I wonder how much these three singers -- whom we heard recently, and who not so long ago would have been instantly recognizable (or almost) -- are even known now

Let's call our first singer "Singer A" --

Singer A; National Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles Gerhardt, arr. and cond. RCA, recorded in Walthamstow Town Hall, London, May 10-13, 1982

by Ken

As I sort-of-explained in a post-placeholder that was up briefly, untold numbers of posts-in-progress, and in particular intersecting (or overlapping) cycles of posts, have been piling up in various state of incompletion, or maybe incompletability. What I put up briefly -- for the usual reason, that since the sh*ttification wrought by the Googlefiends since their takeover of Blogger, I still haven't found any way of seeing and hearing all the working parts of a post work short of actually publishing the thing -- was essentially a fleeting bit of what now stands to be the next-up post-cycle, and yet even so that pair of more or less self-contained scenes from a well-known show, totaling just about 15 minutes' playing time, had consumed a troubling number of hours over a bunch of days. For once instead of bitching and moaning about the grueling prospect of tending to all the details large and small, oh-so-many of them involving seemingly endless picayune picky-work, I had summoned uncommon stores of patience to just do it all, and by the end both excerpts were "done up" just about properly, including even the fully inserted vocal texts.

And "the end" is all too literally the case, since an hour or so after that chunk was posted, complete with a covering note explaining that at this point, now that I had the opportunity to check out and test those post-portions, I really no longer had any need to have them in "published" state but nevertheless meant to leave them up for a while in case any readers happened by -- well, at that hour-plus mark I worked my way through to the painful decision that I really couldn't use them, that thanks in part to the unaccustomed fastidiousness of the work product, it strayed too dangerously into copyright-infringement territory. So crashing down that stuff came.

Oh well.

SO, WE PROCEED -- TOWARD SOME CONSIDERATION OF
THE THREE SINGERS YOU'RE HEARING (AGAIN) TODAY

So much for my fleeting sensation of having brought all those grueling labors to an at least somewhat satisfactory result, not to mention the fleeing sensation of having finally gotten something, if not actually posted, finally, then at least made available for perusal.

So, to work. Before proceeding to Singers B and C --

Let's hear SINGER A sing the whole "Battle Hymn of the Republic"

These four variously special singers -- Margaret Price (s), Yvonne Minton (ms), Alexander Young (t), and Justino Díaz (bs-b) -- share a particular connection

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The post still needs some filling in and filling out, even now that all the texts and our always-intended Yvonne Minton Wagner excerpt are in place. However, as noted below there's still a bunch of other stuff of Minton's we should really hear, now while we're listening -- and so too, at least to some extent, with the others. It has occurred to me, I'm afraid to say, that we may be facing an overtime situation, by which I have in mind, over the next few days, going into one or more overflow, or "bonus," posts. Uh-oh! -- Ken

The young Margaret Price amd Yvonne Minton

MOZART: Così fan tutte, K. 588: Act I, Duet, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, "Ah guarda, sorella"

[A garden by the seashore. FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA are both gazing at miniatures hanging round their necks.]

FIORDILIGI: Ah tell me, sister,
If one could ever find
A nobler face,
A sweeter mouth.
DORABELLA: Just look,
See what fire
Is in his eye,
If flames and darts
Do not seem to flash forth!
FIORDILIGI: This is the face
Of a soldier and a lover.
DORABELLA: This is a face
both charming and alarming.
FIORDILIGI and DORABELLA: How happy I am!
If ever my heart
changes its affection,
may love make me
live in pain.

Margaret Price (s), Fiordiligi; Yvonne Minton (ms), Dorabella; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Jan.-Feb. 1971

by Ken

No, we're not finished with Salome. I've just gotten sidetracked. Hey, as occasional visitors know, it happens. (Frequent visitors know that it happens, um, frequently.) What caused it this time was an unscheduled encounter with a composer who shares with Richard Strauss a particular gift of imagination: the ability to conjure a startling range of musics, which really is what our Salome explorations have been about. I've usually thought of it, especially in an operatic composer, as a remarkable range of empathy -- the ability to imagine all his characters from the inside. But what good is identifying with those characters if you don't have the ability to create them in arrestingly individual musical ways?

We're not going to get to our mystery composer this week, because I thought we needed to fix in our heads the musical identities of the singers who were featured in this unexpected encounter: the SATB quartet (as noted in the post title) of soprano Margaret Price, mezzo Yvonne Minton, tenor Alexander Young, and bass-baritone Justino Díaz. So that's really all we're going to do this week, hear some vocal samples. And I thought we'd do it in voice-range order, high to low. In fact, we've already heard today from our "S" and "A," both of whom, in further fact, have made frequent Sunday Classics appearances.

MARGARET PRICE, soprano
(1941-2011),
born in Blackwood,
Monmouthshire, South Wales

Boy, have we heard a lot of Dame Margaret! The retrospective series that followed her passing in 2011 extended to at least a ninth part, with at least one more promised therein, to be devoted to Price as song-singer; neither my memory nor the archives provide conclusive evidence as to whether this ever happened. (If it did, I can't trace it.)

It's hard not to keep returning to her Fiordiligi in Otto Klemperer's 1971 recording of Così fan tutte, and I haven't tried very hard to resist. It was that recoding that made her an international sensation, and it's this earlier part of the Welsh soprano's career that's going to matter most for our present purposes. Not the very earliest part, which stretches back to 1962, when she made her operatic debut with Welsh National Opera as Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The following year, at the ripe old age of 23, she made an unscheduled debut at Covent Garden, as a late replacement for Teresa Berganza, whom she was understudying. Then-Covent Garden music director Georg Solti apparently didn't want her in the company, saying she "lacks charm," and she was specifically contracted only for understudying.

Price continued to work on the voice, and kept at it after the period we're looking at. Evidence of her versatility is in a Mozart-aria LP she recorded, I believe after the Così with Klemperer, where she sings all three principal female roles from The Marriage of Figaro. Taking the arias in dramatic order, we start in Act II with her first operatic role, Cherubino (a notably earnest, un-cutesy one), and proceed through her eventual role, the Countess, in Act III to Susanna in Act IV.

Sunday Classics snapshots: Count Almaviva goes a-wooing, then and now

Urged on by Figaro (Ross Benoliel), "Lindoro" (Luigi Boccia as Count Almaviva) identifies himself to Rosina (Stephanie Lauricella), with Enrico Granafei playing the guitar and Jason Tramm conducting, at New Jersey State Opera, June 2012. (For English text, see below.)

by Ken

I'd like to think we established the premise well enough in last week's "snapshots" post, "Rosina I and Rosina II," where we heard aural snapshots of young Rosina first as the spitfire being wooed by the supposed poor student Lindoro in the opera Rossini fashioned from the popular Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, and then, a mere three years later, as the desolate, pretty much emotionally abandoned Countess Almaviva in the opera Mozart fashioned from Beaumarchais's equally popular sequel, The Marriage of Figaro.


I HOPE AURAL TRANSFORMATION OF ROSINA
CAME AS A SHOCK -- A REALLY HORRIBLE SHOCK

Sunday Classics snapshots: Rosina I and Rosina II

Victoria de los Angeles as Rosina II at the Met in 1952

Rosina I

I'm docile, I'm respectful;
I'm obedient, gentle, loving;
I let myself be ruled and guided. But --
but if you touch on my weakness,
I shall be a viper, I shall,
and a hundred tricks
I'll play before I'll yield.
And a hundred tricks, etc.
I'm docile, I'm respectful;
I let myself be ruled and guided, etc.

Victoria de los Angeles (s), Rosina; Orchestra of the Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Carlo Felice Cillario, cond. Live performance, June 1962

Rosina II

Grant, love, that relief
to my sorrow, to my sighing.
Give me back my treasure,
or at least let me die.
Grant, love, etc.

Victoria de los Angeles (s), Rosina; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Live performance, Mar. 1, 1952

by Ken

It's not that we've never done this sort of thing before in Sunday Classics. In fact, I like to think we've taken pretty frequent advantage of the oportunity afforded by this peculiar, er, format, to put together any two (or three or more) damned things we want which can benefit from being heard together. Butting together "the two Rosinas," as we've just done, is an idea so obvious that it doesn't seem to occur to many people that it really doesn't get done that often.

Well, here it is.


MY NEED TO DO THIS JUXTAPOSITION STARTED . . .