Operatic kitsch has never been so splendidly celebrated as it is in The Muse Surmounted -- a wildly entertaining horror show of vocal ambitions gone very, very wrong. Taking its lead from the impossibly shrill, off-key recordings of Florence Foster Jenkins, whose self-financed 1944 Carnegie Hall concert remains one of the wildest events ever to occur there, TMS gathers together the very worst that vanity recordings have to offer and wraps it up in a loving, if tongue-in-cheek, celebration of blind musical ambition. If you ...
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Operatic kitsch has never been so splendidly celebrated as it is in The Muse Surmounted -- a wildly entertaining horror show of vocal ambitions gone very, very wrong. Taking its lead from the impossibly shrill, off-key recordings of Florence Foster Jenkins, whose self-financed 1944 Carnegie Hall concert remains one of the wildest events ever to occur there, TMS gathers together the very worst that vanity recordings have to offer and wraps it up in a loving, if tongue-in-cheek, celebration of blind musical ambition. If you want to hear women in their eighties who don't know the meaning of "quit," thickly Queens-accented socialites bulldozing the Italian language, free-form approximations of La traviata, and unspeakable acts of intonation, you've come to the right place. Natalia de Andrade's violent rendition of Manon's "Je marche" turns Massenet's teenaged coquette into a dominatrix for the AARP set; Norma-Jean and Ellis Chadbourne's tag-team "educational" LP entitled "The Art of Messa di Voce Singing"...
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Add this copy of Muse Surmounted: Foster Jenkins & 11 Rivals to cart. $18.99, new condition, Sold by Burnt_Biscuit_Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newnan, GA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Homophone Records.
