Manon Gavotte Face-Off

OK.

Here's the deal. Here is roughly the same excerpt from Massanet's Manon, featuring three heavy hitters: Netrebko, Fleming, and Sills.

[A momentary prayer of Thanksgiving for YouTube would not be out of line here]

It is fascinating to hear the different ways this supremely solipsistic scene can be played.

I will say at the outset that I find Fleming the least successful. This is from Paris I am pretty darn sure cuz we were there. We (TRH and I) were in the front row actually (and feeling highly satisfied with ourselves that we had scored these tickets--- when I saw these seats as being available at the ticket office, I did not even look at how much they cost and just told TRH to give me the VISA cuz "they have some seats" "how much are they?" "the VISA please, it is worth it", and, suprisingly pliable at times, he handed over the Visa and the rest, as they say, erat historia)--anyway, since we were in the front row, we got a long luxuriant look at the red red red costume she is wearing. I sort of like it (but then I have bad taste in women's clothing) but I also wonder if it looks a little like what Carol Burnett wears in the famous sketch she did sending up Gone with the Wind (in a different colour, of course).



Well, maybe not. Memory plays odd tricks sometimes. It must be the upholstered effect of F's costume that made me think in this direction.

But to the singing. I recall being most extremely pleased with her performance. Now however I find some of the sounds she makes just bizarre, croony and underpowered. I think she is better live than on the radio or on recording. But that said, I recall being extraordinarily distressed by her lack of force in filling out the line in the Il Pirata at the MET a couple of years back and that had been a performance we had been looking forward to most most most most keenly (and perhaps too keenly, there was perhaps no way reality could compete with all that anticipation [or with Gavazzeni's conducting on the recording with Caballe (you have GOT to hear the way they do the Act One curtain! It is so exciting!!111!!!)], we were, in short, doomed.) But on the other hand, there is real delicacy in a lot of the passage work and the colors in her voice often are just so so pretty (and she does hold the final long note for a good long time):



Trebs here characterstically ducks out on a little bit of ornamentation here and there but the line is quite authoritative all the way through. She is powerful and the voice comes off as quite slavic when you have her sandwiched by these whitebread girls. She is teh sexaay too. The top is brilliant and pretty darn clean--- love the sound of her big money-shot high notes:



And then there is Sills. The ornamentation just pops out. She sings this music with a real sense of authority. She is oddly enough not interested in some of the longer notes and on the basis of this can almost be seen as an opposite to Trebs. I really like the way she does this. She was justifiably famous for her Manon:



I will probably listen some more and update. But I wanted to get this out there. What do you think? Do some Trebs haterz want to get their freak on? Does someone want to get Rosemary Bollin on line one? Should I have looked at and posted the Gruberova version of this that I did not look at and did not post?