Monday, November 14, 2005

More Times

JSU the unamplified points me to an article I missed on Dessay. This is what I liked most:

"The English baritone Simon Keenlyside, who took the title role, says he regards Ms. Dessay as 'one of those artists that it is sort of unnecessary to deconstruct.'"

Maybe I'm punch-drunk but that strikes me as a wittily offbeat thing to say about one's fellow singer.

I think I have a minor attitude problem regarding Dessay because she's canceled on me twice, and we lunatics that haunt the opera take these kinds of things unreasonably personally. I can't remember what the second was, but the first was Ariadne that year that Lubov Petrova took over ably but not brilliantly, and ever since, a certain friend of mine at any mention of Ariadne taunts me, "ah, but you didn't hear Dessay..." I like to think Damrau was of similar stature in the part, but I'll never know, since Dessay I assume has dropped it.

[Edit: and she's canceled tonight.]

2 comments:

JSU said...

You can't blame her for having surgeries for a vocal crisis, can you?

Pretty shocking that Gurewitsch went a whole full-length piece without mentioning this even once. Hence my description.

Maury D'annato said...

I don't blame her in the least...which is to say...I think as fans we kind of separate the person from the performer. We get mad when someone cancels, but if we met them in real life I like to hope we'd say "feel better!" instead of "why'd you #@%$ cancel on me? I wanted to hear your Zerbinetta!" Does this make any sense?