Once again dear old Auntie does her level best to help us all keep our minds on higher things with a lovely weekend full of Purcell goodies: talks, Symphonies, Evensong, even a dramatised version of one of his semi operas, Don Quixote, with the swoon worthy Paul Scofield. Really does life get any better this weekend? Actually… yes! We have all this and Alice Coote’s Charlotte in a broadcast of the recent Opera North Werther on the 21st at 3pm GMT.
And if that is not enough, and you have access to BBC iPlayer (some of the radio stuff seems to play even when not in UK) then you have 7 days left to catch Phillipe Jaroussky in Handel’s Faramondo.
Now, port or sherry with the slice of fruitcake in front of the fire for all this I wonder? Mmm, I think port.
Mildred, bring in the dogs and lock the gate. We’re going to be ‘unavailable’ this weekend.
One of the things I think I most and least like about getting older is the way my reaction to things changes. Sometimes this can be great. When I was a kid I hated Marmite. Now I love it and couldn’t imagine life without Marmite on toast. When I was teenager I loved nothing more than hanging around with my mates smoking behind the school sheds. Now, going to the opera fills largely the same desire for shared social experience with a hint of transgression. And when I was in my 20s I adored Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel. It seemed to me to represent a sort of calm acceptance of life – not sad, not happy, but peaceful. As I would listen I would feel myself floating slightly up off the ground, muscles relaxed, brain at ease. It was as near to a meditative state as I could get (having failed miserably to master actual meditation).
But apparently not all the changes of age are great. I happened to catch this on the radio last night and was immediately gripped by a sense of sinking, of slipping down in to some great well of lost dreams, and people, and ideas. I scrambled to push the feeling away, and after a couple of minutes I had to switch it off as I couldn’t bear it any longer. I felt like I needed to rinse my thoughts out of this deep melancholy that had coated me, leaving me like some head louse coated in conditioner awaiting the inevitable suffocation (no prizes for guessing what else I spent my time doing this weekend – the joys of having small children ) A burst of a little something also slightly reflective but less intense did the trick.
Now of course there may be all sorts of particular reasons for this – winter is upon us, work is horrendously and incessantly busy, family members are going through great turmoil, and the tail end of a mild MS relapse is still working its way out of my system. Any one of which can usually trigger some kind of mood-resilience slow down. But this felt much more. Much bigger. Much more fundamental. No this felt like Spiegel im Spiegel was quite literally unbearable.
What had once been reassuring was now terrifying. What had once enhanced now devastated. There are bits of music I once adored I now struggle to engage with, or don’t find quite as intensely life enhancing as once before – I’m sorry Vaughn Williams, I like your symphonies but I don’t know if I could eat a whole one these days … and as for you ELO, well good god what was I thinking!!. And I was shocked. This once played a big part in my life, listened to regularly throughout my 20s as I worked out the challenges of that time. Like I lost Mahler after being in the Balkans, I seem to have lost Part. I hope that as with Mahler he returns to me at some point, that life evolves again and once more this music can ‘roll round in earth’s diurnal course’ to paraphrase Wordsworth. And what an incredible tribute to the power of music; or good or bad it affects us deeply and truly does form the soundtrack to our lives.
But for those of you who have not arrived at this weird juncture where the boundary between meditative and melancholic has become too porous to bear, here’s the piece in question with the wonderful Tasmin Little (violin) and Martin Roscoe (piano). Thanks again kind Youtube saints.
Oh and in case you need a little emotion rinsing after that, this is what did the trick for me:
Now tell me that didn’t put a smile on your face – for all sorts of reasons. Crazee indeed! Marilyn you were amazing but dear me, Jane Russell you are a goddess. A goddess you hear.
Afterthought: I wonder how musicians cope when this happens to them and they have to play a piece? At least I can just switch off.
I am constantly astonished by how many people devote such huge amounts of time to helping maintain an audience for classical music and opera by populating the Youtube ‘waves’ with copious amount of well considered, well researched stuff that prompts us all to get out there and buy those CDs and DVDs the industry so wants us to buy. And today I was yet again left slack jawed by the commitment of a Youtuber, in this case TheCompletePurcell.
I woke up (early, bloody storm… Saturday, kids still miraculously asleep and I get woken at 5am by a storm ) this morning with a hankering for Purcell and a vague memory of a long lost Purcell album (yes we are talking ancient history here – an actual LP record!) featuring Barbara Bonney. The good goddess Google (trying saying that after a couple of malts ) supplied a Youtube link to Purcell’s Ah! how pleasant ’tis to love!, courtesy of our sweet and kind Youtuber. I was astonished by a video that features not only the score, but two versions (one with Bonney, one for lute):
Well that’s two more items on the Christmas list I reckon Thank you so much for your scholarship and dilgence TheCompletePurcell, you are a true Youtube saint and a staunch ally of the classical music and opera world.
Don't take it too hard VK, the white shirt clan *might* still make it to Paris for you...! (c) Unknown
o’ mice opera dykes an’ men gang aft agley.
Well as Robert Burns would have said had he been a Kasarova fan opera lover intent on getting to Idomeneo in Paris in January and not a Scots rabble rousing poet philosopher womaniser, things appear to have gone pear-shaped gang aft agley. Tickets, according to the Paris Opera website, seem to be sold out. Now much as I adore and worship Kasarova, I find that just a wee bit hard to believe. It may just be (very) wishful thinking but TS has a theory that there will be returns because Netrebko and Villazon have both cancelled. And that we will get tickets. And you know more unlikely things have happened; like falling in love with a gorgeous Munich woman on the steps of Zurich Opera House after seeing Agripinna
So, ever the optimists, we are pushing ahead with the clan gathering in Paris regardless, I mean after all, what’s the worst that can happen; a weekend in Paris without Kasarova? Much as I adore her, I think we might just find one or two other things to entertain ourselves with.
And needless to say if we do hear of a magic source of Idomeneo tickets opening up you’ll be the first to know.
The latest post from Anik over at Eyebags got me on a Troyanos hunt again (and congratulations Anik on hitting the big 250K!). And that got me thinking about the lost voices that haunt us all…
One of the lovely things about being part of the ‘opera audience’ community is the passing of lore across the generations. Stories of great singers from the past, of memorable productions and famous incidents, abound. And now with Youtube we have a wonderful opportunity to celebrate some of the more recently departed from the legions of ‘those we worship’. So I’m thinking of instigating a new post series – We Are Not Worthy – to add my own little hommage to those great voices I wish I had seen on stage.
And who better to open with than mezzo Tatiana Troyanos? Someone who certainly did fulfil Barbara Bonney’s description of a frisson inducing ‘tall striking mezzo’ (thanks reader PL Thomas for bringing that lovely quote to my attention!). 1993 was a horrible year for opera as three of its greatest voices died of cancer: Lucia Popp, Arleen Auger, and Troyanos. All in their 50s. Troyanos was a hugely popular singer, nowehere more so than at her hometown stage – the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Every time I am there I think of her wandering round that building, striding across that stage.
A huge house like that needs a big presence and she was one in every way – voice, musicality, dramatic and physical presence. There is something about certain singers that I think really appeals to the opera dyke. It doesn’t have any relationship with the actual sexuality of the singers in question; some are out, some are straight, some don’t make their private status public. Neither does fach seem to matter; contralto, lyric mezzo, dramatic soprano, all appear in the list. But they do seem to have one common factor – a particular kind of indefinable presence. Troyanos, Berganza and Fassbaender had it. Kasarova, Stutzmann, Pieczonka, Röschmann, Prina (newly) Mijanovic, Antonacci, Michael and Connolly have it. Garanca doesn’t… yet, we have our hopes! I can’t actually define it, but in the words of the art illiterate, I know it when I see it.
Height seems to be a bit of a factor, though that said Garanca is tall, Kasarova isn’t hugely, and Röschmann isn’t at all. A slight air of seriousness, or perhaps even a certain noble sadness, also seems to unite these women. And certainly there is a hint of humanity, of a life lived and learnt from, of experience, and (probably most importantly) passion in their voices. Certainly all exhibit a tendency to take risks, musical and dramatic, in their performances.
I heard Troyanos plenty but never saw her, and it feels like a great lost opportunity. She seems to embody the idea of a powerful performer suffused with passion and sadness. But thanks to Youtube some of the incredible power of a Troyanos performance can be hinted at. Of course the video quality is awful, you can barely see her and the sound is horrible. But I defy you not to want to punch the air and leap to your feet at the end of this:
[Thank you SO much Onegin65 for posting that.] Kind of makes you excited to see Kasarova (another Mezzo with a real flair for drama) when she finally decides the time is right to tackle Eboli.
Just when you think things are drying up it starts building again. We’ve had a rash of Aggripina’s, (and I have to say the Zurich Agrippina in particular this past year will be unforgettable for me least for all sorts of reasons musical and otherwise!). We’ve got Alcina to look forward to in Vienna next year – Kasarova as Ruggerio, and dare we hope for Prina as Bradamante? Oh please say yes! I still have the new Haim La Resurezzione on endless loop on the iPod, and with every listening my love of Sonia Prina’s voice grows and grows (as TS noted her voice really is entering a whole new dimension these days).
And now news that Deborah Warner is directing the Messiah for the ENO in November and December. Main draw for me is Catherine Wyn Rogers. She’s a Mezzo turned Alto, hints of which move you can hear in this extract from Handel’s Samson. Thanks to Youtuber extrordinnaire Armycasa for that tantalising extract!
“Real” life is tragically interfering with music life, and I am struggling to figure out how to get to London for this exciting sounding Messiah*. But just because I have inexplicably (perhaps even inexcusably) failed to make Handel the centre of my life doesn’t mean you have to. Get there by hook or by crook if you want to enter this “festive season” bolstered against the our annual orgiastic materialist celebration of excess with a little actual spiritual enhancement courtesy of old reliable GFH and trusty friend of early music lovers the ENO.
And if you do make it, please be sure let me know how it was.
* This earning a living / feeding the kids business is really too tiresome… perhaps I should kill two birds with one stone and send the kids out to work? Whaddya mean 9 and 7 are too young! They’d be very handy cleaning chimneys wouldn’t they…
I’ve had La Resurezzione playing pretty much non-stop since I got it four days ago. And it’s kind of sunk in somehow – a bringing back to life, celebrating the triumph of light over darkness.
It’s been getting dark here in Scotland. I don’t particularly like the winter, it pulls my mood down, it weakens my spirit. But listening to this beautiful recording by Emmanuel Haim and her gang has brought spring back into my life.
So thank you Handel once again for reminding me to resist the darkness, to carpe diem, to embrace what makes life great and wonderful and not give in to the tendency we all carry to grumble and complain. You remind me that we need the winter to appreciate the coming of spring, and that everything renews somehow or other, sooner or later. The sun – ’scure the pun – will rise again:
Well you wait years for a Sonia Prina in a white shirt to come along and then two come at once! This one from another friend of Purity – Violet in Somerset. Dear readers you shouldn’t, really… though if you do happen across an Adrianne Pieczonka then actually you should, you really should!
You know you could put someone's eye out with that thing. (c) Unknown
All smutty thoughts about steely lengths should be put aside now please. I’ll have you know this is a respectable site…
PS Is it just me or is there a touch of Joan Jett about that shot?
Joan and Sonia.... Separated at Birth? (c) Unknown
What do you mean “who’s Joan Jett?”!
Joan Jett Truly, Truly, Rocks (c) Unknown
She’s the Goddess of the Guitar.
Oh, and did I mention she’s 51. Yeah. 51. In. That. Video. Mind you don’t hit your head as you faint there.
Well it’s been a bit of a Sonia Prina fest chez McCall this weekend, what with her lovely new website and her fantastic performance in the new Haim recording of Handel’s La Resurezzione. And then our friend in Paris, the lovely Styx, kindly supplies the long sought after “Sonia Prina in a white shirt”, once again proving that there is little a gang of opera dykes can’t achieve if they put their collective mind to it. The IMF might want to bear that in mind as they ponder the global credit crunch:
fiscal stimulus number 1: all citizens to be provided with tax relief on white shirts
fiscal stimulus number 2: all opera singers beloved of the opera dyke fraternity to be provided with a grant towards the construction *and* maintenance of a decent website
fiscal stimulus number 3: Bayerische Staatsoper to be required to mount a ‘Kasarova season’ consisting of Agrippina, Alcina, La Clemenza di Tito, and Orpheé et Eurydice. All bona fide opera dykes to be given a special 10 euro seat price for the orchestra and first balcony. To prevent fraud there will be a test. Sample questions: In which production did Kasarova wipe a tear from her face? and How many times does Kasarova roll her sleeves up before getting down with Röschmann in La Clemenza di Tito? In cases of doubt applicants will be required to watch the Salzburg Parto Parto. Anyone failing to cry will be disqualified.
fiscal stimulus number 4: flight tax to be removed for all low cost airlines flying into cities with active opera houses.
But wait, I’m wandering off point here. So without further ado, and after a very long search, we finally have the Prina in a White Shirt. Now just got to get one of Adrianne Pieczonka and I can rest easy!
The Much Sought After Sonia Prina White Shirt Shot (c) Unknown
We are thinking there could be a new category – White Shirt with Hair Tousling…
So not only does he design great websites for opera singers who are in touch with 21st century marketing, but he’s the kid of cool web designer who responds immediately when someone lets him know of a little bug with one of his sites. Now that’s what I call service. I really hope that more singers out there take notice of this guy – he designs great sites, he seems to have a real understanding of what the opera audience wants and needs from a singer’s website (the Google Map links to venues on the upcoming events page is just one sweet example of a designer with a good feel for his users), and he’s responsive. Worth every penny he gets paid and then some. Opera singers are a funny bunch and their fans are even funnier – they need a very particular kind of site and Marco De Liso knows just what to give them.
I know most of these singers have to pay for their own sites (why on earth they don’t get that written in to their management contracts I don’t know but hey that’s between them and their managers!) and a lot of them even have to do their own site updates (which no doubt explains the sad phenomenon of the good site that doesn’t get updated). So it’s even more important that guys like Marco should be nurtured and given more chances to do this kind of work. It’s definitely a niche web design and marketing area that benefits from people who have a special interest and / or feel for it… like Marco! Be nice if he could figure out a good spin-off business doing affordable content management and updating for the singers too – like I said the pretty but out-of-date site is almost as bad as the no or really bad site.
I’ve been enjoying the wonderful new recording of Handel’s rocking, life-enhancing, Italian sun infused, foot-tapping oratorio (though really it’s an opera in all but name, having been written when opera was still banned) La Resurezzione. This new recording is from Emmanuelle Haim and features a fantastic gaggle of singers (Kate Royal, Camilla Tilling, and our blog subject today – Sonia Prina).
If I could only pick one Handel piece to listen too for the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure it’d be this – if only because in listening to it you get hints and even complete chunks of some of his later and now more famous operas (Agrippina especially!). This is a recording that pays full dues to the youthful drive and energy Handel poured in to his works at this period – a young man and full of the joys of life in Rome, this just drips with grand passion of both the spiritual and the sensual variety.
La Resurezzione led me to finally put together a post about the incredible contralto Sonia Prina. If the 90s saw the emergence of the superstar mezzos (Kasarova, Bartoli, et al), the noughties are I suspect the era when the contraltos emerge from the wings; Stutzmann, Mijanovic and Prina in particular have really drawn attention to that incredible range. Prina’s voice is dripping with depth and emotion, her Mary Cloephas is deeply, deeply touching and left me shuddering. The other thing Prina brings is incredible technical virtouisity. So if you haven’t heard of her before, this is probably a good starting point:
Sonia Prina you are unbelievable! What a display of skill. And I love that cute little smile she has to herself at the end, as if she is thinking “Yeah, Vivaldi I *own* you!”. And she does. That’s a tough piece anyway, and the conductor certainly increased the challenge with a pace that makes Minkowski sound like Harnoncourt. Thanks (again) to ssiroe for the upload and those crazy Polish folks for loving baroque so much they keep the TV airwaves filled with it!
And the prompt to post on her also led me to her new revamped website. It’s a *great* example of how a singer should promote themselves – great design, lots of lovely sound, Youtube and image goodies. And finally – YAY – a white shirt shot Though sadly embedded in the dreaded flash viewer so I’ll have to leave you to go poke around the site and find it yourself Be warned, the site is a little buggy under MAC OS X Snow Leopard, Firefox fares better than Safari. I’ve mailed the site designer and hopefully they can resolve the odd redirect server problems that currently beset it. But those are minor niggles – the good news is this is a site for the punters who want to know what, when, where. And like to check things out on Youtube. Thank you for giving us a site that exploits the web for us opera lovers fully.
I don’t need ANY excuse to post images of the queen of the trouser role mezzo sopranos, Vesselina Kasarova. But the fact the she finally has a new website, and that it informs us that there will be a new La Clemenza di Tito in Toulouse in 2012, does seem to be the perfect excuse were one needed.
Now as I have never been able to find ‘the perfect Sesto’ and ‘the perfect Orphee’ images I thought I’d grasp the nettle and do some screen grabs for a change. Hold on to your white shirts ladies (and VirtualRich – though you really have to stop hanging about here people will talk), it’s TGIVK-Friday.
These images are from the DVD of Gluck’s Orpheé et Eurydice. Click on the image and you can watch the relevant aria on Youtube (ain’t technology, and kind Youtubers, great!). And if you want to know more before committing to buy (though after these two I can’t see why you would need to think twice) then there’s a great review here.
Amour viens rendre à mon ame. Thanks pockhair
J'ai perdu mon Eurydice. Thanks Arashi110!
Of course it ain’t TGIVK Friday till Sesto sings… but let’s save that for next week Well, perhaps just one little image* to keep us going, come back next week for the video and more of the same…
I know Dorothea, I feel the same when I get my hands on a beautiful woman in a white shirt! It's like Christmas Day all over again... Only question is - do you unwrap your present before or after breakfast? Answer: both.
* And for the cognoscenti reader… I hope you appreciate how much time it took to get just exactly *that smile* in a single frame
Darling best GBF brings news of a wonderful new development at Auntie (the BBC)… Now he who has been dragged over the many (many) years we have known each other to many a lesbian bar, event and subtext-y opera has proven himself to be a true friend of the female of the species. Indeed he sat manfully (!) through a rather turgid National Theatre production of a suffragette themed play last year just so I could indulge my love of under-bustle sapphic action (Upstairs Downstairs had a whole different agenda in my mind!). And now he brings us news of further sources of interest for those of us proud to call ourselves feminists – a whole archive of incredible historical nuggets re. the suffragettes.
This archive seems to me to epitomise everything that is wonderful and noble about Auntie. It’s something that is vital to our cultural heritage, that the digital era affords, and for which there is no profitable business model. That is to say, this is exactly the sort of thing the Beeb was set up to do, and is the reason why I still happily pay my licence fee. In all the ‘market driven’ arguing about whether the Beeb is unfair competition we forget (at our peril) one very simple thing – the BBC does (incredibly well) what no market driven institution can do; it protects and promotes our cultural heritage.
Ethel Smyth (right) famously developed a late onset crush on Virginia Woolf. Image (c) equally wonderful New York Public Library Digital Library.
The site is full of original recordings, later interviews with suffragettes famous and not-so, and lots of fantastic background history and commentary. Everything you need to know and then some!
Perhaps most charming of all the extracts is Vera Brittain (in a voice only a certain class of lady speaking on the BBC in the 50s could possibly have mustered) introducing us to the story of how the beautifully eccentric composer, Sapphist (so much nicer than ‘dyke’) and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth ended up doing 2 months in Holloway Prison. My favourite moment is when Dame Ethel herself says; “(..) relays of women produced hammers from their muffs and handbags.” Personally speaking I never go anywhere without a hammer. Or a muff.
But what looks best of all is… confirmation of the November 2010 Alcina. But the good news doesn’t end there! A new Tito. In Toulouse. In 2012. Now surely gals that HAS to be a gathering of the white shirt clan? Book those flights now Tender Smile, we finally get to see her Sesto together
Sorry. Lost power of coherent thought. More on the website later.
... real life is the bastard love child of tragedy and comedy (conceived in a drunken stupor in a bus shelter at 2am, possibly with a member of your own family).
All images are copyright me unless otherwise indicated. But if you want mine... you can have 'em.
And feel free to leave a comment folks... it's always nice to make a connection. Goodness knows there aren't so many opera lovers out there we can afford to ignore each other!
) A burst of a little something also slightly reflective but less intense did the trick.
) this morning with a hankering for Purcell and a vague memory of a long lost Purcell album (yes we are talking ancient history here – an actual LP record!) featuring Barbara Bonney. The good goddess Google (trying saying that after a couple of malts 
) supplied a Youtube link to Purcell’s Ah! how pleasant ’tis to love!, courtesy of our sweet and kind Youtuber. I was astonished by a video that features not only the score, but two versions (one with Bonney, one for lute):
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