Advantages: Beautifully constructed and written Disadvantages: May be regarded as a "woman's book"
This novel deservedly won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2002. The Orange Prize is for women writers, so how many of you guys out there are now dismissing this as a "woman's book"? There is a strange demarcation line in (most) men's minds about "women's books" and "men's books". I personally am happy to roam either side of this boundary, enjoying Sharpe, Flashman, the Tom Clancy doorstoppers as well as works where the action is more internalised. Jeremy Clarkson once wrote in an article that his wife had been reading a novel "where a woman goes away, has a child and many years later comes back again". "Ha, ha," chortled the blokes in my family, "that's the sort of book Mum reads!" Since then, novels such as BelCanto have been known chez Chouchinciao as "Jeremy Clarkson's wife books".
A brief plot outline, no more than you ...
Advantages: Virtuosic operatic vocalism, unusual repertoire, mad scenes... Disadvantages: Fleming's voice is maybe not best suited for this...
BelCanto - she sure can belto
If there is any area in classical music which polarises opinion more than singers and singing, then I have yet to come across it. I've been in opera performances where the conductor has had to halt the show after an aria, because of one portion of the audience booing the singer, whilst the other tried to drown out their boos with cheers... Or I remember another occasion in a very elite Viennese concert-hall where two very well dressed gentlemen came to blows after one made "an insulting remark" about the other's favourite soprano. People can get pretty vocal and worse about their favourite or least favourite vocalists.
I think the other big problem is that a singer can be great in some repertoire but then take a nose-dive in other areas and this is one factor in this particular CD. The human ...
Advantages: In original French! Kasarova, Vargas, Furmansky Disadvantages: They don't pronounce French well. A bit under-rehearsed
La Favorite is one of 3 French grand opera written by the belcanto master Gaetano Donizetti (though it is often performed in Italian under the title 'La Favorita'). The story is based on Royer's and Vaez's play 'L'Ange de Nisida'.
SYNOPSIS:
The novice monk Fernand is dismissed from the monastery in Castile by his prior Balthazar due to his attraction to an unknown beauty whose hand he had touched during a service. Fernand takes off to Leon, where he meets the courtesan Inez and her colleagues in the service of Leonor de Guzman, the mistress of King Alphonse XI, who turns out to be the unknown beauty he met in Castile). Having mistaken her for a royalty, Fernand joins the army vowing to earn glory in battle deserving of her attention.
After showing his valor in a victorious battle with the Moors, Fernand is praised by the happy ...
