Archives for June 2008

Usually it’s easy to tell when a film makes use of non-professional actors. The untrained actors are supposed to imbue a movie with a rough edginess, perhaps a greater sense of “the real” (whatever that means.) More often than not, though, the performances come across as wooden and self-conscious, as was the case with the recent movie Once, for instance.

So I was quite surprised to emerge from a screening of the Golden Bear Award-winning Mongolian movie, Tuya’s Marriage, at the weekend, to discover that I had been watching a cast of mainly non-professional actors at work. All the male characters in this absorbing film, directed by Wang Quan An, are played by non-actor, I found out from reading a synopsis of the film by New York Times movie critic Stephen Holden. These characters have the same names as the people who play them. Only the female lead, Tuya, is played by a professional actress — Yu Nan.

What’s curious is that unlike most English-language films that use non-professional casts, I couldn’t tell the quality of the performances apart. Every character in this film depicting the harsh lives of Mongolian sheep herders living trying to eke out a living in an inhospitable world, touched me. The character played by Yu Nan does most of the “heavy lifting” in the film — both literally as Tuya’s family depends upon her for income, as well as as figuratively as she is the emotional center of the drama and is in the most scenes. But the supporting cast members all kept up with her in terms of engrossing us in their characters’ journeys.

But I wonder if I would feel the same way if I could understand Mongolian? In the past, I’ve been similarly taken with foreign language films which use non-professional casts. One example is Carlos Sorin’s moving Spanish-language film set in Argentina, Historias Minimas. If my knowledge of Spanish were as good as my knowledge of English, would I be more sensitive to the quality of the performances?

My guess is probably yes. In Tuya’s Wedding, I was unable to detect halteringly-delivered lines, tripped-over phrases or intonation problems, whereas these linguistic issues stand out to me when I can unerstand what’s being said.

Of course, an actor’s performance, from a vocal perspective, isn’t just about delivering words. There are all sorts of non-verbal elements that convey meaning such as the actor’s facial expression on any given line. Audiences latch on to these cues, even if they can’t understand the language. But beyond reading subtitles, which rarely convey the detailed nuances of speech, there’s no telling how the body language truly relates to what’s being said.

A couple of years ago, I did something that few self-respecting persons with graduate degrees and aspirations to literary careers dare do in this country: I cancelled my subscription to the New Yorker.

The reasons for cancelling were largely to do with a bad case of New Yorker Fatigue (NYF). The magazine’s reporting style is so uniform that by the time I reached the Financial Page, I would frequently run out of steam. I didn’t see much point in paying all that money for a publication that remained largely unread every week. And there was quite a bit of guilt associated with not getting around to swallowing those long, worthy articles about the war in Iraq and the latest shenanigans at the White House. So I decided to cut myself loose.

Following a two-year break, I recently found myself ready to subscribe again. And I’m happy to report that this time around, I’ve come up with an effective strategy for preventing NYF. It’s quite simple, really: Instead of opening the magazine at the masthead, I turn it around, as one might a Hebrew Bible, and read it from back to front.

The New Yorker‘s critics have such individual voices and methods of approaching their respective art forms thtat I find myself sailing through their reviews. Then I’m all juiced to launch into the big, fat reported pieces in the middle of the book. And the Talk of the Town and arts listings make surprisingly nice chasers.

I definitely recommend this approach to anyone suffering from NYF.

On another note: It’s been a while since I’d read Anthony Lane’s movie criticism. I was turned off the writer a long time ago when I realized that if he likes a movie, he’s quite boring to read. He’s only ever any good when he’s tearing a film he hates to shreds, which basically means he’s only ever any good when he’s writing about big, summer, Hollywood blockbusters.

Like the Mad Dog who walks out in the midday sun, the Englishman revels in Hollywood’s sunny summer movie madness. Lane’s review of the Angelina Jolie flick Wanted from last week’s issue is a case in point. Lane’s opening paragraph is one of the best film review ledes I’ve ever read. Here it is:

“What is it like being Timu Bekmambetov? No artist should be confused too closely with his creations, but anybody who sits through Wanted, Bekmambetov’s new movie, will be tempted to wonder if the life style of the characters might not reflect or rub off on that of the director. How, for example, does he make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don’t even think about a cappuccino.”

If only Lane could come up with this kind of stuff for movies he actually likes.

An inspiring architectural news item caught my eye today. Architect David Fisher unveiled plans for the world’s first rotating skyscraper. 70- and 80-storey buildings are in the planning stages of being built in Moscow and Dubai respectively.

What’s really exciting about these buildings is the combination of sublime aesthetics and energy savings. The skyscrapers will be powered by the sun and wind and continuously change shape as each floor rotates around a central axis driven by wind turbines, one between each floor.

A demo video clip attached to the story in the UK’s Guardian provides an idea of just how sleek, aerodynamic and unique these buildings will be. And imagine the views!

The only thing that worries me about the project is the kitsch factor. In the video, Fisher uses a pretty cheese catchphrase to describe his concept: “designed by time, shaped by life.” And I wonder if people might be put off by the idea of living in a Vegas-style rotating restaurant?

Question: How do singers memorize plainchant?

Answer: Generally, they try to avoid it.

Lacking melodies, rhythms or any of the typical “pointers” that
musicians use to commit songs to memory, plainchant is one of the trickiest
musical forms to learn off by heart.

This issue has been on my mind a lot lately as I embark upon the process of memorizing Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo
Virtutum, the oldest known musical drama of its kind in the western
world, in preparation for a series of performances of the work with my early
music ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, in August.

Telling the story of the devil’s and virtues’ battle to possess the soul, Ordo was written in the middle of the 12th century by the visionary German abbess, scientist, poet, musician and mystic.

As I start to delve ever more deeply into Hildegard’s music, patterns are slowly emerging. But I’m progressing at a snail’s pace. Learning this piece, which balances meandering, loose-limbed phrases that possess the improvisational quality of jazz solos with precise Germanized Latin diction, is harder than committing the Periodic Table to memory.

I’ll be writing an article about the process of memorizing difficult musical works for the Los Angeles Times down the line. For now, here is a list of the techniques I’ve been using so far to try to commit Ordo to memory.

1. Writing in all the translations of the words under the notes throughout the score.

2. Nailing down pronunciations.

3. Learning the notes by singing through the score while looking at it.

4. Making a recording of myself singing all the different sections.

5. Playing back the recording over and over again whenever I drive somewhere or feel like walking around with headphones on.

6. Dissecting each phrase and repeating it over and over again.

7. Singing as much of a phrase as I can back without looking at the music.

8. Going over corners where I constantly get stuck.

9. Looking for patterns within an individual section to help jog my memory e.g. a repeated word or musical motif.

10. Repetition, repetition, repetition until I get to the point where I can sing a chunk off by heart while undertaking a completely different task like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.

11. And lastly, my favorite way of testing my powers of memorization: singing as much as I can remember of Ordo quietly to myself as I jog around the lake.

I’m interviewing some vocalists and instrumentaliists about their memorization processes for my LA Times story. If you have anything you’d like to add to the mix, please feel free to chip in.

Until last Friday night, when I attended San Francisco Opera‘s live simulcast of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at AT&T Ballpark in San Francisco, I didn’t realize that the baseball anthem “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was something of a national anthem in this country.

The song, which happens to be celebrating its 100th anniversary this summer, was cloned during intermission on Friday night, as c. 23,000 opera-goers joined together in singing SF Opera’s spoof version:

Take me out to the opera,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me seat at the Opera House.
I don’t care if it’s Mozart or Strauss,
For it’s “root, root, root, for the divas,
Bring a friend or a spouse,
For it’s “one, two, three cheers for you”
at the Opera House.

This was just one of the many moments that will make last Friday evening last in my memory for a long time. It helped that the weather was beautiful. San Francisco summer evenings can get pretty arctic. But last weekend boasted T-shirt weather even after dark. (Compare this to last year’s inaugural live ballpark simulcast of Samson and Delilah: the weather was so chilly that some people I spoke to were put off coming again this year.)

The experience of watching the great Natalie Dessay perform Lucia was sublime. Even when viewed at a great distance on a relatively small screen with planes flying over head, people lining up to order beer a few feet away, and a slight delay on the sound, causing the singer’s lips to move slightly faster than the words that came out of her mouth, she made the role vast, dark and unbelievably raw.

23,000 people gazed up at her in awe during her descent into madness at the end. Given that it was about 11pm and San Franciscans don’t stay up late and are worried about things like getting to their cars in time to avoid getting stuck after a show, I was amazed at how few of the audience members moved around or got up to leave.

I was also impressed with the responsiveness of the ballpark audience. When Lucia signs her fateful wedding contract, picknickers sprawled out on the baseball diamond yelled “NO!!! DON’T DO IT!!!” Everytime a singer finished a big aria, the crowd behaved like Barry Bonds had just hit a home run. Ah, I thought to myself. This is what it’s all about.

I was going to devote today’s blog entry to describing the fun I had at the weekend when I attended a simulcast of San Francisco Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor alongside 23,000 happy pinickers/opera-goers at the city’s ballpark, and the brilliance of the partnership between SF Opera and the SF Giants in general.

But woeful tidings concerning the announcement of the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune are forcing me to postpone my perky blog post for another day.

The news that the seminal Minneapolis-based theatre company is shutting its doors shouldn’t have come as a shock to me. After all, stories about the company’s lamentable financial situation have been circulating for a while and imminent closure was on the horizon months ago.

Yet I was thrown completely off-balance this morning by the realization that the company’s shut-down was no longer a rumor that probably wouldn’t come to fruition, owing — I was certain — to some knight in shining armor stepping in to pull the company out of debt, but a horrible truth.

Jeune Lune is one of the best companies working in this country today. I count the troupe’s production of The Miser, which I caught at Berkeley Rep a couple of years ago, as one of the five best theatre experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

Jeune Lune’s stopovers in the Bay Area have long been a highlight of the local theatrical calendar. Promises of the company’s arrival to these shores kept me going through some hard times.

Now what? Can nothing be done to save the company? Surely someone somewhere must have a few million to keep artistic director Dominique Serrand and his amazing collaborators afloat. If this company ends up going down, then it will take a piece of what’s glorious about this country’s theatrical imagination with it. In short, this lunar eclipse must be stopped.

I leave you with Serrand’s statement concerning the closure from the company’s website:

In 1978 Barbra Berlovitz, Vincent Gracieux, and Dominique Serrand began an adventure called Theatre de la Jeune Lune. They were soon joined by Robert Rosen and eventually Steve Epp and innumerable other collaborators. Over the past 30 years we have created nearly 100 productions, performed for hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the United States and in France, but primarily and most importantly in Minneapolis. For the first 14 years we were itinerant, making the most of any venue we found ourselves in. Then in 1992, with an amazing groundswell of support, we purchased and renovated the Allied Van Lines building in the Minneapolis warehouse district. We excavated the interior of this historic building to create a stunningly innovative and award winning performance space, opening our new artistic home to the public on November 18th of that year.

Sixteen years later we are faced with an excruciating decision. With the organization burdened by mounting and unmanageable debt, the Board of Directors has voted to put Jeune Lune’s home up for sale. After much soul searching and extensive fundraising and debt management efforts, we have determined it to be the only prudent and fiscally responsible choice. What has been acclaimed, as one of the most striking and unique theatre spaces in the country will go dark. It is a huge loss, a loss for us, for all of the artists who work with us, for our audience and for the community at large, both locally and nationally.

And with the building, we have decided that the time has come to bid adieu to the theatre ensemble we have all known as Jeune Lune.

We have always believed that the making of theatre is an important and essential act. We have always believed in the power of theatre to provoke, inspire, and excite. We have always created our work for and because of our audience. Over the years we have cultivated a loyal audience locally, regionally and nationally. We have garnered numerous awards and accolades, and of course at times we have elicited criticism and consternation. We have benefited enormously from the support of foundations, corporations, state and national organizations, all those who have served as board members, staff and volunteers, the incredible generosity of thousands of individuals, and especially all of the artists. Without all of you we would never have survived this long or created as much. We can never thank you enough.

It has been an amazing thirty years. Few theatre companies last as long. We never sought nor desired to be an institution. Our home was always intended to be a playground in which we could gather with other adventurous souls and create the unimaginable. A place in which to grow, change and evolve. The theatrical experience is an event truly of the moment — immediate, fleeting and ephemeral. Yet in the space of that moment something takes place that is transformative to the human spirit and remains indelible in our memory — the stuff that dreams are made of, the stuff we carry with us forever. We hope you will treasure well the memory of Jeune Lune.

But, as this story ends, a new one begins. We live to create. To do what we know best, what the artist’s responsibility in society has always been — to invent, to dream, to imagine.

Starting today, we begin imagining a new way of working. What should a theatre-generating organization of the 21st Century look like? How can artists create truly groundbreaking art in a fast changing world? Times have changed and so have we. Building upon our artistic legacy, and facing a different future, we are exploring ways to reinvent an agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre with a new name. One that can embrace the concentric circles of artists we have worked with over the years. Together we will create essential and innovative theatre for today’s changing audience. It’s an exciting new journey and we hope you’ll join us with your support, with your presence, with your belief. Fear not: the art is alive and coming soon to a theatre near you. Keep in touch.

A few days ago, I blogged about an interesting experiment that’s just been conducted by The Guardian newspaper in the UK. The publication asked its sports and arts critics to swap jobs for a day. The arts journalists were sent off to write about sports events, and the sports journalists reviewed various arts happenings.

After reading the arts writers’ impressions of cricket, soccer, darts and other sports events, I had mixed feelings about the point of The Guardian’s exercise. Some of the writers did a good job of bringing their own perspective as an arts writer to bare on the business of exploring sport. But many of the critics just seemed beffuddled, bored and/or naiive. I didn’t gain any fresh insights into the sport they wrote about as a result, besides a sense of a wide and unbreachable gulf separating a sports event from the art of writing about culture.

I’m happy, however, to report that the Guardian’s follow-up instalment late last week, in which sports writers covered everything from a Louise Bourgeois exhibition to a production of Tosca at the Royal Opera House, made for a much more interesting read.

It’s not that the sports critics were better informed about the art they were covering. On the contrary, a few were open about their lack of knowledge. For example, soccer writer Kevin McCarra thanked his wife a couple of times in his piece about a contemporary dance performance at The Queen Elizabeth (Tero Saarinen Next of Kin): “There was a pas de deux in there (thanks again to Susan for keeping me informed), but melodramatic gesturing was the staple. It felt more like mugging than acting.” But with the exception of golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan’s boringly clueless piece about Yefim Bronfman playing Brahms with the San Francisco Symphony, all the writers rose to the challenge of bringing their own unique sensibilty as sports reviewers to the experience of writing about an arts event.

I particularly liked cycling and rugby writer William Fotheringham’s article about a pop music concert by Metronomy for its sense of humor and wry (albeit fairly shallow) comparisons between the art of pop and the art of cycling:

“Be it an Olympic cycling team or three guys from Totnes playing music, there are always personalities on show, always a particular way of working. Here, the creative force, Joseph, is somewhat eclipsed on stage (if the gazes of the girls in leggings are to be judged) by the bassist, Gabriel, with his tortured cheekbones. Oscar, the one playing the sax, simply looks round and cuddly.”

In short, The Guardian’s sports writers mostly put the paper’s arts writers to shame.

I don’t think the experiment was terribly valuable on balance. Reading the articles certainly put a stop to my ambitions to persuade my editor at SF Weekly to attempt a similar stunt by rotating all the critics for an issue. But I’m glad The Guardian gave it a go anyway.

There are many reasons why I’m excited to be sticking around the Bay Area this Summer, culture-wise. Here are just a few of them…

1. American Bach Soloists’ SummerFest — what lovelier way to spend a summer evening than munching a gourmet picnic supper serenaded by some of the country’s finest early music specialists?

2. Thrillpeddlers’ Theatre of the Ridiculous Festival — San Francisco’s own Grand Guignol stage company presents a weird and wonderful program of theatrical campery featuring Charles Busch’s Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium and Charles Ludlam’s Jack and the Beanstalk.

3. Asian Art Museum’s Ming Dynasty Exhibition — Not the place to go charging about like a bull in a china shop.

4. San Francisco Theater Festival — this event seems to get bigger and bigger and more and more inventive with each passing year.

5. Lucia di Lammermoor at the Ball Park — can’t wait to experience SF Opera’s production on a massive screen while eating hotdogs and drinking beer.

6. San Francisco Renaissance Voices staging of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum — I’m currently wrapping my head around Hildegard’s germanized Latin plainchant text in order to play “The Soul” in this astounding 12th century work.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of what a specialist in one field can bring in terms of his or her perspective to another, completely unrelated sphere of expertise. A couple of years ago, I suggested to my then-editor at SF Weekly that the different arts critics at the paper might switch disciplines for one issue, to see how each of us would bring our specialty to bear upon a different subject. My editor didn’t go for the idea at all. Shame really; I would have loved to write a theatrical restaurant review and read what my restaurant crtiic colleague would have said about rock music and what the rock writer would have said about fine art.

Having not given up on the idea completely, I was therefore gratified to see that the UK’s Guardian newspaper has asked its sports and arts writers to trade places for a day. Over two issues, the Guardian is publishing what its arts writers have to say about everything from cricket to soccer, and what its sports writers think about the likes of San Francisco Symphony’s take on Brahms and an exhibition of works by sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

I read the sports pieces by arts critics with great interest, though I have mixed opinions about the success of the experiement.

In the most successful of these reviews, the arts writer leveraged his special understanding of art to give the reader a fresh insight onto a sports topic.

Theatre critic Michael Billington’s terrific summary of a darts tournament in Cardiff is the best of the bunch. The critic not only offers the same sharp portraits of the personalities he meets at the sports event that he would of a character or actor in a play, but he also sets the stage by drawing parallels between darts as a sport and theater. (“Darts,” I am told by Sky Sports commentator Sid Waddell, “is working-class theatre.”)

Less successful, however, are the reviews in which the arts writer comes off as a complete novice, utterly lost in the new environment and full of naive wonderment or boredom at the task. Rock critic Caroline Sullivan’s uninformative, unamusing write-up of an England v New Zealand cricket match is a case in point. I’m not saying that an art critic should pretend to be an expert on sport, but he or she should at least bring something of worth to the table. Are there are pop songs or groups that remind the writer of any of the cricket players on the field? How does sound travel on a cricket pitch in comparison to the acoustics in a concert venue? Instead all we get from Sullivan is the feeling that she’d rather be somewhere else: “It’s New Zealand v England – I establish that much, along with the fact that NZ are batting and England bowling. Beyond that, I’m completely lost.”

I’m looking forward to reading what the sports writers have to say for themselves. What’s crucial is that we get the sports addicts’ unique perspectives on the culture. If all they give us are signs of confusion and boredom, then the exercise of trading places for a day is really no more than a gimmick.

I’ve long been campaigning for the appearance of more bars and cafes in performing arts spaces in the US. Seems to me that venues should be doing everything they can to get audiences and performers mingling and interacting and discussing the work and its connection to the world at large. One of the best ways of doing this is by giving people a congenial place to meet, eat and drink. Booze, of course, is the best lubricant for chat.

I also think it’s important for venue managers to let patrons bring drinks into the performance space. People shouldn’t have to gulp their drinks down before they take their seats. They should be able to enjoy a quiet sip in the dark as they experience a show if they want to. As long as the drinking isn’t noisy or otherwise distracting to the actors, then I think it can greatly enhance audience members’ enjoyment of the theatrical experience. If it works for outdoor theatres, then why not let indoor theatres follow suit?

Small venues, flying under the radar as they do and armed with a less stringent rules about getting wine stains out of plush carpets, have spearheaded the theatre bar and drinks-during-the-performance movement. Larger spaces have been more reluctant to jump on board.

Yesterday evening, however, I was surprised and extremely pleased to arrive at American Conservatory Theater’s main venue, The Geary Theatre, for a performance of ‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore, to find a billboard announcing that the company now permits drinks to be brought inside the auditorium.

According to Janette Gallegos, ACT’s spokesperson, the company has been toying with the idea of in-theatre drinking for a while as a way to facilitate dialogue and improve the show-going experience. The experiment began with the ACT’s last production – Curse of the Starving Class (which I didn’t get to see) – and feedback, Gallegos says, has mostly been positive. “A couple of people complained about being distracted by the noise of swirling ice-cubes, so we may end up nixing drinks with ice in them in future. But otherwise people seem happy. It’s an evening out after all and trying to go to the restroom and gulp down a cocktail during a 15-minute intermission can be challenging.”

I was always under the impression that theatre companies had resisted allowing patrons to bring drinks inside the theatre for licensing reasons. Someone once told me that a theatre company needs to get a nightclub license in order to allow alcohol to penetrate the inner sanctum of the performance space. But at least as far as ACT is concerned, no extra permits and licenses were required. The only additional burdens on the company are the extra cleaning and maintenance costs associated with allowing people to bring plastic cups full of drinks into the arena. So far, according to Gallegos, people have been very careful to bring out their trash and throw it away.

I hope The Geary Stage keeps up this experiment and that more performing arts spaces follow suit. Meanwhile, ACT is becoming more imaginative with its concession agenda: Next season, patrons might get to lick ice-cream cones through plays by Tom Stoppard and John Guare.

Prejudice is an insidious thing. Without even realizing that I’d been turned off the music of Wagner at a young age as a result of my father’s vendetta against anyone popular opinion considered anti-semitic, I had decided I hated Wagner. I had made this decision, even though my only exposure to the composer during my formative years had been through playing Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg in my school orchestra at the age of 15.

It was only when I was in New York a couple of years ago participating in the NEA/Columbia Journalism School’s mind-opening Classical Music and Opera Institute that I was forced to examine my foundationless views on Wagner. Music scholar and orchestral impresario Joe Horowitz persuaded me to analyze the roots of my opinion of the composer for the first time. Joe sent me his DVD of Patrice Chereau’s famous Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold recorded in 1980. I had never heard or seen anything like it before. I wasn’t expecting the moody-evocative entr’acts, the over-the-top, epic storyline, and those depravedly-human gods. I was enthralled.

At the ripe old age of 33, I finally got the chance to experience my first Wagner opera live on stage for the first time. San Francisco Opera (in collaboration with Washington National Opera) is staging a new Ring cycle between now and 2011 directed by Francesca Zambello. I caught the first instalment starring Richard Paul Fink as Alberich, Stefan Margita as Loge, Mark Delavan as Wotan and and Jennifer Larmore as Fricka on Saturday night.

Zambello’s use of the story as a fable about America’s use and abuse of natural resources is definitely prescient. This theme comes across beautifully in the contrast between the F. Scott Fitzgerald-like breeziness of life in Valhalla and the dark, sweaty flames of the mines of Nibelheim. Less successful are the endless video projections employed throughout the performance depicting clouds, mountains, water and other natural landscapes. These become distracting and tedious after a while. They don’t add much to our overall understanding of the universe depicted in the opera.

Even though I experienced it on DVD, Chereau’s production remains superior. In particular, I fell in love with Heinz Zednik’s shifty Loge in Chereau’s production. SF Opera’s Margita is no match for Zednik as an actor, though he has a fine, hard tenor voice. He’s just not wily and mysterious enough.

In general, though, I found myself engaged by SF Opera’s production over the two and a half intermissionless hours that I was pinioned to my seat. The music is so lush and full of surprises. And the story is simply mad. I can still hear the clanging anvils from Alberich’s underworld ringing in my head.

I’m looking forward to the next installment of the cycle and will be forever indebted to Joe for challenging my ill-founded bias. I wonder if I could get my dad hooked on this stuff too?

As a singer-in-training, I’m just beginning to squawk out my first aria from the operatic cannon. I’m tackling “Che Faro Senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The famous song is, of course, one of the most divinely beautiful and tragic arias I’ve ever heard, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from my mangled attempts to penetrate Gluck’s underworld.

Thankfully, my singing coach came up with the bright idea of pointing me to YouTube so I could hear some of the world’s great mezzos and countertenors tackle the aria. I spent a very interesting hour listening to the many different renditions that can be found in YouTube’s ever-revelatory cache. Here are my reactions to the interpretations that struck me in the most visceral way, both good and bad:

1. JANET BAKER Probably the most moving version I heard. It’s no wonder that this aria was one of Baker’s signature pieces. She absolutely floored me with her depth of feeling. I was right down there in Hades with her, clutching the dead body of Euridice. There’s something a bit Miss Piggy-like about Baker’s visage. But she made me cry anyway.

2. SHIRLEY VERRETT A heavier sound than Baker’s, but still balanced. The singer looks majestic in her Roman senator-like getup. Sometimes, however, she gets a bit carried away with the emotion of it all.

3. TERESA BERGANZA A lush, powerful voice. I wasn’t too keen on the singer’s habit of swooping up and down to catch some notes, rather than hitting them head on. A bit too romantic a sound for my taste.

4. KATHLEEN FERRIER Singing in English from an old phonograph recording. Even the translated text and the crackling, hissing interference from the record can’t destroy the singer’s strength of feeling.

5. ANDREAS SCHOLL Scholl is my favorite male classical singer, but there’s something too clean and choirboy-like about his delivery on this occasion. He sounds absolutely sterile — more like he’s singing about losing a sock in the laundry than the love of his life.

6. JENNIFER LARMORE I saw Larmore last night do Fricka in SF Opera’s production of Das Rheingold. She was great. The mezzo has clearly lost about 30 pounds since the YouTube clip I saw of her singing Orfeo. Her delivery of the aria doesn’t apeal to me really — it’s plodding, heavy and there’s just too much vibrato. In fact, Larmore sounds like she’s singing Wagner.

Feeling very inspired — and not a little bit intimidated — as a result of hearing all these great voices. Now to try and make the song my own.