Teaser Tuesday - 25th October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

With Mary's coaching and the exercises she practised every day at home, Terri slowly felt her throat opening, lengthening and widening and the voice starting to form lower and lower in her body. It grew stronger and clearer, rounder and more beautiful.

As last week, a teaser from Jessica Duchen's Songs of Triumphant Love this is turning into a good read - I had mixed feelings at the start where it felt as if musical details were being thrown at you sometimes for effect and the same with the sexual encounters but it has found an interesting pace binding together musical careers, the breakup of Yugoslavia and British troops in Afghanistan.

Teaser Tuesday - 18th October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

`D'ye know what it means', he'd asked.

'No' She was flat out underneath him at the time 'It means: "tell me, fair ladies, what is love? What is this burning, yearning, seething desire?"

Jessica Duchen's Songs of Triumphant Love - I've read most (all?) of her previous books - she's a music writer - written a biography of Fauré - all of her novels are around the theme of music - and I've enjoyed them so am looking forward to this. The quote is the main character's - an opera singer's introduction to love and the Italian language (as well as singing it!). Yes there does appear to be rather a lot of sex in this work - maybe inevitable from the title - I'm looking forward to the development of other themes! Here are the reviews on her website - the amazon ones are also pretty uniformly positive.

Sublime silliness

After a discussion on Poulenc's Gloria in the midst of last night's piano lesson (Uttoxeter Choral Society and Sandbach Voices are performing it next week), I spent this morning with Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias

Written in the midst of the occupation of France in the 1940's Poulenc sets words of Guillaume Apollaire. This YouTube clip is from the first act. It gets madder - here's the wikipedia summary of part of act two:

The curtain rises to cries of "Papa!" The husband's project has been a spectacular success, and he has given birth to 40,049 children in a single day. A visiting Parisian journalist asks how he can afford to feed the brood, but the husband explains that the children have all been very successful in careers in the arts, and have made him a rich man with their earnings. After chasing the journalist off, the husband decides to raise a journalist of his own, but is not completely pleased with the results.

..and ends with a call for the audience to go and produce children:

Ecoutez, ô Français, les leçons de la guerre
Et faites des enfants, vous qui n'en faisiez guère
Cher public: faites des enfants!

I was introduced to this piece in the 1970's - at Cambridge - where a theatre group performed this with Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. I went to see it twice - in part because it was so enjoyable partly because on the first visit I ended up sitting behind a tourist couple who thought they were here to see the Cambridge Footlights and were somewhat surprised at what they were served up with! They were rather restless so I got a far better chance the next night with various of the performers appearing from among the audience. On the Footlights connection - could Monty Python have appeared without some of these surreal pieces of French humour - I'm also thinking of Zazie. There appear to be quite a few film clips from various performances of this work on youTube.
Probably not suitable watching for International Women's day later this week!

Flying women in funny hats

No, nothing to do with women and peripatetic bishops, this is part of Act 3 of Wagner's Die Walküre (not act 2 as the youtube notes say)

This is the Bayreuth Pierre Boulez version - I remember watching it with an entranced 5(?) year old daughter when it was first shown on the television back in the 1980's. It's one of the darkest moments Siegmund is dead, his lover Sieglinde wants only death but she is told that she is pregnant - stay for that thrilling moment. (I'm afraid there are no subtitles!)
'Oh herstes Wunder' - towards the end of this clip. There is hope even at this point, the work is wonderfully sung and visually ravishing! Gwyneth Jones and Jeannine Altmeyer.
I've just been watching a cartoon version of Die Rheingold but give me human actors anytime.
And I won't mention X-Factor.

Sophie!

Anneliese Rothenberger who sings the role of Sophie in this production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier died last week. This is the presentation of the Silver Rose:

Just wait for those stratospheric soprano lines tearing at the emotions - and the unforgettable orchestration. Handkerchiefs to the fore - not least on stage!
I'd missed this obituary and had to recover the newspaper last night after spotting a followup letter yesterday.
The film has German subtitles - if you really want the version with English then you need to go here - the film is 10 minutes but, for me, 10 minutes to be treasured. All the alternate emotion and control of the young Sophie just out of convent school.

Magda Olivero

The Italian soprano Magda Olivero is 100 years old today, here's a clip of her being interviewed a few days ago - from a 3 hour session!

And here she is discussing and singing at her 99th birthday

She initially retired before I was born...

Tod ist Tove!

Ann Murray singing the song of the wood-dove from Schönberg's Gurrelieder, the tragedy at the heart of that work.

Ann Murray was the wife of Philip Langridge who died on Friday. There's some examples of his work on also on youtube - but I wanted to mourn. Stay for the denouement! - alas the video cuts off the closing orchestral bars. I'll be listening to Langridge in Peter Grimes later..
PS (Monday) the Guardian obituary of Langridge is now available.

Insufficiency

'Können Sie was lernen' - from the Brecht/Weill Threpenny Opera.
Try to ignore the crunch around 20 seconds in.

Elisabeth Söderström

Elisabeth Söderström, who died yesterday, here sings the Song to the moon from Dvořák's Rusalka

If Beverly Sills rather gushing introduction puts you off, the music starts around 50 seconds in.

Teaser Tuesday - 8 September

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

'Do they miaow now?' I asked, meaning only to show a friendly interest. Sometimes, I admit, I'm quite pleased with myself for remembering the details of my humbler friends' lives. It's an empathetic gift that many politicians I'm sure would trade a limb for.

Typed, very carefully, from Lynne Truss's String and Air, her contribution to a book of short stories edited by Jeanette Winterson for Glyndebourne which take liberties with various opera plots (that one was The Turn of the Screw. The book is called Midsummer Nights - great fun if you enjoy both short stories and opera! I was very tempted to get a random quote from Colm Toíbín The Pearl Fishers but the Truss pipped it!

Prescient!?

From a review of Sallinen's 'The King goes forth to France' in yesterday's Independent:

Battered by climate change, England is in hock, its economy unmoved by the Prime Minister's "very best fiscal stimulation". Icebergs are "breeding like rabbits" in the North Sea and fuel has run dry. On the shores of the frozen Channel, the King prepares for a war without point or justification, while the icons of national identity – telephone boxes and post boxes, currency and stamps, Marmite and victoria sponges, Tube maps and brown ale, policemen's helmets and Routemaster buses, cricket bats and (ouch!) newspapers – are assembled for a final closing-down sale.

Probably a carefully tailored summary - I just about remember listening to this from a broadcast in the 1980's(?). Unfortunately for me, this is being staged in London!

E Lucevan Le Stelle

And whilst on the theme of bite sized Italian opera -

- Tosca!