Holly Cole
Tori Amos
Susana Baca
Lisa Gerrard
Emiliana Torrini
Sainkho Namtchylak
Margo Timmins
Lord, there must be more. Will keep thinking.
I've no doubt we are talking about emotional grab in distinction to gorgeous voices. I loved and kept Roberta Flack's first album too. But voices through the ages? most here don't seem to have explored operatic voice at all.
Not that I did either. I, then one of the two company project managers, locked my boss in his small room with Renata Tebaldi...
just sayin'.
and Janis was a friend of a friend, and her wails were piercing.
Yeah, I think people got 'beautiful' confused with 'favourite'.
To be more explanatory -
I was as alien as any other person to opera, but a guy we hired as a beginning staff member had just been to Rome and had been at the three Tenors concert and played it for us. I loved it right away, and changed my attitude virtually immediately.
Purists will see my conversion as being emotional instead of being related to music on the sheet. I would agree, but in the meantime, I listened more closely and more often.
I stopped torturing my boss.
I am still a fool, cheerfully acknowledge, re classical music and opera.
Still a fool, but more wide ranging in my interests.
What's that beautiful piece from Puccini's Madame Butterfly? Solo female voice that sounds like an instrument made in heaven? It seems to me that any good opera singer will sound ethereal singing that piece, but I could never recognise the voice itself. Whereas the singers I named I would recognise singing anything. But I may just be a little opera ignorant too.
I named what is beauty to me. I rarely listen to opera, because there are not that many pieces I have the patience to sit down and enjoy. Not to knock it, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I heard Joan acapella in San Diego in, ah, late '70.
She matters for me, certainly.
but, she's not renata tebaldi or some other folks....
No argument, Gus. makes me tear...
but...
some other voices have been both great re voice and strong re sense...
thinking, why don't I shut up, what could be more perfect than Gus' link?
On the other hand, I've heard about forty or fifty discs since I stopped despising opera, and can only wish there would not be such a wall.
Ne'er mind, listening to Gus' link.
Mercedes Sosa
and perhaps Sade.
also loved the coarse voice of Chavela Vargas - she sang a few songs in Frida Kahlo, the movie. Can't stand Streissand or Mariah Carey or the screaming/whiny types...even if their voice is technically unbeatable.
Agreeing with the comments on Roberta Flack and Joan Baez.
I also love
Loreena McKennitt.
Sade, as the most beautiful voice of all time?
Yep, Sade. To me. Not to everybody. These things are personal, of course. They have to be.
