Victoria de los Angeles: "la dulzura al servico del canto"

I will always adore the voice and performance of Victoria de los Angeles, especially when she sings Spanish song cycles. We had these boxed sets of classical music records when I was young, with two Rossini arias sung by her ("una voce poco fa"  and "dunque io son'"). I sang along to them hundreds of times (I don't think my mother ever complained).   Something about the timbre of her voice just made me happy. Later, I would recognize that she might not have been the most technically accomplished  when compared with some other sopranos, but she was my first love.

Here's a charming  interview clip, with a song performance, from British TV.

Best comment on this clip ("Che gelida manina" with the divine Jussi Bjorling):  her singing was "la dulzura al servicio del canto."

Lorrain Hunt Lieberson sings. She was only 52 when she died. 52! I found this through the book Orfeo.

Text from the YouTube video's About section:

"The last of Peter Lieberson's five "Neruda Songs", composed for his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Ms. Lieberson made this recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of James Levine, less than eight months before she succumbed to breast cancer, making the text of this particular song that much more poignant.

My love, should I die and you don't,
let us give grief no more ground:
my love, should you die and I don't,
there is no piece of land like this on which we've lived.

Dust in the wheat, sand in the desert sands,
time, errant water, the wandering wind
carried us away like a navigator seed.
In such times, we may well not have met.

The meadow in which we did meet,
oh tiny infinity, we give back.
But this love, Love, has had no end,

and so, as it had no birth,
it has no death. It is like a long river
that changes only its shores and its banks.

Translation: Terence Clarke"

All five poems:

Yet another med change.

May 2014:
Since I was hospitalized for the first time a year ago, I've had a roller coaster with medications.

Medications I cannot tolerate, that made my symptoms worse, or that have caused allergic reactions or adverse side effects:
Celexa. worked, then didn't and caused horrible side effects.
Temzepam: worked, but also caused bad side effects that I tolerated for way too long because I needed to sleep to be able to work. I wish I had known better.
Cymbalta: tipped me from depressed to bipolar, and had lots of crappy side effects like no REM sleep.


Welbutrin: teeth grinding, nail-biting, acute manic symptoms, intense anxiety attacks.

Lithium: worked for a while, then, blam! hives and manic attacks, ugh.
Depakote: felt like being on the SSRIs again: no sleep, constipation, dreary mood, no apparent benefit.
Seroquel . This one helped stabilize the manic symptoms, and helped me sleep (wonderful!)  but was hellish on my metabolism and did not helped the depression. I slept, but I couldn't concentrate, remember  or focus well when I was awake; I am tired all the time, I gained 30 lbs in 3 months (!) and I felt shaky and anxious with every savage blood-sugar change. Scary: I  started to get symptoms of neuropathy in my legs, and this medication can make you diabetic. Worst is the fact that the depression did not go away, even though the panic attacks did. The doctor said we should step down and step off while I started a new mood stabilizer.

So, on to the next: oxcarbazepine, an anti-seizure medication also known as Trileptal (a close relative of Tegretol or carbamazepine). Some of the suckier side-effects are not an issue for me (don't need to worry about birth control pills), but I will need to have my blood levels monitored and watch out for nasty and potentially fatal rash.

So far, so good. The neuropathy disappeared right away, as did the daily mood swings. Trileptal has not caused any new side effects. I'm sleeping reasonably well. My appetite and digestion are normal. No manic symptoms. Still with the bad depression...but not as bad.  I can now read a whole book again, and I have returned to learning: Japanese and Korean.

I still experience periodic flashes of intense, gruesome, horrific depression that make the future seem uniformly bleak and make me doubt my capacity to resist.  But they are not lasting as long. This is progress.

Pirates of Penzance

A friend and I saw a performance of the Pirates of Penzance yesterday at the Lake Harriet bandshell. So much fun! I will be singing this all week.

Poking around in Youtubelandia, I found New Zealand's Essgee Company's performances. Great voices, wonderful staging and choreography, and some liberties with the original. Gilbert and Sullivan purists might not approve, but I love it.





 Linda Ronstadt is so beautiful as Mabel. What a voice!


A more operatically trained singer's performance of "Poor Wandering One." At the bandshell, the swallows all took off when the soprano did her first run.