La meme chose

This meme is the latest one doing the rounds and though I've not been tagged I thought I'd just be presumptuous and do it anyway. It's rather a broad one but I've avoided all the deep and meaningful possibilities and kept it nice 'n' musical.

• I am counting down sleeps until Fedora. (Twenty-seven!)
• I am not happy about the deterioration of Parterre's comment boards into a forum for vitriole, vicious personal attacks and verbal diarrhoea.
• I want far more CDs than I can possibly afford, starting with recent releases by three French sopranos with an infuriating ability to record precisely what I want to hear them sing. (Natalie in Handel, Véronique in French baroque, Sandrine in Vivaldi.)
• I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate what was going on when I saw Marilyn Horne in recital. Marilyn Horne!
• I hate seeing classical singers' voices described (and dismissed) as "artificial".
• I love Yvonne Kenny's voice more than I could ever have foreseen.
• I miss Trrill the way it used to be.
• I fear Natalie Choquette. Please make her stop.
• I hear Patricia Wright singing "Lua descolorida", one of Osvaldo Golijov's Three Songs for soprano and orchestra. Both singer and song are head-spinningly beautiful and I am beyond priviliged to own this on CD. And to have heard her perform it live. *Swoon*.
• I wonder why on earth the DVD of Cecilia's "Live In Italy" recital, released seven years ago, was only this week reviewed in the NZ Listener. Or why somebody felt the need to title the whole section (which also includes reviews of Ayre and a new release by The New Zealand Trio) "Carmen electric".
• I regret not having seen anything at the Met during the three days I spent in New York.
• I dance along to the finale of this production of Rameau's Les indes galantes.
• I sing worse than abysmally.
• I cry listening to Yvonne sing Edwige in Offenbach's Robinson Crusoe, and since the whole thing is adorably silly I'm not entirely sure why. So as you might imagine...
• I am not always emotionally equipped to listen to her stunning and gut-wrenching recording of Gorecki's Third Symphony.
• I make with my hands sounds barely recognisable as music when I play the piano.
• I write this blog because if I couldn't somehow express my love for all this incredible music I'd surely go mad — and a blog seems a (marginally) more sane outlet than approaching strangers in the street to explain the wonders of Natalie Dessay's "Vive amour qui rêve".
• I confuse Marilyn Richardson with Marilyn Hill Smith.
• I need a halfway decent stereo system to do justice to all the beautiful recordings I own.
• I should address the gender imbalance in my CD collection. (But won't.)
• I start to go round the bend if I spend too long at Parsons in Wellington. The combination of their extensive selection of operatic CDs and DVDs with their slightly nasty prices and lack of air conditioning is not exactly conducive to sensible and considered shopping. So I tend to leave dazed, thirsty and desperately poor.
• I finish, or try to finish, 99% of the posts I write in one sitting — saving drafts gives me too much time to consider (and re-consider) what I've written and I tend to delete them before they see the light of day.
• I tag anyone who feels the urge.