Prima la musica, poi le parole

L'Elisir Redux

Funny how things come full circle. I still remember the afternoon, almost four years ago, when I listened to a Met broadcast of L'Elisir d'Amore. It was actually sunny enough to sit outside — rare for a Dunedin summer — so I moved the speakers near to an open window and listened from the verandah. Well, until I got sick of the port wind trying to blow my libretto. I blogged about it, too — said all sort of things — and then that was that, and I doubt it even crossed my mind that I might one day be moved to revisit either my blogged opinions or the performance itself. 

But here I am doing just that, and goodness me, how things have changed. In 2006, I had yet to properly connect with the world of the male voice. I was better with them than I had been, but nevertheless, the most fabulous tenor in the world couldn't move me like even a decent soprano could, and baritones? Forget it. In 2009, I acquired (let's not dwell on how) this recording of L'Elisir because — are you ready? — I wanted to hear the Belcore. Never mind that when I heard it back then, I dismissed this Belcore as "a bit stiff for me" and more or less left it there, pausing only to wonder why the name of this baritone from Geelong seemed so familiar. 

I never did figure that out, but perhaps it was a rift in the space-time continuum — because of course, the Belcore was Peter Coleman-Wright, and these days, well, I'm a bit of a fan. Enough of a fan to go trawling for faintly illicit Donizetti, apparently; this is what his Pizarro, Balstrode and Mahler have done to me. Besides which, baritones generally are just far more my cup of tea than they used to be, so that a character who once seemed a bit of a necessary evil (give Gianetta more to sing, she whined) becomes a source of positive pleasure. And so he is. To be fair, Peter's Belcore still sounds more or less as I remembered; but my response is different. "A bit stiff"? Well, yes, perhaps, but appealingly so; and it's also a funny and strongly sung performance. That's probably helped by my now having some sense of his stage presence, but in any case, he's a delight, and I'm so very happy I had the chance to come back and give him another go.

This, however, was only the start of my little voyage of rediscovery. (He is only a baritone after all.) Then and now, it's the beautiful Ruth Ann Swenson who is the heart of this Elisir — and whatever my initial motivation for listening, with her very first note (which precedes Belcore's) she became my primary and happiest focus. Ruth Ann, Ruth Ann, Ruth Ann. It seems impossible I should forget how lovely she is, and yet I must have, just a little, because her Adina still managed to take me by surprise. Back in 2006 I was quite subdued about her. I described her voice as "an old friend". I said — oh dear — "Ruth Ann has never been a knee-weakening passion for me, but all the same I've had a calm and abiding affection for her for years." And, even worse, "I'm never destined to rave about Ruth Ann as I might (and have) about some others..."

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Well, not entirely. Her voice is an old friend to me. But all this "calm and abiding" stuff doesn't do her justice. I adore Ruth Ann. And I am entirely prepared to rave about her as I might (and have) about some others. Ruth Ann Swenson is a drop dead gorgeous soprano. I've loved her since before I loved opera and I don't intend ever to stop. She is sweet, stylish and heavenly to behold. I've now had the privilege to hear her in person, and she enchanted me all over again — so much so that I'll confess now what I might not have before, which is that, despite seeing Natalie's Lucia twice on the same trip, it was Ruth Ann's Ginevra which gave me the greatest pleasure during my time in San Francisco. I think four years ago I was ill-equipped (in terms both of my own faculties and of the stereo equipment at my disposal) to appreciate just how delicate and ideal Ruth Ann's Adina was. An object lesson in bel canto style, and a lesson in the unlearnable art of charm. Resist her, I dare you. You can't. She's irresistible, and so are those pearly high notes. 

There are more words to eat, or at least to nibble at. My three-sentence flurry of enthusiasm for Ramon Vargas was not unwarranted — he's a very good Nemorino — but at the same time, I can't help thinking what I wrote was more wishful thinking than anything else. If I wrote as if susceptible to the charms of tenors, perhaps I'd become so. It didn't work out that way, and even now that I am susceptible, Vargas does not exactly loom large in my world of devotion. Whereas the other "Mexican RV tenor" whom I implicitly dismissed definitely does; for all his current difficulties, I remain very fond of Rolando Villazon. I also did my best to damn the opera itself with faint praise, but this time around, I felt quite differently — I was struck by just how full of colour and life L'Elisir d'Amore is, by what a tuneful and utterly likeable opera it is. I still have issues with Don Pasquale (I can't quite get past the inherent cruelty of its premise) but I'm re-adjusting my feelings about L'Elisir now, having just had so much fun with it.

The moral of the story? There isn't one especially. I just find it intriguing to see how things change (and how other things remain constant). And don't worry, I don't intend to start revisiting and rethinking every single post in my archives. It was interesting to do so this once, though; after all, one of the reasons I'm pleased I have this blog is the opportunity it affords to remind myself of how I once thought — I tend to forget old opinions once they're replaced. Part of me wants to point at my former self and mock; but it's also heartening to feel that my appreciation of this multifarious world really has deepened and expanded in the last half-decade — despite my propensity to be waylaid by singular fixation. 

Is that a bit too deep and meaningful for a post about L'Elisir d'Amore and how I feel even sillier about Ruth Ann Swenson than I did a few years ago? Probably. Well, never mind. The main thing is that I got to listen to a totally delightful performance of L'Elisir — my little exercise in compare-and-contrast just added to the fun. 

Mutual admiration society

Or something like that. This is what appears on page 13 of this month's Limelight magazine. [Click the image if the text is too small.]

 Um, yes. Number 2 pretty much made my day. Also my year. Not entirely sure what's left to achieve in the remaining decades of my life. (Although the rest of the season of Peter Grimes is a start.)

And, speaking of Cheryl, and Britten, and must-see shows, here's a trailer for ENO's revival of their massively acclaimed Turn of the Screw, which, as I type, is just a few hours away from opening night.

I'd wish I were there, except that I'm here, and we have Peter Grimes. 

More video

Still getting there with Grimes, I'm afraid. My reviews for The Opera Critic and NZ Opera News are done — and in one case published — but I still need to regroup before writing about it all over again. So here, to keep us all going, is a video of our beautiful Ellen Orford, Susan Gritton, being beautiful in Handel. It's an aria from a performance of his Samson, filmed just a couple of months ago during this year's Proms. And it's another reason why Peter Grimes is unmissable: I mean, who could resist hearing this woman sing Ellen's Embroidery aria? Enjoy. 

 

Our Kiri

A few words about Kiri. Not a review — been there, done that. No, I just wanted to say how truly lovely it was to see our Kiri in the flesh. It was my first time. Which seems funny, because growing up in New Zealand, she was so omnipresent and so iconic that I've tended to forget that I've only ever seen her on screens and in photos. I don't know what it's like with children now, but when I was at primary school, everybody knew who Kiri was. No surname necessary. I heard opera at home, so I knew a few other sopranos too, but everybody knew Kiri. And I still think that if you stopped a New Zealander at random on the street and said "Name a famous opera singer", they'd be almost as likely to say Kiri as Pavarotti. (Or Malvina.)

So there she was, and the glossy photos for once don't lie: she's just as beautiful in person. I found her enchanting. The concert wasn't flawless, but it didn't especially need to be. She just had to be Kiri, and it was a pleasure to spend an evening in her company. And she was so warm, so personable, so Kiri and, dare I say it, such a New Zealander, that I found it harder than ever to believe I'd never seen her in person before. I knew she was charming, but it still surprised me how engagingly she spoke when she took the microphone; much better than her conductor, Brian Castles-Onion, whose two little speeches were rather, well, awkward. 

You can read my review (or somebody else's) for details of the program and so on. There were audibility issues but I suspect the basic beauty of that voice is pretty much indestructible, and it has held up better than those of some of her contemporaries: those floaty high notes in particular have lost none of their power to transport. Watching and listening to her, you realise (without necessarily coming any closer to articulating it) what it is that distinguishes a great artist (and a superstar) from the rest. She just is. You can't trace it to one element or another or to anything tangible or technical. She just is. 

And she's also ours. Mine. New Zealand's. Which brings me full circle. At one level, I enjoyed this concert as I might any other gala by a very famous and talented soprano whom I love without every having worshipped as such. But it touched me more deeply than that too, because she is, for lack of a better term, an essential part of my own cultural heritage and upbringing. I don't remember a time when I didn't know Kiri, and, unlike the other sopranos of my childhood, I shared this one with my whole generation and with my country. 

It's not often I get soppy and patriotic. But when Kiri sang an unaccompanied "Pokarekare Ana" as her final encore, I confess I welled up with tears and pride. Not just because it was so perfectly beautiful — which it was — but because it seemed somehow to belong to me. I've known the song as long as I've known Kiri, and I've been hearing her sing it for almost as long. It was already an affectionate and intimate concert, but that moment outdid all the rest and just went straight to my heart. She was our Kiri, my Kiri, and I loved her for it. 

Donna non vidi mai

I think I expected my season of Manon Lescaut to be a bit of a guilty pleasure: a chance to sit in my front row seat and marvel at the magnificence of my favourite soprano, without necessarily getting too caught up in the psychology of the character she was portraying. After all, I didn't like the Manon of the novel at all, and Puccini's opera, while rather more engaging, is still not what you'd call a psychologically penetrating work of genius. Naturally I expected Cheryl's Manon to delight and devastate me, but I just assumed she'd do so because she was Cheryl, not because she was Manon.

Silly me. I should have known I'd never get off so lightly. Cheryl Barker doesn't do shallow. Where my own imagination had failed, Cheryl's stepped in and emerged triumphant, bringing out an intense and complex humanity in Manon which I didn't know existed. In fact, maybe it doesn't. Puccini's Manon is better fleshed out than Prévost's, but Cheryl's seemed to go further still, transcending the limits of her material to carve out a character of extraordinary depth and warmth. A Manon who finally made me understand what des Grieux was on about. 

After just two performances, I praised Cheryl for her ability to bridge the gaps in this opera's lurching structure, bringing a recognisable consistency to the three drastically different phases of Manon's story despite the opera's removal of everything crucial that happens in between. As true as this was at that early stage, it became truer still as the season progressed. Each performance made more sense of the character, and since I now knew (roughly) what the Manon of Act Two would be like, I could see her simmering beneath the surface from the start. And I could see her at the end, too: even at her lowest, Manon's vivacity and her (unwise) attachment to beauty shone through. 

The more I think about Manon, the more I'm struck by how essentially ordinary she is. Yes, she's idealised — fetishized, even — by the men around her, and yes, her circumstances are extraordinary — that's why there's an opera about her — but Manon herself, as a human being, is not extraordinary. Girls like Manon are probably all over the place: only their situations and their decisions which vary. And because she's not operating on the plane of Extraordinary Heroines, she's not bound to their rules. She's free to be unheroic, and this doesn't make her a villain, it just makes her human: passionate, inconsistent and irresistible. 

There are no easy answers when it comes to Manon, and maybe the key to Cheryl's success in the role is that she didn't attempt to provide any. She just opened herself up to the character's tangled humanity, unflinchingly exploring the vast and contradictory possibilities of character and music without offering any moral absolutes. I loved Manon as much for her vanity as for her sincerity, for her flirtatiousness as much as her loyalty, for the petulant humour of Act Two as much as the horror of Act Four. I loved her for just being Manon.

And I loved her for her voice. I do worry sometimes that I seem to write more about Cheryl as an actress than as a singer, but the reality is that I'm always writing about her as both. The two strands are inseparable: just ask Countess Madeleine. Her singing is as electrifying and as beautifully characterised as her physical portrayal, and everything you see in her eyes or the way she moves is writ large in her voice as well. I never cease to regard as extraordinary her ability to combine immense visceral power with exquisite control and subtlety, her singular talent for challenging herself and winning, or her gift for seemingly giving everything while never exceeding her limits, whatever they might be. She hurtles herself into the vocal climaxes of a role without damaging its intricacies, and she can be just as stunning in a tiny moment as in a huge one. 

There's so much in her singing of this particular role which I could single out for praise. Her initially tentative, then increasingly assured utterances in Act One, moving gently from a simple, sad "la mia stella tramonta" to that final "Andiam!", at which point she fled so enthusiastically with des Grieux that on one occasion she actually let go of his hand and ran ahead of him. The sparkle, humour and — wait, was that a trill? — of Act Two's rococo pastiche, and that amazing high C, held not as an ornament but as an expression of repressed rage — one night she held it even longer than usual, and I nearly burst in sympathy. And then suddenly, just as the frills and fun of the dancing lesson had settled into silence, and Manon is alone, des Grieux would arrive and she'd launch into a "Tu, tu, amore?" which was always the turning point of the night. Silvery superficiality gave way to much earthier singing, as Puccini remembered himself, allowing his heroine to stop playing around and start expressing her innermost suffering at high volume and in music of astonishing sensuality. 

Then there was that final act. Seven times I went through this with her, and each time she seemed to give more of herself, to take more risks and just give her voice and body up to the horror of the moment. In the fourth performance she changed the staging of "Sola, perduta" completely and kept it that way for the rest of the season: rather than make her way upstage and lean against an illogical (it's the desert!) wall, she remained downstage and essentially proceeded to fall apart in front of us, intensifying the aria's already tight focus to an almost brutal degree, and maintaining that focus from the conclusion of the aria until her final breath. 

I've seen Cheryl die many times and in many ways, and in operas far greater than this one, but this final act was one of the greatest vocal and dramatic performances I've ever seen her give, not to mention one of the most completely and wonderfully draining. Every fibre of her being spoke of unimaginable pain and exhaustion: every note, every movement, every word simply ached. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I still can't get it out of my head. 

I expected Manon to leave an impression. I just didn't realise it would be so strong. I love all of Cheryl's heroines, but her Manon is the only one who has changed my mind, who has taken my indifference and turned it into affection, fascination and sympathy. I loved all the others even before they'd been Cheryl-ised, but my love for Manon is entirely her doing and a testament to the depth, intelligence and luminous humanity she brings to this and every other character. A month or so ago, I thought I could take or leave Manon. Now she's left me, and I miss her. 

Placeholder

There is plenty left to be said about Manon Lescaut but now, when my brain is turning to 3am mush, is not the time for it. So for now, let me show rather than tell. Here (courtesy of DarioFrancoCorelli) is about the best reminder YouTube can muster of how fantastically well Cheryl Barker sings Puccini, of how beautifully she dies, and of how far she has come in the last sixteen years. 

 

The Professor and Mary Ann

My bloggable backlog is growing, and as tomorrow is yet another opening night, I've decided this is the only way to clear it. Everything at once. Pick and choose as you will.
 

1. SECOND AIDA 

In a fit of enthusiasm after the fabulous second half of Aida's opening performance, I went and booked myself for a second helping. I must confess, however, that when I found myself back in the theatre and waiting for the curtain to go up on those cardboard sets and travelators, I began to wonder exactly why I'd come back. And then Tamara Wilson reminded me. I'm still not nearly as convinced by the production as many seem to be, but it has its moments — and even if it didn't, there would still be Tamara, and she would still be wonderful. If we can't just stop her at the airport and make her stay in the country, then I hope we can at least manage to tempt her back for something else. In the meantime, let me direct your attention to this completely delightful interview. 

The cast as a whole were much as expected, which is a good thing, and the show seemed to hit its stride earlier than on opening night. There are some incredibly strong performers in this show, not least Michael Lewis, whose Amonasro is just a masterclass in Verdi singing, and Dongwon Shin, who this time around was in full splendour right from the start. And while Milijana Nikolic's Amneris still takes a bit of time to get going, when she does, she is outstanding. 

I think what troubles me about this production, more than conveyor belts and problematic scenery, is the extent to which Graeme Murphy seems to have left his singers to their own devices. They know when, where and how to move; they interact with all the complex lighting design and all the other moving parts of the production, but it feels as if that's where Murphy left them, and the rest they've figured out for themselves, each in their own way and with varying degrees of success. So while they all acquit themselves very well indeed, it's sometimes as if each character is in his or her own version of Aida, and I'd much rather see them in something approaching a shared, coherent vision. And, while it's both unsurprising and a cliché to say it in talking about an opera directed by a choreographer, what the singers lack is exactly what the dancers have. The ballets aren't just beautiful, they're also the most dramatically interesting part of the show. Coincidence?

 2. EISTEDDFOD

I always mean to see more of the Eisteddfod than just the McDonald's Aria Final, and then it doesn't happen. But this time I finally organised myself enough to make it to North Sydney on Saturday for the first round of heats. There are few things I like better than a singing competition, and this one did not disappoint, despite the fact that I found myself in the tiniest audience I've ever experienced: apparently even parents and friends tend not to come and watch the heats. At the height of it there were maybe 10 or 12 of us watching. No matter, it was still hugely enjoyable, especially when I discovered several of my favourite singing compatriots on the list of finalists. I heard the gorgeous Sarah-Ann Walker in the afternoon, and if all goes to plan I hope to go back on Friday and hear not only Brigitte Heuser but my favourite Dunedin singer of all, the incomparable Claire Barton. Can't wait. There were plenty of familiar Australian faces among Saturday's singers too, chorus members and Con students and so on, and the standard was generally very impressive: only the few who were obviously not at the right level yet didn't make it through to the quarter finals. 

And while I'm sure it's terribly bad form to name names at this early stage, and despite having determined not to do so, I can't help but mention the one singer who completely blew me away. I recognised her immediately from the OA chorus, and now that I've heard her and seen her as a soloist, I want her out of that chorus and in the spotlight. She is Leah Thomas and she is stunningly good. Not that she needs me to promote her, of course, having already been featured quite, um, prominently by Opera Chic. But she's going straight to the top of my Watchlist. 

 3. EMMA MATTHEWS IN MONTE CARLO

If you'ver read this blog for a while, you're probably aware of my ambivalence towards Emma Matthews. She's absolutely an audience favourite and one of the company's star players, but my appreciation of her has always been more a theoretical thing than a personal response. I've just never quite got it, whatever it is, and while some of her performances have impressed me more than others, none of them has ever made my jaw drop or my heart split. All of this is my problem, not Emma's. She's a lovely singer and if I can't adore her then that's my loss.

I'm saying all of this so that you have a sense of the state in which I approached Emma's brand new solo disc, a selection of bel canto showpieces with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo and of the delighted surprise I take in reporting that it is drop dead gorgeous. It really is. In a mix of lollipops and seriously meaty repertoire, she is graceful, charming and note perfect. She sounds like the Emma I've always thought I should be hearing in the theatre, which perhaps has something to do with the fact that she's not trying to push her voice to the back of an opera house with the world's worst acoustic. Her coloratura not just immaculate but full of personality: she has huge fun with Glitter and Be Gay, drifts beautifully through Ophélie's mad scene, and her "Amour, ranime mon courage" is stunning. Better still is her superlative "Regnava nel silenzio...Quando rapito in estasi": it's sensitively characterised, imaginatively ornamented, and comes with the added bonus of Catherine Carby as Alisa — when's her solo disc, ABC? And she even includes a stunning excerpt from Richard Mills's recent The Love of the Nightingale.

I know I've given Emma a hard time. And I can't take back or alter my response to her live performances, or even guarantee that I'll go madder for her them in future. What I can say is that on this recording, she is magnificent. Her singing is elegant, exciting and beautifully refined. It's showy repertoire, but Emma is all class. Whether I will ever join the legions of Emma's devotees remains to be seen, but this CD has brought me much closer than I thought possible to finally understanding properly what all the fuss is about it. 

 4. FIFTH AND SIXTH MANON LESCAUT

(Yes, OK, technically sixth and seventh.) You'd think this would be the longest sub-post of all, but it isn't going to be. I could say a hundred things about Cheryl's Manon but in the end all those roads lead to the same conclusion: she's Cheryl's Manon. She's extraordinary. She's beautiful and she's brutal and she breaks my heart and she changes my mind. Every time. And every time in different ways. I finished the novel not sure I could ever love Manon. Cheryl has sorted that out for me. The heroine I called unsympathetic a few weeks ago has now, for all her massive flaws, won my heart and, yes, my sympathy. She's still a problematic girl, it's still a problematic opera, but when you live through Cheryl's staggering "Sola, perduta" — or rather, through any of them, they've all been different — the only problem is making it in one piece. 

Ahimè

I have a feeling I promised (to you and/or myself) that I would try to act like a vaguely sane person and not blog about every single one of my eight Manon Lescauts. Well, it's not as if you believed me anyway, is it?  Tonight was the fifth. I'm not going to dwell too exhaustingly long on it, but I do want to write a little about what happened in Act Four, as much as my own aide-mémoire as anything else. 

It began much as usual. Every time is different with you-know-who but the differences are generally on the small and subtle side. So for the first half, it was as different and as freshly detailed as usual and no more, except with perhaps a touch more angst. And that was something I thought I'd sensed in this Manon right from Act One, so it wasn't wholly unexpected either. 

The big change came in "Sola, perduta, abbandonata". Suddenly, Cheryl let loose, with a rendition which was much much rawer and more full of absolute pain than any of the previous three. A bit rougher around the edges than usual, certainly, but in the very best, most meaningful and moving way. It was an even more physical performance than the others have been. Just crushingly intense in every way. And all the usual blocking for the aria fell away; the progress upstage to lean against the back wall on the final "Non voglio morire! Amore...aita!" was gone, she stayed downstage doing her own gutwrenching thing, body bent and voice brimming with excruciating desperation.

That emotion permeated what little remained of the final act. I had already spent the whole evening feeling sadder and more sympathetic for Manon than ever before and tonight, for the first time, her death brought me to tears. And almost to my feet. But that didn't seem quite appropriate (and it's hard to direct a solo standing ovation at one person, though I have tried it) so I settled for leaning as far forward as I could in my front loge seat while madly clattering my best and noisiest (and only) heels, which I had worn for just that purpose. Evidently des Grieux is not the only one moved to irrational outbursts by Manon Lescaut. 

Fourth time a charm

Didn't I say it would be her best yet? I was torn between determination that she would sing and fear that such thoughts would jinx us both. Apparently the power of positive thinking won out. She did sing and it was her best yet. At every level. You might think I'm so far gone I can't tell wonderful from wonderful. Sometimes I think so too. But when she gives a performance like tonight's, I know I can. I can see it, I can hear it, and I can feel it. Her Manon tonight was more delightful, more moving and more magnificently complex than ever, acted to perfection and sung with a voice which eats winter ailments (and me) for breakfast. 

See also: Wanderer on the same performance.

Remember

The only place in the world I should be right now is bed but some things just will not wait. I want to say this right now or it will never be said the way I mean. 
Remember the added layer of brilliance I talked about in Yvonne's fourth Dido (my second)? Tonight it returned, brighter than ever. Of the four performances I've seen, this, her last, was her greatest. And great is the word. I knew straight away the voice would be strong and beautiful — it's the security in her lower register which tips me off  — but somewhere in the first scene she tapped into something and brought off a Dido not quite like any of the rest. It might just have been what I'd been quietly hoping for: the performance where she would channel whatever spirit it was that makes her performance as Cavalli's Dido one of her very finest recordings. Tonight the fire in her eyes and the blaze of her voice were terrifying and magnificent. She nailed the first scene. She outclassed everyone in the hunt scene with her single phrase. And the end, my God. It was as intense as anything she did in Streetcar or La voix humaine. The look in her eyes as she delivered that final "Away!" to Aeneas could have frozen us all, motionless, for days. 
As for the Lament ... words fail. I sat there, front and centre, as she moved forward, ringed by light and sang ... did she sing it? or speak it? ... It was opera, it was life, it was love, it was death, it was Dido. It was perfection. I'm raving. I'm sorry. It was like that. 
She is always great and always moving and always all those things she should be, but this was, I think, a moment in a million: spontaneous, more than just the result of artistry and talent. It came from somewhere else, we don't know and don't need to know where, and there it was. Whatever Yvonne found in it or in herself or whatever, she shared it with us in a way I can't describe, that way that stops you in your tracks. I was a mess. I'd be a mess again if I kept writing. 
This was the Dido I had in mind when I first knew she'd sing it. And the Dido I had in mind when I just wished she'd sing it. Maybe even the Dido I had in mind when I was seventeen and read the Aeneid and was instantly fascinated by beautiful, strong Elissa, who loved too much and against her will. I will say it once more and then I'll stop. Perfection. Yvonne. 

Glorious Joyce

Twittering about it isn't really enough. So let's just take a moment to marvel at the extraordinary Joyce DiDonato, who broke her leg during the first act of Il Barbiere di Siviglia last night at Covent Garden — and finished the performance, complete with a flower-bedecked crutch. I mean, what can you say about a person who does that? I knew she was a pretty special kind of singer (and person) but, well, wow. Anyway, much more — and some rather amazing curtain call photos besides — at Intermezzo, where I first read about all this. And of course, the glorious Yankee Diva herself has already blogged about it: and is typically full of nothing but sunshine and positive thoughts, and busy working out how to get through the rest of the season. Joyce, you're a miracle: here's to a speedy recovery.

Quindici netti

Lauretta, Arabella, Tatyana, Salome, Cio Cio San ... not to mention Manon Lescaut and even, way back when, Cherubino ... here's wishing a happy, happy birthday to my favourite teenager. 

Butterfly Diaries, Part IX: NOT Cheryl's Last Butterfly

If you read this blog regularly, you probably read an earlier incarnation of this post. In it, I talked about what a fitting farewell this performance was, since I had been given to believe that it was Cheryl Barker's last Butterfly ever. But, as you'll see if you read the comments, I've been reliably informed that this is not the case. Opera Australia's subscription booklet — which I've just checked to make sure I didn't invent the whole thing — says "Cheryl Barker recreates the title role for one last season" but evidently that means something else. So, rather than perpetuate a misconception, I've amended this post to reflect the truth. It's worth noting, though, that I've actually changed very little . The fact that it was not a farewell doesn't make this performance any less exceptional. I actually think I might be even more impressed now, discovering that the special charge which Monday night's performance carried — and there definitely was something different about it, farewell or not — was not, after all, the product of special circumstances, but just of Cheryl Barker's limitless artistry. Had it indeed been her farewell, it would have been a perfect one. That it was not; that it was, in a sense, "just another Butterfly" — and that there are more to come — is an indication of just how special she is.

Act One was business as usual. What a terribly misleading sentence that is on its own. You have to understand (and if you have had the stomach to read parts I to VIII of these diaries, perhaps you already do) that business as usual for Cheryl Barker is neither business, nor usual. It's art, and it's extraordinary, and it's freshly created every single time. The predictable aspects of her artistry are those which make her so exciting: her gutsy, gorgeous singing, her responsive acting, her vivid self assurance, her capacity for spontaneity without chaos. All that is standard Cheryl. 

That's what Act One was like. A Cio Cio San as good as they come, as beautifully wrought as Cheryl's Cio Cio San always is, and not quite like any of her others, because, (un)like snowflakes, no two have ever been exactly the same. Perhaps she was a slightly more fragile and serious Cio Cio San this time than the last. Actually, the differences from performance to performance are more complex than any pair of adjectives I can throw at them. At any rate, she was wonderful in the way I expected her to be wonderful, all the tiny revelatory surprises included. Since I thought it was her farewell performance, I couldn't help watching her with that in mind, wondering if the added emotional charge of a farewell affecting her performance. Sometimes I fancied I could hear or see that it was, but it could just as easily have been the power of suggestion on my part — and now I know that it must have been.

Still, I think a turning point came in "Un bel dì". Near the beginning — I couldn't tell you now on which phrase — something changed. I have heard her sing this aria so many times, and while no two renditions have been identical, they've all borne a sisterly resemblance. Not this one. On that pivotal line, whichever line it was, her voice was suddenly different. It didn't crack or falter, but it softened where it had never softened before. I couldn't swear to it — she's such an actress that it's often hard to tell — but I had the idea she had begun to cry. And everything seemed to change. Colours, phrasing, expression, the look in her eyes, the way she moved, the whole soul of the aria — everything. I can't describe the change in any way that will make sense. All I know is that for once this aria — an aria I thought I knew my way around and which, as beautiful as her rendition of it unfailingly is, has never been my number one most devastating Butterfly moment — had me sitting quite literally openmouthed and in copious tears. "Un bel dì" has never done that to me. Not once. Ever. And it did. It was, with apologies for the egregious cliché, like hearing it for the very first time.

Whatever had wrought the change —and I now have less idea than ever what that might have been— it held fast for the rest of the performance, which grew from merely (!) exquisite to (yes, I will stick to this description) valedictory. And we are not talking about a soprano sobbing her way through a performance, although that would be special enough. Yes, there were a lot of tears, but there were a lot of other things going on too — an overall impression of heightened, raw emotion, in the highs as much as the lows, and of a strange, paradoxical combination of increased vulnerability alongside blazing newfound courage. She seems to have mastered the art of abandonment without recklessness, of giving herself up utterly to any given role and exploring all its vocal and dramatic extremes without veering into that scary territory of potential derailment. Her commitment is always thrilling — and I didn't think she could take it any further, but somehow she did. It seemed nothing was off limits. 

And do you know what I love? That she did all of this without turning the night into anything except a totally riveting performance of Madama Butterfly. There was no self indulgence — there never is. Whatever the added emotion, if such there was, it was all put to the service of Cio Cio San. With or without the mistaken idea of a farewell in mind, I doubt anybody could have been unmoved by this. From the most assiduous attendee (ie me) to the most casual tourist — from the devoted fan with a dozen Cheryl Butterflies to compare (me again...) to the novitiate who'd never heard her name until that night — this was a Butterfly with the capacity to devastate anybody. 

So it's over. Tutto è finito, for now. This has been a wonderful trip. You'd think ten performances would have exhausted me, and if I were sensible, perhaps that would be true. I should be all Butterflied (Butterflown?) out, but instead, every time I hear this opera, I adore it, and its heroine, a little bit more. That's down to Cheryl. She wasn't technically my first Butterfly but she was without a doubt the first who made me understand and love her. And now I am a Butterfly addict: Leontyne,Mirella, Renata, Maria, Renata, Antoinette, Daniela, Patricia, and the list goes on. Even Angela, soon. They might not all be singers I otherwise adore, but for as long as they're singing Cio Cio San, I'm putty in their hands. Cheryl will always be my favourite, though: and as wonderful as it was to experience what I thought was a glorious farewell, I'm even happier to learn that I don't have to say goodbye yet to this very special Butterfly. 

Cheryl

Paving stones are unworthy. Let's do the thing properly.

I don't suppose now that I will ever know just how far my own personal devotion goes towards colouring the experience of Cheryl Barker in performance. I do know that I am not alone in responding to her with enthusiasm, affection and a certain degree of awe. My perception of her is that she is extraordinary; that she radiates a vitality and a generosity that I have seen in no other performer of my experience; that she is a supremely intelligent artist; that she is a taker of fabulous risks; and that, hand in hand with all of this, she has a voice which pierces immediately whichever little piece of my heart and/or soul it is that brings me to my knees and makes a devotee of me. I would be a fool to claim that this was in any way an objective perception. I don't want an objective perception. I have enough grasp of the facts of this art form to function as some kind of critic without, I hope, losing every shred of credibility; but when those reviews are done and dusted, the truth which remains is that somewhere along the line in the last two years, Cheryl Barker took hold of me in that mysterious way that opera singers occasionally do, and that she has not released me — nor, if I can help it, will I let her. 

Something specific about her final Butterfly tonight. If I can find a way to write about it. 

Wie ein Wunder vor mir

Oh, what the hell, since I will never do it for real...

 

Her Four Last Songs were sublime. She was a priceless jewel in a slightly problematic setting. Armstrong's take on the songs was a bit too fast and brutal, and the blurry acoustic threw the sound somewhat off balance, so that where she should have entwined with the orchestra she was instead at times subsumed. Had I not been reviewing, I would have sat much closer, thrown the balance off completely but been closer to just her voice. Anyway, it doesn't matter, nothing alters the grace and beauty of her artistry or the black pearl sheen of her voice, nothing alters her intoxicating legato or her sense of Straussian line, and nothing alters the fact of an interpretation so individualised and so committed that her (butterfly-shaped!) music stand practically disappeared. Over much too soon, and had it lasted hour upon hour, the same would be true. I'd like to live in the rapturous climax of her "Beim Schlafengehen" for as long as my poor heart could take it — then expire in the perfect peace of her "ist dies etwa der Tod". She remains our extraordinary Cheryl. Vive la reine. 

Butterfly Diaries, Part VIII

You will have to forgive me, I don't know where this post might go — or if I should be writing it at this hour — but I have the sort of feeling that this Butterfly deserves to be written about with the same energy it created. Or something.

But what I can I say that I haven't said already? And what does it matter, since surely nobody is still reading these Butterfly posts anyway, and I can hardly blame you — you who are not reading this — if that's the case. If I wasn't me, I'd probably roll my eyes and give up on me too. I am me, however, and there's a reason — many reasons — I have this blog. One of them being, it prevents me from doing what I so frequently wish I could, namely, take a stick of chalk to the Opera House concourse and write, at the bottom of the escalators, in Big Bold Letters: Cheryl, ti adoro! Of course I've neither the nerve or the calligraphy skills for such an act of (albeit temporary) vandalism, so I do this instead. I write and write and write and come to the same conclusion. Cheryl, ti adoro. 

Oh, but I'm conjugating that verb all wrong. It should be WE love you, don't you think? I realise not everbody is as mad as me — and a good thing that is, too — but I know I am far from alone in taking pride in Our Cheryl. I'm sure I've said this before, but I never feel more Australian than after I've heard Cheryl sing — because if I want to claim her as OURS, not yours or theirs, then I can't separate myself. If not Australian Australian, then I am, at least, Opera Australian.

This is appalling. I didn't mean to go quite so overboard. Or did I? At any rate, I'm not deleting it, so as excessive as I've been, evidently I'm still prepared to stand by every word. In the sobre light of morning, I still will be. I might roll my eyes at the language I've used, not to mention the punctuation, but change my mind? Never.

And yet I know — or fear, anyway — that I am becoming the Girl Who Cried Diva. I do this sort of thing so often, why would you believe me this time. The only answer I can offer is that, unlike my wolf-crying counterpart, every time I say it, it's true. This rave might outdo the last, but it doesn't negate it. It troubles me though. I had assumed I would be able to hold this kind of thing back until next Monday — the final Butterfly — but here it is, tumbling out, and I apparently unwilling to stem the flow. 

Sleep calls, and (comparative) sanity beckons somewhere in the distance, so I will go soon. Before I do, though, a few things which I want to set down here, if for no other reason than to back up my own memories. I want to remember the tiny, quiet, introspective way she sang her "Vogliatemi bene" tonight — more to herself than to Pinkerton, a little window into a fragile emotional existence. I've never heard her sing it quite like that. I want to remember the little gale of laughter in the midst of "mio piccolo amor", the way the words "l'arsa fronte" disappeared into breathless excitement and the triumphant anticipation in "che pensi? un'ora!". I want to remember how she spoke, rather than sang, "tutto è morto per me...tutto è finito" and "mio figlio". I want to remember the stage business she omitted from the final scenes — when Kate and Sharpless left, she didn't fall prone on the floor, just knelt and slowly crumbled; and there was no crawling to the door after her son before the suicide, she simply remained where she was, watched him leave, and cried. Less was more. Nothing could be more heartbreaking than her face — except her voice.

Enough. I fear I'll have nothing left for next Monday. Except I'm afraid, for your sake — you, again, who are quite understandably not reading all of this rambling — that I certainly will find more to say next Monday. Can't be helped. Or rather, it can be helped but I have zero intention of doing the helping. I am crazy, and I don't care. I'm crazy, but happy. Cheryl, ti adoro.

 

Furore

I don't remember when I first heard that Joyce DiDonato was planning a Handel CD. I do know that it was a very, very long time ago, and that I have been waiting for it ever since. This sort of anticipation cuts both ways. Theoretically, the reward is sweetened by its having been so long withheld but there is a risk, too, in such a long wait. Time to wait means time to dream, and time to dream means time for hopes to be built up beyond all proportion. By the time the real Furore was in my hand, it had a rival: the imaginary Furore, so long established in my mind. 

Needless to say, Joyce has not disappointed me. The real Furore is every bit as fabulous as I had expected it to be. Except that because it springs not from my imagination, but from the imaginations of Joyce and of Christophe Rousset — whose band, Les Talens Lyriques, plays as magnificently as always — it's actually better than whatever I had in mind. She's so utterly right in this repertoire, so obviously at home and — even as her characters reach the depths of despair — so happy to be singing it, that by the time I'd listened once through to this recital, it already felt like a Handel recital I'd been listening to for years. It certainly is one I shall be listening to for years to come.

Her arias are linked by the theme of madness. Handel has lots of madness, of course — it's both an appealing dramatic device and a wonderful excuse for vocal flights of fancy. Don't think, however, that this album is simply one blistering rage aria after another. Joyce's conception of madness is broader and more complex than that. There's plenty of vengeful coloratura, a healthy serving of hallucinations, but there are passages too of quiet despair, of desperate exhaustions and perhaps even of humour — who could take Juno's jealous outburst entirely seriously? 

The disc explores some of the same territory as Magdalena Kozena's recent Handel recital, Ah, mio cor, and both singers are willing to sacrifice pristine vocal beauty to the interests of emotional expressivity. Joyce's approach is altogether more subtle than Magdalena's, and perhaps all the more affecting for it. Rather than have madness — and only madness — define each character, she allows each character to define his or her own madness within a broader psychological framework. Her madmen and women, be they gods, witches or mortals, and however fantastical their ravings, remain grounded in some sort of recognisable reality; their madness is all the more horrifying because it retains the traces of sanity. Madness in baroque opera might be just theatrical convention, but an interpretation such as Joyce's helps to make it into something a little bit closer to real life. 

There is something disarmingly natural about all that Joyce sings — her intelligence, her emotional acuity and her passion for the music are all in evidence, but never in a way that seems forced or mannered. It's hard to say which is most astonishing — her golden timbre, her fearless agility or her gift for spinning long, long lines of unbearable beauty. What's really most astonishing is her ability to weave all the above into one spellbinding voice. From the venomous coloratura of Alceste's "Gelosia, spietata Aletto" to the imperious swagger of Juno's "Iris, hence away" to the sad solemnity of Dejanira's "Cease, ruler of the day, to rise", every note is sung with unshakeable command and focus. Her diction is clear, her phrasing precise; her Italian is so expressive that by the time she switched to English, I already felt like she'd been singing in her (and my) native tongue all along. 

If one track rates special mention, it's Joyce's "Scherza, infida", a mesmerising and deeply moving performance which my words can't really do justice. It's an extraordinary aria anyway. Joyce finds all its devastating power without milking it for excess pathos — draws out Ariodante's borderline madness without turning him into a sobbing lunatic — and does all this with a voice so beautiful you could just cry. I did. But then, even her "Destero dall'empia dite" has me a bit teary. I was about to tell you that her "Scherza, infida" was reason enough on its own to buy this disc. It is, but I'm listening to it now and the same is true of every track. This is a very, very good album. 

Birthday girl

A slightly belated Happy Birthday to the one and only Renée Fleming. To mark the occasion, here's some Mozart. I love her.

Oh, what the hell, you only have a birthday once a year. Here's some more, audio only this time, from her Mozart disc, Visions of Love  — still quite possibly my favourite Mozart arias disc by any soprano, ever. 

She's wonderful, isn't she?

Tatiana

Reader, I bought it. The Met Onegin on DVD, that is. And I think I'm in love...

Butterfly Diaries, Part V

(Yes, I know, troppo Butterfly. But this is it until March, and there are other posts coming, so pazienza!)

I have been feeling a little like Cio-Cio San herself, waiting and waiting and waiting, enduring disappointments and still hoping, con sicura fede and against all reason, that the adored one might come back. Unlike Cio-Cio San, however, mine is no tragedy. Proprio nel punto che ognun diceva: piangi e dispera — just at the moment when everyone said: cry and despair — our prima donna triumphed over illness and did return. They all said I was crazy for booking for so many performances. They were right, but so was I. I could have given this final matinée a miss, but I didn't. I was there, so was she, all was right in the world.

And yet, it wouldn't be the same without somebody cancelling, and so, alas, Catherine Carby obliged. I say alas, but this cancellation too came equipped with silver lining, in the shape of the always gorgeous Jacqueline Dark. I couldn't believe my luck. Anybody sitting in the stalls who let their gaze wander to my loge seat may have witnessed some slightly odd behaviour, as I stifled my squeaks of joy. Cheryl singing! And an unexpected chance to hear Jacqui Dark! Evidently those three cancellations earned me enough diva karma credit for a pretty substantial reward, and this was it.

The last vestiges of Cheryl's indisposition may still have been lurking in the shadows, but not with enough malice to make any difference. I've heard her sing through or immediately after illness several times, and it never seems to be much of a problem — I can't recall ever having heard her sound anything other than absolutely rock solid and secure. Actually, this may just have been my favourite of her three January Butterflies — or would be, if I was at all capable of choosing a favourite. That probably has something to do with my front-of-loge seat as well, always a good place to be. The glow of triumphant return (and my consequent euphoria) helped too. In fact, somebody clapped briefly at a pause in her first scene. A novice, getting ahead of his or herself? Or someone like me, saying welcome back? Probably the former, but I like to think it was the latter.

I will bore myself, as well as anyone still reading, if I attempt yet again to detail her triumph in this role. The point has been made enough times, and not only by me. But it is such a joy to witness artistry at this level, to see a singer in such utter command of every aspect — musical, dramatic, just plain physical — of her role. Watching Antoinette, as a relatively new Butterfly, find her way to a personal triumph, brought home to me once again just how phenomenally demanding Butterfly is for a soprano. A performance like Cheryl's, on the other hand, could almost make you forget that — she seems to thrive on the very aspects of it which seems most exhausting, and the harder it gets, the brighter she shines.

I'm learning to accept that I'll never do justice to Cheryl's Butterfly — or my own response to it — by throwing adjectives at it. Not that I won't stop trying — you don't get off that easily, I'm afraid — but the happy truth of that matter is that it will never work. And it shouldn't. That's what so thrilling and so joyous about this particular singer and her effect on me — as terribly cliché as it is, they're beyond words. All I can do is clutch at straws — gestures, phrases, colours — and say: I really love this.

I really love, for instance, the stillness and self containment of her Cio-Cio San, even at her bubbliest. She captures all the ardency of a besotted teenager without ignoring or masking the serious, adult emotional capacity which will gradually overtake her. I really love her ability to sculpt a natural, engaging and very believable Cio-Cio San while still committing beautifully to the ritualistic aspects of the production, the gestures and the dream/dance sequence, the bowing and so on. I really love the way, as she sings "e starem zitti come topolini ad aspettar", she mimes mouse ears in time with the music. I really love the giggles she stifles during Yamadori's visit.

And I feel like a bad person for dwelling so much on the acting and saying so little about the singing, but it's all tied up together. The commitment and beauty of her Butterfly is apparent in every facet, in her characterisation, in her every move and glance — and in the way she sings it, in the colours of her voice, in its limitlessness, in its startling power, in its rose petal loveliness, in those little turns of phrase, a word here, a note there, the big moments I brace myself for (Ah! M'ha scordata?) and the quiet moments that break my heart (un po' per celia) and all the infinite variety in between. You see what happens when I try to put her voice into words? Sentence structure breaks down, incoherence (more than usual) wins.

Which seems as good a point as any to take myself firmly in hand, and stop. Thank you, Izaghi and Izanami, Sarundasico and Kami, for allowing our Butterfly to return, if only for one afternoon, and for allowing me to be there. Now we can wish her a bon voyage and a magnificent success in Paris, and I can float back down to non-Butterfly earth for a while, until her final four performances in March. Time to remember what else the world has to offer.

Butterfly Diaries, Part IV: Illustrated Edition

1. An offer

A bad thing has happened, but you, yes you, may benefit from my misfortune. Last week I returned to the box office to book for Madama Butterfly on the 7th of March. All seemed well. Then I got home, looked at the thing, and realised what I had in my hand was a ticket for Madama Butterfly on the 7th of February. Alas, alack. Did I misspeak? Did the box office make an error? Either way, I know from past experience that they won't consider exchanging it, and anyway, I've already re-booked for the right date. Which means I have a ticket going spare — the 7th of February is a performance by Antoinette Halloran and Rosario La Spina, and having already seen Antoinette (three times!) in Cheryl's place, I no longer need to go again during her scheduled season. 

The ticket is for C-reserve, seat C12 in the stalls. No surtitle view, but acoustically pretty excellent, and you'll be in exactly the right spot to appreciate the full force of Antoinette's "Un bel di". If you're in Sydney and you'd like it, send me an email and we'll figure something out. As a Saturday night C-reserve ticket, it cost me $106, but I think we can work out a pretty nice deal — I'd just like it to go to a good home. 

2. 09-01-09, 14-01-09 FOURTH & FIFTH PERFORMANCES

Two more Butterflies, two more Cheryl Barker cancellations, two more appearances by Antoinette. What a good thing it's so impossible to be mad at Cheryl Barker. I'm frustrated by the situation, but not by her — painful as her absences are, in the end, I'm pleased she's doing whatever she deems necessary to look after that precious voice. And if there's an element of supercautiousness, on account of her upcoming Parisian début, well, that's fine too. I forgive and forgive, and keep crossing my fingers that she might just make it to the matinée on Saturday, her last scheduled performance this month. And meanwhile, let's just hope she returns in March ready to blaze through her final performances. 

Of Antoinette's three performances so far, I'd say her first was her best. On the 9th her voice was still sounding a bit ragged from the demands she'd placed on it in the previous performance. Wednesday's was somewhere in the middle. Vocally, she's best at the extremes, the high, soaring passages and big, low chest voice. In the middle, a little less secure, but we make allowances, because what a role for anyone to sing. She remains a fine actress, a charming Butterfly, especially in the first act, where she is all youthful excitability. Her own personal take on the role is coming through more clearly with each performance, although so too is a slight tendency to perhaps (for my tastes, anyway) overdo the giggly exuberance just a little. There's a serious and formal side to Cio-Cio San too, after all, but that's something Antoinette has plenty of time and world to grow into. 

Julian Gavin remains our almost lovely Pinkerton, and with Cheryl not around, I actually take the time to watch him a bit more than usual. He's pretty good at finding three dimensions in a character who could just about get away with one, and that bright, secure voice makes him easier still to indulge. I'm more taken with Graeme Macfarlane's Goro all the time, too. Whereas I'm starting to wish Barry Ryan's Sharpless had just a bit more presence and a more benevolent air — maybe it's just me, but I like to feel that he's really on Butterfly's side, as far as possible, rather than that he's just taking care of business as painlessly as he can manage. Wednesday's performance was an especially moving one for Suzuki, Catherine seemed quite genuinely distraught by the end. 

That said, it was also the only one I've remained dry-eyed throughout, but that's more to do with my frustration at diva cancellation than the performance per se — and it received a pretty substantial standing ovation, much to my surprise, so what do I know? 

So now there's only Saturday's matinée left, and then I'm Butterfly-free until March. I'm doing my level best to expect Antoinette to sing. If Cheryl happens to appear, well, what a bonus that would be. All this uncertainty wreaks havoc on my poor nerves, though. It's terribly traumatic, not knowing until the very last moment. 

3. Santé

 

For our prima donna, on the eve of her Parisian début. Get well soon, for les grenouilles if not for us. But that matinée would be nice. 

Butterfly Diaries, Part II

03-01-09 SECOND PERFORMANCE

This performance was not a part of my initial massive ticket purchase (for reasons which I'm sure seemed utterly logical at the time, but which escape me now) so I was punished with a seat in Row U of the stalls. In such a little theatre, Row U is still not exactly the middle of nowhere, however it is behind the overhang of the gallery, which means the acoustic is especially poor, even by Opera Theatre standards. Orchestra? What orchestra? I exaggerate, but not by as much as I like. I was definitely confirmed in my aversion to such faraway seats. Front row or loge for me, thank you very much.

After opening night, I had managed to convince myself (almost) that Cheryl would cancel. No definite reason for this, really, just a surreptitious cough or two and a vague sense that I'd been hearing, say, 97.6% instead of 100. In fact I'd done such a good job of convincing myself that I arrived at the theatre pretty much expecting to hear Antoinette Halloran instead. Which would have been fine — I'm booked for enough performances to compensate the loss of Cheryl in one of them — but, as it happened, she didn't cancel, and so just having her there was a bonus of sorts. 

I'm not used to seeing or hearing Cheryl from so far away, but in the big scheme of things, it hardly matters — far or near, she's still the same beautiful singer, and her commitment, charisma and oh that voice carry far, far beyond the first few rows. In fact it's probably healthy for me to be reminded of that once in while, and to have my focus broadened a bit. I think she was even lovelier than on opening night. I think. I don't know, because I can only just hold on to my last smidgen of impartiality long enough to get my grown up reviews written, and then all that goes to hell and my brain works along the lines of: Is Cheryl, Is Good. If pushed, I could probably suggest that the voice was softer and shinier than it had been in previous performance, that it flowed a little more freely, but really, we're talking about degrees of gorgeousness, and what's the point? She's Cheryl. She's Cheryl. (I'm sorry. I know I'm terribly over the top. But if I can't vent it here, then where?)

Meanwhile everybody else was much as they had been on opening night, no major changes, positive or negative. And why would you change anything? Which is not to say that this is the Most Perfect Butterfly In The World...Ever! but it's actually not far from it, in a restrained sort of way. I can't think what could be improved. Excellent principal cast, fine support from the bit players, stunning voices in the two roles which absolutely require them and, as a bonus, from Suzuki as well. As for the production, for once I really hope that Opera Australia does maintain its habit of keeping productions in the repertory for decades, because I can't see any pressing need to replace this one. I wouldn't mind seeing a version of John Bell's production for Oz Opera expanded to take advantage of the Opera Theatre's facilities, but even so, I don't want us losing Moffatt Oxenbould's production any time so. The Copley Lucia and the Cox Ballo can go (please) but not this. 

The rest you know already. They sang, they bowed, she bowed and the audience rose as one. For reasons likely more touristic than musical, but whatever the motive, the end result is the same and I'm happy. True, the performance in and of itself wasn't quite at the earth shattering, mind bending, scream eliciting standard which your usual standing ovation might require. I adored it but had no expectation of standing for it. However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a gorgeous soprano in possession of phenomenal talent must deserve a standing ovation, just because she does. 

Renée

I have a huge affection for Renée Fleming, for various reasons, and not always for her singing. Vocally, she and I have good weeks and bad weeks. I still think her disc of Mozart arias is one of the best Mozart aria discs ever recorded. I adore her in her capacity as Met in HD hostess with the mostess. But then again, I really really was not impressed with her latest recording of the Four Last Songs, despite all the gushing it has garnered from critics. So it's safe to say I've not been in the best mood with Renée lately.

With perfect timing, however, she's turned up to make me change my mind yet again. I happened across an interview on Ovation (I have cable TV now, temporarily) and she won me over in about ten seconds flat. Just as she does every time I see her interviewed. Because, however much I might question the decisions she makes, I can't question her intelligence or her passion for the art. Maybe she doesn't sing to everybody's tastes, but tihs is one seriously smart, articulate woman, utterly engaged with the music she sings and all the thought behind and around it. So if the decisions she ultimately makes don't appeal to me, well, fine, but I have to respect them when they come from such a person. When a soprano is asked "to whom do you listen, whom do you admire?" and the first names which spring to her mind are Magda Olivero and Rosanna Carteri, it's hard not to be impressed.

And also there is the singing. Which, despite those Four Last Songs, still has the capacity to be appallingly gorgeous. The interview was followed by a clip from her Tatyana at the Met. My jaw dropped. I mean, I had read all the praise for it, but still, this was amazing. Enough to make me feel I might need to own that DVD very soon. Then tonight, I managed to turn the radio on just in time for the final scene of Thais and once again, she had me in throes of delight. I suppose I'll never reach the point of loving her irrationally in every note and every role she sings but when it's the right music and the right emotion and that voice, she's perfection, and even changeable little me can't resist that. 

Upstanding

I was all set to grumble about tonight's audience for Butterfly. Nine billion throats cleared, at least three sets of people who clattered out before it was over, a whining child, laughter in the sad bits, a couple in front of me who arrived after interval and spent the rest of the night falling asleep on each other and the place crawling with tourists. However, I take it all back. I am immensely proud of tonight's audience. 

Because we stood. For Cheryl. Not for the whole cast. For Cheryl, alone on the stage, as she took her final bow. And it was a proper standing ovation, too, none of this half-hearted straggling, a few people standing because they want and everyone else following suite because they think they ought. She stepped forward and within two seconds, the entire audience was on its feet. And I've racked my brain trying to think if I've ever seen this happen here before, and do you know what? I haven't. Emma got a scattered standing ovation for her Lucia, but some of those people were just caught out on the way to catch their buses. I gave Cheryl a standing ovation of one from my loge for one of her Otellos, and four or five of us stood for her on opening night. And that's it. 

In San Francisco everyone stood on every night I attended, apparently as a matter of course. Here, it isn't like that. They barely let you finish clapping before the house lights go up and you're swept out the door. So this was a bit special. Congratulations, audience. All is forgiven. You have excellent taste.

(And yes, I've got myself all out of order. Real(ish) post on Butterfly coming soon. Well, sooner than Pinkerton at any rate.)

CB

It's the post which should write itself, but which nonetheless never seems to get written. I was going to write it after my first Arabella. Then after my last. Then during Otello, then during The Makropulos Secret. Then Christmas Eve, Butterfly Eve, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Something always got in the way — holidays, cable TV and that creeping fear of sappy self indulgence. However, enough is enough. The festivities are done with, the TV is switched off and if I'm self indulgent and sappy, well, you're used to that by now. 

I want to write about Cheryl Barker. And yes, I know, I've said it all (and you've heard it all) many times before. Perhaps not all, though. 

Cheryl Barker has been for me a remarkable phenomenon. Almost without my notice, she has framed my Australian operatic experience from its infancy. While I fixated, besotted, on the other one, she was nevertheless there. I blush to confess — though I have done so before — that my first feelings towards her were quite opposite to what they are now. Before I had heard her sing a note, I decided I Did Not Like Her. To me she was the soprano who cancelled without notice her appearance in Opera Australia's 50th anniversary gala and the soprano who seemed to poised to usurp the honour of Australia's prima donna. Such petty biases on my part are beyond foolish, and I have always known it and always succumbed to them — my only defence is that I usually recover.

And so I did with Cheryl. I went grumbling to her Rusalka and emerged beaming. My mutterings about the preferential treatment she was receiving — role after role after role, every one a plum — turned to rejoicing. Slowly at first. Glorious as her Rusalka was, it was in her Giorgetta (in Il tabarro) that the initial, crucial moment arrived. Running into the theatre two minutes late, I was ushered up to E-reserve to await the interval, when I'd be seated properly. I sank, exhausted, into my seat and was thrust immediately into that gem of an opera, and before I knew it, she hit me between the eyes. For the first time ever, she sang a phrase and I thought: that is such a Cheryl kind of sound. And it brought tears to my eyes.

Still, it was only a beginning, not an all conquering thunderclap. But she stayed with me, and I felt compelled to see her again. And then again, on my twenty-third birthday. Only this time, she cancelled. I was crushed — and now I knew I was hooked. I bought the CDs — all two of them — and counted the hours to her next appearance, in the unwittingly hilarious Don John of Austria. By the end of the year, all hope for my sanity had evaporated. I was her fan. I was mad about her. 

So naturally, I waited to see if I would get over it. I am very very good at losing my heart to sopranos, but they are so lovable, and there are so many to love, that total constancy can be difficult. Besides which, she hardly seemed my type. The voices I've gone mad for in the past have been, almost without exception, silvery Mozart sopranos and silken Handel mezzos. What was I doing listening daily to a Butterfly, a Tosca, a Katya Kabanova?

To be honest, I still don't have an answer to that. Although, as we've seen, her repertoire has turned out to encompass some of the music and heroines closest to my heart. She's even begun establishing herself as Australia's next important Strauss soprano. In fact, whatever my preconceptions, it's pretty blindingly obvious that she is exactly my type. I keep waiting for the shine to wear off but it never does — I get as ridiculously excited about her voice now as ever, and maybe even more so. It isn't something that can be rationally explained in terms of sonic quality, of technical skill, of this or that kind of artistry. In all those field, she is superb by any standards, but that special thing that makes a person go mad for a singer — it isn't to be put into words, despite being in many ways the whole foundation of this blog.

If you've stuck with (or discovered) this blog during the past year, then you know what's happened since. You've read my outpouring heres, as I attended performance after performance — all I missed was one matinée of Otello — and trawled through the thesaurus for new ways to say "beautiful". I could happily retrace the magnificence of all those evenings, but I shan't inflict that upon you yet again. But isn't it incredible — and aren't we spoilt rotten — that within the space of ten months, in our very own city, we've seen one fabulous singer take on such a varied and demanding series of roles, and triumph in them so captivatingly? Arabella, Desdemona, Emilia Marty and now Cio-Cio San, all within less than a year and each sufficient on its own to delight the heart of a devotee such as myself. 

Some, no doubt, will say she has been given too much, that her prominence here is now too great. I used to feel the same way about another soprano, before the wind started to change. When it comes to Cheryl, however, such considerations are nothing to me. I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store, faced with an array of operatic prospects almost too mouthwatering to believe, and the promise of more and more and more to come. And unlike that kid, my particular indulgence never leaves me feeling ill, no matter how much I seem to overdo it. What Cheryl leaves me feeling is happy, stupidly happy. A thousand other adjectives as well, but above it all, it's happiness I think of when I think of Cheryl. 

I declared 2007 the Year of Cheryl, and so felt obliged to restrain myself from doing the same thing again for 2008. In fact, it looks as if, for the indefinite future, every year will be the Year of Cheryl, at least in my world. It's a prospect which, like every note she sings, has me grinning like an idiot. A sappy, self indulgent idiot who has gone on at preposterous length — but I'm afraid I can't help it, and nor do I want to. Cheryl Barker is a joy and a privilege to behold and I thank my lucky stars I have so many opportunities to do so. A little adoring excess is the least I can do.

Puccini at Customs House

There's intimate, and there's intimate. We praise the intimate nature of performances in the City Recital Hall. Even the Opera Theatre seems pretty intimate compared to a grand American opera house. Intimate is a relative concept.

Intimate is one thing. Pacific Opera's fundraising concert last night, billed as "An Intimate Puccini Evening" was quite another. The Barnet Long Room at Customs House is a pretty tiny venue to begin with, seating only 160 in what they call "theatre style". For last night's concert, I doubt it sat even that many. We entered via the stage, stepping down into the seating area to find only four or five long rows arranged lengthways in the centre, facing a stage not much larger than a reasonably large dining room table. 

This was intimate and then some, the sort of set-up where it feels almost inappropriate to sit in the front row. Almost. I did, of course, sit in the front row. Front and centre. Hardly surprising, since I am always a front row kind of girl, but even less so when you realise that this intimate evening was to be shared with the extraordinary Cheryl Barker and her gorgeous husband, Peter Coleman-Wright. Masterfully accompanied by Pacific Opera's music director Andrew Greene, they sang excerpts from Madama Butterfly, Tosca and Manon Lescaut, interspersed with shorter pieces from Pacific Opera alumni, James Roser and Penelope Mills, and commentary and anecdotes from the always engaging Moffatt Oxenbould. 

Moffatt opened proceedings, praising, before anything else, the extraordinary acoustic of this unusual venue. He was clearly excited as he explained to us that they had discovered, in first trying the room out, that it produced a "rehearsal ambience", that live, resonant acoustic which performers always strive to reproduce in the more cavernous space of an opera theatre, but which, in its raw, ideal state, is not often experienced by us mere punters. He promised us something "quite extraordinary", underlining repeatedly the intensity of what was to come. His words could also have been construed as a warning to the faint hearted. 

Intense was putting it mildly. Incredible acoustic, small space, singers in full flight and an audience so close that even those in the back row were probably not much further from the stage than a front row audience at the opera house would be. It's not every day you experience a concert in such conditions, and thank god for that — this was magnificent, but if all performances were like this, it would be a health hazard. As it was, the sheer power and richness of sound might have proved a bit overpowering for some tastes. The concert might have been on a very small scale, but the performances certainly weren't. If you loved the voices in question, this was heaven; if you didn't, well, it might have been hard going. 

But I can't imagine anybody could have felt anything but love, or at the very least, admiration, for these four voices. Penelope Mills was all sweetness and light, particularly touching as Mimi in the duet with Marcello (one of only two points in La bohème which soften my stony heart) and James Roser's smooth baritone was lovely to hear. 

And then there were Cheryl and Peter. Are we spoilt, or what? I know it's standard Antipodean practice to gaze, green-eyed, at the concert schedules of Paris, New York, London and Milan but there are moments when such jealousy is left in the dust. This was one of them. There was nowhere I would rather have been last night than Circular Quay, sitting barely five feet away from the one soprano I'd rather hear than any other in the world, listening, awestruck, as she blazed her way through the kind of "Vissi d'arte" which, had I been hidden away in a big, dark theatre, would have made an embarrassing mess of me. The fact that all I had to do to get there was finish work, change my shoes and take a two minute train ride just adds to the preposterous good fortune of it all. 

They began with Butterfly, the scene between Sharpless and Cio Cio San. What a luxury to have Peter as Sharpless. I love his voice more all the time, partly by association, it's true, but mostly because he's fabulous. He's one of few baritones whose voices I think I would recognise immediately. Nobody else sounds quite like Peter, and nothing sounds quite so good as Peter did in this particular venue. And if we're speaking of luxuries, the greatest of all is to have such an intimate audience with the Butterfly of Cheryl Barker, one of the Butterflies of her generation. Adjectives are redudant, she just owns this role, and that's that. Her "Che tua madre dovra" was wonderfully hard to take at such close range, and when she mimed the sword-in-neck on "Morte!", I flinched. 

Then Tosca, the duet between Scarpia and Tosca. The woman who, only ten or fifteen minutes earlier, had been such an earnest and finely wrought Butterfly, was instantly a fiery, imperious Tosca, so terrifyingly real that you'd scarcely believe it was the same woman, in the same dress. And yet she was, and she was...oh, I don't know. Supply your own superlative. Peter was indecently smooth and suave, quite genuinely lecherous in his advances even if they were on his own wife. Peter and Cheryl, it has to be said, do chemistry remarkably well, be it this kind or the Arabella kind. Their duetting was fantastic, but Cheryl's "Vissi d'arte" was on another plane — despite all of us breathing down her neck, and without sets, costumes or more than a few minutes of context, she was utterly, thrillingly in character, singing those oh so familiar words with revelatory conviction and that steely yet graceful voice of hers, the one which slices my heart into a thousand besotted shards. 

Finally, a fragment of Manon Lescaut, truly only a fragment as they'd opted to drop Manon's "In quelle trine morbide" and begin from "Poiche tu vuoi saper". A shame to miss out on the aria, but just quietly, I love the subsequent duet even better. It's included on the duets disc they recorded for ABC Classics, and I never tire of hearing Cheryl's impassioned "Vieni! Vieni", so it was bliss to hear it (and the rest) in the flesh. Peter was a beautiful big brother, and Cheryl an irresistible Manon, moving convincingly from coquetry to sincere affection and concern. As if I needed another reason to look forward to her debut in the role next season. 

And that was it. No encores, partly, I suspect, because the set-up in the theatre meant it took them most of their ovation just to get backstage again. My calculations tell me it was a two hour concert, so I suppose it must have been, but it felt quite a lot shorter. I could happily have taken a lot more of the same. Then again, just that "Vissi d'arte" should sustain me for quite a while yet. So, thank god for Pacific Opera, and for their need to fundraise. Philanthropy never felt so good. 

Emilia, again

God, Cheryl. How do you do it? Where do you find the strength?

I don't mean strength. Do I? Strength sounds boring. Strength sounds like brute force. Cheryl Force is more elegant and more inspired than just workmanlike strength. Five times I've felt the force of her Emilia Marty. That's not a mistake, by the way. I do mean five times. The Emilia she mimed might have been less than conventional, but she packed a punch just the same. Five times, though, and one more to come. People think I'm brave, or mad, or both, facing this opera six times. Please, that's easy. Singing it? Inhabiting it with all that gorgeous ferocity? That's what takes courage, and genius and, yes, staggering strength. 

Beholding the culmination of those gifts is a piece of cake. Nothing is more magnificently easy than being a part of Cheryl Barker's appreciative audience. I can't tell you how magical she is to see and to hear, to experience in full flight. I will, of course, keep trying. Can't help but try: she is not conducive to dead silence. Speechlessness, yes, but that only lasts so long before all my amazement comes tumbling out. Though I'm saving up the real paean till after closing night. This, if you can believe it, is just a snippet.

One moment of tonight stands above all the rest. A moment of total self-indulgence on my part. Having spent Acts I and II in Row A, I strategically moved myself for the final act. Nerdishness in action. I knew exactly where I wanted to be when she sang her "Pater hemon! Pater hemon! Elina Makropulos!" and fainted. I was preposterously close to her. Only Dr Kolenaty was closer. It felt almost intrusive, but mostly it was just inspiring: the fire and focus in her eyes, her expression, her whole body and, of course, in that sensational voice were a wonder to behold.

Pace, pace, mio Dio

Stepping clear, for a moment, of the twin hurricanes of unending OA controversy and mad Cherylphilia, let's take a breather with a selection of Beautiful Things. (Thanks, YouTube, for saving my sanity yet again.)

Three versions of "Aber der Richtige":
Karita Mattila & Barbara Bonney (I may be in love with Karita Mattila.)
Kiri Te Kanawa & Kathleen Battle [audio only] (Why didn't the universe implode?)
Lisa della Casa & Anneliese Rothenberger (I think this one's my favourite.)

"O wär ich schon mit dir vereint":
Lucia Popp (Irresistible.)

"Where Corals Lie":
Janet Baker [audio only] (Desert Island Disc.)

"Stabat mater dolorosa":
Carolyn Sampson & Robin Blaze (There is far too little Carolyn video on YouTube.)

"Bane of virtue":
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Needs no words from me.)

"Cara speme":
Magdalena Kozena (Sigh...)

And since fabulous isn't the sole province of opera singers, here are Alison, Ava, Judy, Nanci, Shirley and the incomparable Catherine.

After all these years

Still crazy about you, Kathy. Last night I found yet another reason why.

That's Kathy just two months ago. This is why I cannot, despite everything, believe that she is a bad person at heart. She couldn't be, and do this. Rationality be damned. She just couldn't.

[Hat tip to YouTube user cctvupload for posting the video.]

Tales of the City II

Ariodante

Hardly the most scintillating production — actually it could easily be deathly dull, except that it isn't, because it's peopled by a clutch of fascinating singers. And I know it's trendy to scoff at baroque opera where the singers are dressed as if they're singing baroque opera, and to profess one's inability to take such people seriously but perhaps I am an old fashioned girl at heart. I didn't find this laughable. It seemed to me that the point of it all was not to convince us that Ariodante is a ripping yarn or (that vile word) relevant in some deep and meaningful way to contemporary society, or any of that; but rather, to celebrate the one aspect of the opera which remains utterly captivating — the music. If I'm right about that, then it achieved its purpose; this was a pretty fabulous tribute to Handel.

Ruth Ann Swenson totally bowled me over. And I am somebody who already loved her dearly. But my attachment to Ruth Ann has always been at root an emotional one. I loved her for the part she's played in my musical life and because she has always seemed adorable; and I've loved listening to her, but have never gone exactly mad for the voice in and of itself. I also had essentially no idea what to expect from Ruth Ann in a live situation.

She was sublime. She was more than it even occured to me to hope for. Recordings aren't a patch on the loveliness of her voice in person and she radiates sweetness and light. I could have watched her and listened to her forever. Stunningly beautiful in every respect. And yes, my emotional attachment to her colours that view a bit, but even if she'd been totally new to me, she'd be getting a rave here. I just wish I could be there on July 6th, to clap my hands raw when she's awarded her San Francisco Opera Medal. Ruth Ann deserves every accolade going.

And as if she weren't enough — Susan Graham! I knew she was good, but for whatever reason I've never become a proper fan. She was, of course, totally stunning as Ariodante. Stunning in a more objective sense than Ruth Ann, too. Susan sang the living daylights out of this role; it was a total triumph. I appreciated the sheer gorgeousness of her voice more than I have before, and revelled in the thrills and spills of all that terribly heroic coloratura. Plenty of fun ornamentation, too; a lot of it showing off her rather impressive upper register — not the most obviously masculine sound, but who cares? Fabulous is fabulous. Her "Scherza infida" is something to treasure.

Just before the curtain went up, I heard a man behind me say to his companion: "I like her already — she looks like Eddie Izzard." Which cracked me up, because I knew immediately he meant Sonia Prina, and he was completely right:

Although in her stage beard, she looked less like Eddie and a whole lot more like TAFKAP. I still wish I could have heard Earth Mother Ewa Podles as Polinesso, but never mind. Sonia is a different brand of contralto, her voice is edgier and more compact. Sometimes a bit too metallic for my tastes but all in all an appealing villain. Although I was a bit troubled by what seemed an idiosyncratic approach to passages of rapid fire coloratura; her runs emerging in a sort of violently staccato Morse Code. Then again, she was expressing rage, so that's possibly fair enough. Anyway, the important point for readers in this hemisphere is that I think we can look forward to an excellent Orlando from her in August. I wonder if she'll have another Princely beard.

Veronica Cangemi was weirdly appealing as Dalinda. She grew on me. Well no, actually, I liked her immediately but then her first aria didn't quite live up to the silvery appeal of her recitative. But as the night progressed she got more impressive and her whole performance had that sort of neurotic charm that I tend to like. Her mad scene — complete with lightning on cue! — was wonderful. The more I think about her, the more I like her in retrospect. I bet she'd be a lot of fun as Atalanta in Xerxes.

I only realised afterwards that two of the cast of this Ariodante also appear on the Minkowski recording of same.  Veronica's there, and so is Richard Croft. With Ewa it would have been three. Richard Croft, incidentally, sounds so good in this role he's almost a guilty pleasure. Handel tenors (a little like Mozart tenors) can be a bit negligible but there's usually opportunity for a spot or two of knee-weakening — he takes full advantage. To think this man was not long ago roaming the Met in a sheet as Gandhi in Satyagraha. Which, come to think of it, means that every Handel opera I see this year will contain a member of that Satyagraha cast, since Rachelle Durkin, OA's Angelica, sang Miss Schlesen opposite Croft.

The other boys — Eric Owens as the King of Scotland, Andrew Bidlack as Odoardo — weren't quite so swoonworthy, but still, enjoyable. Particularly Owens, who exuded a Sarastro-like air of wise nobility, even if he was a bit mean to his darling daughter.

But oh, Ruth Ann. And oh, Susan. Beautiful apart, bliss as a couple — they, and their voices, are very well-suited indeed. Their duets were among the highlights of the opera. My favourite moment, though, was Ruth Ann's tour de force in Act II, a mad scene of sorts where the laughing girlishness of Act I gave way to a darker, more emotionally complex portrayal and where I hung upon her every delectable note. Four years ago I went to New York. I was supposed to see Ruth Ann then, but she cancelled. I'm happy to say now that she was well and truly worth the wait.

Tales of the City I

I never meant to take so long to write about San Francisco. If my hotel hadn't had the World's Worst Wireless I might have written more while I was there, but it was all I could do just to check my email and the weather. Anyway, here goes.

On Lucia

That should actually read "On Natalie" because you and I know, that's what all this was about. Natalie's Lucia was the single, solitary reason it occured to me to make this trip. Everything else wonderful was just so many cherries on top.

Knowing full well that it might be folly, but quite unable to stop myself, I let my expectations of Natalie build and build. How could they not? For nearly four years — excluding the break I took, which we don't talk about — I have worshipped and adored Natalie in every medium available. In my dying days of file sharing, I downloaded dazzling bits and pieces — "Glitter and be gay", "Tornami a vagheggiar" — and wept with bliss. I have bought CD after CD after CD. If she records it, I want it. I re-christened YouTube NatalieTube because that was (and still is) the best thing about it — it's full of Natalie (thanks in great part to DessayBestSinger). The soprano who won me simply with the sparkle of "Suis-je gentille ainsi" and the limpid sweetness of "Vive amour qui rêve" (I owe Massenet a lot) transpired to be probably the single most captivating all-round performer of my experience; only Judy Garland comes close. Natalie, as far as I am concerned, has everything. I could love her for her voice alone. I could love her for her acting alone. Hell, I could love her for her mad curtain calls alone. The point is that I don't have to love her for one reason alone, or even for several reasons separately. I love her in her total, glorious Natalieness; I love this nutty, hilarious person who is also fiendishly bright, a gifted artist and, I truly believe, among the most significant operatic performers of her time. Perhaps of any time.

So it was with all of this besotted baggage that I arrived at her Lucia. Which is why when I say that she met my expectations, it is not faint praise. I can't claim she exceeded my expectations, because I myself had made that impossible. To use uncharacteristic sporting analogies: I expect Tiger Woods to be the world's greatest golfer. I expect a climber of tall mountains to conquer Everest and K2. And so I expect Natalie to be the Natalie of my dreams. And she was, she was, she was. All that CD, DVD, YouTube and the praise of others had led me to expect, she provided. Though she might just be a little more beautiful in person.

I kept waiting for the experience to feel more surreal than it did. But the truth is, opera at this level — and experiencing my #1 diva in the flesh — is what I've been waiting for. Not an unattainable fantasy, but a possible new reality. Seeing Natalie didn't feel unbelievable, it felt natural and right and true; a logical, normal part of my devotion to her and to the art form. It was magical, but it made sense.

Luck

"Cheryl Barker recital"
"Cancellation due to illness"

Two phrases which, in combination, should spell misery and deep disappointment. I expect circumstances to conspire against me when it comes to singers. If there's a bug to be caught, my soprano will catch it. Not that it has happened so very often — but the few cancellations I've been through have traumatised me enough to make me live in terror of a repeat. The sight of Adrian Collette edging his way on to the opera theatre stage before a performance causes my little heart no end of palpitations. When he showed up before an Arabella, I was stricken; when I was assured it wasn't Cheryl who was sick, I cried real tears of relief.

So imagine my joy and delight to find that for once, illness and consequent cancellation were to work decidedly in my favour.

On Monday I went to a recital at Angel Place by Cheryl Barker, Peter Coleman-Wright and Piers Lane. We were told beforehand that Peter was singing through a nasty cold. He coped quite remarkably, but there was no doubting he was not a well man. Evidently the cold got worse. The trio was due to repeat the programme last night. I, being me, had tickets for both. And on Thursday morning I had the news, from a colleague very much In The Know that Peter had been obliged to cancel his appearance in the second recital. How would the gap be filled. "Piers will play more. And Cheryl will sing more." [emphasis mine, clearly]

Never in a million years would I wish ill health upon the charming Peter Coleman-Wright. But unexpected extra Cheryl Barker? Yes, thanks, I'll wish for that.

From there my good fortune spread. I had a seat in the second row, right at the far edge of the theatre. But my section of the row was unoccupied and I was able to move to an aisle seat, with not a single head blocking the way between myself and Cheryl. Even when, during intermission, the person whose seat I had stolen turned up, he was more than happy for me to keep it. There was even a woman handing out free chocolates at intermission.

None of the above compares, however, to the supreme felicity of simply hearing Cheryl Barker sing. In the end, her bonus tracks amounted to just two extra Lieder at the begining and a different encore; but what happy bonuses they were. Just for me — or so I choose to think — she opened with my favourite Schubert song, an ardent "Gretchen am Spinnrade". I have a history of obsession with this song. I love it. I especially love "und ach...sein Kuss!" and shan't soon forget the exquisite anguish in Cheryl's voice as she reached that crucial moment, und ach...the way she lingered and lingered on that final "sssss"! Swiftly on Gretchen's heels, another big favourite of mine — Schumann's divine "Widmung", fabulously sung. Be still, my beating heart.

Naturally we were denied the duets by Mendelssohn and Schumann which were sung on Monday. Piers Lane filled the gap. Just to add to my run of luck, he played Liszt's transcription of the slow movement of Beethoven 7, followed by Schumann's Variations upon that same slow movement. Beethoven 7 is a current mild fixation of mine and thus one of the pieces of music I was most inclined to hear.

Cheryl returned with the same solo bracket she'd sung on Monday. Five songs by Richard Strauss. If you're me, which you mightn't be, but which I definitely am, there's really not much in life better than a crazily gorgeous soprano singing Strauss from just a few metres away. All of them songs I already knew and loved, chosen perfectly for me and for her voice.

In "Cäcilie" I expected a sort of desperate hunger — "if only, if only" and so forth. But both the poem and Strauss' setting of it, as Cheryl explained in her lovely spoken introduction, were love tokens. Strauss gave the song to scary Pauline the night before their wedding. So Cheryl took it in this spirit, made it a jubilant affair, an expression of longing very shortly to be fulfilled. From expansive rapture to perfect serenity — "Morgen". It's a song like no other, except perhaps its cousins, the Four Last Songs. She was devastatingly gentle, floating down to a soft, soft landing before moving on. When she did move on, it was to "Wiegenlied", which on Monday she had dedicated to her son. Again, magnificent. Not that I would dream of sleeping while somebody was singing like this to me. She flitted, flirted and fluttered her way through the romantic antics of "Ständchen", her instinctive gift for acting illuminating the little scene perfectly. And then came the clincher. "Allerseelen". Of the five, this was the song I was least familiar with, though I've heard it from time to time. I didn't know exactly what it dealt with until Cheryl explained. Then, when she sang, and the remains of my high school German went to work, I understood. On Monday it was amazing. On Thursday it truly tore me apart. She sang this in a manner more akin to a grand scena than an art song and the result was extraordinary. She sang "Stell auf dem Tisch die duftenden Reseden", and I saw the table and the flowers; and saw her see them. When she reached the song's stricken climax, her body bent with the pain of it. It was a moment apart; no plots, props or costumes but as characterful and moving as anything I've seen her do on the operatic stage.

Thanks heaven for intermission. I needed a chance to recover. That was followed by more Piers, Brahms this time. Then Cheryl, with an abbreviated version of Songlines of the Heart's Desire, a song cycle written for Cheryl and Peter by Richard Mills and receiving its premiere on this tour. Maybe it is a terrible thing to say, but I liked the Thursday version better. The songs are attractive enough if not masterpieces, but there was bit of sameishness in hearing eight of them together. Honestly, what I liked best about them was not the songs themselves but the way they made Cheryl sound. True to form, her voice was growing warmer and brighter as the evening progresses, and the wide-ranging but perfectly tailored writing of Mills' songs made for some truly wonderful Cheryl moments. I'm pretty sure (correct me if I'm wrong) that one of the three songs she sang on Thursday ("My woman's transparency") was actually one of Peter's from Monday. She also pulled off a nice version of the final duet, sans partner.

On Monday night, they finished with two duets from Kurt Weill's (justifiably) little known operetta about Benvenuto Cellini, The Firebrand of Florence. The first, "You're far too near me", is a dialogue and would be impossible to do solo. Not so the second, so Cheryl gave us a passionate rendition of the slightly treacly "There'll be life, love and laughter" — not Weill's best moment, and definitely not Ira Gershwin's either, but as stated, All Cheryl is Good Cheryl. She followed with another Weill song, one she and Peter had sung as their encore on Monday — "Mackie Messer". Yes, Mack the Knife, sung with a very Weimar mix of seductive insouciance and black-hearted snarl. Without making too much effort to scale back the operatic scope of her voice, she nonetheless fell beguilingly into the cabaret idiom. I'd love to hear her in more of this sort of music.

Her encore was a surprise. I saw the disintegrating piece of sheet music brought to the piano and thought, what on earth can this be? It was Edward Charles' "When I have sung my songs". A parlor song, not that you'd have known it from Cheryl's searing, heartfelt delivery, which raised what could have been a little bit twee to a credo on the level of "Vissi d'arte". She's magic that way.

Salut à la France

In ten days I've experienced Laurent Pelly's La fille du régiment four times in three different media. Has repetition eroded its charm? Not an ounce. I am, however, thanking my lucky stars I didn't drop French in Year 9 — I did consider it briefly — and instead continued my studies for another eight years. This Fille delights in any language, but speaking French, to paraphrase Natalie herself, HELPS a LOT. I've rarely been more grateful to all my French teachers than when Natalie embarked on her muttered, improvised monologue in Act One. Her delivery and her talent for comedy make it funny even if you can't catch a single word, but understanding (most of) what she's saying makes it even better. Forget the literature, the scholarship, the cultural awareness, the scope for diplomacy/international espionage/world domination; Natalie Dessay's sotto voce ramblings are the real advantage of bilingualism. Just as Juan Diego Florez's legato is the real advantage of possessing a working pair of ears.

Where in the world would you find a more congenial, charismatic pair than these two? In their rushed interview with Renée, Natalie mentioned how different they are from one another, even though "on stage, we are the same". I think she's right. My impression is that Juan Diego is a born musician who just happens to be an incredibly engaging actor, while Natalie is a born actress who just happens to have a drop dead gorgeous voice and all the facility for coloratura a girl could want. That affects their preparation and their approach to performance. But however their routes differ, what we see is the common destination — two performers who are the complete package, who make opera both what it should be and what it already, gloriously, is. 

When Renée said to Natalie, "I always think our goal is to make people forget that we're singing", I confess it rang a little false. I'm not sure that, deep down, that really truly is what Renée's most cherished goal is. Certainly when I listen to Renée — whether I'm in an affectionate mood or not — the one impression I always have is of being constantly reminded of the fact that she most definitely is singing. And that's okay; you can love Renée, or you can not, or you can waver, but I personally feel increasingly disinclined to criticise her for being herself. But presumably she said that not because in her heart of hearts she feels it, but because Natalie has being saying it all over the place for a while now, and it was guaranteed one of Natalie's characteristic exclamations in response.

Natalie, as I've said, is ideal propaganda for this revolution for which she's calling — the treatment of opera as theate above all else, a campaign for singers whose acting is genuine, not token or non existent, a movement away from the absolute primacy of beautiful sound. Her argument, in its essence, has been around much longer than she has, of course. The same ideas are the basis, for instance, of a lot of Maria Callas worship. My concern with those ideas as they concern Maria has always been the potential for "great singing needn't be beautiful" to become "great singing cannot be beautiful" — a tendency to dismiss all prettiness as by definition empty. Natalie counters this tendency brilliantly. She is uncompromising, never sacrificing expressive truth in favour of a lovely sound; but the fundamental sound of her voice makes actual ugliness basically impossible. She's proof that while great singing needn't be sonically ravishing, it can be. And she does it as a coloratura soprano, the fach which, with all its acrobatics and raising-upon-pedestals of gorgeous voices, is probably more responsible than any other for the idea that "pretty=pointless". In roles which might seem custom built for sopranos who wish to avoid acting, Natalie is here to change minds, turn heads and stop a heart or three.

Is she the only soldier in her revolutionary war? Of course she isn't. For the moment, though, she is her army's perfect figurehead. She's one who can appear on talkshows and magazine covers, flying the flag.

For what it's worth, I'm not entirely on her side. I agree with most of her principles. I don't, however, believe that her way is the only way. Opera for me is a musical genre which relies on theatre, not a theatrical genre which relies on music; thus I tend to value sincerity, commitment and scrupulous musicality even higher than "natural" acting ability. If you can bring a score to life through your voice, it doesn't bother me if you're a bit stiff or silly on stage. To be bleedingly obvious — take Joan Sutherland. She is denigrated all over the place for her lack of acting skills, but she has never struck me as a poor actress — she brings a role to exciting and musically exquisite life, so what more do you need? Maybe she doesn't move gracefully, but there's a vast difference between that sort of "poor acting" and an immobile, mechanical singer with no soul or sense of what she's singing. Joan is not the latter; at least she has never seemed so to me. Besides, she is an extreme example. For the most part it seems to me that utter commitment to, and genuine understanding of, the music they are singing tends to draw, at the very least, a reasonable sense of theatre from most singers. I don't necessarily see Rachelle Durkin storming the West End as Hedda Gabler, but she threw herself into Alcina, and in that context her acting was for the most part as striking as her singing.

I'm not sure that Juan Diego wants in on the revolution either. He is a different kind of poster boy, an advertisement not for radical change but rather for the best conceivable realisation of the status quo, or even of the golden past. He acknowledges and celebrates the tradition in which he follows, paying tribute both implicit and explicit to his predecessors. Maybe he doesn't operate on the theatrical edge as Natalie does — then again, I've only ever seen him in comedy, so perhaps he does — but he's convincing (and ridiculously appealing) just the same. Sometimes he slips into stock gestures but the openhearted sincerity of his performances mean that, in Juan Diego's hands, they aren't stock gestures any more — just the natural, spontaneous physical extension of the emotions his singing is expressing.

And because Juan Diego is a true bel canto tenor — and a great one — he also commits himself to the production of beautiful sounds. Beautiful, and once again, anything but empty. As with Natalie, dissimilar though they may be, neither beauty nor persuasive expression need be sacrificed in each other's interests, both are fundamental to the way Juan Diego sings.  They arrive there by different means, driven by different motivations, but both achieve the same outcome — both do absolute justice to the music and to the art form. In La fille du régiment, Laurent Pelly's direction provides ample scope for his singers to bring both the musical joys and the theatrical possibilities of Donizetti's opera to resplendent life. Everyone has the chance to do exactly what he or she does best and the result is bliss.

Once, twice, six times a goddess

I am not falling into my old habits, traipsing across countries or oceans at the drop of a hat in mad pursuit of Australian sopranos. I'd have been happy with my five Sydney Arabellas but since the opportunity of a sixth in Melbourne was offered, I was of course delighted by the prospect. There is no such thing as too much Cheryl Barker. Nor, for that matter, is there such a thing as too much Arabella — at least not this Arabella. John Cox's production is just as endearingly elegant in either setting. The principal cast is thankfully unchanged, which has meant double duty for a couple of the singers — Milijana Nikolic and Lorina Gore sang Adelaide and Fiakermilli respectively on Friday night, then Ulrica and Oscar the following afternoon, a feat for which I most definitely doff my non-existent hat.

The performance I saw was the last of the run. It seems my timing was just right — as I understand it, Peter Coleman-Wright was announced on opening night as singing through a chest infection and subsequently cancelled the next three performances. His cover was Warwick Fyfe, and I concede that, while Warwick's far from a favourite of mine, I can actually see him making quite an effective Mandryka — but the dizzying chemistry of Cheryl and Peter could not, I think, be recreated with half the partnership missing. And since that electricity is one of my favourite aspects of this Arabella, I'm very grateful indeed that Peter was back in health and on stage, as buoyant and teddybearish as ever.

Cheryl Barker was exquisite because she is always exquisite, because being exquisite is what being Cheryl Barker means. No change there, except in the details — no two of her Arabellas have been exactly the same, she is a living, breathing character whom Cheryl creates afresh with each performance. As ever — in Arabella and elsewhere — her voice grew warmer, more expansive, more secure and more enthralling as the evening progressed. She has nailed this role; I hope for the world's sake she's given opportunities to sing it elsewhere.

Failing that, let's just keep her singing it here forever. I'd happily let her lissome, spine-shivering singing keep right on sending me a little further round the bend with every phrase. By the time she says, with perfect coquetry "die drei sind lustiger" I'm already half gone, and at that point we've barely begun. I don't need to point out the aching beauty of the duet with Zdenka; if you don't feel it, then you've a heart of stone which no amount of pointing out could fix. Her "Mein Elemer" is a quicksilver tour de force. "Und du wirst mein Gebieter sein", well, I've already waxed lyrical about this —  Peter and Cheryl in duet radiate true love, vocally and physically, with a sincerity almost too potent to bear. She handles the Act Three confrontation with clarity, passion and towering dignity, a commanding presence and yet delicate, lovable and so, so, so beautiful. From opening night in Sydney to closing night in Melbourne, all this has been true of Cheryl throughout; but then, that's just what she does. She's Cheryl. (I'm mad about her. Is it obvious?)

Production, cast, consuming gorgeousness of Cheryl, all this was unchanged. One thing, however, was very, very different in Melbourne — the choice of tempi. I heard Lionel Friend conduct the opera once here in Sydney, when Richard Hickox was home with a virus. There, he was a proxy Hickox. In Melbourne, he is his own man and his conception of this opera is markedly different. This was fast. Sometimes pleasingly so; sometimes not. In parts, Friend's lightning dash did a nice job of draining off a bit of excess syrup (though I don't find this opera as saccharine as some do) and there were times his zippy recitatives did aid the pacing of the piece. All in all, though, he was too fast for me. A good portion of the glow of Arabella emanates from its ecstatic dwelling on gorgeous melodies, and I think it's okay to allow to just sit and radiate for a little while, no need to keep pressing on and on. Not that he denied us all luxury, not at all — but nevertheless I couldn't help but feel a certain impatience simmering beneath even the most drawn out passages.

The other issue with this fast forwarded Arabella — more obvious to me because I had the performances under Hickox for comparison — was its detrimental effect on the staging. Everything was happening faster, which meant that the carefully measured stage business which seemed so well matched to Hickox's performances, now appeared rougher and more rushed. There was a moment when Zdenka had to blurt a final line more or less over her shoulder, just to get off the stage in time. Arabella re-entered the room while the door was still swinging shut behind Matteo. I think Theodor was singing about his bills before even looking at them. And the depictive Act Three prelude turned from fervent to chaotic; evidently Hickox and Friend have very different visions of Zdenka's First Time. The change of pace, while awkward, isn't ever vastly problematic, and if, like a sane person, you've only seen the production in one city or t'other, I don't suppose it's a problem at all. Having seen it at both speeds, though, I can say I absolutely prefer the slower version, both musically and theatrically. Still, I'm pleased to have heard both, as there was much to love in Friend's reading and in the fluid, fabulous playing of Orchestra Victoria, ably assisted by a far kinder acoustic than that of the Opera Theatre.

And it seems I was not the only blogger making the Sydney-Melbourne Arabella road trip.   Marcellous was there too, and his post makes more detailed mention of the brisker tempi — apparently Friend's reading of the score took about fifteen minutes off Hickox's time, which seems a pretty significant difference. Marcellous attended the same performance I did, which does make me wonder if he might perchance be the distinctively dressed gentleman whom I often see at concerts and opera here and whom I also happened to spot filing into the State Theatre on Friday night. But no, I suppose that kind of coincidence only happens in opera, not in real life. 

Spider and fly

So apparently this what I do on weekends. I go to the Eastern Suburbs to watch Ramon Vargas watch Angela Gheorghiu die.

With the headband and her hair out in Act Two, she even looks like Veronica Lodge. If she's Veronica then maybe that makes me a weird amalgam of Betty and Archie. As aware of her dangers as the former, as blissfully able to ignore them as the latter. No, that's going an inch or two too far. Angela hasn't completely consumed me and I don't believe she ever will. Nevertheless, she has bewitched, bothered and bewildered me more thoroughly than I thought likely — actually, before last weekend's Bohème, I didn't think she could do those things to me at all. That, to my surprise, has flown out the window and now her Violetta has stopped it, for the moment, from climbing back in.

There is so much baggage and back story with Angela. It is impossible to approach her with total innocence. I've spent years forming opinions of her that are only half related to her musical significance. And I'm not about to apologise for that, or try and back track. Very little that I have seen, heard or read of Offstage Angela has caused me to like her. Even during the Met Bohème moviecast, when I was enchanted by Onstage Angela, her non singing persona did not attract me. But rumour breeds rumour, misperception breeds misperception; we have to assume that some of the negativity is baseless. At the same time, I think it's clear that some, at least, is not. She hasn't the ebullient sweetness of Renée or the generous, immediate likeability of Glorious Joyce. Neither, I imagine, is she completely blackhearted. Is she likeable at all, though? I don't know. Do I like her? I don't know, and it depends what you mean. Incorporating all that baggage and back story, adding my own observations of her backstage antics during that Bohème broadcast and the hard-to-articulate impressions of her during this afternoon's La traviata — I don't think so.

But what if everything extra were cleared away? If I had never heard even the briefest mention of this Angela Gheorghiu until the opening credits today, had never seen her or heard her sing until her "Flora, amici", then maybe I'd write something like:

I've just seen this soprano sing Violetta at La Scala and she was captivating. Not perhaps the most aurally luscious Violetta of my life, better suited to the long lines of Act Three than the froth and coloratura of Act One but that's alright. And I'm nitpicking because her singing, whatever else it was, was always interesting. Her acting varied between devastatingly detailed and offputtingly melodramatic but there was a certain something in her stage presence which encompassed both these extremes, allowed her to flow from one to another without losing her magnetism. Occasionally she was completely over the top — has anyone ever made the "aaar" in "E tardi" so very very very long? But then in other moments — Dio mio, she was exquisite. Had I been in a different mood, had I had reason not to like her, I suspect finding fault would be easy. But I was in the mood I was, and I was happy to enjoy whatever kind of Violetta — and whatever kind of Verdi — she felt inclined to throw my way.

Well what do you know, I've gone and written it anyway. She divides me in two. Good twin, bad twin; rational awareness, irrational besottedness. One the one hand — you can practically see her drawing lifeforce from applause, which is a little disturbing. "Sempre libera" really did seem to tax her and I had the impression she was pushing and pulling tempi all over the place. Violetta's illusory "rebirth" just before she died was appallingly overacted. And on the other — I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.

This was what it was. Angela is what she is, like her or hate her, pursue her or run a mile. And I? I fall into both categories simultaneously, or else I'm somewhere in the middle, toss'd like a ship in a Vivaldi aria. About the rest of world and time, I've no idea and I'm not about to go making rash declarations of anything. All I can tell you is that for the duration of this Traviata, Angela entrapped me. And I knew it, and I loved it.

Have diva, will travel: American edition

As some of you may remember, two years ago (to the day, as it happens) I announced that I was throwing caution to the wind and flying to the other side of the world in pursuit of diva.

Well, I'm doing it again. My Canadian grandmother is flying me over to Vancouver for a visit. On the way home, I'll spend five nights in San Francisco. The timing is obscenely good. I'm almost jealous of myself.

I'll see my first Das Rheingold, with a cast which includes a serious and long term favourite of mine, the gorgeous Jennifer Larmore. And since I like doing things in order, I'm pleased that my first live Ring opera happens to be the first one.

I'll see Handel's Ariodante. The cast is overwhelmingly starry. Susan Graham sings the title role. Ewa Podles — Ewa Podles!!!! — is Polinesso. And as Ginevra, the woman whose disc of Italian arias was one of the main reasons I fell in love with opera, the woman who essentially introduced me to the concept of bel canto, the ever beautiful Ruth Ann Swenson.

And. I will see. Natalie Dessay in Lucia di Lammermoor. If you read this blog with anything even approaching regularity, you can perhaps begin to imagine just how significant this is for me. Just writing it makes my eyes water. What kind of state I will be in upon seeing her live, and in Lucia, I don't know. Natalie. In Lucia. Repeating it doesn't make it any less mindblowing.

So that's the plan. I fly in June. Meanwhile any suggestions about what to do with the rest of my time in fabulous San Francisco — or insiders' tips on SFOperagoing, for that matter — are of course heartily welcomed.

More on Arabella (what else did you expect?)

The other women of Arabella

I did say in my first Arabella post that I would save comment on the singers-who-aren't-Cheryl for my review, but (as is my wont and my prerogative) I have changed my mind. Having spent two evenings and a matinée with them, a few among them deserve further attention; not to mention a bit of the uncritical adoration which this forum allows.

Lorina Gore is a blinding revelation to me. Though Fiakermilli is her Opera Australia début, I have heard her once before — as Norina in NZ Opera's touring Don Pasquale. As I recall, I was about the only person not to give her a total rave; I found her pretty and polished but not phenomenal. Fiakermilli is another story; whether the transformation owes itself to her own artistic and vocal progress, to the different repertoire, to the change in venue, or to all or none of the above — or whether it's just me, being my usual capricious self — I've no idea. But a transformation it certainly is, and she well nigh knocked my socks off on opening night. Here, operagods be praised, is the kind of full voiced, ringing, precise and genuinely virtuosic coloratura I've found disappointingly lacking from Opera Australia. Not an overpushed soubrette, not an agile but essentially lyric voice; she's the stuff of which Zerbinettas are made — indeed, having discovered she's out there, I'm keener than ever for an Ariadne. I wish she'd sung Olympia in last year's Hoffmann; and I hope Opera Australia plans to take sensible but full advantage of her talent, which is a rare one among their current stable.

I have already lamented the paucity of opportunities to hear Jacqueline Dark in this city. The fortune teller is another too small role but at least it affords a reasonable opportunity to hear her at full throttle, and I'm increasingly aware of what a pleasure this is. What impressed me in her Tisbe impresses me here too, which is that underpinning the rather gorgeous voice is a real idiomatic intelligence, an understanding of style and of phrasing. She struck me in Cenerentola as one of the few who knew how to make her recitative as lyrical and expressive as her arioso and her ensembles; how to integrate it into the musical whole, rather than chopping it up with the mannerisms of speech. In Arabella she carries those long, long Strauss lines exactly where they need to go without glossing over the details; we can enjoy the dialogue between her and Adelaide while simultaneously enjoying the opportunity Strauss offers to bask in two contrastingly lovely mezzo voices.

Which brings me to the other mezzo of Arabella, the ever more significant Milijana Nikolic. Every role I hear Milijana in leaves me more impressed by her — a real dramatic mezzo with the vocal heft, the range of colours and the versatile, vivid stage presence to do justice to the roles which should become her bread and butter. From a genuinely terrifying Zia Principessa, to a ghostly yet imposing Mother of Antonia, to a toweringly seductive Venus and now a hilarious and adorable Adelaide — she's fast becoming a very important part of the company, and I look forward to more and more and more of her. As I think we've already discussed in the comments elsewhere, Opera Australia looks to be doing Aida next year, and I can think of no better Amneris among the company.

And, just briefly, the one-and-only Arabella of Arabella

Fear not, you shan't have reprise of my last paean just yet. However I did my (delectable) duty post-matinée on Saturday, and queued in the foyer to have my programme signed by divine Cheryl Barker. Who arrived, let me add, in full Act Three costume — she only had twenty minutes to get from curtain call to signing session. We're talking lavish and lacy Viennese ballgown, hoop skirt and all, and flowers in her hair. She looked like a dream, was delightful to speak with, and I'm crazier about her than ever. She was also signing at the ABC Shop in the QVB today, so I hope some of the Cherylites reading this blog managed to take advantage of one (or both!) of these chances to enter the the radiant Presence Of.

Bella

I have the following problems with Cheryl Barker —

Strauss is eye-closing music, but I couldn't close my eyes to Cheryl's Arabella if I tried.

She keeps going blurry at just the moments I most wish to see her clearly. Curse you, tear glands!

She's messing with my senses. Peripheral vision — gone. It takes real effort to see what's around her. Sense of hot and cold — hard to tell, what with all the goosebumps, etc. Sense of hearing — is the famously consumptive audience actually coughing less? Or am I just oblivious? Oh, and rationality is shot too. On Saturday afternoon I will spend three hours looking mostly at a wall, perhaps the odd glimpse of stage; I appear to be happy and excited about this.

The operas she sings in end.

I came to her first Arabella already besotted. I expected the greatest of great things from her. I expected absolute gorgeousness. I expected a three dimensional and utterly believable Arabella for whom I could instantly fall head over heels. I expected that voice which is oh-so-Cheryl and oh-so-thrilling to be in full bloom and knock me over. It's difficult to imagine higher expectations than mine; so how, exactly, did she manage still to surpass them? Or perhaps I mean, to transcend them. She was all the above but more importantly, she was Cheryl and she was Arabella. If singing opera is just a job, she did her job to perfection; if it is an art then she is an artist of the first magnitude.

Little things mean a lot. She is supremely talented at pretending to look out a window. She colours the word "nein" during the lead-in to her duet with Mandryka in a way which manages, in one syllable, to express the entire character and emotional life of Arabella. When others are singing to her, she doesn't "react", she actually reacts, word by word, phrase by phrase. It is an actual conversation. She twirls gorgeously on the dance floor. Her voice blazes brighter the deeper in love she falls and when she reaches that final, crucial phrase — "Take me as I am" — it's a wonder the theatre doesn't just come crashing down. If we clapped hard enough, it might. We did try, I think. I did. (But they discourage long ovations at the Opera House. They bring the curtain down and the house lights up and give you no choice but to shut up and go home.)

And while I do not for a second doubt her acting abilities, it adds to the moving splendour of it all that she is actually in love with her Mandryka, and he with her. Husband and wife on stage together does not in and of itself guarantee electricity, but in this case, it's most definitely there. Never more so than in their Act Two duet. They pledge undying love to one another. Still in character, but with such palpable sincerity and affection that it seems almost intrusive to sit there and witness it. It's a moment of almost unbearable (and thus, completely and wonderfully bearable) beauty. Intense, but tranquil and assured; quite unforgettable.

The me of this moment would like to reach back in time and smack the me of October 2006 around the head, for hearing her Jenufa and not immediately feeling her exquisite power. I'm making up for it now, and then some. I cannot believe my luck — our luck — to have such a luminous and fascinating artist practically at our doorstep and fulfilling dream after dream. Just for now, forget I'm a foreigner and let me be Australian, so that I can say with pride: Cheryl is ours, and we adore her.

Qui la voce

Outside, grey skies and endless rain. Inside, all is bliss and sunshine, because I have Natalie. Or, more to the point, Natalie has me. Music to go mad to. You wouldn't want to be in the fragile state of Lucia or Elvira — Natalie's singing of their mad scenes would assist you, smiling to the abyss. I'm transfixed. How many times have I heard "Ah, fors'è lui" or "Caro nome"? But supernatural Natalie makes everything sound like the first time.  Her Maria Stuarda takes my breath away. Her high notes turn me into Pavlov's dog, I cry on command. And there's the other stuff — brilliant ornamentation, the weird and wonderful sounds produced by Concerto Köln, the glass harmonica for her Lucia (and the unexpectedly absent cadenza like at the Met, the cadenza that's only in our heads, and hers), a phrase or two from a typically overwrought Alagna. But the blood in all those veins is her inexplicable and bewitching essential Natalieness. Cataloguing her special talents and strengths, praising her vocal acting or her agility or her high notes or her fatally gorgeous timbre, that's all beside the point. WE KNOW ALL THAT. Natalie is singular, Natalie is magical, Natalie is opera, Natalie is perfect. Natalie, Natalie, Natalie.

Advent

I did this last year and thought I might as well do it again. Here's an all-at-once video advent calendar. Each link a different bit of fabulousness, some operatic, some not. Enjoy.

December 1st — And I'll adore you too
December 2nd — Mamička
December 3rd — Two revelations in one
December 4th — A favourite triple threat (Her. Forget him.)
December 5th — Two for one
December 6th — Much much much too short
December 7th — Sorely missed
December 8th — An unsung great
December 9th — A knockout
December 10th — Unexpected and wonderful
December 11th — Credit where credit's due, I think this is great
December 12th — Glorious
December 13th — Impeccable as always
December 14th — Looks terrifying, sounds like heaven
December 15th — Gorgeous boy
December 16th — A tribute to my adopted home
December 17th — Still the greatest
December 18th — Knockout glitters
December 19th — Not sure which of the three I love most
December 20th — Caesar herself
December 21st — Bête noire (but she's growing on me)
December 22nd — Magic
December 23rd — I wish this was a video (but it isn't)
December 24th — Sie ist die erste Sängerin

And finally, an embedded Christmas gift. Happy holidays to everyone.

Lovely victor

I've loved Purcell ever since I spent an eye-opening Christmas Day with The Fairy Queen. Sung excitingly, his is among my favourite music. Alas, Purcell is not always sung excitingly. And whereas boringly performed Mozart often retains a bit of Mozartean brilliance just the same, boring Purcell easily becomes unremittingly dreary. I have all the time in the world for period practice (I'm not using the word "authentic" here; I think "authenticity" has a whole lot more to do with heart, sincerity and musicality than which instruments you use or your choice of pitch) but I have no time for colourless, boring performances which sound more like an instructional guide than anything with a personality.

So thank god for Carolyn Sampson, whose new all-Purcell disc Victorious Love manages to be at once exemplary and exhilarating. She shows off both her own extraordinary versatility and Purcell's — every facet of the composer is here in these songs, which encompass loss, love, death, rage, rapture, madness, sweetness, seduction and out-and-out lust.

Here I have difficulty continuing. Because this album is not conducive to balanced, thoughtful sentences and considered praise. It makes me want to shout its praises on street corners, or at least to everyone I meet with the slightest interest in this kind of music. I think this CD is incredible beyond words. Obviously it was always a winning combination. Purcell = good. Carolyn Sampson = indecently gorgeous and gifted in all matters Baroque. This, though, isn't just a winning combination of elements, it's an explosion. Explosion? In Purcell? YES.

And — I've a suspicion I've wondered this before — where in the world did she get that voice? I'm on the verge of declaring it the most fundamentally beautiful sound being produced by any currently working singer. Clearly, that's a crazy kind of claim to make, as there are a thousand kinds of vocal beauty and no one singer can wear the crown, unchallenged. But still... I remember the first time I heard her Rameau disc, finding it physically difficult to grasp just how gorgeous these sounds were. And, it should go without saying, not emptily gorgeous. Carolyn is the whole package, impeccable in every respect. On the list of What Makes My Heart Go Pit-a-Patter, she ticks every item.

Down to specifics. She opens with "Sweeter Than Roses", which is includes the lyrics from which the title is drawn: "what magic hath victorious love". What magic indeed. This song is a perfect bait-and-switch; she starts out by doing breathy languor so well that, if you didn't know what was coming next, you wouldn't guess it. Then from the dream state she bursts suddenly into florid rapture and in the process, with her very first track, conquers every heart. (Well, every one of mine anyway.) Then immediately to something much more serious, "The fatal hour comes on apace". Every word is heavy with meaning and yet she doesn't overdo it for a moment — "certain misery" sound like certain misery, nothing more and nothing less. Purcell has, of course, that very baroque habit of repeating a word or phrase over and over, and Carolyn ensures this sounds like the most natural occurence in the world. She sings "may I not" several times before revealing what she may or may not do (which is to hope) and it doesn't sound like baroque convention, just natural human inability to express a desperate and delicate emotion. That's almost two hundred words on just two songs; if I keep on like this you'll never read to the end.

But for the moment I have to continue like this and mention track three. "When first Amintas sued for a kiss" ought to have earned this CD a "contains explicit lyrics" warning sticker. Read them. And just in case you were in any doubt about what that voyage to the golden coast entails, Carolyn's singing makes it tremulously clear. Now I suppose I ought to pick out just a selection of highlights, or I'll be here all night. Honestly, I could stick a pin in the track listing at random and write up any one of the songs — every single one is exceptional and a treasure. However, I'll choose three of the strikingest, and then attempt to leave it at that.

1. "Man is for the woman made", a cheery little ditty, full of suggestive and sometimes downright phallic imagery. My previous exposure to Carolyn hadn't prepared me for the fabulous sense of humour on display here. The fun she's having is contagious. The fact that she has all that fun while retaining crystalline tone and flawless diction just makes it all the better.

2. From one extreme to the other. The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, a surprisingly operatic seven minute lament by the Virgin Mary. She glides from straight recitative to suddenly intricate and wide-ranging coloratura and back again, and is deeply moving all the while. A human, flesh-and-blood sort of Mary, whose cries of "Gabriel" come not from a placid saint but a desperate mother.

3. "From silent shades." Stiff as the competition is, this is still the most stunning piece on the album. It's also known as "Bess of Bedlam" — the mad song to beat all mad songs. Carolyn's performance is a tour de force, spellbinding and spooky; a riveting balance between comical craziness and the outpourings of a deeply distubed psyche. I shan't attempt any kind of useful description. About halfway through, though, come these lines:

"Did you not see my love as he pass'd by you?
His two flaming eyes, if he comes nigh you,
They will scorch up your hearts..."

and I can say that whatever a person might pay for this disc, it's worth it just to have heard the exquisitely terrifying way she sings them. I'm a bit of a mess again just thinking about it.

There, as promised, I'll draw to a close. I'm conquered. Carolyn is victorious.

Dear Santa

I figure it's the season for wishes, so I've been thinking about some of mine. Too late for this Christmas, of course; but Santa, if you're reading, keep this in mind for future reference.

From the record companies, I would like...

A solo disc by Patrizia Ciofi. Hasn't it been an awfully long time since the Vivaldi motets and Amor e gelosia? I think not baroque this time, though. I'm in the mood for 19th century French repertoire. Massenet (my guilty pleasure) and Berlioz — I know she's recorded Benvenuto Cellini, I'd love to hear her "Entre l'amour et le devoir" without buying the whole damn opera. Some Offenbach wouldn't go amiss and some Meyerbeer too, perhaps. I'll stretch the French theme to include Donizetti en français, too — Marie, obviously, since I'm still obsessed with her Fille, and Lucie's mad scene, which I did have on another computer once and which was odd and fabulous. 

From Cheryl Barker, maybe something in the vein of Renée's Signatures — big scenes and arias from the music she's her best in. I'd like some bits of the roles I regret missing her in — a healthy (or consumptive, for that matter) chunk of Violetta, Elvira's "Mi tradi", Salome's huge final monologue, Tatyana's Letter Scene, even Hanna Glawari... and then, just to indulge me, some things she's never (to my knowledge) sung — the Marschallin's Act I monologue, Elisabetta's "Tu che le vanita", Marietta's Lied, and - why not? - some Vitellia. It would certainly keep me going for a while. Failing that — Chandos, how about a Cheryl Barker Sings Great Operatic Arias for Opera in English? She seems to be a Chandos in-house diva these days, after all — Cio-Cio San, Katya Kabanova, Jenufa, Emilia Marty, Rusalka and counting...

Finally, a recital disc dream I've cherished for several years. Way back when I was first enchanted by Patricia Wright, I imagined her singing Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. I don't now them as well now as I used to, but something in the fragments I recall still seems like a beautiful fit. Actually it's more than that — the fragments I recall, I hear in my head in her voice. And when I listen to her sing Vaughan Williams or (sigh) Bax or even (different kind of sigh) Richard Strauss, this idea always re-occurs to me. They don't fill out a whole CD on their own, though, so I'd pair them — just to make for an all-out lyrical feast — with Golijov's Three Songs. Patricia's take on these is exquisite. I have a recording of them; the world at large deserves the same privilege.

Two other wishes I would have made are already to be fulfilled of their own accord. Natalie Dessay's Italian arias comes out next month; later in the year there's an all Handel recital from Glorious Joyce.

From Opera Australia, I'd like...

As always, Poulenc. Les dialogues des Carmélites seems the likeliest, so I'll make that my number one wish. Antoinette Halloran as Blanche de la Force? Elizabeth Whitehouse as Madame Lidoine? But not Hye-Seoung Kwon or Taryn Fiebig as Soeur Constance (it would inevitably be one of them) — just import Sarah Tynan, she's magical on the Chandos recording.

Bizet's Djamileh, as I've probably said before. Beats Carmen and Les pêcheurs de perles hands down, though it's only one act, so it needs a partner. How about Bizet's Le Docteur Miracle about which I know absolutely nothing except that it's also a one act opera. Viardot's Cendrillon has three acts, but only lasts an hour, so it might fit too. Not that I see Opera Australia leaping at an Obscure French Double Feature any time soon.

More Cheryl vehicles. I don't have to wish too hard for these, I suspect; they just happen. My hope at the moment is that the Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut currently listed on the calendar at the ICBA website with "Will be announced soon" instead of a company name will prove to be Opera Australia ventures. Especially the Butterfly — I'm besotted enough with her Cio-Cio San on film, but to see her in person, in the same beautiful production would make my little heart flutter even faster.

And for Pinchgut, I'd like...

The funding and resources to allow them to double, triple, quadruple or quintuple their season. Or more than that. I wouldn't dare to wish for specific operas from Pinchgut as they're much better at coming up with fabulous ideas than I ever could be. This year, Vivaldi; next year, CAVALLI. I'm very happy. The thought of future seasons has me salivating but oh, what a joy it would be not to have to wait a year between productions.

Back on earth, some slightly more possible wishes for the near future:

A Mimi so revelatory from Antoinette Halloran that I start to think I like La boheme; a shop which actually has Opera Rara's Entre Nous: Celebrating Offenbach in stock so I can finally buy it; good sound quality (despite this ominous post from Bardassa) at the Met cinema broadcasts; continued speedy access to NatalieTube, lately becoming KathleenTube; and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of music in my stocking next Tuesday.

Marie revisited

As fixation and obsession and all their cousins are very much the stock in trade of this blog, I'm returning again to Patrizia Ciofi's Marie in La fille du régiment. I have more to say, especially having watched her again this evening.

She's an extraordinary little creature. Off the top of my head, I can't think of another among my favourites who looks so downright strange when she sings. Quite frequently she actually looks like she's in pain. In repose, she's rather lovely, in her redheaded mouse kind of way, but the act of producing That Voice distorts her face something shocking. And yet she makes a virtue of this. She looks weird, but she looks interesting — and even without the sound on, the way she looks when she's singing makes it plainly evident that something important is happening. Adding to the appeal is the fact that her external contortions aren't reflected in what's going on internally; her face might be twisted but her voice isn't. Patrizia isn't always the easiest singer to watch but she's unfailingly exquisite to hear. Besides, there are moments when the unusual physicality of her singing only helps to heighten its intensity. In the final ensemble, for instance, she and Tonio reprise "Salut à la France" with as much fervour as they can muster. When Marie's high notes emerge from Patrizia, they look like a scream but they don't sound like one — they're just thrilling and passionate pristine high notes, with the force and fire of a scream, perhaps, but none of the ugliness or strain.

The other aspect of her performance which warms my heart is in a sense not really a part of her performance at all. It's the response from the audience. Without wishing too much to dismiss or denigrate the audiences of my adopted country, it disappoints me sometimes to find that rapturous applause, shouting, stomping and so on tend only to come in response to something overtly virtuosic. Loud and fast, in other words. Emma Matthews' Konstanze only received an exceptional ovation for "Martern aller Arten", though her gifts were (I thought) on lovelier display in "Traurigkeit". Frank Peter Zimmermann was incredible in the Berg Violin Concerto, but those who stood were only moved to do so by the preposterously difficult showpiece he gave as an encore. I've no doubt this is the case in many many other places too. But at the Teatro Carlo Felice, at least, the audience is just as enthusiastic and adoring in its response to Marie's fireworks-free "Il faut partir" as to her more coloratura laden moments. Yes, they go wild for Juan Diego's high Cs, but there's as much appreciation here for beauty and depth of expression as there is for vocal acrobatics. Tonio gets to sing the "hit" but come the final curtain, Marie is just as warmly received, if not more so — whether the same would be true here (now that Joanie's long past taking on the title role) I honestly don't know. Though, let's be fair — if Marie is Patrizia Ciofi, I don't imagine any audience could fail to go crazy for her every phrase.

My new favourite Puccini opera

Indirectly, Madama Butterfly was the opera which introduced me to opera. In 2003 it was to be my first ever real experience of live opera. I was not a fanatic at the time. It was in preparing for that production, with a nice Decca Puccini compilation, that I became one. But Butterfly itself was sort of incidental; the music made no great impression on me, Cio-Cio San didn't appeal, and I moved on and have never felt very tempted to return to it.

However, things change. Or rather, divas change them. I fooled you with the first paragraph; this is, in fact, pretty much another post about Cheryl Barker. Cheryl, who has filled the last few weeks with more Puccini than I'd had in the whole lifetime preceding them. Cheryl, who is such perfection in Puccini that I thrill to it as to Mozart or Handel. Cheryl, who has brought me back, in glorious fashion, to Madama Butterfly.

She's filmed it twice. Once in Robert Wilson blue, once in pretty pinks and reds for Opera Australia. I bought the latter and it's a revelation. I love the music. It fascinates me as much as La bohème bores me. Inspired, perhaps, by the exotic setting and highly charged plot, Puccini seems to create a far more multicoloured, expressive and evocative sound world in Japan than he did in Paris. Where La bohème plods, Butterfly enchants. At least it does me. That's helped by Moffatt Oxenbould's simple and beautiful production, one of the prettiest I've seen emerge from Opera Australia.

And I've had my preconceptions of Cio-Cio San smashed to smithereens. I've thought of her as irritatingly fragile, a boring, blank naive victim. Cheryl is none of those things. Her Cio-Cio San is bright and passionate, with a vivid sense of humour. Innocent, yes, but not an idiot. She's thought about life, made a decision and stuck with it. Most strikingly of all, she is, until everything falls apart, genuinely happy. When she smiles, she's not pathetic — you don't pity her, you just smile along with her, because her joy is infectious. Even her suicide, while devastating, is somehow a positive decision; neither that action, nor the woman herself, can be dismissed as Tragic Heroine and nothing more because whatever she is, she isn't tragic.

How much of this is down to Cheryl and how much to the character as written, I'm not sure. There was surprises for me in the libretto. Butterfly's resistance to Yamadori, for instance, is full of wit and humour, which I hadn't realised; I just expected virtuous vows of fidelity and childish obstinance. The unmistakeable Cheryl Barker Touch plays its part too, though, a special talent for intensity without cliché; she's thoroughly, thrillingly operatic without ever resorting to stock gestures or vocal tricks. Even "Un bel di" seems less of a warhorse in her care; she sings it simply and believably, to herself and to Suzuki, not as a party piece for the audience, all distant gazes and sweeping gestures. She's in outrageously good voice throughout, scaling the heights with glossy ease and fifty million expressive colours.

Pinkerton, by the way, isn't a revelation. He's a bastard. There are plenty of reviews which mention "unusually sympathetic" Pinkertons, but Jay Hunter Morris isn't one of them. Which is fine. True, he's convincingly remorseful in the final act but it isn't really enough to make up for what came before, nor is he three dimensional enough to care much about either way. Nicely sung for the most part, if a bit on the brutal side. Douglas McNicol's Sharpless is the Nicer American and a genuinely interesting character. Best of all (apart from Butterfly herself, obviously) is Ingrid Silvaeus' engaging and richly sung Suzuki, making the mother of all thankless mezzo roles seem in fact rather rewarding.

The question now is, is it Butterfly the character I've fallen for, or Butterfly the opera? Will my newfound affection endure with a different soprano in the role? I'm actually pretty sure it will. There was so much to love in this film, and while a lot of it was Cheryl based, a lot wasn't. I'll be testing the theory shortly; I've also bought a copy of Karajan's Butterfly on Decca, featuring my adored Mirella Freni and an all star cast. It's all looking rosy.

Pilar Lorengar

Is it possible Pilar Lorengar is the voice in my head? Following up on my love affair with her Prima Donna in Vienna, I've finally bought a second Pilar Lorengar CD, a nice double disc compilation. I'll ramble about the gorgeousness in a moment, but what's intriguing me is the familiarity of it all. Apart from the few tracks which are drawn from Prima Donna in Vienna, I've never heard any of this before, and yet this doesn't feel like a first time. Which is not to say I actually think I've heard any of it already, because I know that I haven't. But she makes so much sense in every aria, sings everything so properly and in such total accordance with my wishes (even wishes I didn't know I was wishing) that I feel she's in some way giving voice to ideas and conceptions I already had. As I say, it's as if she's the translation into real, listenable singing of the voice in my head. This isn't just some kind of elaborate bit of fawning; I'm not calling her my destined diva or my new favourite or any of that. It's really just a statement of, if not fact, something vaguely resembling it.

Anyway, let me move on to the gorgeousness. Of which, it has to be said, there is plenty. She may look like Sybil Fawlty but, thank god, the resemblance ends there. Disc One offers seventeen arias, each one a shiny, happy delight. The first half is all Puccini, with no boring fall into Generic Doomed Girl — Mimi is not Liu, Angelica is not Cio Cio San. She's all rounded vowels and delicious vibrato, robust but not overpowering. A full lyric who can power her way through Puccini and then turn in a totally refined and subtle Fiordiligi. Without the dynamic extremes or provocative sighs of, say, Monserrat Caballe or Kathleen Battle, her "Depuis le jour" is ecstatic and luxuriant just the same. "Glück, das mir verblieb" comes from Prima Donna in Vienna; I think it's my favourite track on both albums — it's pretty obvious that Korngold and I need to get to know each other better, and soon.

Disc Two is all Spanish — Granados, Falla and Turina, some of it with orchestra, some with Alicia de Larrocha at the piano. It shall have to be liveblogged as it's only just started. Granados' "La maja y el ruisenor" is radiant; "9 Tonadillas" now, and before she's even started, I love Alicia de Larrocha and these songs. This is bliss, she's so bright and so lovely. And so free of self indulgence, almost matter of fact about things, but expressive at the same time. Turns out she's not just my inner voice of opera but of Spanish songs too, even if I still don't really know what I mean by that. Just a weird sense that this is the original. Which makes essentially zero sense. This is a much more peaceful, simple kind of Spanish album than a few of the others I have (and adore — I'm thinking of Maria Bayo, Joyce DiDonato, parts of Kathy's Pleasures of their Company) but no less evocative for it. Indulge me in a sigh or three... unless this cycle finishes and she suddenly breaks into Rex Harrison sprechstimme for La maja dolorosa, all I foresee is more sweetness, light and perfection. So I think I'll finish this post on that assumption, stop liveblogging and return to just listening. This is lovely. I wish I could italicise that word more.

Mimi

Last night, once I could see things had gone the right way, I rid myself of election coverage and watched a video instead. Yes, a real live video cassette, which I bought at an op shop weeks and weeks ago for the princely sum of $2. It's La bohème, the famous Baz Luhrmann production for Opera Australia, starring David Hobson and Cheryl Barker.

Those last two words are, of course, the only reason I bought the video. La bohème is not an opera I have much affection for, I'm afraid, even if that makes me cold and heartless. I hadn't heard it all the way through for quite a long time, but watching it last night did nothing to change my mind. The only part which really gets to me — by which I mean, the music affects me as much as the drama — is the final scene. Mimi's "Sono andati? Fingevo di dormire" is my favourite bit of writing in the whole piece, and the remainder of the opera holds on to some of that genuine appeal. Otherwise, I'm afraid, I'm bored.

Not entirely, though. I'm unmoved by most of the music, but Cheryl is another story. She is now, and she was back then, too. From the first glimpse of her, she's captivating. You could almost believe the ridiculous speed with which the two of them fall in love, because, after all, what is there for Rodolfo to think about? There she is, and she's just a vision (all be it a slightly sickly one) of loveliness. And so interesting. When I watch Cheryl I always have the sense that I'm missing something — she's so alive, so dramatically aware and so detailed in her gestures that I feel that no matter how hard I concentrate, I just won't ever be able to take all of her in. But just trying to is rewarding enough. She's every inch an actress, a real one; and every one of those inches is, thank god, a singer as well. I'm in love with her voice, so instantly recognisable, so very Cheryl. A dark, slender thread which, just at the point where you think it might fray or snap, blossoms and blazes instead. I don't know how it is she manages to speak and sing all at once but there it is. She also coughs beautifully.

Oh, I could go on forever. But won't. Enough simply to thank the gods of opera once again for Cheryl and for my change of heart, perhaps the most dramatic I've experienced. It's just unfathomably fortunate that I saw the light in time for the upcoming season, Opera Australia's Year of Cheryl. Arabella, Desdemona and Emilia Marty, all in one year and all practically at my back door. She might just bankrupt me and I don't care a bit. 

Discovery & rediscovery

Very slow on the uptake, but this afternoon I listened to La Cieca's "Ernani involami" vocal ID quiz. I'm useless at these so I didn't even try. I got the two most obvious (Maria and Joanie) and that was all. But there were some thrills there too. I don't think I've ever heard Anita Cerquetti before — not that a few seconds of Verdi exactly counts, but it made an impression just the same. Antonietta Stella is fabulous. Another one I've never heard. And somebody I've always had the wrong idea about. Because although in theory I've known what kind of soprano she was, her name seems so soubrettish that I always imagine a little, Zerlina-ish sort of voice. Which, of course, it ain't. However, the happiest moment came I think about halfway through. The most glorious noise erupted from my tinny laptop speakers. And I thought: I don't know who you are, but I need you in my life.

Who was it? Anna Moffo, of course. Already in my life. Thank heaven for that.

I like being reminded of why I adore the singers I adore. I had a moment on Friday, too. I played the second disc of an EMI 3-CD Lucia Popp compilation, from the "Great Moments of..." series. The first half is all Mozart, most of it from the CD she did with Leonard Slatkin and so very familiar to me. But then all of a sudden there was her "O zittre nicht", from the Zauberflöte she recorded (fresh from the dentist, her mouth still numb) with Klemperer (Col. Klink's father, of course) way back in the beginning. And just as she began, I realised that I'd never ever heard it before. Stunning doesn't do her justice. I was overwhelmed.

This seems to be a trend — my newest favourites lately seem all to be, in fact, old favourites. Maria has brought me back to Cecilia. I've revisited her Rossini CDs and am staggered all over again by how phenomenal they really are — especially when you think they're recorded at an age when most mezzos are probably still in training. I listened to Ruth Ann Swenson's Con amore (a formative recording in my operatic heritage) last night for the first time in too long and she is as immaculate and charming as ever. More so, even. Once, foolishly, I wondered if she wasn't perhaps a little bland. I was an idiot. I'm over it now. What she offers is elegance, charged (but not swamped) by emotion. Pearly perfection.

And Barbara. I fall a little bit deeper in love with Barbara every time I hear her these days. At long last I was able to hear some of her disc of American songs. It wasn't really enough — I was working, I was in and out of the room, I only heard it in bits and pieces and missed the second half. Still it was enough to make me sigh "Barbara" five or six times; enough to remind me that I'm duty bound to own it. For the Emily Dickinson songs if for nothing else. 

But for all this reaffirmation of long time love, there is still novelty. And today's mini revelation was the latest clip posted by La Cieca — Margaret Price in an excerpt from Lulu. Margaret, of course, is excellent but what's piqued my interest is the music. I liked Wozzeck a lot the one time I heard it; I've always meant to go back to it, but never actually have. And I've always meant to introduce myself to Lulu and once again, never actually have. That excerpt is, believe it or not, the only piece of Lulu I've ever heard and clearly that's not good enough.

So if you've made it this far in this rambling post, and you're the kind who likes to recommend: advise me on my best choice for a first Lulu. Or, for that matter, my best choice for a second, ninth or twenty-first Lulu. Of course, knowing me, it may still be months before I do anything about it, but I'd appreciate recommendations just the same. 

Angel ever bright and fair

I haven't written about her for a while, I don't think. Even if I have, she's always due a tribute or twenty and as one of the blogging faithful, I ought to write one. I speak of Kathleen Battle. Despite the legions of new obsessions and fleeting fancies which I've picked up over the years, I can never forget my roots. I could list twenty or thirty sopranos who are my favourites now. In the days when I could only tell you one, though, that one was Kathleen. And now I find that nothing has changed much. The more I listen to her, the more I'm persuaded that this really, truly is the most beautiful voice I've heard in my life, and will continue to be so.

Look, I know that not everybody finds Kathleen easy to love, whether for artistic, sonic or temperamental reasons. And that's fine. But I find her overwhelmingly easy to love and to forgive. Somewhere in the universe, she has imperfections. On the recordings I own, as far as I'm concerned, she does not. Take, for instance, her Salzburg Festival recital with James Levine, recorded in 1984. Could the four Fauré songs she performs ever be sung more perfectly or more beautifully? Ever? Before you throw Emmy Ameling or Felicity Lott at me — I know. They're gorgeous too. But Kathleen is something else; at least she is for me. When she's singing I can't imagine a voice more beautiful; I also can't imagine any other object or sensation more beautiful.

And what about Pleasures of Their Company, with Christopher Parkening? True, I was brought up on this CD, it's in my bloodstream a bit. Still, even if I had it in me to be vaguely impartial, I'm sure I'd be besotted with this recital just the same. Reviewing the track listing, I can't single anything out for especial rapture, because every single title makes me want to rave. I don't have the CD any more. It's still in Dunedin. But I can hear it all in my head, which just makes me miss it even more. And I was going to say, "especially the spirituals" but then I remember her "Come again, sweet love doth now invite" which made an impression on me even when I was nine years old.

Baroque Duet, with Wynton Marsalis. Live at Carnegie Hall, with Margo Garrett. Two discs of Mozart arias. A Handel recital. Grace, the sacred arias disc most likely to convert a heathen like me. Dream after dream after dream after dream. And then, of course, there's her Semele. If you've never heard it, you've never lived. Nobody could be more ideally cast, and I mean that far far beyond the obvious "Myself I shall adore" remarks; and besides, who wouldn't adore her, when she sounds like that?

Singers like Kathleen are the reason I have a blog. She's so beautiful I think, if I don't express this somewhere, somehow, I will burst. Too incredible for me to cope with alone, so I have to share. And evangelise. Whether it has a shot at doing so or not, I do want this post to cause you to go and listen to Kathleen Battle, whether for the first time or the millionth. But that's not compulsory. At least I've had my say, and expressed yet again my overflowing adoration. She has enchanted me for something like fifteen years now, and I don't think I can say that about anybody else. I had Kathleen (and Kathleen had me) even before I had opera (and opera had me) and it is the most magical thing to find that, after all these years, it isn't just loyalty or affection which keeps me tied to her. I stay in love with Kathleen because she is spectacularly, impossibly, world-beatingly beautiful. And I pledge devotion eternal. Nothing changes, ever.

Maria

Several years ago, Cecilia Bartoli's Chanson d'amour introduced me fleetingly to Pauline Viardot Garcia, a woman who has fascinated me ever since. However, it seems that all along, it was Pauline's big sister that Cecilia really had her eye on. Her new recital disc, Maria, pays tribute to nineteenth century mezzo/soprano superstar Maria Malibran, and marks the culmination of a long time passion and obsession on Cecilia's part. She has even assembled a travelling Malibran museum, so I understand; the large format special edition of Maria comes packaged with a catalogue of her collection.

Even those who can't stand her would surely have to concede that Cecilia is, if nothing else, unique. Eccentric, too. These adjectives work both ways; but for those of us who adore her, they're the reason we do adore her. She has the imagination to conceive of her off the wall projects, the commitment and the clout to see them through, and the innate musicality to do them justice on record. Her ventures into obscure repertoire might sometimes come in gimmicky packaging — the photos in the notes for Maria are, I admit, quite hilarious — but her musical inquisitiveness is genuine. Her singing will never be universally swooned over, but it is special and distinctive enough always to be swooned over somewhere.

I fell in love with Cecilia for the first time when I was nine years old. I fell for her the second time when I was eighteen and opera was moving out of the background and taking over my life — at the birth of that passion, she was my first diva obsession. I was irrationally, overwhelmingly enchanted, and every note which dropped from her lips was perfection to me. And I loved her for her personality too. She was charming, adorable, sincere and sweet. In our household she was christened, on more than one occasion, The Best Person in the World — an epithet generally reserved for Lucia Popp. But you know, things change. I kept loving Cecilia but became a little less irrational about her singing. I began to understand a few of the negative comments. As a person, I've never stopped loving her; but recently I've not been so fond of her singing. I listened to Opera Proibita and I gave it a rave review. It deserved all that I wrote, but some of it sprang from loyalty rather than actual musical response. Dr B. put it best — "spectacular but cold". I think I've felt the same; since that review I've not heard it more than a handful of times. Troubling as it was, I'd come to feel that her present day voice just wasn't any longer one I could feel that fervent diva worship love for. I still loved her, but I was sticking with the past and not the future. News reached me occasionally of her progress into soprano repertoire and, despite enthusiastic reviews, it didn't warm my heart; this wasn't my Cecilia anymore, and I didn't feel that old "I wish I'd heard her sing that" sting.

Until Maria. She is back, my Cecilia, and I am happier to see her than I can express. Is it a change in her, or in me? Both? The repertoire perhaps. Her Vivaldi album was brilliant, the Salieri impressive if occasionally a bit abrasive. But of all her rarities discs, not one has excited or touched me as Maria has. Her return to bel canto marks the return to my heart of the Cecilia I fell in love with — both the first time and the second. Her infectious joy in singing, her perception and insight and, yes, her VOICE. I thought I'd lost it, or at least my love for it, for good. But it is back, if indeed it ever left — and even the recordings which earlier didn't appeal are woven into the spell.

The disc itself is bursting with treasures and pleasures. Comedy, tragedy, novelty songs and prayers. Rarities and world premiere recordings are mingled with cornerstones of bel canto. In Hummel's "Air à la Tirolienne avec variations" she yodels; in Garcia's flamenco filled "Yo que soy contrabandista" she shows off her flamboyant Spanish side. There is a "Rataplan" by Malibran herself in which those characteristic rolled "rrrr"s, familiar to fans and un-fans alike, are even further exaggerated, to an extent either irritating or completely engaging, depending which side you take. Even in my darkest, doubting days, I could never deny that nobody expresses utter joy quite like Cecilia — here, you can hear without out a doubt how totally thrilled she is to be singing what she's singing, and if you've any kind of a heart, that feeling will rub off. The same goes for the recital's serious moments. Her "Ah, non credea mirarti" is one of the most moving I have heard, sung with a pure, limpid sadness and no lachrymose overacting, a quality which makes the joyous cabaletta all the more meaningful. The scena from Pacini's Irene which opens the CD is a tour de force on the level of her stunning early Rossini recordings, bright-toned, mellifluous and captivating, with a resonant lower register, gleaming top and cascading coloratura — no machine-gun here, believe me.

In Malibran's footsteps, she fearlessly tackles music for mezzo and for soprano and sails through beautifully. The selections which gave me pause on first seeing the tracklist — Amina's aria, Elvira's "O rendetemi la speme...Vien, diletto" and yes, even her eerily hushed "Casta diva" — removed all my doubts the moment I heard them and left me quite breathless with joy. Are all her renditions typical? Of course they're not, but then, when has anything about Cecilia ever been typical?

From start to finish I am utterly taken with this CD. It's one thing to adore an unusual recording by a singer whose every note you already worship on principle; another to have adoration re-awakened by that recording. Maria is a magical creation. And this time when I say it, it's not just loyalty and affection which speak, but a passionate response on every level, both personal and musical. There is nobody like Cecilia, and nobody else who could (or would) have thought of this, let alone brought it to such glorious fruition. For that she should at the very least be commended and admired; but more importantly, she should be heard. The concept is attractive, but its execution is what really matters — and it's magnificent.

Autre part

Fine. Warhorse after warhorse, Turandot after Turandot, then I leave the country and look — NZ Opera is doing Jenufa. Well, never mind; I got to hear Cheryl sing it so woe is not exactly me. Anyway, I am very pleased indeed to see NZ Opera producing something which is (for them) not exactly standard repertoire — let us hope it is a sign of things to come. Naturally it's balanced out by the biggest warhorse of them all, La bohème. Fair enough.

What does strike me as slightly odd about their 2008 Bohème, however, is that both Mimì and Musetta will be sung by Australian sopranos. Now, I'm all for opera-as-international-experience. Of course I am. But does the current generation of New Zealand singers really not contain a single soprano capable of singing either of these bread and butter roles at that level? I find it difficult to imagine that this is the case. Still, I'm pleased for New Zealand audiences that they'll have what the NZ Opera website refers to, slightly cannibalistically, as "their first taste" of both Antoinette Halloran and Tiffany Speight. The two Stellas — Tiffany was cast for Streetcar until (so I believe) health issues forced her to withdraw and Antoinette took over. I'm looking forward very much to Antoinette's Bohème here, and Tiffany was a lovely Susanna. Oh and one further thing — I can't help but hope that at some point the promotional image for La bohème is changed. Their frail blonde Mimì is very sweet, but Antoinette's who everyone will actually see, and she's even more photogenic. 

In truth, though, I'd say the potentially starriest cast for NZ Opera next year is that for their touring production of Hansel und Gretel. Ana James sings Gretel and Anna Pierard is Hansel — two rising New Zealand singers who I'm sure will bowl their regional audiences over. They'd bowl cosmopolitan audiences over too. Good move, too, casting Helen Medlyn as the Witch. I said once, having heard her sing a couple of seduction arias, "If this was temptation, it was of the gingerbread house variety", so now everyone's happy.

And meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Natalie adorata opened in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met. The (blog) reviews aren't all in love with her, but I still am. And I do hope that everyone who is (totally justifiably, don't misunderstand me) ambivalent nevertheless appreciates how mindblowingly fortunate they are to have the opportunity for such ambivalence. What luxury, what privilege, to be at leisure to only sort of like Natalie (and then maybe go and see Anna Netrebko sing Juliette a few nights later). Ma foi.

However, my jealousy has been assuaged just a bit by the glorious wonders of modern technology. Thanks to, in order, Peter Gelb's new multimedia Met, NatalieTube (the videos seem to have disappeared now, but know, operatennisfan, that I will love you for all of my days), KeepVid, Videora and my brand new and very pretty little silver iPod Nano (whose name is Mirella, incidentally), within a couple of days of the Lucia prima, I had Natalie's mad scene to watch on the train to work. I know I belong to a generation which is meant to be rather blasé about such technological wonders, but I'm still blown away by what's possible.

Of course there was never any possibility that I would be ambivalent about Natalie. She's my diva, my brain doesn't work that way for her. She's a miracle by definition. So hardly surprising, then, that I loved her, but I did. So much. What I especially love is that when her Lucia speaks to an invisible Edgardo, her words are not the distracted rantings of somebody on madwoman autopilot, but rather a palpable hallucination in which she believes completely. She sings "Alfin son tua" just as she would if he were there and the crowd wasn't. She's so small and so disturbing and so tragic and so perfect. And I suppose while the way she sings isn't for everyone, oh, it is for me. The disappearance of the flute cadenza is a genius touch too. Not sure about the shot in the arm but as for the coloratura and the ornaments it supposedly elicits — yes please. Natalie's reign in my heart continues.