Introductions...

 

 

 I am Fiato Forte, an opera enthusiast living in Chicago who, until last year, had fallen out of touch with that world as a result of life's strings pulling me in various directions. As time passed I found myself missing the experience of going to the opera as if we were two close friends who had fallen out of touch with little awareness. I began listening to familiar operatic standards on You Tube which quickly gave me a renewed sense of excitement for opera as well as Classical music in general. I began to think about it during mundane errands and preschool drop offs. I came across classic voices that I had loved before and discovered others I should have known all along.

  As I continued my rediscovery period in opera, I found myself having silent debates with the opinions that I had held 10 to 15 years before.

"Although I love the beauty in Fritz Wunderlich's voice, I am annoyed at the cracks in his technique...Yes, Dmitri Hvorostovsky is wonderful, but he bears down on his voice in the middle register and has a tendency to sound nasally when singing an 'E' vowel in the lower part of his voice...I totally agree with you "Young Fiato", Maria Callas does sound like a chicken no matter how much emotion she gave in performance..."-You get the picture.

  After some time swimming in the aural waters of my computer's lackluster sound system, I decided that for all my armchair pontifications, that opera is meant to be heard live without artificial amplification which meant I needed to crack open the wallet and head back to the Colosseum that is the Civic Opera House in Chicago. With a name like, Fiato Forte, you may be envisioning a finely cultured individual that is impeccably dressed and financially independent. If that is your assumption you'd be hitting 1 out of  3 and that is being generous. I would purchase season tickets for 1/2 the performances of the 2012-13 season which included Simon Boccanegra, Werther, Rigoletto, and La Boheme. I found myself with an offer for a free ticket to Don Pasquale and of course jumped at the chance. All in all, I was pleased with the productions of last season, but far more critical of individual performances than I had been in the late 90's when I was a regular at the Lyric.

  The season ticket brochure arrived in March of this year with the upcoming season of productions and cast lists. It was then that I decided to upgrade to the entire opera season and give my critique of each production, no matter how brutal or ignorant I may come across as to the reader. I took my cue from George Bernard Shaw who, for two years, wrote a newspaper column as a music critic under the pseudonym, Corno Di Bassetto. His goal was to give honest and straightforward feedback to the general population of London in part, to encourage a well informed common opinion in the late 19th century.  Although I am no George Bernard Shaw, in time I hope to gain readers and engage in some dialogue on the subject of opera no matter how much we may differ.
Thank you
 
    sincerely,
 
          Fiato Forte