We're back on German diction with bass Thorsten Grümbel and sopranos Netta Or and Karen Bandelow, focusing on glottals in German and some unstressed prefixes with open E (er-, her-, ver- and zer-), as well as reviewing a few things that we've talked about before, like the NG sound [ŋ], the unpronounced intervocalic H and some diphthongs.

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In the second half of my interview with Simone di Felice, we concentrate on the the Count's Aria "Hai già vinta la causa" from Le nozze di Figaro. We cover those assimilations of N again, as well as diphthongs and triphthongs, more verb forms and non-aspirated K, P and T.

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Italian Vocal Coach Simone di Felice is with us to discuss more arias from Le nozze di Figaro--since he and I had such a long conversation with a ton of useful information, it will be spread out over two episodes! This week it's Bartolo's aria, "La Vendetta", focusing on some standard verb endings with stressed E, some consonants that are automatically doubled between two vowels and the assimilation of N before certain consonants. The new phonetic letter we talk about is the labio dental [ɱ].

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This is the second part of our 2-part series on Swedish diction, with mezzo-soprano Sofi Lorentzen discussing the text to Sibelius's Fågellek. This week we're talking about consonant combinations and clusters, including:

DJ, GJ and HJ (all the j-glide); LG [lj]; GN [ŋn]; NG [ŋ] and NK [ŋk]; KJ and TJ as well as the soft K [ɕ]; SJ, SKJ, STJ and SK before soft vowels [ɧ]; and the R combinations RD [ɖ], RG [rj], RL [l], RN [ɳ], RS [ʂ] and RT [ʈ].

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This week we're branching off into a new language--Swedish! In the first of a 2-part series, Mezzo-soprano Sofi Lorentzen discusses the vowels and consonants of Swedish, through thte texts of two songs from Sibelius' Opus 36, No. 4 "Säf, säf, susa" and No.1 "Svarta rosor". The new phonetic letters that we introduce this week are for the letter U [ʉː] & [ɵ] and for the soft K sound [ɕ].

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Matteo Pais, coach and music coordinator of the Scuola dell'opera italiana in Bologna, joins us this week to talk about two arias from Le nozze di Figaro, Susanna's 4th act aria "Deh, vieni, non tardar" and Cherubino's first aria "Non so più cosa son". We concentrate on Rs in every position, the letter G and what to do when there are millions of vowels in a row.

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English Diction is our topic this week, covering the texts to "The Roadside Fire" and the aria "Iris, hence away" from Händel's Semele with vocal coach Mark Lawson, contralto Rebecca Raffell and tenor Donald George. Our focus is on what to do with Rs, WH words, the crazy spelling in English and some differences between American Standard and British Received pronunciation. Some of the new phonetic symbols referred to on this episode are [ɝ] and [ɚ] (for those Rs in diphthongs and triphthongs) and [ɒ] (for the British open back rounded vowel).

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We're back from summer vacation discussing German diction, covering the texts to "Die Lotoblume" and "Liebst du um Schönheit" with tenor Mirko Roschkowski and coach Hans Sotin. We concentrate on the assimilation of consonants and also discuss and compare some common open and closed Es with soprano Karen Bandelow.

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We're back to basics again today! Conductor Jonathan Darlington reminds us what all the other markings in the score are about--from tempo indications to metronome markings to rubato and col canto, we discuss what composers are trying to tell us, and compare the markings a little between Italian, French and German.

This week, Spanish bel canto tenor José Bros works through the texts of "La maja y el ruiseñor" and "La maja dolorosa No. 3" with us. We're concentrating on diphthongs and other instances when vowels in Spanish come together, which happens quite a lot! We also talk about the difference between [nj] and [ɲ].

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