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

[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.