Charlie: What can you say about these
Tomas Arne songs?
Elizabeth: Appropriate for a voice
student. I started them in school. The 1978 Pro Musicis recital was shortly
after I graduated from Conservatory so there was a lot of the repertoire I
worked on during those years. The
conventional wisdom back then for recital programming was to start with an
early English piece. It was the old
nymphs-and-shepherds-haste-away theory that you would begin your recital kind
of tame with something early. In the vocal
production of that piece I use a lighter sound with less vibrato than I would
in a more romantic or dramatic piece from later in history. For some reason we believe the performance
practice in Arne’s day had lighter voices and that less vibrato was used in the
tones in that music. I embellish the
heck out of the piece because I was, by
this time, a very ambitious singer so the interpretation has a lot more
technical complexity than in the original score. As written it’s straight forward and charming.
Charlie: Are there any tough spots in
the Thomas Arne pieces.
Elizabeth: Everything has to be sung
well. You have to attack your tone,
sing in tune, get all the notes.
Charlie: Who performs this?
Elizabeth: It’s written for soprano. It could be for tenor. 3rd year of voice lessons might
be the time to start on them. A student
spends just about 100% of his time on exercises the first year. In the second year you are allowed to start
your early Italian arias from the famous 24 Italian Arias book. Those are all from roughly the same time as
Arne, they are just Italian. Those are
the arias that most classically trained singers teethe on. They are all in that yellow Schirmer
book. Everybody knows it.
Once
you’ve done your Caro Mio Ben, etc, then you work on things like Arne, Purcell,
and some easy Handel. You are singing
mostly Italian and English and then as you move along you begin picking up the
techniques to sing other languages, French, German. As a general rule we start training the singers, first in native
English so it’s not too awfully hard.
Then we want them to get going on Italian right away.