Dear Mike and Lauren,
Katarina Karnéus, the mezzo I wrote about, won 1995 the Cardiff Singer
of the world competitition. The article in BBC Music Magazine from April
2000 begins with: "Roger Vignoles was listening to Radio 3 when he first
heard Katarina Karnéus, singing Mozart. 'I had to stop the car'." Soon
he became her accompanist.
Later in the article about her, you can read:
"Recently Katarina went to see the leading laryngologist in France, who
put a camera down her throat and projected a film of her vocal chords
onto a screen. 'He was amazed', she reports. 'He said he'd never seen
anything like this in 20 years. My vocal chords are apparently
asymmetric. He said he'd only seen that in the throats of impressionist,
people who use the extreme reaches of their voice.'"
Given it some thought, I can imagine that an unequal set of vocal folds
is a
handicap, unless their lenghts have a harmonic relation, let's say 1:2,
or 2:3. So Miller was probably right statistically speaking, but not
absolutely.
I should also add, that Katarina speaks about asymmetry, maybe they have
the same lengths, but are different in other aspects, like thickness. I
doubt that, because it does not explain the sentence about the
impressionists, but sill.
It would be most interesting to know more about her, e.g. about her
passagio
points. Her most important singing teacher was Ulla Blom, who is
Swedish, but I don't know where she lives.
This morning I listened to the recording of her in my car, and there the
very special beauty of the voice could not be heard, simply because
the speakers in my car are not as good as the ones at home (they're not
bad though). Changing the bass and treble settings even made it worse.
It was still a beautiful voice though.
About Caruso: of course his recordings are technically all very
primitive, so you cannot expect them to reveal the real beauty of his
voice.
But imagine: since a beautiful tone is all about harmonics, a set of
of vocal chords that are harmonically assymetric, could be the means to
produce both a strong basic tone and a beautiful spectrum of higher
harmonics. In this way a voice could have both the clearness and
bell-quality of a lighter voice, and the warmth of a heavier voice, and
that's exactly what's the case with Katarina Karnéus
I'll keep you informed,
best greetings,
Dré
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