# Padding recital programmes with the "Songbook"



## Darkhawk (Jun 7, 2011)

Anyone else sick and tired of seeing truly talented opera singers waste their talent on the various Songbook tunes? It seems like recitals are more and more fluff, less and less content.

I don't really need to see Renee Fleming perform "Over the Rainbow", and I don't really need Bryn Terfel serenading me with Cole Porter.

I gather it's a mix of voice-saving and crowd-pleasing, but it also seems like a slight insult to the audience at the same time. Do they really not think we can bear a whole concert of real music?


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## Haydn70 (Jan 8, 2017)

Darkhawk said:


> Anyone else sick and tired of seeing truly talented opera singers waste their talent on the various Songbook tunes? It seems like recitals are more and more fluff, less and less content.
> 
> I don't really need to see Renee Fleming perform "Over the Rainbow", and I don't really need Bryn Terfel serenading me with Cole Porter.
> 
> I gather it's a mix of voice-saving and crowd-pleasing, but it also seems like a slight insult to the audience at the same time. Do they really not think we can bear a whole concert of real music?


I am in complete agreement with you. Another unfortunate manifestation of declining standards. And I am afraid it is going to get worse before it gets better...if, indeed, it ever does.


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## bharbeke (Mar 4, 2013)

They are there for these groups:

1. Those whose tastes include both opera and other stuff
2. Dates and other people dragged along who could use something familiar to make the experience more enjoyable


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## Bellinilover (Jul 24, 2013)

As someone whose first love is actually Broadway and the "Great American Songbook," I completely and totally disagree. I say as long as the singers respect the songs and can sing them idiomatically, go ahead and include them. Of course, I also disagree strongly that the songs of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, etc. are not "real music." That kind of attitude truly saddens and irritates me.

I'd point out, too, that American opera singers have pretty much _always_ sung "the Great American Songbook" along with their opera roles and art-song repertoire; Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Jan Peerce, Leonard Warren, Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price, Dawn Upshaw, and Jerry Hadley are just a few of the "older" names that come to mind. So it's hardly a case of "declining standards."

In short, the idea that "those songs" are not genuine music and were never sung by "great" opera singers until very recently is not only insufferably snobby (imo), it is also factually ignorant.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

I actually would be happy to hear more from the 'songbook'. There are lots of fantastic songs from musicals that aren't performed that often nowadays as the musicals they come from aren't part of the repertoire. It can be a chance to hear seldom performed pieces and discover new favourites.

N.


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## ChrisBrewster (Jul 4, 2014)

I'm a big fan of the songbook, but these are the wrong singers for them, and the whole presentation is wrong. We already have hundreds of great recordings by the masters of this style, and I'd much rather hear them done by today's successors to those singers.

Speaking of Bryn Terfel, we heard him give a very good recital, at the end of which he started a long series of "encores" or whatever you might call them. These were so bad and inappropriate (for example, "Home on the Range") that, for my wife, it erased the actual recital from her mind. Bryn, please stick with what you're good at.


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## Bellinilover (Jul 24, 2013)

ChrisBrewster said:


> I'm a big fan of the songbook, but these are the wrong singers for them, and the whole presentation is wrong. We already have hundreds of great recordings by the masters of this style, and I'd much rather hear them done by today's successors to those singers.
> 
> Speaking of Bryn Terfel, we heard him give a very good recital, at the end of which he started a long series of "encores" or whatever you might call them. These were so bad and inappropriate (for example, "Home on the Range") that, for my wife, it erased the actual recital from her mind. Bryn, please stick with what you're good at.


The idea of Bryn Terfel singing "Home on the Range" _is_ pretty silly, but some of his Broadway recordings from his prime years were wonderful. I don't think opera singers should do the Great American Songbook without any feel for the idiom; one can argue about whether this or that opera singer was really suited to the genre. It's one thing to do that, and another to claim that Arlen, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter, Berlin, etc. are "inferior" music. It smacks of this , whole "America hasn't produced any fine art, just commercialism like McDonalds and Coca-Cola" attitude. Along with American literature, painting, and concert music, the Broadway musical _is_, imo, the great American cultural contribution.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Doesn’t it depend on what it is from the Great American Songbook and the singer who sings it? And yet the subject is usuallly discussed as if there’s only one song in the book and one singer singing it. A song such as “Summertime” by Gershwin is part of the Songbook and capable of being sung appropriately and convincingly by certain opera stars. The Songbook is huge and it can say meaningful things about life that the opera composers never got around to or thought important enough. But it’s certainly possible to do them badly without having any real feeling for songs that are generally less vocally demanding and more informal. It can be an excruciating experience to hear an opera star trying to let his or her hair down and they seem to be incapable of it. It’s no wonder that some listeners wish they had never tried.


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## Annied (Apr 27, 2017)

For the most part I dislike opera singers doing crossover intensely. It requires a completely different technique and bringing an opera technique to it normally just makes me wince. Even Carreras, with his impeccable sense of rhythm rarely managed crossover successfully.

There are a few exceptions. I can happily listen time and again to Carreras singing "Love Changes Everything" or Domingo's recording of "An American Hymn". More recently I braced myself when I bought the Calleja "Amore" CD, seeing that it included "La Vie en Rose" and fully expecting to hear it (to my ear), murdered. In fact, it absolutely blew me away. But the exceptions tend to stand out because they're so few and far between.


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

Bellinilover said:


> The idea of Bryn Terfel singing "Home on the Range" _is_ pretty silly, but some of his Broadway recordings from his prime years were wonderful.


And you haven't lived until you've heard Terfel sing "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler in Welsh (on a very early recital disc).


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Most of them don't know how to do it right without sounding "operatic" but this ought to change your mind. This kid gets it right.


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## Annied (Apr 27, 2017)

I've heard him sing it in English and I agree. (Calleja also does a good rendition.) The more staccato songs seem to work more successfully with an operatic voice than ballads.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Bellinilover said:


> As someone whose first love is actually Broadway and the "Great American Songbook," I completely and totally disagree. I say as long as the singers respect the songs and can sing them idiomatically, go ahead and include them. Of course, I also disagree strongly that the songs of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, etc. are not "real music." That kind of attitude truly saddens and irritates me.
> 
> I'd point out, too, that American opera singers have pretty much _always_ sung "the Great American Songbook" along with their opera roles and art-song repertoire; Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Jan Peerce, Leonard Warren, Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price, Dawn Upshaw, and Jerry Hadley are just a few of the "older" names that come to mind. So it's hardly a case of "declining standards."
> 
> In short, the idea that "those songs" are not genuine music and were never sung by "great" opera singers until very recently is not only insufferably snobby (imo), it is also factually ignorant.


The appetite for opera stars doing popular songs goes back even farther than that. Adelina Patti's favorite encore was "Home Sweet Home," and 19th-century audiences ate it up. Stephen Foster wrote America's first "songbook," and opera singers of the day used to program his songs all the time. In short, it's always been done.


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## gardibolt (May 22, 2015)

It can work just fine if the singer understands the milieu and performs accordingly. But if they don't you get atrocities like the opera star version of "West Side Story."


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## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

Annied said:


> For the most part I dislike opera singers doing crossover intensely. It requires a completely different technique and bringing an opera technique to it normally just makes me wince. Even Carreras, with his impeccable sense of rhythm rarely managed crossover successfully.
> 
> There are a few exceptions. I can happily listen time and again to Carreras singing "Love Changes Everything" or Domingo's recording of "An American Hymn". More recently I braced myself when I bought the Calleja "Amore" CD, seeing that it included "La Vie en Rose" and fully expecting to hear it (to my ear), murdered. In fact, it absolutely blew me away. But the exceptions tend to stand out because they're so few and far between.


Mario Lanza had a big voice but he knew how to bring it down for the pops and sang them as if he meant it.


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## gardibolt (May 22, 2015)

Yes, Lanza's a great example of someone who could do it because he understood both the classics and the pops. Others, not so much.


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