Lawrence Brownlee channels Aretha in Beethoven 9th
mainYou gotta see this.
Pt 1: Practicing Beethoven’s 9th while waiting to pick up my son pic.twitter.com/kPVazfUxwL
— Lawrence Brownlee (@Brownleetenor) May 5, 2021
But this:
Pt 2: Practicing Beethoven’s 9th when things go off the rails 🤣 pic.twitter.com/J78M4u14Bb
— Lawrence Brownlee (@Brownleetenor) May 5, 2021
Singers can practice Beethoven everywhere, also in the bathroom and toilet. He can have it. Beethoven himself practiced in the latter.
Beautiful voice! Pronunciation leaves still something to be wished for.
I am literally a German teacher and hear zero problems with his sung German.
The R, mainly.
Pronunciation seems fine to me, just shouldn’t be a break in the middle of “prächtgen.”
As a native speaker: the pronounciation is not 100% native, but I have heard much, much worse from other singers. His German sounds perfectly fine to me.
Perhaps you might enlighten us on the particulars of his German you object to.
It’s only the R, the rest is OK. And then, it does not matter very much, since no German speaks the way Beethoven had written the part.
……and nobody cares anyway……I will put you on the list for “Pedant of the Month” (which you actually don’t deserve because I find your posts interesting – except for these)
I give singers wide pronunciation latitude as long as they are reasonably crisp, on pitch and are musical. If you were such a stickler, you couldn’t listen to Renee Fleming who has abysmal German pronunciation, but sings lieder and Strauss opera roles so beautifully that you give her a pass. Conversely, listen to the live Furtwaengler led film of Don Giovanni at Salzburg and when the great bass Otto Edelmann sings Madamina he turns Quel che fa into Kvell che fa. I give him plenty of latitude as well. Not their native language.
So excited he’ll be joining us (Tulsa Symphony), Gerhardt Zimmermann, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Ryan Speedo Green , and now Tamara Mumford next week for Beethoven 9 at the ball park!
gotta?
doan hafta doan wanna
Love it!!
It’s incredible when you play all 3 together, one right after another.
Tremendous singer, can’t wait to hear him at the Met again – someday………….
Wow! so many experts on sung German here! Perhaps all of you who are criticizing LB’s German would care to upload to YouTube your demonstrations of how the music should be sung.
You realize that there was exactly one person criticizing his German and quite a number of people defending him? I don’t get your post… Besides, you don’t have to be a singer in order to say a word or two about pronounciation. But this is moot, since he was really doing very well in that respect as well!
I’m always bewildered by people who criticize a singer’s slight mis-pronunciation of some non-native aria words and condemn a performer because they sing some music slightly flat or sharp yet can sit through and defend the complete destruction of a libretto in some idiotic updating of an opera. As an example of one of the most flagrant operatic rapes, setting Rigoletto in Las Vegas in the 1960’s wherein, according to the libretto, a casino singer has the right to exile or jail a love rival, an assassin is paid, not in dollars but in scudi, a casino employee, petrified that some gambler cursed him (an everyday happening in Las Vegas, I’m sure) who is dedicated to preserving his daughter’ s chastity, parks her on the top floor of the casino within sight of the most dangerous seducer in Nevada and then doesn’t call 911 when he finds her dying in the trunk of a car. I won’t even go to Faust building the A-bomb in his industrial complex or Macbeth wearing a tuxedo and having a WW2 jeep at his disposal.If he has a jeep, I assume he also, has Sherman tanks and M-1 Garands and BARs so he should win easily. A few sharp or flat notes or a mispronunciation of an umlaut is meaningless compared to just a few examples of libretto devastation listed above.
[I’m always bewildered by people who criticize a singer’s slight mis-pronunciation of some non-native aria words and condemn a performer because they sing some music slightly flat or sharp yet can sit through and defend the complete destruction of a libretto in some idiotic updating of an opera.]
Are you sure they’re really the same people?