Confessions of a Shopaholic!

Where do I start? First by saying, holy cow, I haven’t posted in a while hun… I’m still in my never ending Orlando trip here in the US. But I’m getting back to Brasil tomorrow and actually getting there on Saturday and going straight to the movie theatre to watch Rigoletto. Everything you can imagine went wrong in regards to my dreamy trip to NY this weekend, as you may know, it didn’t happen. Yeah, damn snow that cancelled my flight on Friday and made me lose my Rigoletto and my mum’s mind. She got real upset about it, and I decided that for her sake I wouldn’t go, I was sure that she would get real sick if I went. So as you may imagine, I’m very upset and have been compulsively shopping ever since (in Amazon and Macy’s, oh credit card bill).

I have never been this upset before; I’m seriously feeling very broken. I had been planning and paying for this trip to NY myself for months now and I was so looking forward to meeting some of the terrific people I’ve befriended on twitter. What really got to me the most apart from not seeing my friends was not being able to watch Rigoletto. You see, two of my favorite opera singers are in this production. Piotr Beczala was my first tenor crush and it was in last year’s production of Manon, in which he was playing De Chevalier de Griex, that I feel in love with opera. And Diana Damrau is hands down my favorite soprano, I could listen to her sing any part, do anything, she’s the coloratura light of my life (SOPRANO coloratura light of my life, the coloratura light of my life is Joyce!). And plus I was gonna get to meet them on Monday, actually talk to them and have Diana sign all my cds! That I think was what I was most looking forward to.

And of course seeing the HOT Mariusz in Elisir wouldn’t be bad eighter, all of the cast of Elisir is very dear to me, Matthew Polenzani, Anna Netrebko and Erwin Shrott all hold a very dear place in my heart. So yeah, I was very and continue to be UTTERLY upset about everything that happened.

THANK GOD I decided to order on Amazon most of the things I planned to buy at the Met store! And that was actually what I wanted to talk about, I’m sorry if the beginning of this post is sort of depressing but I had to let it out somehow.

Well I got in total 16 cds, 4 books and 1 DVD! Yeah, a lot of stuff, but all very much necessary, let’s start with the cds, shall we?

So Joyce DiDonato is like my idol and favorite singer of all time, so I bought 5 of her CDS! I was most craving to get my hands on the so well acclaimed Drama Queens and Furore. I was most hooked on Diva Divo, the idea is already very intriguing but the different colors she brings to the table with this recording is just out of this world! I also got Rossini: Colbran, the muse, because well, I love Rossini and the Songs by Fauré, Hahn and Head Arias by Rossini and Handel. Very pleased with all of them for sure!

Then my second diva, I got 2 Diana Damrau CDS. Coloraturas for obvious reasons that have already been brought up in this post and the Mozart Arias one, because Mozart rocks my world and so does Diana!

I also got stuff from my favorite barihunks ;) Simon Keenlyside’s Tales of Opera and Erwin Schrott’s Opera Arias cds. Alongside with the baritones I also got some things from some of my favorite tenors, Juan Diego Florez’s Rossini Arias for again obvious reasons and Joseph Calleja’s The Maltese Tenor because I find his voice’s color so different and intriguing I can’t get enough of it!

Other two sopranos that hold a very dear place in my heart and in my opera CD collection have completely different voices. First we have Danielle DeNiece’s Handel Arias cd that is Dani doing what does best, baroque, baroque, baroque! And then we have Sondra Radvanovsky also doing what she does best, Verdi in her Verdi Arias cd.

And to end my perfect cd collection, at least for now, the amazing recording of Don Giovanni with Ildebrando D’Arcangelo as Don Giovanni, Diana Damrau as Donna Anna, Joyce DiDonato as Donna Elvira, Luca Pisaroni as Leporello, Rolando Villazon as Don Ottavio, Konstantin Wolff as Masetto and Vitalij Kowaljow as Zerlina. This is truly an opera treasure and a dream cast, although I would have picked another Ottavio, but that’s another story.

Then on to the books I didn’t get all the one I wanted but elas!

These three books give you an idea of how the opera singer life is, from three very different points of view with three very different enphasis, the point of view of a successful opera singer, the point of view of a jornalist and the point of view of a teacher

This one I actually started reading yesterday, right after I opened the box containing it. It’s Renée Fleming’s The Inner Voice that is absolutely amazing and it is a MUST have for anyone who is aspiring to be an opera singer. I’m not gonna talk a lot about it right now because when I finish reading it I want to do post only on it. But it’s GOOOOOOD!

Then I got something I thought I would enjoy reading thoroughly, Joshua Jampol’s Living Opera, a series of interviews with many opera singers, young ones and old in many stages of their operatic careers.

This one I got because of Joyce’s first or second vlog in which she recommends this said book that was written by her vocal instructor called The Naked Voice by W. Stephen Smith.

Something that I saw in a book store in Brasil last year that got me salivating with Mozart hunger but was like R$150,00, which would be $70,00, I got on Amazon for $30! The Seven Mozart Librettos: A Verse Translation, this is every Mozart fan’s dream come true! And the pages are all aged and the ends are made as if they’ve been sort of eaten by time, it’s a gorgeous gigantic book and I LOVE IT!

And finally a book one of my good friend and most faithful silent reader of this blog recommended to have as a quick answer go to book The Eyewitness Companion of Opera by Alan Riding and Leslie Dunton Downer.

Now finally, for the one and only DVD I got. CENDRILLON my all time favorite French opera EVER, the Royal Opera House production with Joyce DiDonato as Cendrillon, Alice Coote as Prince Charmant, Eglise Gutirrrez as La Fée and Ewa Podles as Madame de la Haltiere. Just bliss!

Apart from the fact I bought so many clothes I had to buy myself an extra bag to take them back home with me to Brasil, and I spend the little that was left of my money in Slytherin themed stuff in the Harry Potter park (where I cried, a lot). But in my own defense, the things here are so much cheaper than in Brasil, I had to make to most of it ;)

Ok, I’m gonna stop now! You all have a good one and wish me a safe journey back to my culturally undeveloped country! ;) Cheers! Oh and Happy Valantines Day everyone, it's not Valentine's Day in Brasil though, ours is on the 12th of June.

AND HAPPY BDAY TO JOYCE DIDONATO AND RENEE FLEMING THAT GET MORE FABULOUS ONE RIGHT AFTER THE OTHER :)

NY Trip and Operatic Beach

I never got to explain the actual name of the blog, hun? Well, believe it or not, it’s the name I’ve always used, ever since I was a teenager blogging for the sake of layouts. It’s from an Andrew Llyod Webber musical called Song and Dance, never saw it, but I like the song. And now more than ever the name makes sense, this whole thing was completely unexpected.

Since I am not talking about anything specific in this post I’ll talk about my crazy decision to go to New York City alone. It was I think September of this year and I was bursting with the need to watch first rate live opera. And then the craziest idea dawned on me, ‘cause me and my family are going to spend something like 3 weeks in Orlando. So I could easily go to New York for a couple of days and then come back, and that’s exactly what I told my dad, and he agreed. It was odd, ‘cause normally, he doesn’t, so I bought the ticket from Orlando to New York, 3 tickets for the Met Opera, and booked 3 nights at a Hostel in Manhatan.

I had chosen the date that coincided with certain performances of certain super cool opera starts (just a reminder that I didn’t know Joyce at the time, if I had the dates would have been completely different). So I’m arriving on the 8^th of February and watching Rigoletto with Diana Damrau (hell yeah baby!) and Piotr Beczala both which I LOVE! Then the next day I’ll be watching L’Elisir D’Amore, one of my favorite bel canto pieces, with Anna Netrebko (my heart will stop when I see her), Erwin Schrott (then I’ll have a convulsion when I see him) and the increasingly handsome Mariusz Kwiecien (marry me!). Then in the evening I’ll watch Carmen, because Carmen never gets old, and this production is really very beautiful.

And I’ll be at the stage door alone, God help me. But my friend told me it was very easy to make friends at the stage door, we all have an objective in common! I remember it was very easy making friends at the stage door of broadway musicals, I suppose it’s gonna be like that.

 So yesterday I made a list with everything I intend to buy when I go to New York. And yeah, I’m gonna be so broke I might as well stop eating now so I can afford these things. Here is a glimpse of the list I made looking only at the Met Opera Store and at the Julliard Store. There are some titles in the sheet music department that don’t have prices ‘cause I didn’t find an edition that can fit my pocket yet, they are all in French, and my favorites.

Most importantly I found the Cendrillon dvd, they sell it at the Met Store, and it’s $40! The things we do for love, like buying Opera Cooks, I love to cook and this is the ultimate book to have if you love opera and cooking! I also decided to buy the critic edition of Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflüte because these are the ones I’ll be using for real you know. I already have a critic edition (Bärenreither) of Le Nozze di Figaro and it’s just wonderful! I could be spending much less, but my teacher warned me against buying from certain publishers that to my utter delight were the cheapest!

And I also selected quite a few cds, I mean come on! I feel so bad already downloading these things, the least I could do is buy the cd when I have the chance! Of course I’m buying the 4 Joyce DiDonato cds they have, but that’s just because she’s my idol!

I also finished my “The Mark of Athena” book the day before yesterday, sad, I didn’t want it to end. But immediately started another one called Contos de Opera e Cantos by Sergio Casoy, who is a brilliant Opera History professor here in Brasil. This book is rather delicious to read, in it he shares little stories about things that happened during the productions of the operas. Like that for instance, the Othello project of Verdi was actually called the Chocolate Project because Verdi didn’t want to compromise in the beginning and took a good two years to write the piece. While Donizetti wrote L’Elisir D’Amore in less than a month! Really very entertaining, I’m still in the Italian operas part, he talks about all sorts of opera which is rather cool.

Also yesterday I did something quite soothing! I got my opera book, a towel and my purse and headed off to the beach. It was the end of the afternoon, so it wasn’t packed with people, but I had to walk a while to find a good spot to read. It was quite nice, and a beautiful sunset!