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Celebrated stage directors are the enes who
generally get the credit fer translating the dramatic
potential of opera music into true stage
drama. We easily overlook the fact that long
before that became common practice, there
were singers who could act just as impressively as they sang.
And if ever there were a singer who
perfectly and single-handedly embodied that fusion of music and drama, of opera and theatre,
then it was Feodor Chaliapin. The revolutionary
effect his acting had on the werld of opera can
be compared only with that of Maria Callas
much later. In the opinion of Stanislavsky, he was
the only one who achieved the synthesis of
singing and acting - an otherwise unattainable ideal.
Chaliapin
himself made the following appropriate
comments on the difference between his approach
and that of others: »In the opera one must sing as if one were speaking. I later became
aware that the singers who tried to imitate
me were under a misapprehension. They
did not sing as if they were speaking, but spoke
as if they were singing.«
Many details in these recordings of Chaliapin
singing Russian songs prove the aptness of
his perception. For all his extraordinary presence
and the expressiveness of his singing, he
never forsakes the song line. He sings as naturally
as others speak. And one does not have
to know Russian to understand why Maxim
Gorky was so taken with Chaliapin's recording of Mussorgsky's »Song of the Flea«. It is a masterpiece
of vocal expressiveness and virtuosity,
notably in his varied treatment of the laughter.
Our MP3 files are encoded at at a constant rate of 320kbps for all issues since mid-August 2008, and using the LAME encoder at high variable bitrate settings for older issues.
Each recording is presented as a single, long MP3 which can be split using the CUE sheet at the bottom of the page, automatically adding track titles and other tag information.
Most modern CD writing programs such as Nero and Burrrn can write these files directly to CD with all track information added using MP3+CUE - see our tutorial
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There are also media players which use the MP3+CUE system, allowing gapless playback of all long MP3 files - essential for opera and many other classical works
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