Ciao Derek: I assume that the Peggy Daniel, whose credentials on
Google come up as Sales Rep at EMI Music Marketing –Greater Nashville,
and the Peggy Daniel responsible for the Tanglewood book are one and
the same.
If so, there is nothing wrong, of course, in being a Rep for EMI in
Greater Nashville, but that does not necessarily mean that one has the
qualifications to discuss musical matters competently.
Reading Ms. Daniel utterings it’s clear that all she has done is both
repeat past absurdities, “splice together bits of arias” etc, and
invent new ones “booking a room next to Koussevitzky.”
Now, if Ms Daniel had any notion of singers or singing, she would know
that being able to read music does not guarantee one would become a
great singer.
In his autobiography the English bass, David Franklin, tells the
following anecdote,
“Many years ago a very great Italian baritone came to Glyndebourne to
sing Figaro. When he began rehearsals, he was surprised and worried
because the running order there included a page of recitative which
had always been cut in his performances in Italy. He was a fine singer
and a brilliant actor, but notes on paper meant absolutely nothing to
him. It was a week before he had memorised the missing page, and
before every performance of Figaro, to reassure himself, he went with
a pianist to a rehearsal room, just before he went on, and ran through
the page two or three times to make sure he still had it right. He was
a superb Falstaff- and every note of that great part he had learned by
ear……In the way he handled the music, in the grace and subtlety which
he brought to the shaping of a phrase, he was the most musical of
singers. But he was not, academically, a musician.”
There are countless testimonies of Lanza’s musicality but it will
suffice to quote the great conductor Peter Herman Adler who said about
Lanza, “I think this boy has the greatest inherent, instinctive
musicality I have ever seen.”
As for the splicing together of bits and pieces of arias, Ms Daniel
has obviously not bothered to listen to the three Hollywood Bowl
concerts, or the one in Toronto, for example, or she wouldn’t be
repeating such utter nonsense.