I said I was not much interested in the CD business, but I do follow the new releases when I can. Before summer 2011 I recommended you a few superb recording, and I still believe all three of them are magnificent -- each in its own way.
Some CD's are great for the way the program presented on them is interpreted and those are that I like the most. Christine Schäfer,René Pape and Anna Larsson (among others) are the true geniuses of interpretation. They manage to turn their 'imperfections' to their advantage that add to their already extraordinarily humanized way of singing the known songs or arias.
But then you have those who have an uncommon sense of musicality, who dare to sing the known stuff in their own, recognizable, way -- that actually gives a whole new flavor to the songs and arias they sing. Malena Ernman and especially Peter Mattei are good examples of that kind of singing. They both recently released new CD, and both contain several very interestingly performed tunes. Krassimira Stoyanova, instead, is a quite different case: a singer who managed to avoid the stardom, and almost stealthily impose herself as one of the best living singers.
I already blogged about the empirical evidence that a successful (good, witty, well assembled...) production of a French opera in Paris is extremely rare. I even believe to have understood why it is so, but discussing it now would take me far from my summerish light mood... On the other hand, if you see any English opera title in Paris don't miss the chance to see it: English operas in Paris are regularly meticulously produced, with a grain of audacity, and with superbly composed production teams...
And there you discover again that incredible talent of Malena Ernman's (another Swedish miracle) that we've admired many many times so far (see in particular her sensational Julie [see also this]) Visit her [very] personal website.
She must be the most talented, wittiest, funniest... hardworking singer today. A great artist!
Why do I talk about this? Because I met today someone whom I offered that DVD of Dido & Aeneas almost a year ago --someone who's not at all into opera-- and who today thanked me for the most memorable moment of refined musical beauty (just when I thought my present must have finished on a shelf collecting the dust...)
The following video-clip is... well... just a video-clip. You need to converge to Dido's lament and feel all your foundations shaken up.
Malena Ernman, singing When I am laid in earth (preceded by Thy hand, Belinda)
Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.
When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate
Many singers recorded this aria but I believe, besides Malena Ernman, the recordings of Janet Baker, Lorraine Hunt, and Véronique Gens (yes, yes!) are somewhat above the rest...
This is also a Wilkommen post to a fellow blogger, Likely Impossibilities, who recently moved to Vienna and who will keep us posted about what's on in Operatic Austria -- at least during 2010-2011.
Malena will sing in a new production of Semele (dir Robert Carsen) at Theater an der Wien which opens on Sept 15th (but I suspect the tickets are impossible to get)
So what about Julie? I saw this DVD a year ago or so. Since we have another production of this opera in Paris starting on January 8, I decided to see it again, to brush up on it.
3 general informations about this opera would be: (1) it is short - only 74 minutes long; (2) it is a chamber opera somehow following a Britten-like line of creation - I bet he would've loved it; (3) it is close to the Wagnerian vein too, as it combines an extraordinary libretto with the music that weaves through the text only to accelerate your dive into the psyche of each of three characters. This should be as close as you can get to the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, and I'm pretty sure Wagner would have loved it too.
