She Rises (The Original)

Russian Diction is our topic this week--baritone Dmitri Vargin helps us work through the text to Onegin's aria "Вы мне писали... Когда бы жизнь домашним кругом". Our focus this time is on unstressed Os in every position.

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This week we're back with baritone Christoph Pohl and vocal coach Michael Schütze, focusing on the texts to "Mondnacht" and "Die Mainacht". The episode started off being about open and closed Ü, and ended up branching out in a few different directions, including double consonants and open and closed U and I.

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Early music specialist Andrea Marchiol is our guest this week, discussing the texts to Piangerò from Händel's Giulio Cesare and the Prologue to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, the earliest opera to remain in the standard repertoire. We focus on not accidentally doubling consonants and open E's and O's (as usual!), as well as talking a little about the different styles of recitative throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

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In the second episode of our two-part discussion of French liaison, Dr. Francois Germain takes us through the text of "Chanson triste", with a focus on verbs in the future tense as well as the pronunciation of consonants in liaison.

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Happy Anniversary to The Diction Police! I started this podcast on April 1, 2010, so this week marks the first episode of our second year!

Episode 32 is the first of a two-part discussion with French vocal coach Francois Germain focusing mainly on liaisons, with some exceptional words in French and the pronunciation of future verbs. Our text this week is En sourdine, a Paul Verlaine poem.

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This week is the other half of my conversation with Tuscan tenor Giorgio Berrugi. Our texts today are Christoph Willibald Gluck's "O del mio dolce ardor" and Petrarch's Sonnet 104, "Pace non trovo." We talk about whether or not to use glottals in Italian (spoiler-the answer is NO!), some irregular verbs you may run across, some standard suffixes with stressed E and the importance of knowing every meaning of your lines in an opera.

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Castilian Spanish is our focus this week, with Basque soprano Vanessa Goikoetxea. Our texts for today are the Zarzuela tenor aria "No puede ser" and the Obradors song "Al amor". This time we are concentrating on the S, C and Z, and the LL in Castilian Spanish.

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This week we are back to German Diction with vocal coach Michael Schütze and baritone Christoph Pohl. We focus on the text to Agathe's Aria "Wie nahte mir der Schlummer... Leise, leise" from Der Freischütz and Heinrich Heine's poem "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'" from Dichterliebe. Since German has so many of them, this week we are concentrating on consonants! Double consonants, 2 in a row, 3 in a row, with some ideas on how to practice them, as well as the genitive (possessive) S.

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Our first episode on Czech diction! This week conductor Tomá Netopil is our guest, discussing two texts from Rusalka, the Song to the Moon (Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém) and the Prince's first act aria (Vidino divná). Since many people are less familiar with the Czech language, we tried to cover a lot of the basics, while concentrating on things foreigners have trouble with like the palatal D [ɟ] and T [c], the voiced H [ɦ] and the accent markings on vowels and consonants, including our favorite Czech letter ř [Ř]!

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Happy 2011! We're starting back up again with a discussion of Un'aura amorosa and De' miei bollenti spiriti with tenor Giorgio Berrugi. We concentrate on some common suffixes with stressed o (-oro, -ore and -ose), intervocalic S and using consonants to create expression.

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