#felicity lott

To honor both the 233rd anniversary of The Magic Flute's premiere and the late, great baritone Benjamin Luxon, I'm sharing this clip.

this was my favorite thing when I was 13. Took me three hundred years to find it again. 

This is what made me fall in love with these two divas (though I heard it on the radio as a studio recording. It’s just as fabulous here).

When I wasn’t listening to opera I was listening to NPR’s “Classics by Request” program and this was the first (and only) song I requested and when I phoned the host she asked me why I wanted to hear it. I didn’t go into the whole falling-instantly-in-love-with-divas story so I told her Part 2, that it sounded exactly like my cats talking to each other. She asked how many cats I had, and when I told her four, she was very surprised at how many that was. I didn’t tell her there used to be more than that.

This is I guess related to the previous entry - a selection of songs doing exactly what it is says on the title. This is a collaboration between Lott and the Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager; the programme is all German.

The songs on this album have been group according to the stages of love - meeting, falling in love, getting engaged and married, having children and being parted by death, with songs by a variety of composers making up every one of these stages. The booklet, written by the accompanist Graham Johnson, is chatty and giddy, talking at length about the challenges of choosing repertoire for a duet recital/album in general, and for two women singers in particular (”concluding kiss is usually less appropriate” - I don’t see why). The trio on this album has managed to find no less than 46 tracks’ worth of material tho, including a number of brief piano solo pieces acting as joiners/dividers, which form an aesthetically pleasant, sound narrative. Some of the songs are divided into multiple tracks; and the track listing is slightly annoying to read.

Angelika Kirchschlager is one of those singers who don’t particularly set the stars spinning for me; her voice here blends beautifully with Lott’s tho, and they are well balanced in their duets. Maybe this doesn’t have quite the same spark as Lott’s duet albums with Ann Murray, but the pairing works.

Favourite track: As said, there’s an abundance from which to choose, and everything is beautiful. I’ll go with the opening duet (and track no.2 after a brief piano intro), Robert Schumann’s Erste Begegnung from Spanisches Liederspiele Op. 74 to a poem by Geibel. It’s vintage brown romanticism - there’s a brook, and a rosebush, and under the rosebush the girl meets the boy and it all might be a metaphor for sex. I also love nos. 23 and 24 - Du Ring am meinem Finger - which are two different composers’ takes on the same poem by the fabulously named German Adelbert von Chamisso de Boncourt, who was born in Champagne, and who had fabulously interesting live, fighting wars and traveling the Americas as botanist.

Women's lives and loves Felicity Lott, soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, mezzo Graham Johnson, piano

Felicity Lott, an elegant British soprano, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the 1990-91 season as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” It became her signature role / Erika Davidson/Met Opera

Tall and self-possessed, with an air of wit and sophistication, Ms. Lott was ideal for parts like the introspective Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Countess in his “Capriccio” and yet another wistful Countess, in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”