Great Singers on Great Singing: A Famous Opera Star Interviews 40 Famous Opera Singers on the Technique of Singing (Limelight)

I'm a mezzo soprano with more than 40 years of performance experience and I learned new things when I read this book. It's not for beginners as the technical references would be confusing. But for the experienced singer who always wants to learn and improve there is a wealth of information. On the first read through I just examined what the mezzos had to say...a good way to get info quickly for your particular voice type...then I sat down and read it all. This will be a permanent part of my music library.

I read this book when I was young (borrowed it from the Library) then bought it later. At the time I first read it, I was studying singing myself and I really wanted to make sense of what teachers were saying and what great singers had to say about singing. I found the book wonderfully insightful, but completely contradictory. It seemed so few singers agreed with one another. It was like black was white to some of them. The descriptions of the passagio left me more than confused, "Making the throat space larger by making it smaller?" Or Corelli's idea of shoving your tongue down your throat to hold the larynx low (a thing that literally choked me!). I concluded that there were as many ways of singing as there were singers. And NONE of their insight helped me one bit in understanding my own voice teacher (who I left because in the end, I was getting no where, and only getting a sore throat). Once I had found a great teacher (a former very famous Wagnerian soprano) who really seemed to understand about freeing the voice, I began to understand what things meant. She was able to tell me what the different terms people used meant, and that sometimes terms that sound in contradiction really were explaining the same thing. At this point, I purchased the book and read it again. With this new insight I was able to make more sense of what the various singers were saying. It is true, they still contradicted each other as far as their methods, but at least I was able to see they were still talking about achieving the same things. Some of the singers were using the same technique I was being taught, and they explained it well enough (though in different terms) so I could see what they were all about. I also listened to their recordings and could hear the same things I was being taught. In the end, though the book was written to help curious people understand what makes these particular singers "wonderful", again one must never use it to teach yourself or anyone else proper singing technique. If you used all you read, you would tie your throat into a knot. For me, what I found most interesting was learning what these various singers were trying to achieve in their singing, and that was very insightful and beneficial. Even Jerome Hines shares a time period where he lost his confidence (and as far as I can learn, I think he had about the longest active singing career of any singer in living memory), where he actually when to see a therapist to discover what suddenly was overcoming him and ruining his ability to produce like he used to. The psychological aspects of singing are seldom talked about in any technique, but he reveals some super important ideas about what and how we feel about ourselves and how they can actually destroy what we are trying to do (and that bad technique doesn't even have to be a part of that). No matter the real value of the book, I have to say that what is written in these interviews is often the closest we will ever come to w

Proving once again that there is no "just follow these simple steps and you'll be a great performing vocalist" recipe to greatness. Through many interviews with accomplished singers, this book proves that each artist must struggle (even with great talent in hand) to find their own unique way to vocal greatness. Many of the interviews confirm the universal vocal truths we all know too well. But there are also some unique pearls of wisdom and insight from highly accomplished vocalists which makes this book well worth the read.

This is a nice book to read for one looking for basic ways of how different singers sing--how they approach it technically, emotionally, physically, spiritually, etc. This book will not teach you how to sing, but it will provide familiarity of great singing icons of the past half century, and if you read much, if not all of it, you will learn that there is no one right way to sing, everyone is different. Enjoy.

Hines, at a time when he needed vocal advice himself, asked his operatic peers to tell him just how they sing. Their unguarded answers are greatly revealing, and greatly useful to the aspiring singer; that's why this book has been in demand for decades.