I don’t buy Bartoli’s recordings myself but the woman is constantly exploring new repertoire and then recording it with a palpable joy and enthusiam. And people love it and buy the CD in (relatively) large numbers. So, what is wrong with that? She is one of the few artists out there who can still make a case for viable classical recording projects.

http://www.amazon.com/William-Bolcom-Innocence-Experience-University/dp/B000641YZK

Completely agree.

This phrase is being ‘re-purposed’ to mean “Any recording I don’t like.”

Don’t like baroque music? Vanity project
Don’t like Renee Fleming? Vanity project
Don’t like John Adams? Vanity project

Please — like the world was crying out for the endless recordings of Butterfly, Boheme, Carmen which were cranked out at the height of the LP era.

There is probably more of an enduring place for “Sacrificium” than most of those projects.

Somehow I don’t think so. The few singers that record CDs
these days have hightly complex negotiations for each project. And becoming more and more the trend is a concert tour following the recording/release. Ceci, Placi, Renee, JDF, Angie, Joycie etc.

I don’t believe that most recordings are vanity projects in the purest sense in that Sony , i.e., says to Renee, what would you like to record dear, anything is fine with us. But they are more towards that end of the spectrum than the “Joyce, report to studio 3, pick up your music in the office on the way” end of the spectrum.

They do it because it’s part of their job, not out of vanity. Some singers have recording contracts to fill, you know?

The case of the Nixon in China, which I have not heard, is according to our reviewer perhaps an example of a less valuable contribution to the catalog.

Bartoli does very good work, I think, and I wasn’t all that hard on her in my review. The programming certainly brings a level of class to the top-10 opera charts that we rarely see.

There are comparatively few CDs recorded and released by the big companies today and I think the market for audio-only is not so large as it was say 30 years ago.
So for the most part it takes a lot of marketing input to make a recording and usually some big name and/or a
concept. Many of these releases are going to seem like vanity projects and to an extent they are.

The vacuum left by the fewer cd releases seems to have been filled by the DVD releases, which seem to include many more releases of a general repertory nature. There are some “vanity project” type items here to , to be sure but they are blended in with less carefully marketed items.

For example, RF’s Verismo is a vanity project. That being said, besides her fans and those gullible enough to buy into the whole “La Voce bull, who would want to spend hours upon hours listening to this singer do stuff that Scotto, Olivero and even Freni did better? Make no mistake, I thought the recording was decent, great, for what I expected of her, but beyond the excerpts from Zaza, the original Sola Perduta and the arias from Leoncavallo’s Boheme, much of what I heard can be heard better sung elsewhere.

Then there’s every vanity project that Cecilia Bartoli has put together for the past decade: Salieri, Vivaldi, Prohibita, Malibran and Sacrificium; hell, even the Sonnambula. Those vanity projects have allowed us to discover music that has remained largely unrecorded, forgotten and ignored for many years. Is it a vanity project? Absolutely, just as much as RF’s, but if it had not been for those vanity projects, we would not know how wonderful a composer Malibran could be, or how utterly delicious Salieri could be, or about the music that the Popes forbade people to listen to, or those arias written for castratos whose name WAS NOT Farinelli.

Let’s not dis all vanity projects as unnecessary. Thanks to some vanity projects we have enriched our knowledge of the repertoire.

Since “Aslop” has been attended to, I’ll mention “begs the question” when “raises the question” was intended.

I thought the 1st act of Nixon when I saw it at IU was fabulous. The 2nd act was just a total bore I fell asleep.

I still don’t know why or how has it not gone through some serious revisions. I think the opera would be best reassembled as a biopic on Nixon, trash all that China stuff and include an act on Watergate and a final scene with Nixon leaving the White House.

If the trip to china must be staged, let’s make a scene one of act 2 and move right along.

(dorion – the answer to your last question is….)

Anyway, this is not the reason I came on Parterre. I’m utterly shocked that we have posts on Nixon in China (and Sancia di Castiglia on Opera L of all operas!!! a Donizetti score I absolutely adore by the way) but not one single word that I could find about Guleghina’s wretched Turandot last night, which was on Sirius.

Is Gelb really serious about allowing her to do the HD? A 5 yo. can tell she can’t sing the notes from the very first bars. Is the whole entire world going INSANE?