Thursday, November 12, 2009

Further Commentary on McLaughlin/I Furiosi's Piangero

A year ago, I mentioned a fascinating recording and video of Gabrielle McLaughlin and I Furiosi performing Handel's Piangero. A recent thread on the New Forum for Classical Singers linking to the original post (thanks, coloraturaminx!) shows that there is both support for and resistance to the growing practice of historically informed vocal performance. In spite of a little rudeness here and there, the full comment thread does make for some interesting reading.

And for the record, I absolutely loved the video.

2 comments:

  1. Fascinating! Thanks SO much for the link to the comments, Chris. As a voice teacher it's always interesting to read all the thoughts on stright-tone vs. vibrato. My thoughts are that SOUND is vibration, so there's naturally vibrato in every pitch. But, again, the pitches can be straightened (more like the vibrato minimized) for emotional effect. Again, a fascinating discussion.

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  2. Anonymous10:12 PM

    Definitely an interesting conversation thread. As someone with first-hand knowledge of the group in question (as in, I am in it) I found myself wishing I could comment and explain why the artistic choices were made as they were. As for the slightly prickly comments, I found myself wondering if any of the detractors would change their tune after going through the near-impossible process of presenting a concert series and making a commercial CD.
    Sure, we don't deserve extra credit because what we do is difficult to achieve..it's just that it's hard to take criticism from people who sound as though they have no idea of the amount of work actually involved in any of this.

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