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re: ' you are so cute.'

Posted by:	LegitOnce 09:22 pm EST 12/07/13
In reply to:	re: ' you are so cute.' - jsr 07:05 pm EST 12/07/13

I'm not doubting that there was an alternate in the part, but I doubt whether one was really necessary. All told, Sharon sings for about ten minutes, and she's not on stage more than about another ten minutes besides that. The difficulty of singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth is that it is a long an extremely rangy role. Her first cavatina is, relatively speaking, one of the less challenging bits she is asked to sing. Further, a stage Lady Macbeth has to project over an orchestra acoustically, not over a piano with a body mike. There's also the issue of tessitura here. What makes this aria challenging is that the usual casting for the role of Lady Macbeth is a mezzo or a low dramatic soprano, and the aria climbs to a B-flat and then there is a high C in the cadenza. That's very hard work for a big voice at the beginning of a long night, but it's less difficult for a lyric soprano, whose voice naturally lies higher. (One reason more lyric sopranos don't sing Lady Macbeth is that this music actually sounds a little too easy in a lighter voice, without the effortful ferocity Verdi seemed to be asking for.) As to how well a basically lyric voice handles Verdi's Lady, you can find out next season at the Met, when Anna Netrebko is going to sing this opera in New York for the first time. (She premieres the role in Munich this summer.)

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