Having been born too late to have the chance to experience the likes of Kirsten Flagstad, Birgit Nilsson, Astrid Varnay, Lotte Lehmann, Maria Callas, Giulietta Simionato, and even Marilyn Horne live on the stage has many sucky aspects to it. But I can't complain too much.... After all, I live in the time of Vesselina Kasarova, a stage chameleon of operatic proportion if there ever is one.
This is she, in three different operas: Offenbach's La belle Helene, Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. The clip is a bit out of sync, I'm afraid. The uploading process seems to have caused the audio to lag behind a little. But, anyhow, if I hadn't told you, would you have realized that it is the same woman in each of these different roles?
2 comments:
Bonjour Smorgy,
For the moment, I give my preference to "La Belle Hélène". But anyway, it is very difficult to say what is the part of the singer and what the part of the composer.
You must have not only a perfect ear but also a good eye sight: I do not remark any discrepancy between sound and picture.
I always regret those small blogger videos. Do you trade size for sound quality or is there any other reason for not choosing YouTube??
Georg
Bon soir Georgy,
That La belle Helene DVD from Zurich Opera is one of my all time favorite recordings indeed. It's both, I think... Offenbach is rather underrated as a composer. He was a genius for melody. Though, I think one would be hard pressed to come up with a more erotic-voiced Helene than Kasarova in 1997.
My jaws still drop when I listen to her Helene... the voice is like freshly molten lava and the way she colors it and gives it a little vibrato at opportunistic moment... That's x-rated singing without being vulgar - if I've ever heard such a thing. ;o)
O, I have been uploading more with the blogger tool rather than using Youtube because the latter has this wacky tendency to make the video and the audio go out of sync in the uploading process. :o( I think most of the time the video falls behind... and the longer the clip is, the more behind it gets. It's too bad the blogger video can't be seen in full-screen mode indeed. Maybe the site-techs are working on that? (hoping... hoping)
Thanks for stopping by. Hope the week is going well in France!
Smorgy :o)
Post a Comment