Monday, November 02, 2009

From the shallow end of the think tank

I get these ideas lodged in my cranium and they won't go away.

So you know how singers do Tribute to [Extremely Dead Singer] albums? Dawn Upshaw's Jane Bathori thingy, Bartoli helling around with Maria Malibran, Joyce DiDonato's recent...

Wait stop there. Joyce DiDonato, you say? Me, I mean. You probably didn't say it unless you read out loud. Say, what if she were to do another tribute album where, well I'll give you hints and you can guess the theme.

1) She's wearing a white wig on the cover that follows the Texan maxim: the higher the hair, the closer to god.

2) She might also be wearing what one friend of the tribute-object termed "appalling American clothes" if she can be persuaded to doff her habitual good taste in favor of a gamine sense of kitsch.

3) Highlights of the disc might include (oh I'm just giving it away now) Berio's divoon folk song do-ups, a set including Pergolesi's "Ticket to Ride," and perhaps a bonus track of "Surabaya Johnny."

C'mon, you know it'd be great. I can't help it. It's my ipod's fault. You start going down a road of "mezzo...keen intellect...sense of adventure" and where does it get you?







[With all due apologies to the object of this game of vocal paperdolls, which we all like to play.]

6 comments:

An Actual Puccini Scholar said...

If this were to happen, it would be the best news I've had since I learned that Berbs once sang through the Pavane for a Dead Princess in the style of Sarah Vaughan. While dressed as Eleonora Duse.

Maury D'annato said...

Oh my god. Did that really happen? [Being a dullard, I googled "the Berbs" thinking maybe they were a pop band. It took several minutes for the lightbulb to go on.]

An Actual Puccini Scholar said...

She did the Ravel/Vaughan thing at Hunter College--there's a review archived somewhere on the NYT site. She was performing in one of Duse's original gowns--God knows where she bought it--around the same time. So I'm guessing a bit; but, yes, something like that did happen, somewhere.

DawnFatale said...

There are recordings around of Berberian doing the Pavane thing as part of her "Second Hand Music" program.

Love is not always the answer said...

But didn't DiDonato just did a tribute album to Diana Krall. No wait, Diana Krall posed on the cover of the Colbran CD, didn't she? No wait, Barbra Streisand just did a Rossini album. Heck, I'm confused...

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