A nocturnal stroll through downtown San Diego

Ever since I made the fateful decision to work night shift at a local nursing home to fund my college education many years ago, my biological clock has never been the same.

So, here is a musical slide-show of what I see when I go out and walk around downtown San Diego this time of year. I'm afraid I use an amateur camera... and kept the flash off (which was quite a pain since I'm not that good at keeping my hands still these days). The photos look brighter than it really is... and the clouds (which is actually what the locals here call 'marine layer') don't look that devilish to the naked eye.



Downtown is pretty heavily patrolled by the local police... And on a week night like this, it is pretty quiet by the time midnight comes around. I took off from home in East Village area and stopped at Albertson's store to pick up some snack before heading west (toward the bay) through the northern part of the Gaslamp Quarter and the Core-Columbia District (along Broadway).

You really don't run into as many homeless folks while walking around town at night... Though I still did manage to run into this wacky dude who seems to find a new camera cellphone in the trash bin every week (I've been running into him walking around town for years now). Broadway west of 4th Avenue is really quite nice at night, though I tend to stay to the south of it (made a brief excursion for the sake of getting a shot of the Civic Theater, home of the San Diego Opera, though).

One thing about walking around the Columbia District (where the tall buildings are) and the Embarcadero (waterfront) at night, though, is that they actually let freight trains thru... And those thing are REALLY long! I had the appropriately bad timing to arrive at Santa Fe Depot as one was passing to the south.... for 15 minutes. I finally got to cross to the Embarcadero side of the track at 11:15PM and was quite surprised to catch 2 planes landing at Lindberg Field (San Diego International Airport) since I thought they have a no-flight between 10PM-6AM policy.

The downtown bank of the San Diego bay doesn't boast any beach, but a long concrete hiking/cycling path called the Embarcadero Promenade. It is lined with artsy modern sculptures... well.. I don't know if I should call them that since they are made of various sorts of materials and some are really pretty flimsy. Most are pretty amusing, though, like that giant octopus you see by Anthony's Fish Grotto in this video. Some are more... serious (?) like that bronze Pele not far from the Maritime Museum (where all those historic tall ships are). During the day it is a busy bay with all sorts of ships (row boats, canoes, fishing boats, water taxi, bay cruisers, sail yacht, cruise ships, navy cutters, etc) roaming about... not to mention the speed boats that patrol North Island Naval Air Station on the opposite bank. During the night, though, it is beautifully still and quiet (I'm sure the Navy speed boats are still doing their patrolling, but they stick pretty close to their shore that you can't really hear them from the downtown side).

Anyhow... if there is anything in this city that can remind me of the sense I get staring out into the grassy plain of eastern Missouri at night it is sitting along the Embarcadero Promenade and gazing over the dark water of the San Diego Bay. After a while you can even see the water birds flying about noiselessly and you wonder why time ever matters at all.

Sing it as written (by whom?)!

One of the things that I love about scientists and real scholars is that they know what their assumptions are when they discuss issues and they are generally not prone to having a black and white view on issues that are essentially gray. Many lay folks I interact with don’t even recognize it when they are making an assumption... let alone knowing what the assumption is.

What I’ll address today, though, are the opera enthusiasts who go around condemning anyone who doesn’t perform their part in the opera ‘exactly as written on the music score’... Come scritto-ists, I call them (‘come scritto’ is Italian for ‘as written’). They operate under the mistaken notion that what the opera composers throughout the ages had written down on the score always represent the exact music that they had in mind and are carefully preserved as is from the day they were committed to paper to this... And that any performance deviation from what is written on the score is disrespectful and would be disapproved of by the composer if he were around today. They couldn’t be more wrong...

While it is generally true that today’s composers tend to commit every details of how they would like their opera to be performed on the score, that has not always been the case. The further one looks into the past, the sparser the score becomes. The surviving score of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, for example, only has the basic vocal line accompanied by a bass continuo... And that’s it. The rest of the performance just has to be re-orchestrated and arranged by the conductor. Many different versions of the score for an opera can exist in the periods since then (up to modern time) and not every details is written on the score until Rossini started the practice around 1815 (when he realized that the performance style was changing and he wanted to preserve the style of his days on paper).

“When Western music had only entered its development, when nothing had yet been written down, the composer and the performing musician were identical. Music was simply improvised in public, as we would say today. The separation between these two functions, i.e that of the composer and that of the performer, developed gradually as a result of the devising of more elaborate means of notation to describe a composition in a concrete way, and the desire of the composers to give their works a definitive form.

Only recently has the absolute separation been reached. Musicians today ordinarily have no knowledge of the art of composition; they have a downright slavish relationship to the written music they receive from the composer. Their task is simply to perform the compositions of others as perfectly as possible in terms of technique and expression. The precise designation of all the ornaments which were to be played, a compositional practice which began in the late Baroque period was initially regarded by musicians as a degrading insult. During the Middle Ages, composers were performing musicians and almost every musicians was also a composer. In any case, every good musician had to master the rules of composition and improvise, and so it was taken for granted that the latest form of a work would emerge only on the occasion of its current performance.”
- Nikolaus Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialog (translated by Mary O’Neill), P. 9-10

On top of that, the surviving autograph manuscripts often don’t completely agree with the distributed printed score (which can come in many different versions), and one can’t use the same rationale in ones’ articulation of which version is the most ‘authentic’ for different composers (while you can generally trust the Rossini autograph score to represent perhaps his final thought on it - if there was ever such a thing considering his penchant for music-swapping and fine-tuning to fit specific productions - rather than the printed score since he didn’t have much control over the printing and reproduction process, Puccini was a lot more involved in the printing and proof-reading process so that often time the printed score is more accurate to his last musical intention than the autograph score is).

“Copies of the full score and printed orchestral parts were prepared quickly. They had to be, since prompt fulfillment of business contracts depended on it. When gross errors existed in the model from which this material was prepared, *Ricordi’s copyist made marks in the margin. Sometimes corrections were introduced by the composers, but most of the time copyists did their best to interpret the notation, glossing over lacunae or ambiguous signs. In theory, a manuscript score and parts would go off to a theater and come back to Ricordi unchanged; in practice, changes were regularly introduced, often by well-intentioned musicians of a later generation unable to understand or interpret properly what they had in front of them. Some changes were incorporated into later scores and parts, though not into the autograph manuscripts (which could be used for archival reference).

It soon became impossible to tell where a composers’ notation ended and a copyist’s or an orchestral musician’s began.”
- Philip Gossett, Divas and Scholars, P. 104

(*Casa Ricordi is the leading publisher of musical scores)
Also, how practical is this notion of always having to absolutely stick to what the score says when the performance conditions today can be so different from those that existed when the music was composed? Richard Wagner orchestrated his post-Ring operas with the precise acoustic of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus in mind (click here to see just how special the acoustic of that particular opera auditorium is). It doesn't make sense to stick to the same instrumental requirement when the opera is performed at a different venue that doesn't boast the same sort of voice-friendly acoustic while expecting to hear the same result!

And neither does it make sense to impose what today's popular notion of 'stylistic tradition' on performances of opera is on works from a different period where the audience of the days had different expectations than what we do today. I suspect that had Händel been able to expect total attention from the opera audience of the Baroque period (who did not sit quietly in a darkened hushed hall for 5 hrs to hear every note of his music but loitered about socializing and eating in a seatless and well lighted auditorium), then he would have gone for a vastly more concise and dramatic route in his composition... with less room for virtuoso show-off moments (it took spectacular vocal acrobatics from the castrato singers to attract and hold the attention of that distracted an audience). Had the bel canto composers and audience expected to hear their singing actors (after all, opera has ALWAYS been a musical theater art form and never just a concert one) singing in seamlessly beautiful tone through out their vocal range, then they wouldn't have composed music that was clearly meant to exploit not only floridity but also vocal colors, often indulging in leaps and scales that require greater than 2 full octave of singing range from the performers.

One doesn't serve the opera's composer when one blindly cries for a strict adhesion to the score without first asking 'which score and by whom?' and knowing about its' musicological problems. Often time, what a lay opera fan considers to be 'stylistically correct' is really nothing more than his own preference of it (usually based on his first hearing of the piece). Many operas of the Baroque and bel canto periods suffered from such a prolonged lack of performance that we no longer have a sure knowledge of what the applicable performance traditions of the original periods actually were.

This, of course, doesn't mean that any sort of variation or improvisation is fair game when performing non-modern operas. It just means that it is not any more virtuous of one to deify every note that appears on the printed music score than it is to totally corrupt what is on it. Since when has going to an opera became such an exercise in musicology? What is really served when the purpose of an opera is subverted in the name of its pedagogy? Even in the court of law, wise judges are always mindful of the spirit in which a law was written (that cannot always be accurately represented in the letters of it) and allow a room for judicial judgment.

Surely, in a performance art, whose purpose it is to communicate a story to its audience via musical and theatrical media, getting across to the audience the spirit of what the musical notations were put down to describe must be more important than just getting all the instruments (voices included) to sound the notes on the score in the right sequence at the 'right' tempo (even when the score was written before the invention of the metronome). Else, we reduce a creative art into nothing more than bookkeeping (no offense intended for bookkeepers).

"Er staat een huis aan de gracht in oud Amsterdam... There's a house on the canal in Old Amsterdam
Waar ik als jochie van acht bij grootmoeder kwam... where 8 yrs old me used to visit grandma
Nu zit een vreemde meneer in 't kamertje voor... Now there's a stranger in the front room
En ook die heerlijke zolder werd tot kantoor..... and an office where the attic used to be.

Aleen de bomen, de bomen, hoog boven het verkeer... Only the trees, swaying above the traffic
En over het water gaat er een bootje net als weleer... and the boats on the canals remind of the old days.

Aan de Amsterdamse grachten.... On the canals of Amsterdam,
Heb ik heel mijn hart voor altijd verpand... I forever pledge my heart
Amsterdam vult mijn gedachten... Amsterdam, I always regard
Als de mooiste stad in ons land.... as the nicest city in our land.

Al die Amsterdamse mensen.... All the people of Amsterdam,
Al die lichtjes 's avonds laat op het plein... All the evening lights at the squares,
Niemand kan zich beter wensen.... What more can anyone ask,
Dan een Amsterdammer te zijn.... than to be a native of Amsterdam!"

How nice would it be if going to a classical recital in the USA is as natural an event as it is for the Dutch in this snippet of Vesselina Kasarova's recital there in 2004 (Prinzengracht Concert)! She's singing 'Aan de Amsterdamse grachten (On the Amsterdam Canals)' with the Dutch baritone Thomas Oliemans... with the enthusiastic crowd singing along with them. Now... THAT's what music is all about! A real two-way street of shared experience.

A lazy June walk through downtown

I like June in San Diego, California. It's comfortably cool. It's cloudy. The tourists aren't here yet and the flowers and trees are still glowing in their not-that-dusty-yet new leaves and flowers. From this, you would rightfully conclude that I'm not a native Californian. Frankly, I find it endlessly irritating how the weathermen here keep talking wistfully about the prospect of a sunny heatwave at the end of the week... You know, the same sort of thoughts that occur to fishermen in the Grand Banks when they hear on the radio the voice of the forecaster gleefully reporting that the malevolent hurricane has now veered 'safely' off to sea...

Anyhow. I got to go out a bit in the comfortably hazy weather earlier in the week and took a few video and photo shots with my little Kodak camera... and putting them together into the video below. The quality is a bit iffy (after all I took it with a photo camera and not a camcorder), but it should give you an idea of what it's like to walk around Downtown San Diego in June.

We start at the little park on the bayfront between the famously sail-roofed San Diego Convention Center and the Hilton Hotel. My favorite haunt, actually... It's nicely quiet there most of the time even when there is a big convention going on or a fair at the Embarcadero Marina Parks or Seaport Village nearby. I won't be visiting there much once the cloud cover leaves town in summer... No shade anywhere for a smorg to hide in!

From the top of the Convention Center you can see quite a lot of the bay and Coronado 'not an' Island on the opposite shore. Just north of the Convention Center is the curved reflective towers of the Marriott Hotel and its marina, flanked by the Embarcadero Marina Parks (north and south). The blue bridge is, of course, the San Diego-Coronado Bridge... 2 miles long and 200 ft tall at its dogleg bend (to allow battleships to pass under). Coming down the north side of the Convention Center gives you a great view of the Historic Gaslamp Quarter (and a bit of Petco Park baseball stadium, home of the San Diego Padres). This is the part of town where hip young folks come to party and keep the brewery industry in business. They aren't very good at keeping all the brew in for more than a few hours, though. You really have to keep an eye on the sidewalk when you walk around here in the morning hours to keep from stepping in stains of various degrees of yuckiness (made by man and his best friends ).

The Gaslamp Quarter is where the trendy restaurants and boutique shops are (not as chic as what you'd see in La Jolla or on Coronado, but also not quite as expensive). Anchoring the northwest corner of the area is psychedelic Horton Plaza... the colorful mess of a building where you wouldn't want to be lost in just when you have a real need to use the restroom. Taking the elevator to the top floor (Level 5) and you can have a good rooftop look of the surrounding downtown, too. The angular tall buildings of the Columbia Districts to the north really aren't that tall... The Phillips screwdriver top one is One America Plaza, the tallest building in downtown at 500 ft (which is right at the building limit since Lindberg Field, San Diego's international airport, is really close by).

The last few seconds of the clip takes you southeast of downtown proper to the border of Logan and Sherman Height neighborhoods where you'll find historic Villa Montezuma (Est. 1887) at the southwest corner of 20th Avenue and K Street. It's one of the few historic buildings in the area that the San Diego Historical Society is still taking care of (the lack of funding had caused them to drop Marston House north of Balboa Park a while ago ). It costs $5 to get in for adults and $4 for seniors...I didn't go in there (the shots were taken on Sunday afternoon when the place was closed). It is looking rather worn - with cracks on the stained glass windows and the terracotta exterior is chipped and look ready to fall out. And man, does that yard need some work or what? It is still a magnificent looking Queen Anne house, though, and well worth the entry fee to visit when you are in downtown area. It isn't too long a walk from the Trolley line. You can actually see Petco Park from there, just across I-5.

I'd love to move back to the more leisurely Midwest one day, but man... I'll really miss those windsurfing seagulls... and a few other things.

A Watch-ful Post

Vesselina Kasarova watch: The mesmerizing Bulgarian mezzo is spending June in Tokyo, Japan, making her house debut at the New National Theater as the title role in Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella).

Juliette Galstian watch: The gorgeous dark-voiced Armenian mezzo had recently updated her website, changed management rep, and will be singing Cornelia in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Cour des Hospices in Beaune (France) on 11 July.

Dorothea Röschmann watch: The German soprano with the golden voice is singing Polly in Weill's The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) at Barbican Hall in London and at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris.


Christiane Karg watch: The young German soprano recently granted me a cyber interview and is off to sing Silvia in a performance of Haydn's L'isola disabilita at the Musikverein in Vienna this weekend before coming back to resume performances as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro at Opera Frankfurt.

Gay Penguins watch: Z and Vielpunkt, the gay German Humboldt penguins, had adopted an abandoned penguinette and are having a good time mothering it in their little corner at the Zoo am Meer in Bremerhaven... Who still says that homosexuality is unnatural now? These two aren't even the only gay birds at the same zoo...

Smorg watch: My friends keep telling me to eat something... Why? I'm not a Wagnerian soprano, I can't hit the high C in triple forte and I sure as heck don't want to look as though I could either.


But, anyhow, after having spent a week having the same noodle soup for dinner (instant noodle is my cooking specialty), this 6" long Vietnamese beef sandwich from Sau Voi Deli at Ranch Market on Clairemont Mesa Blvd is what I'm having for dinner tonight... Neither cheese nor any sort of sauces are needed on this thing. It's just grilled beef with really crushy fresh vegetables on a chewy bun. I suspect it is quite healthy, but, thankfully, the tastes doesn't betray that quality!

Vesselina Kasarova: Mozart Arias (Mozart-Arien)

Among many opera singers and classical musicians, the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is regarded as the ultimate test. One just can't claim to have mastered one's musical ability until one has successfully mastered his music. But the rub is... most of it is so understatedly graceful and dramatically perfect that when you are successful at performing a Mozart aria well, well, you'll end up blending right into the story so that the audience may be excused for not being appropriately aware of all the vocalizing skills and control that you had put into the performance in order to achieve this easy-sounding music. To love Mozart is to never say 'look at me!', I guess... at least not when you are on the stage.

With old Wolfie demanding the highest level of technique and control in the performance of his cruelly exposed music (it is so lightly orchestrated that the audience can notice even the slightest bit of any wavering in the voice... among the many other things that keep singers awake at night), most singers have all they can handle just to sing his music - hitting all the right notes in the right sequence at the right tempo. And that is often good enough for many (after all, Mozart's music is nothing if not easy on the ears).

RCA Red Seal CD: Vesselina Kasarova - Mozart Arias

Once in a long while, though, we are lucky enough to encounter a singer who can not only recreate what Mozart had written on the score, but who can actually bring vividly to life the characters that Mozart's musical notations are meant to try to describe. The dark-voiced Bulgarian-Swiss mezzo soprano Vesselina Kasarova is one such artist... The voice is very alluringly plumb (with that ever present Slavic sad/mellow tinge to its basic clarinet-like timbre) and intriguingly androgenic... being equally compelling in male roles as in female ones. It is a very distinctly recognizable voice - if not conventional in its beauty. And one that is astoundingly adept at expressing emotion, able to shift into many different colors with endless shades of chromatic and dynamic nuances. Kasarova can bewitch you with a smooth-as-silk legato line, cause you to purr contentedly with her caressingly breath-taking soft singing, chill you from inside out when she takes away that warm vibrato in the voice, and then blow you right off the continent with her tornadic rage of her blasted fortissimo.



This CD of 12 Mozart opera arias and 2 orchestral interludes captures musical story-telling of the sort that leaves one with the impression of having been with Dorabella, Cherubino, Idamante, Farnace, Zerlina, Donna Elvira, Cecilio, Sesto, and Vitellia as they live through the events of the opera where the arias occur - so vividly that one nearly compulsively duck as the frenzy Dorabella flies about the room flinging her arms and tossing things she knows she wouldn't break about in a show of temper that is as exasperatingly fake as it is adorable (#1, Ah, scostasi/ Smanie implacabili). We all know she hasn't a prayer at not cheating on poor Ferrando at the first chance she gets, but we are compelled to admire her effort to convince herself that she wouldn't anyhow.

Perhaps her assumption of young Cherubino (#2, Non so piu cosa son) is a little ..er.. assertively hormone-driven (ahem!) than many opera lovers would be familiar with, but this is just the Cherubino that could grow into the tragic hero of Beaumarchaise's third part of the Figaro trilogy (The Guilty Mother) rather than the much assumed 'Don Juan in the making' mold. The profuse passion produced in this rendition is too sincere for me, at least, to foresee a cynical womanizing cad as the young lad's future incarnation.


Of another sort of character altogether is Kasarova's portrayal of the adamantly chivalric and noble (if youthfully sensitive) hearted Idamante (#3. Non ho colpa & #5. il padre adorato). The tessitura (average pitch) of this part is quite high for Kasarova and there is a biting edge to her high notes that somehow works to enhance Idamante’s indignation even more. It isn’t a malicious indignation, but there’s quite a bit of royal anger in it, too. The voice retains its richness very well even in higher passage (quite unusual for this role since he is usually sung by more light-voiced high mezzo or a soprano... unless the tenor version is use).

Especially revealing to me is her incarnation of Farnace from Mitridate (#6. Venga pur, minacci e frema and #8. Gia dagli occhi il velo e tolto), an opera seria that Mozart wrote when he was only 14 yrs old. Somehow this epitome of murderous prodigal son is nearly always sung by a male countertenor now, even though the alto castrato who originated the part obviously lived on his lower register (Mozart, unlike the modern composers, wrote his music to fit specific singers rather than voice types). As politically incorrect as this may sound... Kasarova sounds like she has enough testosterone in her voice to turn any countertenor into a basso profundo. But that isn't even the best part about these two tracks!

Her laughing passages in 'Venga pur' are disturbingly deliciously deranged... and my blood freezes when her second pass on ‘l’ira sua mi rendera’ in the slow middle section of the piece just dissolves into blood-chilling coldness that convinces me that I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of this lass when she’s having a fit. This makes Farnace's turn around in the brilliant long aria of repentance, 'Gia dagli occhi', even more touching as a contrast. It is taken at a rather slow tempo, and it is a credit to Kasarova’s exemplary breath-control that no strain shows in her long drawn out really low passages... or even in those jumpy coloratura passages.

Zerlina the peasant girl may be a minor role in Don Giovanni, but Kasarova's Zerlina (#7. Vedrai, carino) carries a big stick when it comes to showering her man with some loving tender (disguise as bruise remedy). Many a Zerlina have made me smile with her rendition of this slick little sexually suggestive aria, but none had managed to make me blush beet red and steam up my glasses the way this Zerlina does... with just her voice! There is something seriously sensual about her use of vibrato and the rubato she employs that gets the message across even if you don't understand the Italian lyrics being sung. If one can ever successfully intone a quaking bout of sensual desires while delivering a melody... I'll just say that it is always a good idea to have some smelling salt handy when you listen to this CD... and leave it at that.

As far as I know Kasarova has never sung the batty Donna Elvira (#9. Mi tradi, quell' alma ingrata) on the stage. Listening to the hurricane force of this vocal tempest of a track, I wonder why not... She obviously wants to (has said so in interviews), and, by Jove, what Don Giovanni would have a prayer at dodging this insistent a stalker? I've heard many fittingly loony Donna Elvira, but Kasarova's Elvira comes with a twist... She is willfully loony. The Commendatore Statue really ought to leave Giovanni to this gal. She'd be a sorer punishment for him than any flame of hell would, I reckon (totally meaning this as a compliment, by the way).

Cecilio in Lucio Silla isn't one of my favorite opera characters by a long shot. He is usually not much more than a dream boat character who spends the opera being overshadowed by just about everyone else (the high tessitura of the role and its coloratura demand often reduce its singer to just singing the music). It is so refreshing to finally hear a Cecilio who doesn't sound like he is singing a set of written notes during the coloratura part of this aria, but that the coloratura is just his way of expressing his near delirium - of voicing his exuberant happiness. And, boy, do we all need to hear it before we get to the final two opera characters to appear on this CD.


Vitellia (#11, Non piu di fiori), the impetuous princess who longs for the imperial throne, is perhaps the juiciest role Mozart ever had the pleasure to musically characterize in his operas. Her final rondo carries the weight of the entire opera about love, lust, betrayal, and clemency, and it is one that requires a great singing actress to really carry out its dramatic potency. With an absurdly simple melodic line, Mozart endows his soprano with a chance to convince the audience that the vicious character who had spent the entire opera up to these final minutes of it scheming to murder and riot all for her own gain actually has a real conscience... and that she actually listens to it. Kasarova's deep and dark sound and her willingness to explore the ugly places in Vitellia's self-inspection along with her interplay with the bassett-horn obbligato create such a compellingly humane scene of how deciding to do the right thing can be such a trial to one who isn't accustom to self-sacrifice that suddenly you find yourself requiring Tito to be just as merciful as he would need to be to forgive such a wreck of a woman... rather than the usual contempt for the emperor's absurd obsession with clemency.

And to go from that Vitellia to this Sesto (#13. Deh, per questo istante solo), the model of a walking sorrow whose life would be willingly sacrificed in the name of love... One has to amaze at how such drastically different psyches can be so convincingly portrayed by the same soul. Here, more so than in the other arias on this CD, is where one really gets a good glimpse of the famously soul-shattering Kasarova pianissimo... the sort of softly sung phrases that float on the breath so that one can almost reach out and wave one's hand through Sesto's broken spirit. His self-loathing (totally justified, by the way) is so sincerely rendered that one feels barbarous to have to agree with his guilty verdict. The death penalty might just be more merciful for him than a pardon would be indeed.

And so, we come to the final track (#14), the concert aria Io ti lascio, oh cara, addio, originally written for a bass, and are asked by this serenely melancholic voice singing in perfectly silk-like legato to "Pensa che a te non lice, il ricordarsi di me, (Remember that you are not allowed to remember me)" ... Yeah, uh-huh, good luck with that... Listening to a CD like this you can either love or hate this singer, but to not remember her forever afterward is simply a non-starter! Utterly impossible!

Vesselina Kasarova is truly one of the most exciting opera singers around. She takes risks and her daring keeps you interested. Most of the times she pulls it off, and sometimes she doesn't but if there is one thing she isn't, it's being boring. And the most wonderful thing is she never sounds like Vesselina Kasarova is showing off her technical brilliance, but always like the character she is portraying expressing some thoughts or emotions. It also helps that she is wonderfully accompanied by the magnificent Staatskapelle Dresden under Sir Colin Davis. They are so in sync with each other that they make you forget that you are listening to choreographed music rather than being caught in a real conversation between composer and characters for the last hour or so it takes to play the entire disc.

There are lots of Mozart arias CDs out there, but there are only a handful that are sung with such distinct personality as to worth remembering above the rest. This is one of those few. Kasarova is not stuff of background music, so if you're looking for relaxing singing, you've better look elsewhere. This singer commands attention.
 

Tracks:
*1. Cosi fan tutte: Ah, scostasi/ Smanie implacabili (Dorabella)
2. Le nozze di Figaro: Non so piu cosa son (Cherubino)
3. Idomeneo: Non ho colpa (Idamante)
4. Idomeneo: March of the Priests ( instrumental)
*5. Idomeneo: Ah, qual gelido orror/ Il padre adorato (Idamante)
6. Mitridate: Venga pur, minacci e frema (Farnace)
7. Don Giovanni: Vedrai, carino (Zerlina)
8. Mitridate: Gia dagli occhi il velo e tolto (Farnace)
*9. Don Giovanni: In qual eccessi, o Numi/ Mi tradi, quell' alma ingrata (Donna Elvira)
10. Lucio Silla: Il tenero momento (Cecilio)
*11. La Clemenza di Tito: Ecco il punto/ non piu di fiori (Vitellia)
12. La clemenza di Tito: March: Maestoso (instrumental)
13. La clemenza di Tito: Deh, per questo istante solo (Sesto)
14. Concert Aria for bass: Io ti lascio, oh cara, addio
Tracks 4 and 12 are orchestral pieces. I'd rather there being 2 more arias instead, but they fit well with the rest of the program.

1 CD. Sung in Italian. Booklet contains track list and printed libretto in Italian and English.