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I seem to have spent the week writing about bel canto singing without posting a single aria from the bel canto era. Let’s rectify that with this beauty I found online: the young Renata Scotto singing the Mad Scene from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” It was filmed in Tokyo...
I’ve been ruminating about bel canto all week—not just the sometimes thrilling, sometimes mediocre Donizetti operas the term usually implies, but the larger meaning of “beautiful singing.” Maria Callas and Ella Fitzgerald are bel canto singers in their very different...
I’ve been thinking about bel canto the past few days. Usually the term refers to a fertile era in Italian opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Composers like Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini used long-lined melody and bravura passagework to tell their...
My friend Becca Jo’s challenge to stop telling her what performances I didn’t like, and instead show her what I did like, has stayed with me. Ever since our conversation last Friday I’ve been pondering: where does my own heart lie? What is my musical home base? I’ve...
This week I find myself floating around in what feels like a weightless state, after four months of unremitting pressure. Almost all of the NYFOS subscription concerts fell into the autumn season, along with the preparations for the Juilliard concert in January. We...
Program notes for Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do: Songs of Gay HarlemThursday, December 12 at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center My first awareness of Harlem’s gay subculture came from an unlikely source: a Cole Porter song I heard decades ago called “The Happy...