She Rises (The Original)

Before we go on holiday break, I wanted to get another Special Edition of The Diction Police, this time on Bel Canto music. Tenor Javier Camarena and basso buffo Carlo Lepore give us tips on how to practice coloratura and patter, while conductors Henrik Nánási and Erik Nielsen talk about Bel Canto style, cadenzas and what young singers can do to prepare themselves better.

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This week we are back to Russian Diction, with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev, discussing the texts to two Rachmaninoff songs, Opus 14 No 1 "Я жду тебя" (I Wait for You) and No 14 "Весенние воды" (Spring Waters). We concentrate on the й (I-kratkoe), the devoicing of consonants, the hard sign ъ (not to be confused with the soft sign ь or the vowel ы!), another way to write the JE vowel-ѣ, and a little on the soft consonant щ.

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We finish up our 2-part series on Hungarian diction this week, concentrating on Zoltán Kodály's "A csitári hegyek alatt" with Zoltán Nyári and Henrik Nánási. This week our focus is on the consonants, especially the fun combinations of GY [Ɉ], TY [c], NY [ɲ] and LY [j]; and the variations of S [ʃ], ZS [ʒ], SZ [s], CS [tʃ] and C [ts].

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This week is the first of a 2-part series on Hungarian diction, discussing some text from Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (Kéksakállú herceg vára) with conductor Henrik Nánási and tenor Zoltán Nyári. Here is a link to an online libretto--we chose the first two long passages of Kéksakállú and the first long passage of Judit. If you have downloaded this on iTunes, I added the text to the Lyrics tab under Get Info, hopefully it will go through for you. We focus on the 14 Hungarian vowels, which come in short and long pairs. The new phonetic symbol that we come across is [ɒ] for the unaccented dark "a".

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This week we are discussing long and short syllables in German with mezzo-soprano Tanja Baumgartner, tenor Virgil Hartinger and Uta Mücksch, a prompter at the Semperoper. The texts for today's episode are "Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen" from Der Freischütz and "Waldesgespräch", by German romantic poet Josef von Eichendorff, one of the most famous pieces from Schumann's Liederkreis Op. 39.

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Soprano Nathalie de Montmollin is back to talk about three poems of Paul Verlaine, one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century. We concentrate on some of the mixed vowels, especially [œ] and [ø], the letter X, and go over some of the confusing spellings that make up French!

Our texts for today are "Mandoline", "Prison" (or "Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit"), and "Green".

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Episode 20 is our first discussion of Spanish Lyric Diction, with Pablo Assante, the chorus master at the Semperoper in Dresden. We discuss some of the differences between Spanish and Italian, as well as the differences between Castilian and Argentinean Spanish, the letters B (which can be transcribed as [b] or [β]), D ([d] or [ð]), the unvoiced TH pronunciation of C and Z [θ] and the aspirate S used in Spain. Our texts for today are the Obradors' song "Del cabello más sutil" and "Bonita rama de sauce" set by Argentinean composer Carlos Guastavino.

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Italian Diction is back this week with conductor Matteo Beltrami from Milan. The texts for this week are "Tutte le feste al tempio" from the second act duet in Rigoletto and Dorabella's "Smanie implacabili" from Così fan tutte, and we talk about when to voice or unvoice the S, the imperfect verb ending -EVA and the problem of rolling Rs! Maestro Beltrami also talks about the importance of text in recitative.

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Today we're talking with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev about the text to Lensky's Aria from Yevgény Onégin. We concentrate on the vowels e [jɛ] and ё [jo], the hard consonant ж [ʒ] and the soft sign ь.

Since we talked so much last week about studying the diction of your native language, I thought it only fitting that we discuss a little English Diction today! Our guests are Mark Lawson, an American coach on the music staff of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and Aaron Pegram, an American tenor in the ensemble at the Semperoper in Dresden. Our texts today are "Take O Take Those Lips Away" and Stephen Foster's "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair". We concentrate on the American diphthongs and discuss how to handle the Rs when singing in English.

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