Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

she s amazing!!!!
it s easy to sing but difficult to feel and express is she does both very wel!!!!

My band actually might do this Aria at the very end of our first demo, only I'll sing less opera like (I don't have a warble of an opera singer)

I agree, the diction isn't very good. Maybe it is the way Maria chooses to interpret the piece. Being as her diction is always superb, I think that she is purposely using bad diction because in this aria the character is foretelling her death and so using bad diction as a tool to portray the extreme physical weakness that occurs before death. Brava Maria, she is my favorite Mezzo to have played Carmen, its priceless!!!

What a stunning piece of opera. I am enormously disappointed by the final note being a major rather rather a minor - it spoils the piece at the end for me , which is otherwise breathtaking.

To today's listener, I agree completely. You may know this or not, but in the Baroque period, before, and for a while afterwards, it was considered unusual to end with a minor tonic. The major tonic was largely used to signify that the aria was at it's end.

I know very little about music that isn't, uh, modern, but I believe that it was ended with the minor tonic because that minor tonic provoked feelings of unease, unhappiness, tension etc, and that by ENDING it with the minor tonic Purcell left us listeners with these feelings unresolved, which (as you said!) was unusual at the time. It added to the drama of the whole thing wonderfully, carrying across to us the feelings of the piece.

uno dei brani musicali per cui vale la pena vivere

Two very very different composers from two very very different time periods! =)

Of course I know that Purcell and Britten are of different time periods, my God!
What I wanted to underline was simply their gorgeous equality in composing novelty beyond ages and in keeping faith to a sophisticated British taste that I find so lovely...

nice singing but terrible diction