You have ears, but you are still wet behind them. Here's a quote from someone who really can tell the difference between a great singer and a mediocre one.
Conductor Sir Georg Solti said of Fleming, "In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing; the other was Renata Tebaldi."
Um, Montserrat Caballe, Edda Moser, and Joan Sutherland are all 1000x better than either singer. Callas has pitch issues and sings in an ungainly manner. Fleming has no idea how to focus on a note and instead makes her entire performance about her breath.
Like many children, you make outrageously uninformed statements that you think make you seem precocious, but which simply betray your inexperience and lack of intelligence. Time is the only cure for that. And your attempts to write "technically" about music ("focusing on a note"--LOL!) are hilariously misinformed.
Fine. Forget I said anything. Every time I bring this up with anybody I get mocked and ridiculed, so just let me listen to my own recordings and you listen to yours.
Every time I bring this up with anybody I get mocked and ridiculed, so just let me listen to my own recordings and you listen to yours.
If every time you bring this up you get "mocked and ridiculed", perhaps you should take that as a sign that people recognize you don't know what you're talking about. To say that Renee Fleming--or Callas--is not your favorite singer is one thing. To say that either is mediocre at best is another thing all together. But contrarianism is a phase most of us pass through, especially in youth, and hopefully you'll outgrow it.
It's intriguing, though, that Caballe is your standard of singing, while you call out Callas for her "pitch issues" (a nonsense term) and singing in an "ungainly manner" (whatever that means), considering that Caballe, like Callas, experienced a premature vocal decline and ended her operatic career giving performances of wild inconsistency. Fleming, on the other hand, is still singing with great style and musicianship well into her fifties, as her recent Met performances have shown.
I mean, I know there's a video he made that should more or less prove he's a teenager, but Fantod talks like no teenager I've ever met. And I work with teenagers.
LarryD2, you're right, my language was too strong for Callas. She is quite talented. I still have my opinion about Renee Fleming, but I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.
I always hoped that Rene would have come to Braodway in a revival of RAGS. I think she would have been brilliant in it.
"Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around."
Fantod, it's not that we mind what you said, it's the way you said it. If you don't like a particular singer, fine. That's expected around here (personally, you lost me when you said Callas was mediocre, but that's me). But c'mon. You know this board. You gotta be able to back up your opinion, not just pop off a few adjectives. If you tried that bare minimum stuff on the Met's message board, the posters there would eat you alive (happened to me when I was 17).
(btw, La Divina has been dead since the 70s, so referring to her in the present tense is a bit weird)
Yes, I already said my language was too strong. I also am not a music professional, so it's difficult for me to describe exactly what I mean and couldn't articulate it properly.
And, like I said, mediocre was too strong of a word. She is a very good opera singer, I just don't see what's so special about her. She does have a fabulous recording of Lucia di Lammermoor and Rigoletto