Quality really isn't good enough for DVD. In first scene they were blue as E.T.Originally Posted by Almaviva
Anyway, despite bad quality, I want DVD! But there's no hope, because Bayerische Staatsoper said it will be no DVD.
You can check other performance clips:
The first cut is the deepest?... Not for me, at least not in Opera.
Most of the operas I know more than one version of it, my preferred one is not the first I heard. There are exceptions, though, and one of them is I Puritani. This was my first exposure to Bellini's masterpiece:
And to this day, I think this incredible mad scene is one of the top recorded operatic fragments of all time:
On top of being a trailblazer composer, Arnold Schönberg was also a good amateur painter. The above is one of his self-portraits.
However, his greatest artistic contribution was in music, and his opera Moses und Aron, in spite of being incomplete, one of his best efforts.
Arguably, the best rendition ever is from Hermann Scherchen, with Josef Greindl as Moses.
but we can also watch a complete staging in youtube:
Ruggero Leoncavallo's Chatterton was one of the first operas to be recorded in its entirety.
It was in 1908, conducted by Leoncavallo himself, with the logical problems of the early recording period, and with Granados and Signorini singing the protagonist's role.
There is another, much more recent, recording, from Bongiovanni, that's nice, but without a stellar cast:
Leoncavallo also wrote the libretto, adapting a play by Alfred de Vigny about English poet Thomas Chatterton, that killed himself at eighteen years old. It was also the first opera of Leoncavallo, and was premiered in 1896, after the success of Pagliacci, but it never entered into the repertoire.
A couple of examples:
Massenet wrote one version of Werther, with the title role being adapted for baritone, rather than tenor.
This was done for the great Italian baritone Mattia Battistini, that sung then the opera in Warsaw, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rome, ... It was well received by the audiences, but it has been performed rarely since the early 20th century.
Battistini recorded two arias in 1911, singing in Italian:
Listen to him singing in the first 60 second and then suddenly switch to 2:16 where he starts to talk with his speaking voice:
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If I was to choose one single tenor to listen to for the rest of my life, little Giuiseppe Giacomini would be it. What's interesting is that when you mention Giacomini to other singers, they'll go gooey-eyed and wholeheartedly agree that he's a genius - but mention it to a great proportion of opera listeners and the arguments against that very statement can sometimes be enormous. I've heard all the arguments; it sounds unnatural, he uses the 'lowered larynx technique' which gives him too dark a sound (funny, cause when I mention this phrase to singers, most of'em haven't even heard of it...!), he doesn't have an exciting top... What?!
Admittedly, in his 60s and now 70s he's developed a power-wobble - but look at Sir John Tomlinson. He's had a wobble for the best part of ten years and yet it's the elephant in the room nobody talks about (or rather, don't care about).
Giacomini, age 54, giving it all.
One of the highlights in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda is the confrontation scene between Elisabetta and Maria herself.
This recent high wattage scene between Mariella Devia and Anna Caterina Antonacci:
that we can compare with the one between Edita Gruberova and Agnes Baltsa:
or between two great artists like Leyla Gencer and Shirley Verrett:
Curiosity - a male Cherubino:
A few singers that started in vaudeville or Broadway, were later also performing Opera. Of course, the biggest start among them was Rosa Ponselle, but in this post we are going to write about Grace Moore.
Moore was singing in Broadway in the early 1920s, and after undergoing training in France, she sung Mimi in a performance of La Bohčme, in Paris. She was also hired by the MET, and she sung there during sixteen seasons.
On top of that, she was also a Hollywood actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, in the 1934 movie "One Night of Love".
As an opera singer, her most celebrated roles were Tosca and Louise:
Her last role in the MET was precisely Tosca, and she died little after in a plane crash near Copenhagen.
Some people think that best movie usage of Wagner's Ride of Valkyries was in that American war movie where they played it from attacking helicopters... well, just to let them know, here (starting on 2:02) is the real winner surpassing all other scenes with it's dramatic strenght and beauty:
La Magicienne was Fromental Halévy’s sixth and last opera. It was an unabashedly Grand Opéra, with the five acts, and the ballet.
It's was loosely based on the medieval legend of Melusine, but in Halévy's opera the heroine, through a pact with Satan, gains an irresistible seductive power in return for pledging her soul. But in the end, she is repentant, professes to be a Christian and dies.
The premiere was a success, and there were some further 45 performances in 1858 and 1859, but later the opera dissapeared from the repertoire, until it was rescued recently in Montpellier, from where we can hear the aria of the protagonist in the Second Act, "Celui de qui je tiens mon pouvoir infernal":
Melusine's aria
Callas had so many vocal abilities that some still remain unknown. Here (between 6:55 and 7:00) you can hear fascinating and unique way of singing in low register of great dramatic strenght, which she - unfortunately - never used on stage or in studio:
With this technique she could make great duet with Flórez: they would play Pagapeno and Papagena transformed, for this particular adaptation, to Zanzarone and Zanzarona.
Simon Boccanegra was premiered in 1857, and was considered by Verdi as one of the great fiascos of his career.
The composer was, however, really fond of many passages, and he was blaming a big part of the failure on Piave's libretto. When the occasion presented itself to review the score, he started the cooperation with Arrigo Boito, that will be continued in Otello and Falstaff, and they presented at La Scala, in 1881, the revised version of the Boccanegra, that was a success, and with three legendary singers in the cast: Victor Maurel, Francesco Tamagno and Edouard de Reszke.
Most of the changes in the score will come in the First Act, and one of them was to rewrite Amelia's cavatina "Come in quest'ora bruna" with a different orchestration and less high-pitched notes. Also, the corresponding cabaletta was removed.
This is how the 1857 version of the aria looks like:
William Walton's Troilus and Cressida was premiered at Covent Garden, on 1954. It was not a success, but the opera was performed later in San Francisco, New York and even Milan. To no avail.
A couple of revisions made in the 1960s and 1970s were again frostily received. Originally, Walton wrote the part of Cressida for Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, that however did not premiered the role (though she recorded some excerpts), and for the last revision he converted Cressida in mezzo, for Janet Baker to sing, and cut some 30 minutes. A CD was recorded:
However, the intention of Walton was all the time to write a Post-Romantic opera, and he was indeed succesful at that. Of course, for many critics this was the right thing to do in the 1920s, but not in the 1950s or later.
Let's hear the fist intended Cressida, Ms. Schwarzkopf:
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