{"id":325,"date":"2013-03-04T07:30:37","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T20:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catesings.org\/?p=325"},"modified":"2013-03-04T07:30:37","modified_gmt":"2013-03-03T20:30:37","slug":"monday-music-ouvre-ton-coeur-bizet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/2013\/03\/04\/monday-music-ouvre-ton-coeur-bizet\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Music: Ouvre ton coeur (Bizet)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s something bright and bouncy to make you dance on a Monday morning!\u00a0 It’s by Bizet, who is best known for the opera Carmen<\/em>, and is clearly fond of Spanish musical styles – this one is a Bolero, and utterly gorgeous, and it must be said, I am terribly cross that one of my fellow singing students found and laid claim to this before I could – I really covet this piece of music!<\/p>\n

[youtube http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sZZzlHUPB0k&hl=en_US&version=3&rel=0]<\/p>\n

The singer is Youngok Shing, a Korean soprano who I’m going to have to keep an eye out for (the lovely thing about writing this blog is that I keep discovering new singers to listen to and learn from).\u00a0 I listened to a lot of versions of this piece before finding this version, and to me, there was no contest – her voice has a lightness to it that really suits this style of music, and she keeps her vibrato very closely under control, which I think is absolutely necessary in something this lively and fast moving.<\/p>\n

(Having said this, I did quite like Joan Sutherland’s version<\/a>, which has a lovely orchestral accompaniment , and if you want something very different indeed, here’s one by counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky<\/a>, which I don’t quite love, but the lower voice and slower pace bring a different, perhaps more seductive colour to the tune.\u00a0 There is no excuse for the random bird sound effects, however.)<\/p>\n

I was trying to find out more about this piece of music, and discovered it was part of a symphonic poem written during the period of a Prix de Rome grant (which was supposedly about religious music, but apparently, Bizet had rather gone off religious music after writing an unimpressive Te Deum).\u00a0 Later on, it got shoe-horned into an opera about Ivan The Terrible, in which, as far as I can tell, it gets sung by a Young Bulgarian as a song about his home country (which is apparently Spain…).\u00a0 I can sort of see why the opera didn’t quite work out, because the lyrics make absolutely no sense in this context, even by opera standards.<\/p>\n

Here they are, in case you were interested:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
La marguerite a ferm\u00e9 sa corolle,
\nL’ombre a ferm\u00e9 les yeux du jour.
\nBelle, me tiendras-tu parole?
\nLa marguerite a ferm\u00e9 sa corolle,
\nOuvre ton coeur, ouvre ton coeur
\nOuvre ton coeur – \u00e0 mon amour.Ouvre ton couer, \u00f4 jeune ange, \u00e0 ma flamme
\nQu’un r\u00eave charme ton sommeil
\nJe veux reprendre mon \u00e2me
\nComme une fleur s’ouvre au soleil
\nOuvre ton coeur, ouvre ton coeur
\n\u00d4 jeune ange, \u00e0 ma flamme<\/td>\n		The daisy has closed its corolla
\nDarkness has shut the eyes of day
\nLovely one, will you speak with me?
\nThe daisy has closed its corolla….
\nOpen your heart, open your heart
\nOpen your heart – to my love.Open your heart, o young angel, to my flame
\nThat a dream may charm your sleep
\nI want to take back my soul.
\nAs a flower opens in the sun
\nOpen your heart, open your heart
\nO young angel, to my flame.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

If that’s a song about Bulgaria, then I fear the symbolism is too great for me to grasp…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s something bright and bouncy to make you dance on a Monday morning!\u00a0 It’s by Bizet, who is best known for the opera Carmen, and is clearly fond of Spanish musical styles – this one is a Bolero, and utterly gorgeous, and it must be said, I am terribly cross that one of my fellow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[139,169,268,337,549,557,579,786],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-classical-music","tag-dame-joan-sutherland","tag-georges-bizet","tag-ivan-iv","tag-opera","tag-ouvre-ton-coeur","tag-philippe-jaroussky","tag-youngok-shing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}