Colorful Horton Plaza

Pete Wilson had his faults, but he also did many good things for San Diego, including revitalizing downtown area with the construction of this psychedelic Horton Plaza. One just can't get bored looking at the place.

For first time visitors, though, this place can be maddening. You can't find a simple way to get from one level to the next and end up circling the entire complex a few times before finally getting to the floor you want (there are 2 elevators, but they're tucked away on the east side of the building). Once you've familiarized yourself with the place, though, there are many benches and hidden corners where you can perch in while amusing yourself watching the newcomers do their circling around bit.

The mall is owned by Westfield. The newly renovated Balboa Theater isn't a part of the complex, though. The music in the clip is the air-check recording of Vesselina Kasarova singing Mozart's Lied, an Chloe (KV 524) from her January 2006 concert with the pianist Charles Spencer... at Vienna Concert House.

Vesselina Kasarova: Passionate Arias

I have been spending the last week in an acoustic bliss. Vesselina Kasarova's newest solo CD, Passionate Arias (on RCA Red Seal label), arrived in the mail... and it is even better than I had expected.

Those who are familiar with the state of the opera today probably already know her as one of the greatest Rossini and Mozart singers of her generation... and lately of Baroque music, especially in the trouser roles (male roles played and sung by female singers) due to that fascinatingly androgenic voice and look that she has. So, looking at the track list on this CD and one may be justifiably skeptical about the repertoire it present: dramatic vamps from the late Romantic Period: Principessa di Bouillon from Adriane Lecouvrer, Azucena from Il trovatore, Eboli from Don Carlo, Ioanna from Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans, Santuzza from Cavalleria Rusticana, Bizet's Carmen, and Dalila from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila.

See... these days, the Baroque-Mozart-Bel Canto repertoire and the Italian-French Dramatic repertoire are sung by 2 rather different voice types. The BMBC singers are like the flight-footed sprinters. They have lighter voice of large range and incredible speed that can cope with all the virtuoso demand of the music. The IFD singers, on the other hand, have larger and fuller voice that can deliver the drama better while being able to pierce through a much larger and louder orchestra. Kasarova's voice is unusual... falling somewhere in between the two. It is sizable, full, and darkly colorful enough to make you dream about her in Verdi operas, but it is also a heck of a fast-moving voice (when she does virtuoso bravura aria, one fancies her as a heavy metal rocker.... check this clip out and see how exciting a bit of opera singing can be!). But, at any rate, she's spent the last 20 years of her professional career singing exclusively Baroque-Mozart and Bel Canto music, so a jump into the heavy dramatic repertoire is at the very least interesting.

Listening to the CD, all doubts are scorched right off the my mind from the first track to the last. Kasarova is so terrifyingly good that I'm having a hard time writing a review this CD... I'll just say for now that those people who like to go around clips of her on Youtube to say that her voice had been ruined or uglified or whatever really haven't got their ears screwed on straight. Either that or they don't know what the hell they're mouthing off about at all. Her voice is bigger and warmer than before, and with an even more alluringly dark tint to the basic tone that really adds to her already considerable ability to breathe new life into whatever she sings.

 
Yes, I've seen a negative review of it on Die Welt online. To that I'll say, that all opera fans will likely already have preconceptions about the operatic characters appearing on this CD... and likely an ideal singer of Azucena (Podles?), Eboli (Baltsa?), Santuzza (Obratsova?), and Carmen (Resnik? Domashenko?) firmly fixed in their mind. Experiencing this CD will likely cause one to choose: do you stubbornly renounce Kasarova's portrayal as 'mannered' for being her own woman who might not fit snugly into your own previously conceived idea of her, or will you allow yourselves to learn more about this surprisingly complex character whose feelings and convictions are just as strong as your own?

Kasarova is the singer who threads fervishly on the line that separates pure singer from pure actor. And though she will occassionally cross the line and emits off some sounds that make you go 'Ugh!', more often than not she is spectacularly successful at pulling off the illusion that sung speech is what people do to communicate in real life and that it is the proud and jaded (though really quite a bit more beautiful than you'd have expected) Azucena herself who is recounting her mother's unjust burning at the stake to you as if it had happened only 10 minutes ago. From the vengeful Princess of Bouillon to the repentent Princess Eboli to the rebellious-bird-like Carmen and the mesmerizingly seductive Dalila... 

No, Kasarova doesn't just simply sing anything. She is much more than just a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice. Hers is a voice that carries a strong and yet sensitive character. One that enables the many shades of humanity that compels you to sympathize with her - knowing full well that the character is a murderess or a seductress.


Here's a sneak peek at the final track on the CD. It is uncannily dramatically effective how she connects her first pass at 'a voler dan tes bras' to 'Ah! répond à ma tendresse' with that gorgeously controlled diminuendo... and then accentuate the end of the phrase with those chest tones.

Then on her last pass of the same bridge she does the conventional little 'break' between the verses and smoothens the pass through the lower passagio because she knows by then that Samson is now hooked. He isn't going anywhere and will tell her what she wants... she just has to keep him transfixed). Kasarova doesn't sing any note just for the sake of sounding it. She does it in a certain way because what is coming out of her is meaning something. That's what separate a real artist from just singers!

And... the Dalila tracks aren't even the most impressive ones on this CD. Kasarova is accompanied by Maestro Giuliani Carrera and the Munich Radio Orchestra. The Serbian tenor Zoran Todorovich appears on 2 tracks (as Jose in the dance scene from Carmen and as Samson in Dalila's final aria).

So... you know what to do after glimpsing what a tour de force recital this CD is. Amazon has it for a very reasonable price!

A visit to the Torrey Pines Gliderport

Thanks to a tip from my friend Georg, I hopped on a bus north to La Jolla yesterday to check out the La Jolla Historical Society's event at the Torrey Pines Gliderport. They started leisurely late since the forecast called for potential morning rain, but when the clouds were doing a Houdini act (aided by the wind), a few paragliders and hang-gliders came out to play.

It turned out to be quite a gorgeous day! I snapped a few photos and put them together with some operatic music (though nothing tragic happens in it. Promise!).

Science makes me feel lucky (and giddy, for good measure)

It is easy to take the value of science for granted when all you do each day is to uncritically use its byproducts without stopping to think about what makes such a technology possible in the first place.

So... it is refreshing to me to watch the clip above every so often and be reminded of just how far we have come and just how much knowledge the human species has accumulated over the years. How lucky I am to live in the days when I have the ability to climate-control my living space so that I can sit nice and cool in an air-conditioned room in the dead of summer, sipping on a ice-cold Crush's finest orange root beer while the sun gives its best effort to sterilize my roof and lawn. How nice is it to be able to walk outside in the cold Midwestern winter, crunching through the layers of snow for hours without getting frost-bitten because of today's high tech clothing that traps body heat while allowing perspiration and keeping out moisture... all without weighing a ton.

It's a great comfort to live in a time when I can take over-the-counter medicine for minor aches and pain, and when I can be mostly certain that I'll be able to walk out of a doctor's office alive (they don't just bleed you to death as a way of fixing everything anymore) after allowing him and his colleagues a good look at what my internal organs are doing without having to be cut open. Coming down with an illness that has neurological symptoms doesn't immediately causes you to be accused of witchcraft and liable to follow the end path of Joan of Arc and the other 'heretics' that got either burned or stoned to death nowadays... well.. in most places of the world, that is.

And, get this, I can make my favorite opera singers sing for me all day long... over and over again at my command. All it takes is to hit a little button on the stereo and - voila! - endless acoustic bliss. It a luxury many people who are a lot more talented and deserving than I am never had the chance to enjoy. Mozart could only hear his music performed when someone paid for the musicians to do it for him.... live. The rest of the time he just had to do his best to re-create it in his memory. And he could only hear the musicians that he could travel to see live performances of while I have heard... or at least glimpsed at (since recordings sometimes can't capture a performance the way it really sounds in live setting) many great musicians and actors and other sorts of performance artists via CD, DVD, television and internet broadcasts that I wouldn't be able to ever experience in person.

Scientists don't know everything. Of course not. But they are the first to admit it and to keep working hard in order to know more and more. The incomplete knowledge we have today is a whole lot better than what we had a century ago (and beyond that). I just don't get it when some folks seem so keen on just dismissing this massively useful though 'incomplete' knowledge for its 'imperfection' in order to argue for some theology that offers nothing more than assurances it can't deliver. And I don't understand why some religious people are still fighting to discredit a scientific theory like evolution by natural selection without even knowing what the theory addresses and states (and not states) in the first place... all in their quest to pit the science against their religious teaching.

"The word of God is the creation we behold, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man -----

In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation."

- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

A look around the Maritime Museum of San Diego

Being decidedly not affluent at the moment, I wouldn't spend $17 on a non-essential... unless it is for a great and rare opera that I couldn't hope to ever catch live again in many many years or for a once a year tour aboard the impressive historic ships of the Maritime Museum in downtown San Diego.



The star attraction here is, of course, the Star of India... today's oldest ship still in active service. Above is a short-ish slide show of still photos of most of the ships (the Californian was, sadly, off limit when I dropped in). The music in the background is Sails by Chet Atkins.

You can actually get into the museum to see all these ships for $15, but adding $3 would also enable you to go on a cruise around the middle part of the San Diego bay on the little Pilot. A good deal!