деве Февронии, Skazaniye o nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fevronii (hee hee! how's that for a long title?), an opera that has long held a deep fascination for me. I am ultimately planning to work on this and other Rimsky operas.

But all of that has been shoved aside. By what, you ask? Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno by Handel. Some time ago, I attended a musicology colloquium with Ellen Harris as guest speaker. She extended the observations and arguments she made in her book Handel as Orpheus and spoke about this early Handel oratorio. I thought the clips she played were absolutely stunning (organ concerto, final scene) but after sniffing around a bit thereafter, forgot about it.

Now (well, to me!), Emmanuelle Haim has recorded it with a stunning quartet of soloists. And there are some videos of recording released that are an enormous amount of fun -- some of them are below. In the quartet voglio tempo, I was struck by all of the singers -- how appropriate Natalie Dessay, Sonia Prina, Pavol Breslik, and Ann Hallenberg are to their roles and to this kind of approach to early music.

Says Haim:

Twenty years ago, everything was concentrated on the reaction against the romantic tradition of interpreting the baroque. Bill is part of that generation: people like him and Reinhard Goebel and Sigiswald Kuijken fought to establish authentic practices of ornamentation and bowing techniques. For them, it was a battle for purity. Now it is over, they have won and students learn in conservatoire both romantic and baroque methods. You can choose whether you hold a violin against your chest or your neck.

This double practice is what interests me, and that's how the players in Le Concert d'Astrée are trained. Most of them are very young and all of them are flexible. My leader also works for the 'normal' orchestra in the opera house in Toulouse, my cellist is a great jazz player, my percussionist is involved in Indian music.

This is what I like -- she still has a historical perspective on performance practice (for instance, instrumentation in baroque operas -- what might work for Handel would not work for Monteverdi, say) but feels free to adapt and adopt without a concern for purity. Musical practice miscegenation perhaps. Anyhow, her recordings both feature so-called baroque specialists and others that are anything but: Susan Graham as Dido, Ian Bostridge as (Monteverdi's) Orfeo and Aeneas, Natalie Dessay as...well as a whole crapton of things. It leads to incredibly vital music-making which is still recognizably historically informed.

--In any case, it got me to thinking about 2 things: (1) what sort of qualities in a voice suit this style of music (keeping in mind that "this style" is perhaps one of the richest and most varied period of classical composition lumped all the hell together)? and (2) holy shit, Ann Hallenberg rocks!

Let's go with #2. The evidence, your honor:

Ann Hallenberg steps in at Zurich for Bartoli:

Stepping into a difficult, untested role as a substitute for perhaps the most famous singer in Europe on a few hours notice, Ann Hallenberg was greeted with polite applause as she walked with Minkowski to their podiums in the pit. And then, somehow, a magical evening commenced.

Hallenberg singing the same role, Piacere:


AH sings Bradamante in the Spinosi recording of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso:

1) Asconderò il mio sdegno


2) Taci, non ti lagnar


3) Se cresce un torrente


4) Io son ne' lacci tuoi

whoah, minnesota?

So on a lark, I investigated the website of Minnesota Public Radio further and there seems to be a gigantic trove of really interesting things, even just in the classical music section.

Playlist below culling some interesting features, including Vivica Genaux (interview and singing of Neapolitan songs), Phil Gossett on Verdi's Ballo, Dinnerstein and the Goldberg Variations.

meredith monk

I knew what I forgot yesterday. Well one of the things I forgot. I forgot to listen to the Meredith Monk interview (weirdly, also at Minnesota Public Radio like the Fleisher clips...)

Interview:



Meredith Monk performs Our Lady of Late (for voice, wineglass, and percussion):



also on agenda: listening to Atlas. Impressions later.

cara speme

from


Joyce DiDonato's Website:



Also check out Ms. DiDonato's blog (why did it take me so long to discover it? the world will never know).

long overdue post on the nordic voices

One of the most beautiful evenings I spent listening to voices live happened when I was in Taipei one summer. It was the summer after graduating from college, and even though I was traveling on the other side of the globe, I still toted a couple things that comfortably reminded me of school and my existence there.

At any rate, there were a couple performances that friends had bought tickets for during my trip. They were part of a choral festival in which various vocal ensembles from around the world performed. The first night featured a choir from Korea and a six-voice Swedish ensemble called Nordic Voices.



The programming of NV was really quite superb. It was mostly twentieth century works, concentrating on the latter half, with particular relish in programming aleatoric and humorous works. What also struck me was how beautifully trained their voices were. The first soprano, in particular, had an incredible, enveloping timbre, projection, and control. Memory being a fickle, nonetheless I have a visceral recollection of what it was like to hear that voice swell and it was unlike any evening that I spent in the company of name singers at the Met, for example. (Duly noted that the size of venue could not be more different, as well as the lack of accompaniment.)

The excellence of the concert notwithstanding, the most beautiful moment of the evening occurred at the final encore when the singers, holding bouquets, turned away from each other to face the audience in a line where the footlights would be if the stage had them, and sang a "norwegian lullaby" in the warmest tones of sleep imaginable. At the second verse, the dynamic warmed still further, ever softer, until it seemed even the lights hushed to hear the melody. It was an amazing evening.

I can't believe I was such a doofus (or in such a funk, take your pic) that I missed their concert at the National Gallery of Art last winter. Boo on me!

This, looking back, may have been one of the more important signs to me that maybe opera might not be the best fit for me (who knows until I'm in a production!). That isn't to say that it won't fit -- in fact, I think it will be a wonderful fit, at least temperamentally. But it's no longer the only option in my mind, and I think that's only a good thing.

School starts in a month and a half! I've already found a place to live and I sign the lease next week. Immense!

(I notice that there are some video clips of NV available. I'll try and do some html-fu when I get home so I can post them here!)

*cue eye of the tiger*

Ohhhhh yeaaah. Not only is there a new Rocky movie (I'm actually not all that excited about it), this marks a step up in my html-foo. Not only did I crib together the (admittedly simple) embed tags for this realplayer object, but I also grappled with geocities to host my damned playlist.

See, realplayer exports its playlists natively as RMP files, which geocities says "nope, we're not buying that BS today!" so I had to try all sorts of playlist filetypes, including m3u, pls, and xpl, none of which geocities would accept. Finally, it turns out that geocities WILL accept smi, which is a godsend, because at the point where I discovered this, I was too annoyed to have to contend with a playlist syntax that was much more complicated that smil, which is actually incredibly simple (much simpler than RMP, for instance). Enjoy the fruits of my labors. I'll have to figure out how to show the playlist itself and forward/backward track some other time.

Edited to add: Ok, rudimentary forward and backwards in playlist have been added. Will have to learn more java/reaplayer functionality to figure out how to incorporate more snazzy things. For the moment, just listen to the pretty singers:

1. Inger Dam Jensen - quick clip from Die Schopfung (Mit staunen)


2. Mark Reizen (and Maxim Mikhailov as the Head) - Ruslan's aria and Act II finale


3. Pavel Lisitsian - Il balen


4. Dorothy Maynor - Depuis le jour

comparative voices

I always get somewhat depressed with kunst vs. stimm debates, particularly since it tends to also boil down to kunst vs. technique. Why does it have to be an either/or question? Also, I would think that for the vast majority of people, a certain level of technique is necessary for any kind of kunst.

Anyway, let's leave that aside for now, because I could talk until I were blue in the face trying to deconstruct (Derridean) the opposite pair of kunst vs. stimm/technique. Instead let's do some comparative listening. First up is Elizabeth Parcells, a coloratura soprano who died not too long ago and whom I just discovered fairly recently via youtube. From my vantage point, the vocal production is really quite stellar - the tone clean, unforced, and without any efforts at artificially manufacturing a sound or darkening the voice. It's just there. The florid technique is also quite solid, though perhaps not terribly flashy. Unfortunately, it seems that the dramatic instinct is rather dowdy. It seems that while there is earnestness in abundance, an actual flair is quite absent, although these qualities are less apparent in the performance of Ah se in ciel as compared to Vorrei spiegarvi o dio, which shows off an outrageously deployed technique, including high pianissimi, decorations, and lovely singing on a micro-phrase level. However, to my ear, it still lacks an overarching architecture, and while that may not fall squarely on the shoulders of the soloist, one is left with a feeling of the singer's skill rather than of the concert aria's resounding beauty and delicacy of feeling. The maddening desync between dramatic imagination and schooling of voice is better illustrated in a youtube here.

Elizabeth Parcells - Vorrei spiegarvi o dio!



Elizabeth Parcells - Mozart's Ah se in ciel

Contrast EP singing Ah se in ciel by Mozart with the lovely-voiced Sandrine Piau, first up on the youtube playlist. The gusto is evident and it doesn't all have to do with speed. Always with the decorations, there is a sure sense of where Piau is going, where the phrase lies, the music feels inevitable, whereas with EP, the more difficult passages bog down in themselves and it feels much slower than it actually is. The life is gone.

However, Piau's production already sounds problematic. There is a harsh edge in many of her notes on high, and the whole thing sounds a little dry-voiced. Not in the usual sense of missing legato, but there is an element of compression that transfers a certain crackling to the voice. A decade later, in the concert of Sacred Mozart arias from this year at the Basilica de Saint-Denis with Les Talens Lyrique (the videographer seems to have a thing for the (cute) oboist, Patrick Beauregard (people are actually named that?)), Piau again sings "Ah se in ciel" and the voice shows much wear and tear. The speed is faster, but instead of excitement, it sounds ragged and rushed, which is a shame :( The troublesome vocal production sounds even more strained, and watching the tendons and strain in her neck is definitely an act of morbid curiosity. One of the most useful bits of erstwhile technical observation I've read was in a throwaway line in Renée Fleming's The Inner Voice (which, however I feel about Fleming as a singer, I have utmost respect, appreciation, and affection for her persona as put forward in this book -- if only 1/5th of it were close to RF the woman, I'm sold) in which RF describes her mother and her colleagues speaking with wonder about Leontyne Price (e.g., "look how soft her neck looks when she's getting that volume!"). The neck and jaw, at least on me, show strain very easily, so watching those two parts, combined with listening, tell me alot about my singing.

The next two youtubes compare high singing and registration. The second of the 3 youtubes in the playlist features this crazy 83-year-old woman singing Ah dirai-je maman (in Italian, I think). While there are certain pitch issues and all that (and it's not recorded complete) there is something to be said about the wonderfully free, coruscating vocal production in a woman of 83. It's certainly an education to watch her. In combination with some articles in that one website I posted about, the author, Cathy Pope (about whom I know virtually nothing), describes the jaw-dropping that is involved in singing. She describes:

To achieve a resonance that filters through the cheek bones the jaw really must release back and down. This will eventually result in the total avoidance of responsibility for phonation by ‘muscling up’ of the jaw, neck and tongue. I have an acquaintance who is elderly and of course perfectly entitled to a relaxed afternoon nap in his chair. When he snoozes his jaw drops in a beautifully relaxed way. Try literally chewing your jaw back keeping the mouth gently oval.

That image definitely helps me visualize the kind of looseness to the jaw that's desired.

Contrast Maria Malatesta Cabro's singing with that of Natalie Dessay, who's battles with vocal nodes are widely known. I wouldn't say that I "called it" when it comes to Dessay's vocal troubles, but having learned about it, I can't say that it came out of left field, listening to her in 20/20 retrospect. A lot of the voice is produced smoothly and beautifully (and nowhere have I heard her more beautiful than in the youtube of Mozart's Et incarnatus est), but when it gets right up there into the highest registers, it starts to feel pressured and clenched and that power is applied in the throat. The mystifying thing is that none of this is seen in the neck (though in this particular youtube, you can't see her neck at all because of a drapey, yummy-looking scarf), but you sure can see it on Dessay's expression, even in this youtube.



Lots of food for thought. The main one being that while I won't sacrifice kunst for technique, I really won't sacrifice technique for kunst either, if for the simple fact that sacrificing technique doesn't serve kunst anyway. Ugh. Sounds like I want a big wedding cake and to eat it too (despite the fact that this is somewhat of a dead metaphor). *sigh* now I'm hungry.

Edited to add:

I dream of being the baritone Teresa Stratas. How amazing is this?