When she had finished the aria, and I had told her how wonderful she sounded, I said "Do you realise that you are putting a large space between the consonant and the vowel in the first word? It's coming out as 'Puh-arto'. Try singing 'Parto', just like that.
She did, and we worked together for the next twenty years until her sad and much too early death in 2006. It was an amazing time for me.
So you see that I begin my listening of anything from a very high standard of beauty and excellence.
In tonight's performance of 'Tito', all of the singing was fairly good. No one sang flat or did anything strange. A couple of the sopranos had very fast vibrati but otherwise sang quite well.
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I also liked the Publio of Christian van Horn and the Tito of Matthew Polenzani.
Poor Tito has a kind of dumb role to deal with. In fact, the entire libretto is fairly silly.Thank God for Mozart's magnificent music. I wonder what possessed him to set this to music?
The set by Sir David McVicar was stolid. An all-purpose back wall with windows and doors, an enormous clunky staircase that took up half the stage, and a few oddments that slid on and off stage.
The stage direction, like the set, was deathly heavy. It needed someone like Steve Wadsworth to get the people doing something besides standing still, facing out, and singing their piece. He directed Lorraine in Ashoka's Dream, and Xerxes, among other operas to tremendous effect.
As I said, the rest of the cast sang all right if you excuse the tremoli in some of the sopranos (soprani?). It was kind of a dull evening.
David and I amused ourselves by renaming two of the leading characters 'Vidalia and Pesto'. It works!