Americans might be interested in seeing the Sting/Karamazov segment on NBC's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (whatever that is) Monday night.
Ron Fletcher wrote: > It is out there making big bucks! We cannot change anything. Except > maybe > the minds of a few other people that discover this list out of mere > curiosity about the lute. I suppose there will be a few ears turned on to the glories of the renaissance by Sting's effort. But for all but a tiny minority of the Sting fans who buy his CD, Sting's Dowland will BE Dowland, now and forever and ever, amen. If they like it, they will go no further, and if they don't, it will be because the music's no good. So if Sting stirs a renaissance renaissance I'll be thrilled, but if it happens surprise will not be adequate, and I'll have to resort to astonishment. My own impression, from what I heard, is that it was pretty much a student effort, and I'm not at all surprised if, as has been reported here, later performances are better than the CD; maybe he's getting more comfortable with it. A few posters have complained about the miking on the CD. The October 8 Los Angeles Times, which I just got around to reading today, had an interview feature with Sting, who said he wanted it to "sound modern. Most ancient music is recorded at a distance," he says. You're in a chapel or somewhere, and you hear it at a distance, almost 400 years away. We recorded this very close, so you're inside the lute, my voice is inside your head [Does anyone else find this concept a bit gross, to say nothing of painful and claustrophobic? Never mind...] There's an intimacy and a sensuality about that that I thought we could offer that hasn't been done before in this music." Either Sting has become an expert on the thousands of early music recordings available, or he has a penchant for unsupported sweeping statements that would would make Roman envious. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but the a few pages away in the same LA Times issue is a feature headlined "Polishing the Art of Singing Badly," concerning a play about Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), the wealthy widow who Wikipedia aptly describes as "an American soprano who became famous for her complete lack of singing ability." Wikipedia has a link to her famous recording of the Queen of the Night's second-act Aria, which, alas, my browser downloaded as a text file, perhaps exercizing its own artistic standards. I was also intrigued by Wikipedia's listing, among "further references," a link to "William Shatner's musical career." But perhaps this is getting just a bit off topic. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
