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mechtild September 1 2011, 03:11:11 UTC
Holy cow! Look what that movie is going for now at amazon. *gulp* I guess I'll just have to wait for Dan's remake.

Tell ya what. When I've watched it I could loan it to you, ey? DVD's are cheap to send media mail.

I didn't care for Renata Scotto. She had a vibrato like a tommy gun and I found it unpleasant. My husband does a hilarious imitation of her.

Ha ha! Well, obviously not a singer to your taste. But by the time I saw her she no longer had a tommy gun vibrato (which suggests to me a very fast pulse). In fact, people used to say, "You could drive a truck through her wobble it's so wide." I saw her in Adriana Lecouvreur at the Met and she did not sound good when she pushed, which was anything high or dramatic - there was that wide wobble, unpleasant in itself but also making her go flat. But I have a recording of her singing the two famous arias from that opera when she was in her prime and they are fantastic. I think she must have had a short-lived instrument. Maybe that was true for Leontine Price, too. She wasn't old when I was seeing operas, but she was no longer singing. Teaching, but not singing. But I have a record of her singing arias and it is one of my all-time favourite collections of operatic singing. Her singing is absolutely gorgeous on these recordings. But I remember hearing that she, too, lost vocal quality relativley early in her career. In fact, that's what I heard about Callas, too. (I think her later recordings are quite good, though, when she is singing mezzo arias.) What a singer she was. She was like fire and ice to me - blazing through arias or giving me chills. Or maybe it was that she used her voice like a sword - it flicked or stroked or fretted through a piece, but finally went for the kill, with some passage or other that would be like a thrust to the heart.

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yeuxdebleu September 1 2011, 03:53:09 UTC
Tell ya what. When I've watched it I could loan it to you, ey? DVD's are cheap to send media mail.

Oh! That would be wonderfully kind of you. If you don't want to take a chance with media mail, I'll be more than glad to reimburse you for first class and return it to you that way. Just let me know when you're ready to send it and I'll PM my address. I checked Netflix and they don't have it. Thank you!

I liked Leontyne Price. She used to stop in at our office at RCA (I worked in classical marketing) when she was in the studio recording. Said we had the best coffee in the building. LOL She was absolutely lovely.

I only saw her as Aida and in Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which opened the new Met at Lincoln Center. I didn't see it opening night though. The tickets cost a small fortune.

I saw Montserrat Caballe in Aida, too, and although she was about the same size as the pyramid on set, her voice was to die for.

I have quite a few of Leontyne Price's recordings and probably my favorite is the abridged Porgy and Bess that she recorded with her then husband, William Warfield.

Gosh, you're really dredging up old memories. My Met subscription was for the Saturday matinees. That was a little less expensive than evenings and didn't involve getting home late on work nights. I still listen to Met broadcasts on the radio fairly often.

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mechtild September 1 2011, 12:08:11 UTC
I saw Montserrat Caballe in Aida, too, and although she was about the same size as the pyramid on set, her voice was to die for.

Ha ha! My friend who was the big Callas friend used to call her "Monsterfat Caballe". He also said she had a great voice. I never saw her, alas. I am awed more than jealous, really, of all the great singers you were able to see and hear in person, Yeuxdebleu. It's as though you were present for what is prime opera performance history as it was made. WOW. I guess that goes for all the plays and shows you saw, too.

I will send you the DVD, then. I hope to watch it some time this month. Let me see if I have an email for you, to contact you for an address.... No, I don't. But if you look on my user info page, my email is there. I don't want to post it here because of all the nasty bots that keep showing up and dumping junk mail in my posts. :)

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yeuxdebleu September 1 2011, 21:57:54 UTC
I am awed more than jealous, really, of all the great singers you were able to see and hear in person...

It's odd now to think of how I took it all for granted back in the day. I had gotten BAs in both music and drama in college and headed straight to NYC a week after graduation. I worked in the recorded music business for 29 years and lived for the opera, ballet and theater. I had the Saturday matinee Met subscription for 25 years and attended a concert, ballet, play or show a week in addition to that. I was rarely home and never had much money for anything else. It all went for tickets, but that was OK. It was what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world.

Because of working in Marketing (which included Promotion and Sales) I got to meet nearly everyone who recorded for RCA and was allowed into recording sessions if I wanted.

For a music lover, I could not have asked for a better career...or life!

I will email you my address info. Thanks again.

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