Sexy

It's July and time for my sexiest opera singers list.


Dmitri Hvorostovsky


Renée Fleming


Angela Gheorghiu


Roberto Alagna. I think he's cute.


Anna Netrebko


Cecilia Bartoli


Juan Diego Florez


Jonas Kaufmann


Elina Garanča. Will anyone wonder why this picture is supposed to be sexy?


Maria Guleghina. Or this one?


Erwin Schrott


The last one is Liliana Nikiteanu who always seems very sexy to me. Sexiness like beauty is all in the eye of the beholder.

I'm much happier with these pictures now. For the sexiest in drag category please consult Eye Bags.

Maria Ewing

I cannot explain my taste for this "picture" of Maria Ewing, found by accident on the internet. There's a whole website full of these here. I think the part above the forehead is not so pointy, but the picture is clearly her.

Maria is the only opera singer included in this set. I am assuming that if you wanted to do 3d animation, you could choose these heads as the faces for your characters, attach them to suitable stock bodies, add hair and outfits, and off you go.


Here's something a little more conventional.

Maria is an artist who specialized in very theatrical opera, may be regarded as a founder of the genre. She was most famous for two roles, both entirely outside her natural lyric soprano Fach: Carmen and Salome. She allowed nothing to stand in her way, even nudity.

Blogging

Dear Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera, LA Opera, Santa Fe Opera, San Francisco Opera, etc.

I know I've visited you in the last few years. I know the current financial crisis is affecting your endowments. I cannot save you. My "endowment" is also smaller, and it is what allows me to visit you at all.

I cannot save you, but I can wish you good luck.

New Blog

I found a new blog called Hot Opera Singers here. She actually searches for this stuff. Instead of Googling them like I do. The overall theme is shirtless men.

Gerald Finley

New blogger has reminded me that Gerald Finley is also cute.

On the Death of Merce Cunningham

Picture is John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

When I was an undergraduate in Sacramento, Merce Cunningham came to our school with his group and performed. There was a play running in the Little Theater that used a steeply raked stage, and the dancers were required to dance on it. They did the best they could not picking up speed when running down the stage.

Things happened for no apparent reason. In one section one of the male dancers appeared in thick furry leg warmers. We puzzled. What could it mean?

In the pit were two grand pianos and two young men who “played” them. Every once in a while one would lay his arm down on the keyboard or reach inside the piano and pluck the strings. I think it was only later I realized these were John Cage and David Tudor.

One of our professors condescendingly informed us that we simply didn’t understand. As though he did. We did Stravinsky and were at least aware of Webern, but this was something different.

Of course, it was intended to be meaningless. Is that what the professor meant?

Very Unusual

Cecilia Bartoli is not at all like anyone else. For one thing she is musically fearless. She does not hesitate to mold anything to herself, and this number is a fabulous example. It's a cut from her La Sonnambula recording which I listen to quite a bit.

Has any singer ever appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic without a conductor besides her? Pavarotti and Netrebko may sit around listening to singers they admire for the source of their interpretations, a practice that is vastly superior to the mechanical correctness that is so popular today, but you may be sure that La Bartoli is consulting her own musical imagination.

This particular rendition is utterly astounding. The duets with Juan Diego Florez are gorgeous.

Maybe I'll go on a binge and review everything she's ever done that I haven't reviewed before. Maybe I'm ready.

Kaija Saariaho

If you've never heard Saariaho's music, you have to try this: "Parfume de l'instant" (Perfume of the moment). The conductor is Esa-Pekka Salonen, thus rounding out the trio of famous Finns of today.

Kaija Saariaho Interview

[This is also from Opernglas.]

NEW MUSIC
KAIJA SAARIAHO

Her newest projects lead the composer to Hamburg, Berlin and Luzern. In the discussion with our coworker Johannes Schmitz she revealed the first details of her third opera "Emilie" - written for a Star soprano - which will be given its first performance in the spring 2010. Selections from the interview.

JS: Frau Saariaho, your music seems to want to advance often into other dimensions of the perception, it can have something fantastic, a metaphysical, perhaps even religious level.

KS: Religious I would not say. Each art must have a mental level and music is for me the art form with the richest possibilities of communication. In music lies a very large secret, it can affect us deeply. In music are so many emotions, that we cannot control.

JS: In August at the season opening of the Berlin Philharmonic your new composition "Laterna Magica" will have its premiere. This composition has to do with Ingmar Bergman and also with the cinema?

KS: It is a metaphor. You know what a Laterna Magica is: the faster the pictures follow one another, the more constant is the movement. This idea was my starting point in order for me to make one think about the tempo in music and its perception. For me it was about the question of how the musical material behaves in different speeds. I came to this by the reading of the autobiography "Laterna Magica" by Ingmar Bergman, which I read in the summer two years ago, when he died. I had already written a lot of "Laterna Magica" before his death. It all came together: his way of describing the light, the way he used light and color in his work as a film director - and my work as a composer. In my thinking music has to do very much with light, and when orchestrating I think very strongly about the concept of colors.

JS: You have also written a new opera, your third after "L'amour de loin" and "Adriana mater." In March of the coming year is the premiere. Is the composition in the meantime complete?

KS: The score is present already, because I finished the work on it recently. It is a work for a single voice and carries the name "Emilie." I wrote this opera for Karita Mattila. But I would not like yet to actually tell much about it, because the team, which will produce the opera is naturally not yet so far.

JS: This Emilie du Chatelet, for many years the unmarried life partner of Voltaire, obviously led an unusually free life. She was well known as a female scientist and had also as a woman a very self-determined life, even to her sexuality. [?]

KS: She was a very passionate person. Her personality appears to me very rich - also with contradictions. That led to some very rich musical material. The personality of Emilie in my opera had to carry already alone, therefore, many contrasts in itself, since the piece is written for one voice only.

JS: The piece is not written for orchestra alone, but you return again to the use of electronic sounds as with "L'amour de loin."

KS: I work in "Emilie" with live electronics. But electronic is not for me an end in itself, it is simply a component of my art. The orchestra for ”Emilie“ is not fully realized: Initially I had a small chamber setting, that should reflect also a little the epoch in which Emilie lived. The harpsichord plays an important role in the instrumentation. But during the composition process I added the sound of more strings, also in order to carry over the power of Karita’s voice. Now the orchestra is approximately 35 persons strong.

JS: Let us again return to the historical person around whom your new opera turns. Is Emilie du Chatelet a kind of model for you personally, possibly for our time? Or are you interested less in the social, perhaps even sociopolitical dimension of the figure?

KS: Naturally I am also interested in this layer of Emilie as part of our life reality - and as part of my life reality, finally I am a woman. But it would reduce the figure very much, if I had pursued only such an intention. The social role of a woman is only one aspect of many. But in the long run my figures interest me more as human beings than as woman or man

Website

For the Website of the Day Award I nominate Nina Stemme. Have a look.

And now if you need an antidote to all that Wagner try this.