As a belated Valentine's present, The Diction Police is back with all new episodes for 2013! Miss Kitty Fantastico and I are all settled in our new apartment and I have quite a few episodes already recorded, so we should be able to stay on track for this spring!

This week and next we'll be talking about some arias from Händel's Messiah. On this episode, tenor Charles Reid goes through the text of "Comfort Ye... Ev'ry Valley", and then we discuss some of the problematic traditional misuse of diction with Jan and Catherine McDaniel, from the faculty of the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University, focusing on the words COMFORT and SAITH (plus other words that tend to be mispronounced), rolling Rs in the combination CR and GR, the pronunciation of the letter X and a whole lot about schwas.

The score for Händel's Messiah can be found as a free download at Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) and you can find the libretto here ("Comfort Ye... Ev'ry Valley" begins the Messiah). We talk about the word COMFORT quite a bit on this episode and I promised to post YouTubes--I found one with Jerry Hadley singing, this one where tenor Howard Crook sings COMFORT correctly at least once :-) and a very interesting BBC TV show about Comfort Ye with Trevor Pinnock discussing it, Kurt Streit singing. There are, of course, a ton of YouTubes of this recit and aria, have fun listening to them and comparing the diction to what we talk about in the episode!

Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com