The Divine Anastasia Stratakis (I mean Stratas)
Oh, now I am on a Stratas kick and I just have to post these other two YouTube excerpts. Winsome as Perichole, as Nedda a wild bird. Watch these and fall in love with her. (I think that Lulu in Paris was recorded for TV, but I'm not certain; I'd pay money to see that, for sure!)
Well, youtube has removed the Perichole as well, which is a pity. For now the Nedda remains, and it's something to see!
Well, youtube has removed the Perichole as well, which is a pity. For now the Nedda remains, and it's something to see!
Labels: aria, nedda, opera, pagliacci, perichole, teresa stratas
posted by Counterleben at
9:30 PM
4 Comments:
Good Morning, Daniel. I found your blog through Richard Slade's Richard the Tenor and have enjoyed reading through your several most recent posts. There's something extremely familiar about your name--I have a feeling we've met rhrough friends at a performance or perhaps it's just that I've been at one of your performances.
I remember Stratas's Perichole well--in the midst of one of her most intense periods of personal drama she sang and acted an adorable, deftly comic Perichole in the MET's delightful production, impure patched together edition that it was. Because of the vagaries of my own professional schedule and her many cancellations, that was the last time I was to see her live until Madame Lidoine in "Carmelites".
I would like to place a link to Der Neugierige on DesignerBlog, and will look forward to reading more here.
Oh, and my two favorite sopranos--a really schizoid paring at polar opposites of performing style and repertory, but there it is--Victoria de los Angeles and Leonie Rysanek. Different though they were, I never left a performance by either of them without knowing much more about the music they sang, the composers whose works they inhabited, or what it means to be a performer.
Hello Will. You obviously have great taste: de los Angeles and Rysanek... ah yes, definitely sopranos not cut out of the same cloth. And yet how wonderful they both are. And great to read your reminiscence of Stratas' Perichole. Didn't Cyril Ritchard have something to do with that production?
Cyril Ritchard had almost everything to do with the production--he not only directed it but sang(?) the role of Don Andres in which he was not only very distinctive but really quite wonderful. I'm not sure how much of the corrupt edition of the score he was responsible for but if you didn't know the original and just wanted a very good time at the MET, the whole thing worked beautifully.
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