My tastes in music are, I'm proud to say, pretty wide-ranging (at least, I hope they are) but they've never stretched quite as far as a genuine appreciation of bel canto opera in the Italian tradition, especially early nineteenth century stuff. Until today.
This afternoon I found myself in the audience for Bellini's La Sonnambula as performed by a Singaporean company calling themselves the Opera People. I'd never heard of them before one of my students, Ines, a very talented singer, told me she was involved in the production as a member of the chorus. I sort of felt obliged to attend I suppose, but I was also intrigued as to what the show might be like and vaguely suspected I might just enjoy the experience if I listened hard and worked hard to abandon my seemingly innate prejudice against lady sopranos of the prima donna variety.
In the event I didn't have to work hard at all. Just hearing the orchestral players warming up behind the set (well more of a band really than an orchestra in terms of actual numbers) was enough to excite me. The acoustic sounded particularly rich and it was easy to differentiate the players and focus on detail and these guys were obviously on top of the material. And as soon as it all kicked off I was struck by just how good it all sounded, and I'm talking very, very good indeed: crisp, tuneful, often bouncing along and harmonically gorgeous in an obvious but nonetheless deeply satisfying manner. I didn't recognise a single melody but felt entirely at home with the music as if I'd been listening to this kind of thing all my life on a daily basis.
I suppose everything being live and up close and personal, as it were, had something to do with it, but I was just completely swept away by it all. I'll break off here since I've officially run out of superlatives, but this is something I'll have to come back to, and soon.
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