Things that are not L- T- that I have been watching/listening to lately

[cahn]

Tosca! (Puccini)
I watched this one with Raina Kabaivanska, Placido Domingo, and Sherrill Milnes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnO7FBS1akI&t=2369s
My thoughts while watching this opera:
1. Alan Menken totally must know this opera and was thinking about it while writing "Hellfire" for Hunchback of Notre Dame because "Va' Tosca" is basically the same song. (Only better.)
2. I have to take back the complaints I had after watching Turandot about Puccini being misogynistically into torturing women. Now I think he just likes torturing people. Well okay then.
3. ...so it is becoming more and more clear that I am willing to fall in love with anything that has a sufficiently important part for the baritone and also is clothing the baritone in suits or period equivalent, and ideally with a clean-shaven baritone. Right. So, er, that's a thing. I blame my LDS upbringing :) (not for the baritone part, but for the clean-shaven suit thing)
4. Boy, Scarpia may be the only death I've seen in opera where he actually, y'know, just dies, without a lengthy aria or even (like Tosca herself) a beautifully declaimed line. ("Scarpia! Before God!") I like it!

But anyway... all three of the leads are just super amazing. I had never seen Domingo in a visual production, and now I see what the big deal is. Kabaivanska is also excellent, and has superb chemistry with both of the other leads. Milnes has now catapulted to the status of "yep, gotta check out anything I can find that he is in"; wow, his musicality and voice acting is really, really excellent. (I might even prefer it to Hampson's, though I like Hampson's voice better.)

Puccini, on the other hand... I mean... Tosca was delightful, I liked it much more than Turandot in a lot of ways and definitely more than La Boheme, it was full of death!catharsis, and I absolutely adored this production, but I think I don't really feel the need to watch any more Puccini, particularly (as opposed to Verdi, where I suddenly need to watch All The Verdi). (How much death!catharsis, after all, does one really need in one's life?) Though I may check out La Fanciulla del West at some point.

Rigoletto (Verdi):
shewhostaples (directly) and seekingferret (indirectly) recommended this to me as a next Verdi. I said I thought it would be a little too intense. We were both right. It is really, really good; it is about the most intense in the way of daddy issues as possible; and boy, is it depressing as all heck. I finally sprang for Met On Demand and watched the version from 2013 with Željko Lučić, Diana Damrau, and Piotr Beczala, set in Las Vegas. (seekingferret, I think this is the one you saw?) The setting was really really well done (it was really interesting how little of the story had to change or be rolled with at all). The whole thing was remarkable, the singers were fabulous (I must say I found Beczala a little less convincing acting-wise as the cheerfully amoral Duke -- he just seemed very amiable -- but his singing was great), the music is stunning, I really enjoyed it, and I don't know whether I ever want to see it again. No, that's not right, I do want to see it again, but I think this is one I admire rather than fall desperately in love with.

(Also, in contrast to Scarpia, Gilda has a reeeeally long death aria for someone who's been fatally stabbed by a professional and dumped into a sack.)

War Requiem (Britten):
Keenlyside, Bostridge, Cvilak, Noseda: This is just devastating to listen to in the year 2018. I mean, highly highly recommended. But devastating. But that aside... Bostridge is lovely as always, Sabina Cvilak is actually really really good, Keenlyside is of course wonderful -- being me, in the baritone solos I kept wishing he wasn't quite so operatic (...I totally Do Opera (and post-Baroque oratorio) Wrong, as a result of having come to it from Baroque-ish oratorio and a Renaissance-heavy choral tradition), but I thought his duets with Bostridge were really lovely in the way they layered their two different types of voices, which is exactly opposite of what I thought I would think about it going in. (Usually I get quite irritated with operatic voices singing together in oratorio, but Bostridge and Keenlyside together complement each other, and I could listen to that all day.) I listened to this on Spotify partially to try to figure out whether to buy this one or Hampson/Bostridge/Netrebko. I've only listened to samples of the latter, but I prefer Hampson's voice by a lot in the more meditative baritone solos; the duets are very different and I don't know which I prefer, actually, as they're both really great; and I have a definite preference of Cvilak to Netrebko (Cvilak has a pure center to her notes, whereas Netrebko has a darker and more, I don't know, velvety tone that maybe other people might prefer but that I don't like as much). I might have to get both.

Elijah (Mendelssohn):
I remembered that way back when (2009, as it turns out), I was frustrated a lot by listening to what I felt were over-operatic voices in this oratorio, and I thought, hey, maybe I should see whether Thomas Hampson has done an Elijah. In fact, not only has he done one (with Robert Shaw conducting), a) he has done so with Barbara Bonney, who was another of my big opera crushes from 2013 when I was mainlining Zauberflotes, and b) apparently in 2009 when I was going through samples of all the Elijahs, I actually selected (and bought) this one as the one I liked the most. (Also, Jerry Hadley is about the best Obadiah I've heard, but he scoops his voice a lot -- I still haven't heard one I'm really happy with.) I guess, go me for being consistent in what I like? :)

My other version of Elijah (Terfel/Fleming -- and this is the thing: in opera that would be a dream cast, and Fleming is probably my biggest opera crush ever, but in Elijah I get super annoyed at both their voices) has John Mark Ainsley, who is usually very dependable in giving the kind of sound I like, but I feel like he's trying too hard to be operatic... I think what I actually want is an Elijah that is cast as and sounds like a Handel oratorio, and no one else in the world wants this, so I'm bound to be disappointed...

Comments

[espresso_addict]

The War Requiem has got to be one of those all-time most devastating works, as well as one of the most effective settings of poetry.

[cahn]

It really is just a completely devastating work in general. I am not sure it is possible to listen to it in a fully absorbed way and not come out passionately anti-war.

Agree about the poetry setting too -- I loved Wilfred Owen before I ever knew War Requiem existed, but. Just amazing.

[seekingferret]

Yay Rigoletto. And yes, that's the production I saw, though I'm not sure it was with those singers. Google says that Rigoletto was probably Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Duke was probably Matthew Polenzani, and Gilda was probably Aleksandra Kurzak. I'd love to see Damrau sing Gilda- she's always a favorite of mine.

I think an amiable Duke can make him come off even more sinister. One of the things that's most fascinating to me about Rigoletto is how Verdi doesn't try to minimize Rigoletto's dark side and manages to get you to root for him to have a little happiness anyway. It requires such a nuanced empathy.

[cahn]

Damrau was really good, and she and Lucic together had a lot of filial feeling there. I'd be interested to know what you thought of Hvorostovsky as Rigoletto, if you even remember at all at this point -- I've watched a bit of him as Germont on Met on Demand and he comes across to me as quite cold a lot of the time (though not always). (His Onegin is my favorite Onegin of all time, but Onegin's supposed to come off as really cold most of the time.)

Ugh, yes, I was totally rooting for things working out for Rigoletto even though he's clearly not a hero at all. (I mean, I knew they wouldn't work out, but I really wanted them to!) Verdi is so brilliant.

[antisoppist]

I am not sure how much of an Elijah geek you are or wish to be, but have you seen The History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio Elijah by F G Edwards (1896), which is on Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38223/38223-h/38223-h.htm

I am mostly fascinated by the working relationship between Mendelssohn and his translator William Bartholemew, who is bewailing many of the same things that beset translators today :-)

[cahn]

I am not an Elijah geek, but holy cow, I am clearly missing out. This is really cool! The translator stuff sounds really interesting. (Though I obviously am not anywhere near your level, translation is something I do find fascinating just from dealing with poetry and vocal music in translation and often tearing my hair out about it)

[iberiandoctor]

Alan Menken totally must know this opera and was thinking about it while writing "Hellfire" for Hunchback of Notre Dame because "Va' Tosca" is basically the same song. (Only better.)

INDEED, LOL forever <3

Now I think he just likes torturing people. Well okay then.

Yes, this, absolutely. I like Turandot, and actually really like La Boheme apart from the particularly female-torturing aspect of things, but I really really enjoyed Tosca, and there is also the Hampson/Kaufmann aspect of things, which is not a trivial matter ;)

Also, I am not LDS, but I definitely feel you on the clean-shaven suit thing ;))) (Speaking of ex-LDS persons and Javerts, we should have a conversation about Will Swenson some time!)

[cahn]

I actually really like Turandot, it's just that I also find the storyline kind of horrifying :) La Boheme I enjoyed (it's the only opera I've seen live twice, because when I was in grad school a friend who really loved it dragged me to get student tickets a couple of times) but it's definitely one of those Girl Dies Of Consumption operas. (It's shocking to me that I like Traviata, but then, it had Germont, and, well, Hampson ;) ) But Tosca is my favorite Puccini so far. Definitely Hampson/Kaufmann is not at all trivial!

I know nothing about Will Swenson. (I don't keep up with current Javerts, clearly...) We should definitely have this conversation :)

[iberiandoctor]

I am fond of La Boheme because of RENT, actually - here I am showing you my low-brow roots ;) And when you make it back over to Puccini you will adore the Hampson/Kaufmann: Tosca Mortal Enemies Edition ;)

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT WILL SWENSON! He played Javert on the Broadway revival of Les Mis, that is, the cast that brought me back to fandom. He was actually not a particularly good Javert (his accent was terrible; in all the Montreuil scenes he tromped around going "MISS-YOU LE MAYY-ORR"), but he was very, extremely, hot, and also pretty, and had insane chemistry with his Valjean, and like the rpf trash I am, I fell headlong like a brick for them and shrieked about it at great length here; the link also links (see Exhibit B) to Vimeo vid showing various takes of That Barricades Scene. And then there was fic and the rest is history, lol.

Despite the meh-ness of his Javert, he is actually mesmerising onstage (this is him in Priscilla, from 2:45 in; this him in Hair; he's now in Jerry Springer, and he was excellent in the crappy role of Earl in Waitress when I watched it on Broadway last year); he is adorably married to Broadway royalty Audra McDonald; and he is as adorably ex-Mormon, from 3:50 (apparently ex-Mormon royalty, if you believe reddit). My favourite Broadway ex-Mormon ;)

[cahn]

Whoa he is married to Audra McDonald?! That's the part that jumped out at me, lol. Also, haha, yes, if he's a scion of the Hales family that's a bit of Mormon royalty. (Mormons are Weird. I mean, I am one, though perhaps a rather heretical one! But I cannot deny that we are Weird.) NotAnyMormon, lol! I watched that whole interview and I thought what he said about Book of Mormon was interesting -- that was very much my reaction as well. I laughed a little when he brought up Jesus Christ Superstar -- it wasn't really on my radar growing up at all (I still haven't watched it, in fact, though I've listened to some songs), but I just read a post on a Mormon blog that was talking about how they were forbidden to watch it when they were growing up (this stricture no longer applies at all, and the reaction to BoM was very different), so it was interesting to see another take on that at the same time. I feel like he's not the strongest singer I've ever heard (...I should probably try to listen to him sometime when I haven't just overdosed on Hampson, though; it is totally not a fair comparison :) ), but he has incredible stage presence and movement -- I can see the appeal :) (Still watching the Javerts from your RPF post! Shall report back!)