David Daniels - Venti turbini - Rinaldo (Handel)

440...poor guy lolz! what's with the shoe?

I have this DVD and I hate it. It's just plain ugly. Daniels just doesn't cut it here and he is never ever good to look at.

and you don't think his singing is disrespectful? :)
I find that much scarier than the staging to be honest.
It's a horribly fatigued voice, it has no colour and richness. This guy's gone completely downhill but the worst has yet to come with Or la tromba.

Why don't light countertenors leave this aria to heavy contraltos?! Podles, Horne, Mijanovic, Prina..those are the Rinaldos!

I like his voice... even if some women sing it better.
Instead of heavy contraltos, I thinks it's more castrato-like to have a mezzo (Genaux for example) or a light countertenor.

While I may respect your taste for a smaller, lighter voice in the role it's not necessarily related to what Handel wanted. He's famous for adapting parts according to whichever singer was available unlike some Bel Canto composers or Mozart that tailored roles around a specific singer's voice.

Also, the whole castrato speculations always tend to be pointless since we have no proof of all the claimed miraculous qualities of their voices, but granted those speculations were true, castrati are said to have a good middle and low as well as high, which definitely isn't the case of most counterternors.

I also respect you may like Daniels but in this Rinaldo performance it's objectively disgraceful, technically speaking.

Excellent. With philisters like leoparm, the Met in NY will never starve. Go there and enjoy people in biiiiig beautiful costumes (at least after they will have fired the current stage director because like people booh his laudible attempt to take dust off the cultural embarassment that it is).

I totally agree with you I think that every opera should be staged according to the time it was made at. For example everyone you should look up movie Farinelli and see how amazingly beautiful stage is there :)