Hello and thank you for visiting. A classical music enthusiast. Particularly of opera and vocal music. Travel some for opera too. Opinionated but don’t expect people to agree. Think most critics fail in their duty to critique but simply follow rut-deep agendas.
The name is inspired by Metastasio and his belief in a happy ending and the anonymity is because my employer doesn’t allow for personal blogs to be written.
Feel free to leave comments.
Thanks!
LietoFineLondon 
As one of the tenors in the Philharmonia Chorus line-up for the Mahler 8, not for me to comment, but you may want to look again at your review, as Brindley Sherratt was not singing. He was replaced by Stephen Gadd….
Andrew Martin
andrew@andrewjmartin.co.uk
Apologies … I did not know that and will change immediately. I was rather surprised as I have always thought BS was brilliant.
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Thanks for your articles. Finally a little more room for critical music. And finally a bit of real competence! And thank you for adhering to my group in Facebook dedicated to Gustav Mahler :-))
Hello Pierfrancesco. Many thanks for your comments! And a huge fan of Mahler so thank you for creating the group!
Totally agree with your review of ‘Die Frau’. We were there too, on Friday evening.
Thank you. It was marvellous. I wish I could have seen it again.
I have enjoyed reading through several of your posts and have found them extremely informative. Keep up the great work 🙂
Best wishes
Charlotte
Thank you! I enjoy reading your blog too. Very jealous of your tour of Italy!
I noticed a comment you made on the iTunes site about the latest CD from the 18 year old singers Jonathan and Charlotte. You requested that iTunes do not class their music as classical. Whilst I would agree that Charlotte is not a classical singer, her partner Jonathan is very much in that mould.
Obviously you have done little or no research into his musical background. He is still taught at the Royal Academy, London (as he has been for some years now); has had a masterclass from Pavarotti’s teacher who, it is recorded, could find no faults. He also had a masterclass with Ronaldo Villazon who described his voice as ‘astonishing’. I’ve heard this young man sing two of the new CD solos live and he’s breathtaking. By far the best classical talent to appear on the scene in the past few years.
During my lifetime there has always been a smack of snobbery in the field of classical music. Thankfully classical ‘crossover’ is now mainstream and this makes opera appeal to a much wider audience.
O Sole Mio, Santa Lucia and Va Pensiero are not popular songs as you’re aware, so iTunes are perfectly correct to class the CD as classical.
Go on, give yourself a treat and buy the CD. You know you want to!
Thank you for your comments but I had indeed carried out research before my comment on iTunes. What I find difficult to accept is that iTunes would put an album like this in the classical section. It is not – and never will be – classical music. My opinion on ‘cross-over’ is documented in my blog and my make no apologies for it. I also doubt whether ‘cross over’ really does have that much impact in terms of drawing more people to opera as in my experience in the industry the results are negligible. And I might add what saddened me most about Jonathan Antoine is that despite some training at the Royal Academy, he effectively ‘sold out’ and went on Britain’s Got Talent.
I won’t be buying the album.
Dear Direction of LietoFineLOndon,
My name is Arianna Rostagno and I take care of StreamOpera’s management, a website I hope you already know.
http://Www.StreamOpera.com is a special website dedicated to OPERA through High quality streaming on demand.
Every week we publish two operas, recorded in important theatres, at the moment in Italy and Europe only. Among the most famous theatres there are: Royal Opera House, Opéra Royale de Wallonie Liége, Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Arena di Verona, Teatro San Carlo of Naples, Teatro Carlo Felice of Genoa etc.
At the moment we have already published 75 Operas.
Obviously our aim is to sell the operas via streaming, at the moment at a cost of €3.99. However, Streamopera doesn’t only offers operas as mere commercial windows. In fact, thanks to the two curators Sabino Lenoci and Davide Garattini, directors of the magazine Rivista L’Opera, we offer a large number of sheets on the composers, with reference to each opera, synopsis and critics sheet for each work we publish. Furthermore, there’s a section for interviews to great artists who talk about one character in particular which they have played.
We hope you’ll find our website interesting and useful, and we would also like to ask you to give us your help: as professionals in this field, we’d very much appreciate your opinion on our project, if you find it easy to use, if you reckon it lacks of something or you have any suggestions to give us.
If you like our project, we would love to find a way to collaborate with you, while keeping ourselves available to any proposal.
Waiting for your kind and prompt answer,
Best wishes,
Arianna