On the other hand...

Tom pricked my Florez bubble yesterday evening, by a) assembling a group of friends to play the Schumann Piano Quintet in our front room (they made music and I made the food), and b) over dinner afterwards, saying 'Florez isn't a patch on this...' and putting on a CD of Fritz Wunderlich.

There are performances - like Florez's - which leave you clapping and cheering and full of superlatives. There are others which leave you speechless.

King of the high Cs? Better believe it...

I'm high as a kite. Universal Classics held a little 'do' today for one of their best and starriest stars: Juan Diego Florez (above, photo credit: Decca / Johannes Ifkovits). Savoy Hotel; a collection of press & industry colleagues; and he sang three arias - the big whacks from Rigoletto and La fille du regiment (the one with nine high Cs) plus 'Granada' from his Sentimento Latino album, and I was standing 4 metres from him throughout. I nearly died of joy.

It's unbelievable. The security of that technique is, as far as I can tell, more comparable to Jascha Heifetz than any other singer I can think of. There's no shadow of doubt, but also no flaw in the pouring of the honey, just utter beauty and wonder and a hell of a lot of oomph, at least close to. Florez's voice is sometimes said to be 'small' or, better, 'small is beautiful', but it certainly didn't sound that way (beautiful, yes; small, no!) from 4 metres... It was hard to get the press & industry to stop applauding afterwards, and that takes a little doing.

I shook his hand afterwards. Yes, alas, I have washed since. But tomorrow I get to interview him (at least, 98% sure that I will), so maybe I can replenish that supply of wonder. And yes, he's drop-dead gorgeous - but with a voice like that, who even needs those sultry eyes?

He opens in La fille du regiment at Covent Garden in January.

It's my birthday...

...and this year my special present is seeing in print in The Independent something I've been wanting to write for 20 years. Voila.

Please excuse me for a couple of days while I push off to Paris.

An Independent Carmen

Here's my piece about Carmen which appears in The Independent today. Enjoy. The show opens at Covent Garden tonight, and someone who saw the dress rehearsal told me that Jonas Kaufmann as Don Jose was so marvellous that his big aria alone would be worth the price of the ticket. (I'm not going tonight, but will see it later in the run and report back then.)

Please sign this if you like Korngold

I've just discovered that Brendan G Carroll's definitive biography of Korngold, The Last Prodigy, is out of print. As next year is the 50th anniversary of EWK's death and there is going to be A LOT going on to mark the occasion, it seems completely ridiculous that this book, which took Brendan 25 years to write, should be unavailable. It's an invaluable and irreplaceable resource. The Korngold website, run from Athens by another devoted Korngold fan, Eleftherios Neroulias, is carrying an online petition to the publisher, Amadeus Press, begging for the reprint of the book. You can read and sign the petition here.

My own rather more modest book still seems to be in print, but it's no substitute and I am the first to admit that.