Smorg's Current 15 Favorite Youtube Opera Clips
Nov 19 '07 (Updated Nov 25 '08)
The Bottom Line 15 of Smorg's favorite Youtube clips from various operatic repertoires. Maybe there are some that would interest you non-opera fans!
Thanks to Youtube, I've had a chance to glimpse many great performances by artists whose heydays came and went before my time while exploring many newer singers whom I haven't had a chance to hear live yet.... not to mention overindulging in clips of my favorite active singers, also.
Here are 15 of my current favorite opera clips on Youtube.com
1. Vesselina Kasarova as Romeo in Bellini's The Capulets and the Montagues from Paris Opera in 1997.
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvaWNTPi3Us
Bellini wrote his Romeo for the soprano Giulia Grisi (who also originated the role of Adalgisa in his Norma), so visual disparity between the female singer and the male character is often a sticky point for the modern audience (especially those who are new to the opera). Only once in a blue moon do we have a singing actress who can make us totally forget her gender while blowing us away with her passionate singing. Vesselina Kasarova is one of those mesmerizing stage chameleons. It is unfortunate that this performance from Paris Opera isn’t commercially available, but it doesn’t hurt to catch just a glimpse of greatness, ay? If you like the music, why not buy a recording of this marvelously beautiful work? This is one of the very few opera around that I can listen to from start to finish for days on end without feeling like skipping any track.
2. Birgit Nilsson sings Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in Osaka, Japan 1967.
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR1Dlokc_iY
Has death ever sounds so inviting, so magnificent, so encompassing, and so infinite? Birgit Nilsson had a voice that could give the big D all those qualities and more. A glowing incendiary phosphorus kind of a voice that could break right through the dense orchestra that is playing at top volume and still signing off with a most breath-takingly soft pianissimo that floats above her sparring partner as if to give it a final affirmation of her mastery over the defeated finality of death. Isolde refuses to live without her beloved Tristan, and not even death can separate them. She doesn’t really die at the end, but is magically transfigured. The two are united forever in a state not quite describable by words (you really have to listen to the music to ‘get’ it).... For me, Isolde walks into the crashing waves of the North Sea and becomes one with the ocean.
3. Vesselina Kasarova sings Con l’ali di constanza from Händel's Ariodante from Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona in 2006..
Clip: http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=uiXmHsryTRc
And for those who think of opera as ‘sedated music for the aged’, this fearsome exercise in singing pyrotechnic should drive home how wide and diverse a musical genre opera is. With the first 2 tracks, you have heard quintessential bel canto and German music. With this track, it is quintessential Baroque. Ariodante (one of the 3 heroic knights of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) has successfully asked for the hand of Princess Ginevra from her father, the King of Scotland, and breaks into a song of jubilation.... done in the style of a knight with too much testosterone and caffeine in his system. It is so florid that a really great rendition that showcases the singer’s ability to imitate an uzi with her vocal chords (it’s usually a ‘her’ singing Ariodante now, this is formerly a castrato role) while projecting enthusiasm and virility convincingly in the voice is very hard to come by. Kasarova is one of the best singers in doing all that. This performance from Barcelona isn’t commercially available yet (but may get released to DVD in a year or two).
4. Luciano Pavarotti sings Nessun dorma from Puccini's Turandot at a concert
Clip: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TOfC9LfR3PI
If a singer ever owns an operatic song, the recently departed Pavarotti owned Nessun dorma. Truth be told, he really just sings the song rather than interpret it, but with that one in a billion voice, he could get away with a lot. This is the aria Calaf sings on that sleepless night before his judgment day... His beloved Princess Turandot had ordered out her troops to find the answer to his riddle (to avoid having to marry him), and if she succeeds, he will lose his head (along with the heart he had already lost to her early on in the opera). It's tough being in love sometimes!
5. Astrid Varnay as The Kostelnicka in Janacek’s Jenufa in
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiC7gJHLVMU
Motherly love trumps morality... The Kostelnicka (the mother of Jenufa) is the ultimate 'fallen' character in the operatic world, in my opinion. She starts the opera as the moral compass and the steady rock of her little community, but when Jenufa faces possible public humiliation of being rejected by her boyfriend after having given birth to a son out of wedlock in this conservative enclave, the Kostelnicka resolves to do the unthinkable... Drowning the 8 days old infant in the nearby creek and hope that the corpse will have been destroyed by the deep winter freeze by next spring. It takes a great actress to pull this role off without being one-dimensionally ‘evil’... and a more repellingly sympathetic Kostelnicka than one Astrid Varnay is hard to come by!
6. Nina Stemme, Vesselina Kasarova, & Malin Hartelius sing the Trio from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier at Zurich Opera in 2004.
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eZt_JlEyb8
In the operatic world where drama is often brought of jealousy, self-indulgence, madness, and murders, there is a respite in the elegantly mature Marschallin the Princess von Werdenberg. She has been dreading that her young lover, Count Oktavian, would leave her for a younger woman since this morning. And when her dread comes through that very evening, she graciously steps aside and sanctions the young couple's pairing. The gal in drag singing the opening 'Marie Theres!' is Oktavian (Kasarova), the grand dame singing the haunting opening phrase 'Hab'mir's gelobt in liebzuhaben in der richtigen Weis (I promised myself to love him in the right manner)' is The Marschallin. The other girl is Sophie (Hartelius), the young girl Oktavian had fallen in love with. This is one of the best performances of this trio I've heard. They blend magnificently without trying to out-sing the other voices.
7. Susan Graham sings D'Amour, l'ardente flamme from Hector Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust in Brussels, Belgium 2002.
Clip: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sGn0UR0kww8
Marguerite believes that Faust has abandoned her, and sings this song of longing while looking out over her window and remembering Faust's physical presence. I don't know what the pencil in this clip stands for, but I know that a more vocally beautiful Marguerite than Susan Graham would be a rare find. This is a quintessential Berlioz-sounding piece. He was a master of the orchestra, and any lover of the sound of the woodwinds would fall instantly in love with the oboe solo of this number.
8. Diana Damrau sings Der Hölle rache from Mozart's The Magic Flute in London in 2000.
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp6DFkWUsbc
There isn’t any more beloved hateful character in opera than the Queen of the Night, an ambitious woman who reaches for power beyond what the men in her life would like her to have... And so Mozart wrote this nasty little aria for her to vent in the second act upon seeing her daughter, Pamina, recoils at her command that she kill the Priest Sarastro to reclaim the magical 7 Circles of Stars. It is so characteristic of the Queen... Continuously reaching for the stratosphere (there is no aria in operatic repertory that has a higher sustained tessitura), but is continuously spoiled by the flute.
9. Elina Garanca sings Una voce poco fa from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=od368OEUZ_8
Quite a lustrous voice for the young heiress Rosina. Her mundane existence under the roof of Don Bartolo (the fox that guards the hen's coop, if you know what I mean) has been pleasantly spiked by the appearance of a young and handsome suitor, 'Lindoro' (actually Count Almaviva in disguise). Does 'Lindoro' really know what exactly he is getting himself into? Perhaps not, judging from a good glimpse of Rosina's not so innocent personality in this aria. I have been frustrated by Elina Garanca's theatrical restraint before, but this rendition is really an eye-openingly juicy one.
10. Natalie Dessay sings Olympia's Doll Song from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann in Orange, France
Clip: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wpBoEhxDk
Olympia, the perfect mechanical doll of Hoffman's invention, has her moment of glory before overheating and meeting one of the most explosive end in the history of operatic mechanized dive... literally. Anyhow, she doesn't blow up here, but Natalie Dessay's Olympia would have even the most uptight audience amazed at how she manages to sing this fantastically difficult song while running around playing the sprite around the stage.
11. Vesselina Kasarova sings ‘Un mari sage’ from Offenbach’s The Beautiful Helen Act II finale
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYCmtFFmQMM
Helen of Sparta is the most beautiful woman in the world, a title that comes with the privilege of never having to say sorry for anything... not even when her sage of a husband (Menelaus) returns home early from a trip to find her in bed with one Paris of Troy. But a performance like this is really unfair for Menelaus... Kasarova's soprano voice even trumps her looks as the most sumptuously beautiful on the planet. She can even get away with harassing Maestro Harnoncourt in his own orchestral pit!
12. Agnes Baltsa sings 'O don fatale' from Verdi's Don Carlo
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyPazl9QMQ
There are more than a few notes that Agnes Baltsa, the highly dramatic Greek mezzo, sings here that would cause seasoned opera-fans to grimace.... but isn't she convincing as the self-loathing, angry at destiny, and boxed into a corner Princess Eboli who is denouncing her own good look? This is opera at its most convincing, if not most technically perfect. All the ugly notes occur just where ugliness doesn't hurt, but could actually highten the drama. This Eboli doesn't even need an eye-patch to scare you off your shoes!
13. June Anderson sings Viljas Lied from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvDEavu26B4
Anna Glawari is a flirtatious widow with such a large bank account that the Pontevedrians would like to keep her from marrying a foreigner. The trouble is, she is currently partying around in gay Paris, whose romantic sub-current is hard for this lusty a girl to ignore. How playfully lusty is Anna? This 'Vilja Song' is what she sings at the party full of suitors in Act II of the operetta. No wonder she's a widow.... What man wouldn't kill to grab a voice like June Anderson's?
14. Olga Borodina & Placido Domingo sing Mon coeur s'ouvre á ta voix from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila
Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBDMyQ0oJCI
Dalila, assured of Samson’s feelings for her, sings this seductive song in her (need I say ‘successful’?) attempt to get him to reveal the secret to his superhuman strength. Olga Borodina is such an irresistible danger girl of a Dalila that not even his hair could save Samson from spilling his secrets.
15. Thomas Quasthoff... Actually, humor me and try the following 2 clips in successive order:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa46UG8PivE (singing ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkwKK-NjryU (jazzing up a storm )
Notice something about the dude? Quasthoff has serious birth defects from his mother's exposure to the drug thalidomide (used to combat sea-sickness) during her pregnancy... so he doesn’t sing in opera production. This is one of the very few singers that has never sung in an opera performance that I wouldn’t mind if people call him an opera singer (fans of cross-over divas like to do that), since he is very well trained in classical singing and can probably blow us all away in concert performance of an opera if he wants to. Deh vieni alla finestra is a song Don Juan sings in his attempt to seduce the young peasant Zerlina to bed him despite of this being her wedding day to another man.
Voila! So now you have a better idea of what kind of music roams through my head in a day. If you find yourself curiously attracted by one or more of these clips, why not check out the whole work? Maybe you do like operatic music after all!
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Member: Smorg
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