To those who think fine baroque singing didn’t exist until the advent of Harnoncourt, Elliot Gardiner, and Christie I offer this example…it’s about as exquisite a piece of singing as you are likely to find anywhere.

And of course, there is La Sills in “se pieta”…giving a masterclass in the art of using the trill as an expressive device…no one has bettered her in this music.

Come on, guys. We don’t have to be so provincial to protect our favorite repertory and our favored ways of getting it delivered. And Harry continues to set up the same old parodistic straw-men of absent-minded professors and tea cozies and such as his evidently uninformed image of one of the liveliest parts of the current musical world. No one could have heard — or seen — the recent Juilliard ARIODANTE and slavered on the way he and Operabitch are doing here. That sort of young, skilled music-as-drama and some of the new music going on in places in Brooklyn most of us hardly know about certainly compare favorably to the frequent sleep-walking mediocrity we’re always bitching about at the Met and other places.

You said it! I love me some Baroque opera. I just spent last month listening to all my Handel…from Agrippina to Serse. But sometimes I think Baroque Opera does need to be rescued from the Baroque Specialists. Handel needs to be sung with the same commitment that you would need for any 19th or 20th century opera (although not the same volume!)Handel didn’t write for anemic shrinking violets. His singers were world-class and passionate.

Horne vs Sills? Tebaldi vs Callas? We call those feuds? Cuzzoni and Faustina once got into a fist fight over equal time….ON STAGE!

Why would they? Just mentioning that they like Baroque opera means they’ll be attacked by you and operabitch ten times over.

And really Harry, I know you read this site pretty regularly, so you should know by now that I personally love opera from the 19th and 20th centuries, want to hear more from the 21st century, and am interested in trying 18th century opera. So characterizing all Baroque opera fans as passionless is just nonsense.

Or David Daniels trying to do some songs from Berlioz’s Nuits d’ete, and try to sound like a poor twilight ‘drag version’ of Janet Baker…who incidentally also stuffed up herself the second time – she recorded this work.
Why should people stay silent and stomach such nonsense because their fans are forever willing to devour the stuff?

Jeez….some artiste’ are labeled or pedaled as ‘Baroque specialists’ by some and then all of a sudden: they are then made the Mother Teresas’ of music. To then question ‘artists slumming around, where they should not have gone’ is seen as some form of blasphemy… As some cruel attempt at bruising those more genteel and tender sensibilities of Baroque ‘purists”

Talk about the sacrosanct suck-suck nature surrounding that manufactured craft of projecting and maintaining that embalmed aura :’The Performance Art of Baroque’ being seen as an separate entity in itself……Totally away, from the actual music on any page. As I said earlier, ( since the shown reactions to those comments, would tend to reinforce my previous opinion) it is all about various fossilized forms of constipated ‘style’ – or refined modes of contained approach and listening. Where real emotion is seen as dangeous.
A case:
” More tea, one lump of sugar and a finger biscuit Maude! That opera was so sweet, didn’t you think’? And please be careful, and do not spill the tea on that precious starched embroidered lace table cloth, Grandma-ma promised and left in her Will!”

On the other hand, those people more at home in the 19th & 20th Century, are red blooded passionate people. We do not care if you hate this or that composer, loathe this or that conductor, and want to strangle this or that singer or instrumentalist. If people think they deserve it, they speak up.

Well researched means that there has been an effort to select music and to prepare editions that will conform somehow to what the composers and or performers (and also audiences) saw in their time. What you talk about is not research but performance; there is a difference, learn it. While it is true that there is still some to be desired in the performance of early and barroque music, the research that is been happening around it is exceptional.

I for one think Haydns Orfeo is a masterpiece. It is beautifully constructed and beautifully composed.

As for the roles that Bartoli sang, once again, she sang what fir her voice. Yes, she is a mezzo soprano and if you notice the 2nd part of that, there is a soprano attached to that. A mezzo soprano is not the same as a contralto, as many might supposed. There shouldn’t be that much of a difference between a Mezzo soprano and a soprano, specially when they are young and the voice is still sitting a little higher than normal.

Scholars have put forth the theory that the opera could be a collaborative effort in which Monteverdi took part and somehow, through time was given the full credit.

But if I don’t have to watch her, she is wonderful.

They are but historical parrot-rote learning ‘antique – research queens’ searching for fame, surrounded by their clutter of fake ‘hallmarked’ pieces of not silver but worthless musical lead. To provide for their dubious validity, we all pay the price: by having inflicted on us, these performed special specimens of corrupted and virulent tripe, evidently dear to the hearts and mind of those supplying the polluting stuff. Such toxic material : saved and dug up from music’s compositional garbage tips and murky wells, deep in the dark dusty dungeons of some Jurassic Park music museum in places the World forgot. The patron sainted heroine of the Cause presently, is of course that famed music rag & bone picker, Cecilia B. – that female Steptoe , well suited to – adapt survivor for this Recorded Age. such baroque-fest creatures as these, are emblazoned: knowing that their souls have being indelibly tattooed with some ‘scholar’s good elephant stamp’ given out via praise, by some positively potty music professor, perhaps maybe their record company’s P.R department or by their misguided ‘cutie’ followers having fainting fits sans the smelling salts, on hand.

Imagine the same ridiculous situation two centuries from now. Some conservatory clowns trying to discover the correct instrumentation and performing style for the then unknown A.L.Webber ….or say that, for 20th century ‘modernish’ Eric Siegmeister’s horrid piano works. The latter could be then easily authenticated by heretic performance (just start banging the keys or commence smashing the piano!)

Harnoncourt I can take more seriously. He’s very good. His complete set of the Beethoven Piano Concerti with Aimard is brilliant.

But those other 4 are specialist hacks who when the history of conducting is written won’t even get a mention.

John Eliot Gardiner
Roger Norrington
Christopher Hogwood
William Christie
Fabio Biondi
Christophe Rousset

It’s like when they used to refer to a singer as “an intelligent singer.” That used to mean that the voice was so ugly they had to come up with something nice to say. Example: John Aler.

As for narrow-minded, it’s been my experience that the most narrow-minded group of music lovers is those who like “early music.” They seem to think that music stopped when Mozart died, won’t listen to anything from the 19th century on. Conversely, there’s the “new music” crowd (example: Mark Swed) who thinks that anything written before 1950 was trash. I can do without both groups.

My music loves range from Byrd and Palestrina to Britten and Tan Dun. But I’m honest and realistic about most baroque (not all) opera and its form. Some of it I like but a great deal of it is conventional, dull, too long, and repetitious. As an example, Monteverdi’s Poppea. This would have made a great 90 minute to 2 hour opera but it drones on for 4 hours and leaves you numb. Wagner never does that because there is so much interesting going on in the orchestra — an advance unknown to Monteverdi. So when the vocal writing gets dull there is nothing to search for — and find — to hold your interest. At least that’s my take on it.

I love Handel’s music but most of the operas never rose to the level of musical inventiveness as Cesare or Messiah. And I love the re-discovery of some, though not all, of these works of his.

But to think that there are all these great masterpieces by Vivaldi or Haydn or whomever just waiting out there. That’s hogwash.

As for Bartoli, most of the roles named above (Elvira, Fiordiligi, etc.) are things she should never have sung. She’s a mezzo with a top but she seems to think she’s a soprano. She records more than she sings on stage. I find her boring and watching her? Don’t get me started or I’ll have to make another “sour” commment.

I think that is true of most opera composers of any stature! Vivaldi is the master of the formulaic.