Warning: lousy sound alert! Also, this is 1962, and the voice has developed those issues which prevent many people from listening to her – the spread at the top etc. Despite this, it’s a lesson in operatic acting, and an unexpected one. Watch her body when the horns make their stabbing sounds at the beginning – it’s as if she’s been stabbed. Again at the strings leading into ‘O regina’ and again at each subsequent transition, the body is one with the music.
Compare, if you like, someone like Elena Obratsova in performance (http://youtu.be/mguac0EuQoU). Music in the pit, acting on the stage, little connection. ‘Ti maledico’ might be addressed to someone else. Or compare her gesture at the final ‘O belta’ to Callas’s conventional-seeming but subtle folded hands.
Only a fool would say that there’s not good work being done on the Internet. But the nature of the medium, the way it has reshaped journalism and public discourse, makes it harder for that work to matter. In its contribution to the ongoing disposability of our cultural, political, and social life, in encouraging the cultural segregation that currently disfigures democracy, the Internet has to bear a great deal of responsibility for the present derangement of American life.
Charles Taylor, film critic, writing in Dissent online. (Via Arts and Letters Daily).
In 1525 the first book published in the Estonian language was printed. The book was a Lutheran manuscript, which never reached the reader and was destroyed immediately after publication. _ Wikipedia
Sometimes I think that there’s no such thing as an easy song. This chestnut by Dvorak ought be straightforward: two pages, nine phrases, not technically taxing, ever-popular. Listening to a dozen or so performances on YouTube changed my mind.
There’s the accompaniment, notated in 6/8 against the singer’s 2/4. Lots of three against two then, no problem, except that the LH of the piano is syncopated, there are integral grace notes and almost everyone uses lots of rubato. Too much of that and the song loses its pulse – Dvorak marks it andante con moto – and becomes a series of stop-starts. We have a tendency to feel phrases as working towards the middle and then away. but these have their weight at the end, and they mustn’t become lead boots.
Then there are the markings, which most people at least seem to have glanced at. There’s nothing to stop you interpreting, of course – no one right way – but it seems to me that the markings all indicate that Dvorak wanted a certain quality to the song - think of it as confiding, inward. (If you don’t want to do it the composer’s way, at least be clear what you don’t want to do.) He directs the singer to start the first stanza piano and mezza voce and the second pp. Did I say there were no technical difficulties? Well, piano, mezza voce rising to a high G – that’s not so easy. Again almost everyone makes it simpler technically by opening out on the G, singing it more loudly than the rest of the phrase.
Then there is the question of how to treat the two added bars in the second stanza, that lovely expansion of the melody at the song’s climax. Do you attach them to the phrase before, or the phrase after? Where’s the breath? Do you reinforce the feeling con expressione or can you let the phrase expansion do that for you?
Published first as one of a set of Gypsy Songs, and first sung by a tenor, the song was designed for domestic, small-scale performance. It’s unfortunate that people choose it as as an encore with orchestra and still more unfortunate when they help out poor Dvorak by adding half a stanza.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Netrebko would like to make an announcement.
In complete contrast, here’s the girl from Richmond, keeping those Gs and F#s right in line and observing the pp in the second stanza. Oddly, she doesn’t bother with the crescendos much.
Not much feeling there, though? – more of a demonstration.
If you’d like to sample the dozen, here’s the playlist. There’s a good version by Magdalena Kozena, a lovely, simple one by Kiri Te Kanawa and a heartfelt one from Sutherland, marred by a deeply unfortunate introduction and horror visuals. But the pick of the bunch, for me, is someone who sings the first stanza as Dvorak wrote it, and alone amongst my dozen, attaches the extra bars to the phrase before. Like Sutherland and Kiri, she brings to it the inwardness and tenderness the song requires.
Crowds rearranged themselves when Kael entered the room, literally and figuratively. She had an almost talismanic belief in the validity of her first response to a movie (she never saw it twice)
Which I suppose is fair enough, since very few of her audience would see it twice, either. Still, it’s a little different from what used to be the basis for critical judgement worth contention. I was schooled to think that to know a text practically by heart was the basis for any serious conversation about it. This implies, in its turn, that some texts are much more valuable than others . . . A lost world? Not quite: the people who keep it up are the devotees.
