The London Lounge

Great topic and beautiful clips.
Great voice is a gift. What you choose to do with it makes the music. One of my favourite examples of intense drama expressed with tasteful restraint (even though it's baroque): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhda-E4l7ck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Avxqeq_ ... re=related by the late Hamlet Gonashvili and Ansambli Rustavi. This recording was installed in the Golden Records of the Voyager Space Craft by NASA, so if aliens intercepted the spacecraft they would have something beautiful to listen to...Hamlet was not a very smart dresser but he had the voice of an angel.

Simon, I shouldn't have hesitated to post this link to a very special music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO77g4mR ... re=related
Intensity rendered musically, not with sheer volume, although her voice was capable of anything. A truly superb soprano. And, because it's the "Great Photos" section, it's worth putting a face to the beautiful music of Lucine Zakarian:

Beautiful! I was in her hometown of Akhaltsikhe in southern Georgia not long ago, there are a few Armenian hatmakers there who make Caucasian cloth caps, a little smaller than the Alden model...and because it's "Great Photos", I have to include some shots of the rugged Caucasian landscape around Akhaltsikhe that produced the genius of this great soprano

alden wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaxrq7cd ... re=related

For Che'lla mi Creda, I believe a more dramatic voice than the great Bjorling is necessary.

Have a listen to the same aria with Richard Tucker singing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvuvPXd_hcc

This could just as easily go in "Ladies We Admire".....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhyY1H8tLM0