Misplaced Lens Cap
Fai_Ryy
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Claire Keane
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art blog(derogatory)
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
titsay
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
noise dept.
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@operahands
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s final written words - a forward to the 1955 book “Faith in Music” —————————-
As we bring to mind the immeasurable wealth of beauty which the prodigious, creative masters have left to us through their great works as their legacy, it is difficult to suppress serious...
Arturo Toscanini
"But I am the star," she protested. "Madame," Toscanini replied, "the only stars are in the heavens."
These songs date mostly from fifty years ago; their texts are mostly from earlier decades. Meanwhile, I'm still here: as the sound recedes, I stand still.
Ned Rorem, Composer's Note, 50 Collected Songs
Salzburgers
January 8th, 1779
..I swear to you on my honor that I can't stand Salzburg or the people in it (I mean the native Salzburgers). Their language and habits are completely unbearable. Well, let's discuss something else..
Wolfgang Amadeus to his father, Leopold.
Melancholia
While Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is certainly an epic work, the opera's prelude is something to behold. A good prelude gives the audience a succint preview of the emotional highs and lows of the opera - essentially telling the entire story in an abbreviated instrumental form. This prelude does all that and more. It soars. And it is not for the light at heart.
Its power even touched the film director, Lars Von Trier. His recent film Melancholia opens with an abstract slow-motion eight-minute sequence set to Wagner's prelude. Aside from severe planetary malfunction in the solar system, the film deals with the depression of two wealthy sisters, and it is fascinating. Von Trier manages to brilliantly sneak in the prelude's themes here and there - so skillfully that you hardly know you're listening to it. Of course, that's how it should always be.
UnderAppreciated: Doctor Atomic
Often the lesser known operas of a given composer are the pithier ones. John Adams is best known for Nixon in China. But the rich and dark depth of Doctor Atomic surpasses his more popularized works. Which is not a surprise, seeing as we're dealing with Los Alamos and the Bomb. Focusing on the leading scientists of the Manhatten Project, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 2005 opera also looks into the persona of Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, who was not exactly the most Christian of women.
I've heard a mezzo say that listening to Kitty's aria, "Am I in Your Light?," made her want to sing opera...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf8Z_ciROM4
[For those YouTube goers who don't know already, knowing to click on the icon resembling a gear in the bottom righthand corner of a YouTube video will seriously change your viewing experience. Selecting a higher setting when available, such as 480p, boosts a mediocre image to a more tolerable quality.]
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
"Notice to Mother and nobody else"
Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don't cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. to begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I'm sure. I'll ask you one more thing. - Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. - Please - Sometimes I've been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very), Love, Sam Barber II [written at age 9]
Need a Fach?
"Freed"
Many singers I know have a love-hate relationship with the unique Renée Fleming, calling her "self-indulgent" to put it nicely, and even venturing to claim that she ruins the music she sings. While I won't mention her new pop-rock album (and conveniently new hair extensions..) - check them out if you dare - I will bring up her Strauss.
"Befreit" is five minutes of Straussian glory. As is Renée's dress. I don't think he would have wanted it any other way. Feast yourselves:
"Befreit," R. Strauss, Fleming and Vienna Philharmonic
UnderAppreciated: "Psyché," Paladilhe
The Under-Appreciated of the Week goes to the stunning French art song, "Psyché" by Émile Paladilhe (1844-1926). Greek legend has it that Psyché wasbeautiful enough to make even Venus jealous. Venus eventually ordered her son, Cupid, to shoot Psyché with one of his arrows, in the hopes that she would fall in love with a strategically-placed ugly beast. But when the time comes, Cupid is so struck by her beauty that he shoots himself with his own arrow.
Psyché Revived by Cupid's Kiss, Antonio Canova, The Louvre
There are only a handful of recordings on YouTube - Spotify offers a few, namely Renée Fleming's version that is taken at her typical (under)tempo. But Beverly Sills delivers a rendition that does the song justice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ3Xw_Cy6VA
How can a song be so simple yet so haunting? If only Beverly's last 45 seconds were of a higher audio quality!
A few lyrics, written by the infamous Corneille: Je suis jaloux, Psyché, de toute la nature. Les rayons du soleil vous baisent trop souvent..I am jealous, Psyché, of all of Nature. The sun's rays kiss you too often..
Evocative portraits of today's opera greats, shot by Dario Acosta. When he photographs you, you know you've made it.
Anna Netrebko
"She's an opera singer?"
The Opera Portrait
There's something unsettling about the portraits of classical singers. Such emotive individuals, yet their mouths - their instruments - are closed. More often than not, I find the Mona Lisa smile on their faces. Above, Juan Diego Florez; below, Marilyn Horne.
Overture
One Bostonian evening not too long ago, two musical friends and I loaded into our voice teacher's mini-van and headed downtown to see an opera. If you put four energized opera buffs in the same mini-van, classical music will ensue - at high volumes. And when *that* moment comes, the climax of the piece, when the buzz of the treble deafens your ears, your hands can't help but find themselves raised in the air proclaiming the musical wonder of the thing. Thus, Opera Hands.
With Facebook walls stuffed with YouTube clips and DropBoxes spilling over with the newest discoveries, the inspiration for a blog comes from the buzzing online community of enthusiastic young singers. We need to jazz up opera. Consider Opera Hands the Perez of classical music with a penchant for that intensely personal yet universally touching art form of opera.
Opera does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.
- GEORGE MAREK, J. Merrill Knapp's The Magic of Opera
