BBC4 re-run of 2003 Kathleen Ferrier documentary

[Mary Chambers]

I seem to remember that there is very little film of her in existence, if any, which is a shame.

[L'enfer]

Thanks Caliban I shall make a point of watching this on the iPlayer at some point.

[Caliban]

Thanks Caliban I shall make a point of watching this on the iPlayer at some point.

[Caliban]

I have to make an admission. Was going to mention this earlier, and it's occurred to me again having heard the Ferrier recordings on CD Review this morning.

I don't like listening to her!

I'm sure she was a wonderful person, and a great communicator live, and it's a tragic tale...

... but I can NOT get past that hooty, matronly tone.

My loss, I'm sure

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I don't like listening to her!
... but I can NOT get past that hooty, matronly tone.

My seconds shall be calling on your seconds, sir!

(You're not the only one: Brassbandmaestro once said words to the effect that her voice gave him the creeps! We still talk.

But for me, if I were forced at gunpoint to name the single most beautiful sound that I had encountered in my life, I would say "The sound of Ferrier singing.")

[amateur51]

My seconds shall be calling on your seconds, sir!

(You're not the only one: Brassbandmaestro once said words to the effect that her voice gave him the creeps! We still talk.

But for me, if I were forced at gunpoint to name the single most beautiful sound that I had encountered in my life, I would say "The sound of Ferrier singing.")

I love her singing too, fhg - it always makes me smile

[aeolium]

But for me, if I were forced at gunpoint to name the single most beautiful sound that I had encountered in my life, I would say "The sound of Ferrier singing."

I know what you mean, fhg, but I'm not sure 'beautiful' is the right adjective here. I like what Britten said about encountering Ferrier's voice: "the only thing that moves me about singers, and that is that the voice is something which comes naturally from their personality and is a vocal expression of their personality. I loathe what is normally called a 'beautiful voice' because to me it's like an over-ripe peach which says nothing, and Katherine never had that."

I think that about Ferrier, the sheer personal quality in her voice, and all the singers I most admire - Patzak, Schöffler, Elisabeth Schumann, Gobbi, della Casa, Janowitz, and yes, Pears, whose voice is imo very far from 'beautiful' - have that immediately recognisable quality.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Good points, aeoli: I didn't mean "pretty", but an intensely warm, piercingly impassioned and almost unbearably moving sound that is what I think of when I use the word "beautiful" in this context.

... makes me smile, too, Ammie, just to think of it. (Although, at the end of Das Lied, for example, it can cut away all my psychological defences and leave me helplessly weeping at the beauty [that word again!] of it all: an experience it would be entirely wrong to describe as having "unmanned" me - I am rarely as completely human!)

[salymap]

And somehow the recordings that are most played now, [I]Blow the wind southerly, O Rest in the Lord,[I] don't show her quickness of mind and humour, but perhaps make her sound a different kind of person. She had a beautiful and moving voice but, to me, it never tied up with her love of jokes and general liveliness.

[Caliban]

My seconds shall be calling on your seconds, sir!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Q8AqYLKro

Good points, aeoli: I didn't mean "pretty", but an intensely warm, piercingly impassioned and almost unbearably moving sound that is what I think of when I use the word "beautiful" in this context.

... makes me smile, too, Ammie, just to think of it. (Although, at the end of Das Lied, for example, it can cut away all my psychological defences and leave me helplessly weeping at the beauty [that word again!] of it all: an experience it would be entirely wrong to describe as having "unmanned" me - I am rarely as completely human!)

It's Janet Baker who does that to me