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Symptoms of baritonophilia are clear. You suffer from baritonophilia when you hear about Pikovaya Dama, you think of Prince Yeletsky, or hear about Die tote Stadt and think of Pierrot; you even think of Riccardo when someone mentions I Puritani. If a tenor sings Pelléas, you complain and you would rename Don Carlo as Posa. If you identify with those symptoms, you should know that it's a quite common disorder (not as much as tenoritis and sopranitis, though) and it's not serious. Just accept it. And enjoy it. And thank Mozart again, this time, because of his Don Giovanni, Leporello, Count Almaviva, Figaro, Guglielmo, Papageno and all of his baritone guys.- Details
Today, the Schubertiade Vilabertran 2016, the 24th festival, has been presented. That's why I'm posting later than usual; I wanted to talk about the programme, especially regarding the song recitals. First of all, the dates: the SV16 will take place from 18th August to 3rd September and the format will be arranged as some years ago: the fifteen concerts are concentrated in three long weekends. The first one, from Thursday 18th to Sunday 21st; The second one, longer, from Thursday 25th to Monday 29th and the third one, the shortest, from Thursday 1st to Saturday 3rd. Six song recitals are scheduled; two in the first weekend, four during the second one and one at the third, plus three talks related to three recitals, one each week. This year, the predominance of the German language is overwhelming: Schubert (a lot of him, as you can imagine), Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, [...]- Details
Terezín is a town in the Czech Republic, infamous for the Nazi concentration camp which was set there between November 1941 and May 8th, 1945; Camp figures vary according to the sources but there are chilling ones in any case. The Terezín Memorial website indicates that there were about 140,000 prisoners; Terezín was not an extermination camp but the living conditions were so harsh that 35,000 people died (hereafter where it says "died" please read "were murdered "). When the Soviet army liberated the camp there were only 19,000 survivors; during the previous months, 87,000 people were deported to Auschwitz to be executed and only 3800 among them survived. The Terezín camp was kind of "special" to the Nazis, who wanted to present it as an example of their beneficial influence on the Jews. Their cynicism came to such an extent that they organized [...]
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Do you like Shakespeare? I do, a lot, since I first read Hamlet many years ago. I admit that, leaving aside that four centuries separate us, I would smack some character's nape, but the way he plays with words compensates for everything. Shakespeare was mainly a theatre man so his success in Opera is just natural; as it is that we don't usually find his verses in songs. Most songs, in fact, are included in plays, such as Desdemona's willow song in Othello or Clown's songs in Twelfth Night. In fact, we listened to Clown on the first post this year. Today we'll listen to a Shakespeare's song too and, according to my notebook, some more are coming the next months. The reason? As you probably know, this 2016 commemorates 400 years since William Shakespeare’s death; I don't think he needs to be rediscovered but it's always a pleasure to read him and to celebrate his words.
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"Love, that moves the sun and the other stars."I read this sentence somewhere when I was at school and I jotted it down in my notebook (yes, back then I already wrote in notebooks). Later, I found out that it was the last verse of Dante's Divine Comedy and it spoke about transcendent love. Still, damage was already done and the quote was engraved in that teenager's memory without further reflection, only for its beauty. Love moves the sun and the other stars and moves also poets to write verses (sometimes) so unforgettable as those of Dante; many of these poems became songs so it was just very easy to choose that word, love, to start a new series of songs.
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