Modern Life

Modern Life allows you to have anything you want. Well, maybe not love, but anything else. For instance, if you can't afford to fly to every interesting opera performance in the world, you can buy a copy from House of Opera. They recently had a sale. $10 is a much more reasonable price for a product of this quality. I bought 7 dvds.

I have bought things from them before. I bought a copy of Cecilia's Il Turco in Italia from them before it came out commercially. These videos are filmed at home off of someones tv set, and they look it. In Il Turco the picture suddenly becomes a test pattern every now and then. It was worth it to see the madness of this production.

I chose to listen first to a performance from La Scala of Verdi's Il Trovatore. In commenting on Corelli I said that no one takes these kinds of risks any more. I'm eating my words again, for I had not seen 35 year old Salvatore Licitra singing Manrico. He is burning down the scenery in "Di quella pira." Was even Corelli this out there? We could tame him, smooth out his rough edges, but would we love him more? The picture is terrible, they film through the pauses, the tabs in the dvd go to just anywhere.

But Muti is conducting. It is a marriage made in heaven.