Some thing about opera.. can't sum it up in one line, sorry.

Went to say Eugene Onegin again at the Met with this season's cast. The Polish tenor Piotr Beczala pwnd Lensky's big aria before the duel. He's gonna be a big star.

^^ heard that on radio 3 last night. enjoyed it muchly.

i also love the gardiner figaro dvd.

I still have a kind of reflexive dislike of things that seem to require big, expensive productions unless they really REALLY justify it -- I feel this way not only about opera but Matthew Barney installations and arena rock shows. I guess the exception would be something like a David Lean epic.

I also don't generally like the sound of operatic voices - not keen on the vibrato. I was raised on it, so I actually grew up with the strange notion that the only kind of "proper" singing was that wavery singing I didn't really like that much.

(to be fair, even classical vocal teachers would not describe vibrato operatic singing as the only proper singing)

Did not like operatic singing until very recently. Isn't there a thread where Dan Perry explains that singing with vibrato is natural and if you sang without vibrato at operatic volumes you would shred your voice? Don't see how you could do the Chet Baker/Joao Gilberto without a microphone.

Well yeah, the invention of microphone was really one of the main things that made 20th century popular music different from what came before. I think it was mentioned in some other thread that one of the reasons Bing Crosby is considered such an influential singer is because he was among the first to make use of the microphone to produce types of "quiet" singing that weren't possible before.

Well thank god for the microphone then!

Well yeah, Bing Crosby, but he was still singing in a manly baritone not the ethereal whisper of the two guys I mentioned. And I'm no expert but I wouldn't call Bing a vibratoless singer. And I assume there was plenty of pre-microphone singing without the full-on vibrato of the opera house.

Let's talk about vocal vibrato
How Does One Get Vibrato (Singing)?

Neither one has a single word about Der Bingle.