Pretend You Don't See Her [Import]

Pretend You Don't See Her [Import]

ASIN: B0000A59T1

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
33 digitally remastered tracks from two of Jim's shows, including 4 bonus tracks, 'The Old Arm Chair', 'Housewife's Prayer', 'Old Pard' & 'You Belong To Me', with notes by duet partner Dolores Watson. Includes songs Jim never did at RCA. Voicemasters. 2003.

Tracks:

La Boheme: Quando Me'n Vo' Soletta
La rondine: Chi Il Bel Sogno Di Doretta
Gianni Schicchi: O! Mio Babbino Caro
Semiramide: Bel Raggio Lusinghier
Lucia Di Lammermore: Regnava Nel Silenzio
Un Ballo in Maschera: Volta La Terre Fronte
Il Barbiere di Siviglia: Una Voce Pocco Fa
CAVATINA: Quel Guardo Il Cavaliere
La rondine: Ore Dolci E Divine
La Sonnambula: Ah! Non Credea Mirarti
Rigoletto: Caro Nome
Turandot: Signore, Ascolta!
Turandot: A Little Path
Turandot: I Live At The Source Of The Yangtze River

Customer Reviews:

Soaring!!.......2007-01-11

This CD is probably one of the best additions to my classical collection. There are many great opeatic artists both past and present, but after listening to these renditions bu Ying Huang, I can honestly say that she will be rated amongst the greatest!!
This CD is a well worth purchase for those who enjoy classical music in particular, Opera.

O! Mio Babbino Caro made me weep.......2006-03-10

I'm saddened by the nitpicky nature of some of the opera "critics" who've chimed in on this CD. Like many things artistic, it is easy to criticize, especially on technical details. As a professional musician (pop, not classical) I have worked hard to hear the essence and emotion of a performance, and not to get bogged down in trying to make myself feel superior.

Case in point: I first heard "O! Mio Babbino Caro" on my infant daughter's show, Classical Baby on HBO. The visual is an animated cow singing to a bull-shaped constellation. Despite the triviality of the image, I found myself weeping every time the segment came on. I don't care for opera much (I prefer instrumental classical music by far) but there was something about that voice and that performance that touched me. I did some online research and finally found this wonderful track. I listened to Callas, Fleming, Brightman, and many others while searching and found them all lacking (no disrespect intended). Maybe it's Huang's youth that captures the subject matter so profoundly (I read the translation, and wept again at the emotional content). Maybe that's just a really compelling cartoon cow, but if a piece of music in a foreign language in an unfamiliar genre can touch my heart like this does, I'm a believer.

Don't give in to the negativity and snobbishness of some of the other reviews. Listen as a child does, without prejudice and with no axe to grind.

Bel canto!.......2003-11-10

After her impressive rendition of Cio-Cio-San in Frédéric Mitterrand's filmed opera `Madame Butterfly' (1995), Ying Huang released her first solo opera album, with James Conlon conducting the wonderful London Symphony Orchestra. Huang's voice of exquisite sound and sweet timbre, along with her well refined crafting, brought me special joys throughout the listening. For a young voice like Huang's, this album is a selection with quite some range that displays her excellent bel canto and ineffably beautiful lyricism. Besides the superb quality of her voice, her singing is with unique grace, in the dramatic lines as well as in the coloraturas. Introduced by Huang are also two Chinese songs, "A Little Path", which is a folk song, and "I Live at the Source of the Yangtze River", which is an old song with lyric from an ancient Chinese verse.

Listening to such singing is a heavenly feeling. Huang's soprano might be a small instrument, but it is very flexible and exquisite, and she will do very well in recital. I will be very much looking forward to hearing more from her.

Pleasant recital.......2003-07-01

Ying Huang has a pleasant, silvery voice and a good coloratura technique. She is fairly young on this recital, I believe only 26. She shows signs of becoming a real musician and artist. I found her coloratura to be pleasant, but not spectacular in the Sutherland and Sills mode. Her biggest advantage is her pure, silvery voice. She has nice Italian diction, but it needs to be projected more. I found her "La Sonnambula" aria to be nicely sung, definitely better than Renée Fleming's overdone version on her overrated "Bel Canto" disc. The ornaments Huang uses are the traditional ones and she tosses them off fairly easily. Her trill definitely needs work. I found her to be at her best in the comic arias, especially the "Un Ballo" aria and the "Don Pasquale" aria. "Una voce poco fa" contains nice coloratura. As for her high notes, they are soft and pure. They do need to be a bit more secure, but at least she hits them. Her staccati need a bit more work in "Caro nome". The last part of this aria is cut. This is the part that includes Gilda's final trill and the diminuendo with which she leaves the stage. I found the Puccini selections sung well, but she needs to add more drama to them. In fact, she needs to work more on characterization overall. She is young, so she will probably improve with time. I found the Mandarin-language selections delightful. This disc can be enjoyed for Huang's pleasant voice, developing musicality, and fairly good coloratura.

Wonderful Natural Voice, Needs more training........2003-04-07

A couple yeras ago, before she was famous, one of her vocal teacher criticized that her voice needed more training. Unforturnately, I didn't see the difference between then and now. Most of time, the natural beauty in her voice covered up her technical shortage, but she reached high notes, the inperfection is obvious.

Customer Reviews:

"Come, Loge! Descend With Me!".......2007-06-12

Title: The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
Composer: Richard Wagner
Conductor: Reginall Goodall
Orchestra: English National Opera Orchestra
Label: Chandos

TIMING (Estimate): 16 hours, 50 minutes

CONDUCTING: While I do praise Goodall with his amazing attention to detail, his ridiculously sluggish tempi will tick some Wagnerites off. But I did enjoy listening to the slow beauty of his Rhinegold Prelude. This was recorded live and sung in English.

ORCHESTRA: This orchestra sounds nice, even if the sluggishness can bring them down at times. "Descent into Nibelheim" doesn't sound too good in a slow tempo, but the entire orchestra does sound lucid here. "Erda's Warning" sounds very otherworldly and mystical. All of the leitmotivs are heard loud and clear, just like in Marek Janowski's and James Levine's versions.

SINGERS:
Almost everyone does a great job here. Two exceptions, though: Gregory Dempsey's Mime is probably the dullest one on record (not emotional enough), and Anne Collins's Erda can be a bit too light and heavy at times. All in all, no one here is graded C or lower.

GRADE: 4/5

The Valkyrie (Part 2): Wagner: The Valkyrie

Siegfried (Part 3): Siegfried (Goodall Ring Cycle/Chandos Opera in English)

Twilight of the Gods (Part 4): The Twilight of the Gods (Goodall Ring Cycle/Chandos Opera in English)

Free at last!.......2004-09-18

I've enjoyed listening to the Ring cycles by Solti, Bohm, and Furtwangler, but my pleasure has always been dampened by the necessity to follow the dramas with a German/English libretto. This performance freed me from that burden and allowed me to listen to the Ring with my ears alone for the first time. And what a delightful experience it was! I found I could understand about half the words the first time through. but that was enough for me to understand what the characters were saying and concentrate on Wagner's great music. Some of the characters (Loge and Alberich, for example) are almost perfectly comprehensible, while others (Fricka in particular) might as well be singing in German. The sound itself is superb, with perfect balances between orchestra and voices. Goodall's conducting is famously slow (about half an hour longer than usual), but he is never slack and he reveals a wealth of detail in the orchestration. The singers are a mixed lot, with Loge, Alberich, and Mime particularly effective. Bailey is hardly the grandest of Wotans, but he is solid and convincing. In any event, for us non-German listeners, this recording is a real treat. I would not recommend it as a first Ring (Bohm is a good choice, though some of his tempi are rather hectic), but as a supplement to a recoding in the original language, it is hard to beat. Give it a try! As for me, I'm ready to go on to "Die Walkure" (pardon me, "The Valkyrie").

I Love This Recording.......2002-04-05

I was a little suspicious when approaching this English-language version of Das Rhinegold. I was considering assembling this as my third RING set (behind Solti and Levine) and had listened to THE VALKYRIE (Die Walkure) with a little initial disappointment. Although the live sound quality was very interesting, the tempo was much slower than I was used to and thus a little disconcerting, and the English words were harder to understand than I had hoped. Nevertheless, I persevered and listended to THE RHINEGOLD (probably my favorite of the four RING operas, although I know this puts me in a minority) and was amazed. Best of all, after listening to this album I revisited the Goodall VALKYRIE and discovered a new appreciation! Now the Goodall set ranks as one of the best I've heard. It just needed to get under my skin a bit.

What's so good about it? Three things stand out for me: First, the slow tempi that were a litle rough at first actually allow, upon repeated listenings, a new discovery and understanding of Wagner's unfathomable genius. Every nuance is slowed down just enough to be fully accessible. Second, the modern English translation really does make this a different experience...my initial mistake was thinking that English lyrics could allow me to listen to this as background music, and that's not the case. However, if one devotes the same attention to this as a German recording, the time wil be richly rewarded. Finally, the smaller orchestra creates an almost chamber music-esque setting, which compliments the music in an undefinable way. Despite being in English, this is almost more Germanic than original-language recordings.

I still probably wouldn't get this as the first foray into Wagner's RING (I still think Solti or Levine are the choices for that). But for someone who already has some familiarity with the work, this will provide a lifetime's enjoyment. Cudos to Chandos for resurrecting these recordings!

The Goodall Ring - 1975 - Restored and Remastered.......2001-06-08

I have been curious about this for years. When I saw the packaging, I wondered whether this was the same Ring that has been kicking around for a couple of decades from the Sadler's Wells performances of the mid-70s. News flash: It's the same. However, the box says that it's been re-mastered with something called 24-bit digital mastering. Since I never heard the old records, I have no idea if this is better. Judged on its own, the sound is terrific. This live recording really places the listener in the theater with clarity and authentic spaciousness. So often, a live recording will capture the audience up close, then the orchestra, then the singers, cataloguing every throat being cleared and every bow being tapped. Somewhere in the distance, the singers voices follow their heavy tread over the stage. Not here. There is an intimacy to the sound here that approximates sitting in about the tenth row back in a large hall. It doesn't sound like the opera's being played in your room; it sounds as though your room has been transformed into a medium sized theater. I found it uncanny.

As to the experience of the drama in English, that too is remarkable, at least for someone like me whose home-tongue is English. The drama takes on an immediacy that I have never experienced before. This factor alone is why you should explore this Ring. I can't overemphasize the impact on me that this recording had on me because it was in English and because it was well-acted. Surely this is what Wagner meant, at least dramaturgically (obviously allowing that you can't actually see the action).

Overall, the singing is competent, and in some places, it's excellent. None of the cast really stands out musically. Norman Bailey's wobbly Wotan could have certainly benefitted from a deeper, richer tone. Still, and perhaps more importantly, he creates a god who is clearly unsure of where the moral highground is, even when he's standing on "an open space on a mountain summit." Everyone, for that matter, is dramatically convincing, especially Emile Belcourt (Loge) and Derek Hammond-Stroud (Alberich) and Robert Lloyd (Fasolt), all of whom, by the way, have excellent diction. And speaking of diction, I almost could have done without the libretto when the men were singing. Not so with the women, whose diction was uniformly wanting.

Goodall's pace is notoriously glacial. Still, it's interesting to hear it parsed in this way, and I never had the feeling that I was going to fall off the world. Which is to say that the tempos were deliberate, not affected. This was definitely a labor of love for RG and the English National Opera. The orchestra is a little thin sounding, and perhaps, not entirely up to the score. Occasionally a horn mis-blew and a cello creaked. This is unavoidable in live performances, I suppose. Still, there is a surprising sense of smallness to the ensemble, even though there's never a moment when the balance between singers and players is lost. As a result, the overall effect is a balance of clarity and urgency that is clearly the upside of Goodall's idiosyncratic "vision" of the score. Not a huge or "erotic" sound, but always committed, intelligent, and sometimes impassioned.

For all of its flaws, this is an astonishing and, for me, an indispensible recording because it made me listen to this opera with new ears. While it's not the most lyrically pleasing recording (Karajan) or musically authoritative (that would be Solti, IMHO), dramatically, this Rhinegold excells any recording I know of. I will definitely buy the rest of the set.

Agreeably Surprised.......2001-06-01

I wasn't expecting much from a 'Rhinegold' in English, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good this English National Opera performance turned out to be. The translation by Andrew Porter fits the English words amazingly well with the music; so much so that the singers were able to introduce nuances that can only be heard if one is familiar with language that is being sung. I was listening very carefully and albeit my ears are not as good as many others' I rarely heard a misaccented syllable. The words are not clear enough to do without the libretto entirely, but that's of little moment.

I'm not picky about singers but I didn't hear a bad one on this recording. I especially liked Robert Lloyd as Fasolt. The conducting by Reginald Goodall is less incisive than what I'm accustomed to. The producers must not have messed with the recording too much during the transfer from analog to digital, and it sounds warm and compressed like an old LP.

I'm eagerly waiting for the rest of Goodall's recordings of Wagner to be avaiable.

Average customer rating:
Grooves Vol. 10 & 11 "35 songs" FEATURING the bogman, joe ely, speed the plough, spearhead, jane siberry, the big geraniums, ani difranco, bobby mcferrin, the delevantes, freddy jones band, aimee mann, swales, heather nova, bottle rockets, emmylou harris, son volt, fabulous thunderbirds, drivin' n' cryin', health and hapiness show, boy george, tracy chapman, teenage fanclub, jerry lee lewis, pretty & twisted, kris kristofferson, wake ooloo, john hiatt, cyril neville/uptown allstars, susan werner, butch hancock, lisa loeb, ben folds five, vin scelsa
********TRACK LISTINGS******** , bogman - light a candle for me / joe ely - all just to get to you / speed the plough - said & done / spearhead - of course you can / jane siberry - see the child / big geraniums - evolution , ani difranco - cradle and all / bobby mcferrin - vivaldi's concerto in G minor: allegro / delevantes - long about that time / freddy jones band - hold on to midnight / aimee mann - ray , swales - without her around / heather nova - maybe an angel / bottle rockets - gravity fails / emmylou harris - where will I be / son volt - windfall / "acoustic"- delevantes - on my way home , fabulous thunderbirds - here comes the night / drivin' n' cryin' - light / health and hapiness show - tossed like a stone / boy george - same thing in reverse / tracy chapman - the promise , teenage fanclub - don't look back / jerry lee lewis - crown victoria custom '51 / pretty &twisted - ride / kris kristofferson - worth fighting for / wake ooloo - age of reason / john hiatt - shredding the document , cyril neville & the uptown allstars - rock with me / susan werner - last of the good straight girls / butch hancock - eileen / lisa loeb & nine stories - snow day / ben folds five - philosophy , and john hiatt & vin scelsa - spoken intro / john hiatt - walk on (acoustic)
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: B000RDG9DM

Average customer rating:
Grooves "Vol. 10 & 11" {2 CDs, 35 Songs} THE BOGMEN / JOE ELY / SPEED THE PLOUGH / SPEARHEAD / JANE SIBERRY / THE BIG GERANIUMS / ANI DIFRANCO / BOBBY MCFERRIN / THE DELEVANTES / FREDDY JONES BAND / AIMEE MANN / SWALES / HEATHER NOVA / THE BOTTLE ROCKETS / EMMYLOU HARRIS / SON VOLT / THE DELEVANTES / THE FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS / DRIVIN' N' CRYIN' / HEALTH AND HAPINESS / BOY GEORGE / TRACY CHAPMAN / TEENAGE FANCLUB / JERRY LEE LEWIS / PRETTY & TWISTED / KRIS KRISTOFFERSON / ALLSTARS / SUSAN WERNER / BUTCH HANCOCK / LISA LOEB / BEN FOLDS FIVE / JOHN HIATT & VIN SCELSA
all just to get to you, said & done, of course you can, light a candle for me , evolution, cradle and all, vivaldi's concerto in G minor: allegro, long about that time, see the child , ray, without her around, maybe an angel, gravity fails, hold on to midnight , windfall, on the way home, here comes the night, light, where will i be , same thing in reverse, the promise, tossed like a stone , crown victoria custom '51, ride, worth fighting for, age of reason, shredding the document, rock with me, don't look back , and eileen, snow day, philosophy, spoken into, walk on last of the good straight girls
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: B000OWFGEO

Cabaret
Average customer rating:
Cabaret
1993 London Studio Cast
Manufacturer: Curtain Call
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000000B4N
Release Date: 2001-01-02

Tracks:

Set - Youssou N'Dour
Zing Zong - Kanda Bongo Man
Hawa Dolo - Ali Farka Toure
Tres Impoli - Franco
Kaokokorobo - Papa Wemba
Demgalam - Baaba Maal
Den Te San - Kasse Mady Diabate
Zunguluke - The Four Stars
Big Blow - Manu Dibango
Nanan - Meiway
Jelebi - Ismael Lo
Hanzvadzi - Thomas Mapfumo
Andrada - Koffi Olomide

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Pretend You Don't See Her

ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B0000A59T1
Release Date: 2003-06-17

Album Description

33 digitally remastered tracks from two of Jim's shows, including 4 bonus tracks, 'The Old Arm Chair', 'Housewife's Prayer', 'Old Pard' & 'You Belong To Me', with notes by duet partner Dolores Watson. Includes songs Jim never did at RCA. Voicemasters. 2003.

Society Clown: The Songs of George Grossmith

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Society Clown: The Songs of George Grossmith

Manufacturer: Divine Art
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000059M49
Release Date: 2001-02-13

Tracks:

See Me Dancing the Polka
He Was a Careless Man
Bus Conductor's Song
My Janet (An Old English Ballad Gone Wrong)
How I Became an Actor
Lost Key
Mother and Her Child Were There!
His Nose Was on the Mantepiece
French Verbs Song
I Am Not in the Vein, My Nuse or the Perplexed Poet
Oh Butcher, Oh Baker
If You Value a Peacable Life
I'm Tired of the Moon, My Love and Myself
Go on Talking-Don't Mind Me!
I Don't Mind Flies
Baby on the Shore
I'm His Daisy
How I Became a Detective
My Lady Nature's Little Joke
Tommy's First Love
I Loved Her and I Left Her
Your Honoured and Ancient Name
Happy Old Days at Peckham
See Me Reverse

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