Life returning to a semblance of normal

Finally, after 3 homeless months, we've moved into our new home. There are still plenty of boxes to unpack, but at least I once again have access to my CDs and scores.

Also after a fight with Verizon, I now have reliable internet access at home, so I should be able to post with increasing regularity from here on in.

Finally, live music has returned to my life. Last night I heard a nice concert of Mozart given by the Florida West Coast Symphony. I won't review it (nor any other performances in my new community), since I consider this a conflict of interest, but it was nice to see and hear a live orchestra once again.

Happy Birthday Madame Zeani

The great Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani celebrated her 80th birthday on October 21 and unfortunately, due to my preoccupation with moving into our new house and preparations for a visit from Wilma, I neglected to mark it.

Zeani was one of the great singing actresses of the 50s and 60s, whose career was pretty much ignored by the recording companies and limited primarily to Italy. Her signature roles was Violetta, which was recorded by the Romanian state label Electrorecord, and is also available as a live performances from several different venues (see if you can find the Naples recording with Gianni Raimondi which apart from a very audible prompter and generally bad sonics is a fabulous performance). Her Addio del passato rivals Muzio's as one of the most affecting that I've heard. Happily, there are many other live performances available, which are a testament to her great talent as a singing actress of the first order.

She was married to the basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni and both were on the Indiana University faculty in the 80s when I was student, although I did not study with either of them. They were both, however exceedingly kind to me and I remember them both with great fondness.

Once I get all my boxes of CDs sorted out, I will put on the wonderful series of recitals that Bongiovanni has put out from live sources. There was a commercial Puccini disk for Decca, which was released by Belart (coupled oddly with a Graziella Sciutti recital), but I'm not sure if it is currently available.

Madame Zeani has recently retired but I hope that she had a great 80th birthday and that she continues for many more!

Withdrawal

It's now the middle of October and if I were still in NY I would have seen at least three performances by now. Even though I work for an opera company, our season doesn't start for a while and I'm going through more separation pains.

So I have to rely on recordings for now. I found a wonderful DVD of Figaro from Salzburg with Reri Grist as Susanna and have spent a fair amount of time with the new Tristan (I'm falling in love with Nina Stemme's Isolde). But even as good as these are, I miss live performance.

The weather's beautiful and I love my new job, but I need more live music!

OK, rant over.

What are they singing?

There is a lot of discussion in this and last month's Opera magazine about the decision of both ENO and the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, both advocates of Opera in English, to use surtitles for their performances. The comments include reasoned arguments by a noted singer (Andrew Shore) in the letters, to snide asides in unrelated reviews ("Now that even Saint Louis, like ENO, has surrendered to the congentially lazy and introduced condoms..."). It is certainly a hot topic among the writers and readers of that august publication.

I've always had an ambivalent feeling about both Opera in English and surtitles. I studied at Indiana University where we always did operas in English. At the time I felt it was a disservice to the students, since most companies in the "real" world perform in the original language. As a concept, I like the idea of opera in English. I think it would certainly be a more complete experience for the audience if they could understand and relate to the text being sung. But the reality is more complex. First, at least in the US, the translations used tend to be trite, without literary merit on their own part, and secondly, no matter how hard a singer tries, some text will never be understandable, because of the vowel modifications required within certain tessitura.

On the other hand, surtitles have their pitfalls as well. I've been at performances where ill-chosen, or ill-timed translations have caused audience guffaws in the most dramatic moments, and the physical limitations of looking above the stage and then back down to the artists, interfere with my personal enjoyment of an opera. The Metropolitan Opera solution seems best of all, since the translation is closer to an audience member's typical field of vision, titles can be turned off if they are not needed and most (although not all) neighboring screens don't interfere.

The argument that surtitles make singers lazy and less concerned with their diction is total hogwash as far as I'm concerned. I was a professional singer for 10 years and have many friends active within the industry and I can tell you that I do not know one singer who has ever given any consideration to whether or not there were surtitles in forming their approach to a piece. Technique is technique and surtitles would never change that. If a singer's diction is going to be bad, it will be bad, and the presence (or lack of) titles certainly won't have any effect.

On the whole I think that titles are good for people new to opera but I do question the wisdom of using them in performances in the audience's native tongue. I'd prefer that they weren't there, but on the other hand they are usually easy enough to ignore. So I'm not really sure what the ruckus is about.