others have greatness thrust upon them
As you may recall, last year the BBC Music Magazine published a list of “The 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time,” and one or two of you didn’t quite see eye to eye with their selection.
Well, this year they’ve turned their attention to the top 20 among tenors, who are (in ascending order of greatliness):Â
20. Sergey Lemeshev
19. Wolfgang Windgassen
18. Alfredo Kraus
17. Anthony Rolfe Johnson
16. John McCormack
15. Franco Corelli
14. Peter Schreier
13. Juan Diego Florez
12. Carlo Bergonzi
11. Tito Schipa
10. Peter Pears
9. Nicolai Gedda
8. Jon Vickers
7. Beniamino Gigli
6. Lauritz Melchior
5. Jussi Bjoerling
4. Fritz Wunderlich
3. Luciano Pavarotti
2. Enrico Caruso
1. Placido Domingo
Never have liked that curdled singing!
Listen Marcia, if you don’t know how to listen to good singers, then don’t even post anything substantial in this blog. Oh wait…what you posted wasn’t even anything close to substantial. So yes, don’t post anything. It lowers the artistic caliber in this thread to subzero temperatures.
I would really like to hear Robert Dean Smith (albeit the vocal size…or lack of it) outside of a European house as Tristan, and Stig Andersen or a future Wagnerized Jonas Kaufmann would be nice too.
Voigt’s highest notes haven’t been very on tonight (the opposite of the problem she usually has), but otherwise I think she sounds fabulous…certainly much better than mostly anything I’ve heard her sing since the ’90s. Maybe it’s just me. /shrug
Marcia – you bite your tongue. Hard! Debbie Voigt is like butter cream frosting on a chocolate cake. Yummy!
Good thing she pulled out of the Ring; could have out-Behrened Behrens in her last years. Sad, Debbie was having some good moments until the train wreck at the end of the love duet. I thought especially when I heard her in Frau in November that she had lost a lot of her former gleam. Arrrgh!
Curdled is the perfect word to describe Voigt’s singing. And I don’t see how the poor tenor can make it to the end.
I haven’t heard a great Isolde since Nilsson.
Marcia sadly is right; no one since Nilsson has sung the role the way it should sound and I’ve heard many of them. Waltraud Meier may have nailed it in the 1990s but by last November in Munich she was very disappointing. And Marcia is also right when she says Voigt’s voice sounds curdled… the exact opposite of vocal cream.
Cream or curdles, Voigt always sounds to me like she’s in a recital: all voice, no character, no drama.
I couldn’t bear to listen to the Met broadcast, so watched the Chereau Tristan from La Scala on DVD. Meier is in pretty good form there–much fresher than she’s sounded in the past, and less matronly. Absolutely convincing.
Voigt is now ruining the liebestod. To hear Flagstad’s classic and incomparable performance go to bassocantante.com.