I can understand why you would take issue with Gualtier’s ears in the light of your disgraceful experience at the Met, even though he is hardly responsible for that. But why does he need a new set of balls?

Your name, Gianni, is actually far more suitable to one of my favorite Christmas carols than Gualtier’s:

Deck the halls with balls of Gianni
Fa la la la la la la la la

At least over Sirius cyber-space, tonight’s SALOME, at the MET sounded like a dramatic tour-de-force..no prophesised melt-downs–at least no unintentional ones–to these ears.

I was very less than wild(e)about the last outing of this production, in 2004..in fact , I thought it stunk to high heaven. Tonight, however, I was very hooked in to Matilla’s deranged Princess of Judea. she actually started out in an almost Mozart-ean sound, until she got crazier and crazier.

While I know what we hear over the air isn’t the same as what is heard in the House, I thought Kaiser sounded quite fine—no trouble hearing him—or liking what I heard.

Summers’s reading was much more lyrical than many other conductors might chose…but very beautiful, and very dramatic nonetheless…

Thinking about it, I think you are right. In the sound she has the framework for a very large voice but without a core to it we will never know.

The slightest little manifestations of physical tension in the body will have an impact, and will detract from the sound. For instance, applying a bit too much pressure to chest muslces will kill a bit of resonance from the chest cavity, as will tense shoulders. If the back of the tongue comes up either on the in breath, or during singing, it makes access to the top a shade more difficult. This will have a knock on effect – the singer might really grip with the stomach muscles, or maybe tense and raise the jaw, just to give 2 possible examples, in order to get those top notes out another way. These things often result in a faster, narrower vibrato, which I think is absolutely manifest all though Mattila’s recital disc (the one which includes Lisa, Elsa, Amelia Grimaldi etc).

Mattila does have quite a lot of tension around her neck and shoulders, and I think this simply limits the extent to which her voice can resonate in her own body. This is what I find so frustrating about her – were this not the case, we wouldn’t get the polo mint effect, we would get more volume, far more ease, and she’d have access to a much broader range of repertoire.

I have no doubt that somebody will now come along and tell me the above is totally inaccurate, or possibly that I know nothing about singing, but whatever. That is my sense of what is going on with Mattila, a sense I have gained through working to address a lot of my own tension issues with a really marvellous teacher.

Just been watching (‘cos I had to) Nadja Michael’s Salome on DVD, and close up the intensity of her performance does carry all the awful tuning and approximate singing. From a distance in the opera house, I winced. I thoroughly recommend the 50-minute ‘let’s make an opera’ documentary that goes with it.

She would be more than capable of Fricka, or whatshername in Gotterdammerung – do I mean Waltraute? – or Brangane or Ortrud or Kundry or possibly even Sieglinde. If she expressed the vaguest desire to sing any of them she’d be booked up like a shot.

So what was great? Her Elsa, her wacky Musetta (what a gal), Elisabetta from the acting point of view and the aria to the Countess, but NOT ‘Tu che la vanita’. Surely, Cocky, it would be disastrous for her to do Isolde’s curse stuff in Act One? I’m sure the duet would be beautiful, and even the Liebestod, but…

CK

Though I will add that Cassandra doesn’t need to be such a nasty bitch about it…it was a misunderstanding and a simple correction would have sufficed.