Ricardo Muti. When he leads the CSO, it always seems as if the Musicians have tuned it up an extra notch, and aren't on Autopilot. He also can be quite funny in his comments from the stage

 

I LOVE HIM. Most of his recordings that I have are so exciting.

 

In other threads I've made my dislike for tenor Roberto Alagna pretty well known; usually, he's a tenor who does absolutely nothing for me, especially when it comes to Italian opera. That said, his voice has always been very well-suited to French music, and if I had to listen to him it would be in that repertoire.

 

This counts for me too, the best thing he did was Traviata conducted by Muti.

 

Let's see. What can I say nice about Kurt Baum?
Ah yes. That man sure does have a powerful voice.

My guilty dislike confession (hold the rotten tomatoes):
Licia Albanese sounds to me like a little ol' grandma but man oh man can she bring you to tears simply by her acting ability alone. The lady telegraphs soul and sensitivity to her roles like nobody's business. (Case in point: Her Madama Butterfly)

 

It's funny how we all perceive things so differently, because to my ears it's just the opposite with regard to Albanese: good voice, but vocal acting bordering on the melodramatic that doesn't really move me.

Here are a couple more:

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf -- I don't care for her interpretive style, but her timbre is one of the purest soprano timbres I've ever heard.

Leonard Warren -- Of all the famous American Verdi baritones (and this includes current ones like Quinn Kelsey), Warren is the only one I've never been able to "warm to" emotionally. But he was by any standards a great baritone, with an extraordinary voice.

 

I try not to post comments about singers that I don't like in the threads devoted to them. One of my least favourite sopranos is Renee Fleming. She would be my prime example of 'a beautiful voice is not enough'. However, her recording of Rusalka on CD is wonderful, vocally, musically and dramatically.

N.

 

I'll compliment Patrice Chereau on his ability to direct singers and get fine acting performances out of them, which made his Bayreuth Ring interesting to watch despite such idiocies as Rhinemaiden hookers living on the Grand Coulee Dam and Brunnhilde's immolation looking like a kitchen fire in a New York tenement. Despite his good work with actors, he deserves to experience a much bigger fire somewhere. :devil:

Oops!. I was only supposed to say something nice!

 

If you can't say anything nice about anybody .... come and sit by me.
(copyright Eleanor Roosevelt)

 

Renee Fleming is the most exasperating singer with one of the most stunning sounds -- a voice like velvet, (probably the most beautiful soprano voice out there), but for some idiotic reason she enjoys over emoting as in her Traviata line, "e ta-a-a-ardi", and swooping and scooping like her former jazz singing days.

 

Sometimes it's hard to be sure whether you dislike an artist but like certain things about her, or like her but dislike certain things.

The swooping and the scooping, the oohing and the cooing, each tiny vibratoless croon and sigh precisely placed and impeccably controlled... Rene Fleming is a woman who knows exactly what she wants to do, wants to do as much to a musical line as she can think of doing whether or not the musical line calls for it or can bear it, and does it perfectly. I love her voice and her intelligence, but she can drive me bonkers. I just want to say, "Renee, you're fabulous! Now stop harassing the music and just sing it!"

Needless to say, Fleming has done some fantastic things. Skip her attempts at bel canto and try her in Strauss or Rachmaninoff. I love her "Night Songs" with Jean-Yves Thibaudet. I'm also fond of her American opera album, "I Want Magic!"

 

Why one earth starts such a horrible thread, this will end up in a blood bath

 

It doesn't have to, though, provided posters put more emphasis on the positives than on the negatives.

 

I agree with you (about Renee Fleming). I don't have a passionate dislike for her but I prefer a cleaner, more precise tone. I find her sound a bit "woolly". Although I don't know if that is the right word to use to describe her. Gundula Janowitz (who sang a lot of the same repertoire as Fleming) is the type of sound I prefer in Mozart and Strauss. Or Lucia Popp. And I also agree with you that I've never heard any great interpretative insight from Fleming (I presume that's what you mean by 'a beautiful voice is not enough'). She's very musical and her singing is always very polished but she's never really done it for me.

 

You must be tone deaf

 

To return to the thread...

My antipathy towards Zubin Mehta is well known and based on much experience, however tonight I have been watching the 1977 Royal Opera House New Year's Eve performance of Die Fledermaus conducted by Mehta and I have to say that many of the characteristics that I find annoying in much of his conducting, are just about perfect to drive along this frothy celebration.

 

What kills me about Renee is that her voice is so exquisitely gorgeous she didn't HAVE to do those things.
What bothers me is that she CHOSE to do them. She's not blind, nor deaf. She's read and heard these comments ad nauseam before and just didn't care.
I'll give her this: She's a smart cookie. She knew when to close the curtain and, unlike Pav and some others, end up on top.
She deserves accolades. She brought one of life's most stunning voices to the world of opera. Whether some of us found her actions exasperating, or not, we're all lucky she came around in our lifetime.

 

I want to say - because this is a nice thread and I'm (basically) a nice guy and this is New Year's Day and I'm hoping this year will be nicer than last year - that the first time I heard Renee Fleming was as Desdemona with Domingo at the Met. She was young then and her singing was less mannered. She was perfectly lovely. I wasn't much aware of the progress of her early career, and the next thing I recall hearing was a concert performance of the "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka. I was just bowled over by its beauty and poignancy. Since then Renee has often given me pleasure; I even like some of her forays into popular music and jazz, and love her virtuoso rendition of Joni Mitchell's "River." See what you think:

 

This thread seems to have become a discussion of the relative merits of Renee Fleming, and I don't really wish to de-rail it, other than to say I have first-hand knowledge of the lady, having worked with her in the London Symphony Orchestra's semi-staged version of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Barbican. I had the tiny role of the doctor who takes Blanche to the lunatic asylum at the end, and played one of Stanley's cronies, as well as one of the ghostly figures of the soldiers Blanche imagines, with Fleming at one point draping herself over my naked torso.

On a personal level, I found her absolutely charming, and not in the least prima donna-ish, a complete professional and serious about her work. At one point we had a discussion about how much more she had enjoyed doing the role of Blanche this time round, having been able to dig deeper into the character. Actors often say the same thing about re-visiting a role they've played before, so she is evidently a thinking artist. Hearing that voice close to was something else as well. It was actually much larger than I'd imagined and arrestingly beautiful from top to bottom.

That said, like Woodduck, I have certain reservations about her work in certain fields, and I too am irritated by the jazzy swoops and slides, which increasingly crept into her performances in later years. I don't like her in Italian opera at all, and, though her Violetta was technically well-sung when I saw her do it at Covent Garden, I didn't feel she was really inside the role, the gestures, both musical and physical, seeming more applied than felt from within. On the other hand I absolutely love her recordings of both Rusalka and Thais, both gloriously sung, and I enjoy many of her recital discs, the American I Want Magic album, Strauss Heroines and Great Operatic Scenes in particular. In none of these is she either un-musical or interpretively bland.

I'd certainly place her as one of the greatest sopranos of recent times.

 

GregMitchell: I've watched Fleming's Violetta on Youtube, in the Los Angeles Opera production with Rolando Villazon as Alfredo. I suppose I'd agree with you that during Acts I and II she didn't seem totally "inside" the role; however, Act III was a different story, IMO. In that act I believe everything -- voice, acting (vocal and physical), costuming and makeup -- came together to produce a truly moving death scene.

 

I'm prepared to believe you. After all, artists are human. There are times when everything comes together and times when it doesn't. There is so much intangible that goes into the creation of a great performance.

When I saw her in the role in London, I was strangely unmoved, nowhere near as touching as Cotrubas, who was vocally much more fallible, Gheorghiu or Josephine Barstow, who was devastating in the role with English National Opera back in the 1970s.

 

Composers:

I appreciate Berlioz' contributions to both orchestration and the Romantic cultural movement
Holst's Planets can be fun

Performers:

Lang Lang does give off a Lisztian flair that would be fun to see live

 

My mom, a classical musician, once remarked while listening to one of his pieces on the radio, "Berlioz has got to be the dullest composer on the planet." I don't know enough about his music to know whether I agree or not.

 

For Anna Netrebko, the only nice things I can say about her: after she butchered Mozart (Don Giovanni), bel canto (Puritani, Anna Bolena, Lucia Di Lammermoor), Verdi (La Traviata, Macbeth, Il Trovatore), Massenet (Manon), Puccini(La Boheme) and Strauss ( Four Last Songs), there are still musics I enjoy that she has not touched just yet.

...And at least she seems a little bit humble.

 

How lucky we are to have a soprano of that caliber in our lifetime.
I think I'll zip my lip on my reply. As Thumper once said, "If ya can't say nuthin' nice, don't say nuthin' at all!")

 

The baritone Leo Nucci is one of the very few opera singers I literally cannot bear to listen to. That said, based on what I've seen he was a truly great Rigoletto from the acting perspective.

 

I envy anyone having only a few opera singers they find unbearable! I suppose I felt that way once. After listening to opera for fifty-some years I now find listening to a majority of present-day singers, perhaps not unbearable, but far from a satisfying way to spend my time. At the end of the average Met broadcast I feel pleased mainly at having satisfied my curiosity and made a gesture toward being up-to-date, and only occasionally at having been given an encouraging demonstration of vocal and artistic prowess, or evidence of the health of the art of singing. So far this season I've come away feeling, "Is this the best the Met can do? Wasn't the Met once home to the greatest voices in the world - or are these now in fact the greatest voices in the world?" I don't in fact believe that to be the case; I suspect that the Met no longer has quite the pre-eminent position it once had among the opera houses of the world, and that there are many fine artists we've hardly even heard of happy to be concentrating their efforts elsewhere. That isn't such a bad thing; at least it's pleasant to think that operatic singing might be in better shape than I'm aware. Still, it's the Met, at least in America, that has for generations reliably brought opera to vast numbers of people unable to get to live performances, and the name "Metropolitan Opera" has traditionally been a symbol of culture, as well as many people's introduction to opera and great singing. So far, this season, I've heard some opera classics presented to us by singers who've come nowhere close to some who've sung this music in the past, and on the Met's own boards.

But I guess if I'm supposed to say something nice here it would be that they brought us a lovely young Gilda in Nadine Sierra to relieve what was otherwise a Rigoletto at a level of provincial routine.

 

Well Silentio, that isn't the sort of post I was soliciting for this thread, but I do have to give you points for bitchy creativity. :lol:

 

Solti's recordings sure sound great, even though they tend to be episodic, unlyrical, bombastic and overly brassy. He also had an uncanny ability to assemble terrific casts for his recordings, which recordings are unfortunately often let down by his performances in the pit.

 

I would like to share a few words about our Lord and Savior Ludwig van Beethoven.

He was a noble-hearted, misunderstood, reclusive man who found music was his true love, and I respect him for that. He influenced innumerable amounts of people, from composers to concertgoers. He was loved and respected by all my favorite composers. And, for many reasonable reasons. First, his technical skill was of the highest order, and he wrote memorable motifs, themes, and other kinds of thematic contents. He was a great orchestrator of his time, innovative in his instrumentations, and progressive in his use of interaction between different voices. He pushed thematic and harmonic development to its limit through lots of hard work and self-analysis. Really, he's a swell guy. If only I liked him, I'd call him my hero, since he had all the characteristics of a worthy man and artist. Not as a demigod, just as a brilliant human being.

It really is such a shame he interests me for everything but his music.

 

It really is such a shame he interests me for everything but his music.

I forwarded your posting to Ludwig. Then I remembered, too late, that he can get really, really mad. Maybe you'd better arrange to not be at home for a couple of days. I apologize, I really do!

 

A few years ago I watched a YouTube video to see what the Netrebko fuss was all about. The video was from recording the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman. My strongest memory of it was "who is the mezzo, she is good!" It was Elina Garanca. Since then I have seen the 2007 Opera Gala from Baden Baden also with Garanca and some so-so soprano who thought that she could sing Norma!

 

Barbara Frittoli: Though I personally find her a faceless interpreter with a charmless stage presence and a too-wide vibrato, I have always liked the actual color of her voice.

 

I discovered, when I first started listening to opera that, if it was an aria that was new to me, then no matter how many times I played it, it would always remain tuneless if Pavarotti was singing it. Once I knew it well (thank you José Carreras), the problem vanished to a large extent, but it didn't endear me to Pavarotti. Two or three years on, I heard him at the ROH in "L'elisir d'amore" and could recognise and acknowledge the sheer beauty of the sound he produced.

 

I saw him in The Met, doing Mario Cavaradossi, 1996 I believe, he could hardly walk any more. but his voice was incredible good.
Love his recordings also, but then again, each his / her own taste.

 

Bellini lover , possibly you would have like Leonard Warren more if you could have seen him perform live . But he died in 1960 , and not too many of the people who saw him on stage are still left .
Sometimes, you need to see an opera singer perform live on stage to get the full impact of that performer's artistry .

 

I am glad we have some wonderful recordings from the man.