Midwinter Music Mania

Coming to an iPod near me in the very near future:

• The King is Dead, by the Decemberists (downloading it as I type this). As I wrote at the time the last Decemberists album came out, "I am a pretentious theater-nerd from Portland, so I am contractually obliged to love the Decemberists." And I am on record as preferring the Decemberists in literate pop-song mode to the Decemberists in heavy rock-opera mode. The King is Dead -- ten folk-inspired songs in forty minutes -- is exactly the kind of music I was hoping the band would make after the excesses of The Hazards of Love, and I look forward to listening to it tomorrow.
  

• Cleopatra: Arias from Giulio Cesare, by Natalie Dessay (to be released February 8). Man, I was looking forward to this as far back as two and a half years ago, when the word first surfaced that Dessay would add the role of Cleopatra to her repertoire. She's my favorite opera singer, and Cleopatra's "V'adoro, pupille" is perhaps my favorite Handel aria. And now she's recorded it!

Dessay is also currently performing in a production of Giulio Cesare in Paris, at the Palais Garnier. Must resist the urge to look up cheap flights to France...

I'm so excited about both of these albums! I feel as though I'm back in college! -- the era when I discovered both of these artists. Blissful afternoons of sitting on my dorm-room quilt and listening to the Decemberists and Dessay -- I really don't do that often enough, these days.

V'adoro!

Two things about me:

1. Currently the most-played song on my iPod is Natalie Dessay singing "Tornami a vagheggiar," from Handel's Alcina. Her effortlessly tossed-off coloratura pyrotechnics, which perfectly express the aria's theme of being head-over-heels in love, just make me happy whenever I hear them.

2. Other than that, my favorite Handel aria is "V'adoro pupille," written for the role of Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare. I don't have a favorite recorded version of this one--I love it for the delicate, sensual beauty of the music itself. And now I have a personal association with it as well, having incorporated it into my play The Rose of Youth.

I already posted this interview with Ms. Dessay about a week ago--but reading it again, she says that she is planning to star in Giulio Cesare at the end of 2009. In Paris, no less!

My favorite opera singer and my favorite Handel aria. Oh lord, somebody had better stop me before I get so excited that I start singing jubilant coloratura myself.