She Rises (The Original)

In Episode 16 we discuss the texts to "Avant de quitter" and Marguerite's "Jewel Aria" from Gounod's Faust with French-Canadian coach Nathalie Doucet. We talk about some letter combinations that make the J-glide (or Jot), compare the open and closed forms of OE, O-slash and the schwa, discuss why you should study the diction of your own native language and some of the differences between Canadian-French and French spoken in France.

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This week we concentrate on the German CH in all its forms, with mezzo-soprano Tanja Baumgartner and tenors Virgil Hartinger and Mirko Roschkowski. The texts for this week are the Komponist (Composer) Aria from Ariadne auf Naxos and the Brahms Lied "Von ewiger Liebe".

Here's the first episode of the new opera season, a discussion of Italian recitative with coach Felice Venanzoni. We focus on the recit before "Là ci darem la mano" and the aria "Non mi dir" from Mozart's Don Giovanni. We talk about many diction details, but also about recitatives in general and how to approach learning and performing them.

On this episode I also talk about 7 steps to learn music and have added a page to the website to list them out and explain them a little more fully than in the episode. I hope you find them useful!

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In this special edition of The Diction Police, we discuss studying and working in both the US and Germany with Americans Stephanie Woodling Bucher and Timothy Oliver and Australian James Martin. We talk about how our careers got started and try to give you some tips on how to prepare yourself for the professional world.

This week we discuss German diction with Mirko Roschkowski and Clemens Posselt, working through the texts to Im wunderschönen Monat Mai from Schumann's Dichterliebe and O du, mein holder Abendstern from Wagner's Tannhäuser. We focus on the combinations NG, SP at the beginning of words and a few regular inseparable prefixes.

Back to German Diction, with the texts to Strauss' Zueignung and the first two poems of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben. Our guests this week are Rainer Mühlbach and Stephanie Atanasov, and we review some sounds that we've already talked about, like Äs and Ls, and also talk about the prefix ZU- (so that no one will ever mispronounce Zueignung again!) and the suffix -IG.

This week we talk about Russian Diction with Maria Fontosh. First we discuss the text to Tatjana's Aria from Yevgeny (Eugene) Onegin and then we go through the alphabet to try to take some of the fear out of reading Cyrillic! We focus on a, я and unstressed o.

French Diction is our topic this week--we concentrate on the texts to À Chloris by Reynaldo Hahn and Chanson à boire from Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, with a discussion of the nasal vowels and bright and dark As with Francois Germain, a coach and French Diction teacher on the faculty of the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam.

Auch kleine Dinge and Die Nacht are our texts this week, with Nadja Mchantaf and Mirko Roschkowski. We talk a little about what to do with Ts and Ds that follow one another ("und duftet doch"), some open and closed Us, and show you a few words with ß that crop up in many Lieder.

This week we work through 2 arias from Il barbiere di Siviglia--La calunnia and Una voce poco fa. Our guest is Andrea Sanguineti, an Italian coach/conductor with the Staatsoper Hannover in Germany, and we talk about the letters C and G in Italian and some standard suffixes with stressed E and O.