Love These Reminders

The YouTube comments ebb and flow. Some make no sense. Some are in French, Italian and so on. Today, though, someone posted the following comment on the Papageno video: (sorry, can't link at the mo' b/c I'm at work and YouTube is blocked. Obviously Blogger isn't!)

I cannot thank you enough for posting these incredible videos of Nathan Gunn. He truly is one of THE GREATEST operatic baritones of our generation. He'll certainly become a legend! I think his Papageno is by far the best! I love your channel so much I just subscribed to it! A million thanks!

I've said it a gagillion times before, give or take a few million: This is what it's about. Sharing the music. Sometimes even I need that reminder.

Commentally Speaking

Been getting a lot of nice comments on YouTube lately, both on the channel and on specific videos. Here are some from the past few months. I did not correct spelling or grammar...

Channel comments:

I enjoy your videos sooo much! Nathan Gunn wooh! Your son is just a dream!!! Yay opera! Keep it coming!

I don't know how you do it. It's like you've picked all the operatic music I am most likely to enjoy, and posted it. It's taken me a long time to moderately enjoy opera; I hardly ever listen to it, mostly singing it in my voice lessons. But first Camelot drew me to your page, then the Magic Flute clips made me buy the dvd, and now I've listened to the Pearl Fishers songs... and I'm hooked. I don't know if I've ever heard anything so beautiful- I jerked my head up from what I was working on, stunned, to pause and marvel at the beauty.

Random video comments, linked to the video they're on:

What a lucky child to have you as a parent..

Ooh... I hadn't had a chance to check this out until now, and that was BEAUTIFUL. What a gorgeous voice... *sigh* Poor Zurga. Nathan does angsty very well.

This is one fo the most beautiful baritone arias. I just went back to the University of Illinois for my audition and I ran into Nathan's wife Julie, and Nathan himself, again. They are two of the nicest most talented people. Thanks so much for posting this fantastic piece of music!

You, are funny Mom ..best , greatest, coolest and creative minded.
So much fan to watch your videos ... :):) Thanks !

Your son is really cute with his constant smile :):) His preparation for music blended togehter with perfect coreorgaphy.Bravo Alex !!!!

O-M-G!! I love these CD songs - very educational! - and I love your video interpretations even more! This is such a great interpretation of the famous "Die Forelle" quartet! :P


I don't know why everyone always complains about Nathan Gunn's voice not being interesting enough, or whatever they're talking about. So he's not ridiculously rumbly; I find his smooth sound and passionate delivery quite pleasing.


nathan gunn as papageno is perfect, no matter which language he's speaking or singing. love his hat! (not sure why people are so down on translated works. many feel the same way about anime translations too, for goodness sake! they don't even take the quality of the translations or lip-flap matching into account. such high-falutin' snobbery, haha!) a very refreshing and entertaining production, thank you very much for your postings!! (your children are lucky, too!)

omg!! I love nathan gunn as papageno , his amazing!!

He is just the perfect Lancelot. I didn't like the casting for this show, Marin Mazzie is good but just didn't fit. Fran Drescher? Oh please! The only one is was cast well was Nathan. He is just Lancelot. And Christopher Lloyd as Pellinore was great

Thank you very much for posting this. This has proven to be invaluable in researching this charachter. His performance is spectacular.


Nathan Gunn is just pure amazing and always has been!!!

thanks so much for your wonderful postings of Nathan Gunn ... WHAT an incredible voice singing songs from Camelot - a show I never did care for but now am listening to all day long thanks to his smoldering voice.

Bravisimo Osborn....tiene una voz maravillosa y una tecnica y linea de canto...impresionantes.

Excellent! A truly effortless rendition.
Thanks for your Osborn clips, Luindriel!

BRAVISIMO, Osborn.

Excellent! It is so nice to hear this aria sung by a tenor with a rich low register! The coloratura is remarkable and the timbre masculine. I must admit that I am really impressed!

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words!

Don't be shy- comment here on the blog too!

Trolling About

Feeling a little bored this evening so I'm poking about YouTube on the Nathan Gunn videos that other people have posted to see if there are any new comments since the last time I looked. I do this every 6-8 weeks or so. Sometimes I direct people to my channel or blog. Sometimes after seeing a video too many times I notice things that I never noticed before, like Nathan removing a stray hair or something from his mouth at about 3:26 in this. Actually Banawoman had pointed that out to me but my memory being what it is, I forgot.

Not quite sure why this video of mine comes up when I do the "sort by date added" on the Nathan Gunn search on YouTube. Any ideas on that? Anyone?

Now, if you go to YouTube and do a search on Nathan Gunn, you do need to weed through some of the non-Gunnster Gunn videos. For example, there is a Nathan Gunn out there who is some sort of religious leader. He goes on missions around the world. He posts videos. Those videos interfere with my searches for the REAL Nathan Gunn videos. Next you'll get Slither. Do you want Slither? I don't think so. But there's a Nathan Fillion and a James Gunn and they're always listed together so Slither always comes up. I have learned to put "-slither" on any google searches I do. Sometimes those guys still come up in the results, possibly because they've worked on other, non-slither projects together. And for the record, I have no idea what slither is, and I don't care. Then there are other random Gunn videos out there, but they're not OUR Gunnster.

One video that won't come up is this one. He's not in the tags or description. In fact, I came across this totally randomly when I was searching for different Despinas doing Una Donna. It came up in the related section and, ardent fan that I am, I recognized him from the tiny thumbnail picture for the video. Kind of makes you wonder how many other untagged videos there are of our favorites out there. He wasn't tagged in this one at first, but someone mentioned it in the comments of another video (don't ask me which because that I don't remember) and I put a comment suggesting that the video owner put him in the tags. If you do click that link, you have to get through the bariatric surgery scenes, but hang in there, it's worth it, I promise. And if you like interviews, you can also look here. You'll get a fair share of performance in that too.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for updates after tomorrow's voice lesson and Friday's solo operatic adventure to Die Fledermaus.

Variations on Papageno

Papageno has always been a huge favorite around the I'd Rather Be Sleeping household. Like, before That Performance I saw live in HD.

Someone on YouTube posted this "Papageno Variations" video in response to one of my Papageno videos. It's cool, no?

Off I Go

I'm going to Florida tomorrow and won't be back until Monday. Here's some stuff to hold you over until then. This is all part of my "sing like no one is listening" attempt.

Yet another video of this. I never give up.



And this:



There's one more... if only I could get it to upload. But if you click through those to YouTube (and you should, so you can rate and comment... PLEASE comment with suggestions!!!) you'll see the other. If it ever uploads. Otherwise, you can see it here:
Still Singing Like No One Is Listening - Vedrai Carino



Finally, something professional. I love love love this:

What day is it? It's Friday, right?

Having two weeks in a row with all these days off has totally mixed me up, day-wise. But I do believe that it's Friday. Did I say Happy New Year yet? If so, here it is again. Happy New Year! Vocally, this year I resolve to sing like no one is listening. I want to really practice on putting out that full sound that I know I can produce. I can do it sporadically but I want to do it consistently at all ranges. Is that too much to ask?

The last couple of days I've been tossing slide-show videos together in iMovie. Here are the results:



and



Of course you should click through to see the full descriptions, rate, add to favorites and comment.

And just so this comes up in people's Google searches: Nathan Gunn. YouTube. You Tube. There. That should stop people from always ending up here when they google that.

Cat pic time. I promised Viola this week, if I recall. Too bad. I have this silly one to post instead and it features Diego.

Yeah, Whatever. Butter.

Yeah, ok. So I posted the video from the Kennedy Center thing. I'm not into this musical theater hokeyness, but his voice is like butter. Or chocolate. Butter and chocolate melting together? Anyway, I'm not going to embed it so click on the link if you want to see it.
YouTube
MySpace

Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve Traditions

Last year on Christmas Eve Alex asked to hear Just Before Sunrise. My brother-in-law broke out the scotch and we had a tasting. Who knew that JBS was perfect background music for scotch?

This year we're not seeing my BIL until tomorrow, so we had to do our own Nathan Gunn tasting at home. Wait that didn't come out right... ahem... what I meant was, well, you know what I mean. Instead of scotch this year, we had bourbon. It seems so hard core! Bourbon! Like my voice should suddenly go all scratchy or something.



So we started with select scenes from Camelot:



And moved on to Romeo:

Nathan Gunn as Mercutio in Romeo et Juliette: Mab


and then Pearl Fishers:
(and what's with the the Lyric taking the video down and just leaving us with the slide show???)



And finally Magic Flute:



I think I like Christmas Eve. And I just want to add that I have the best husband in the world! He sits and watches all these NG videos with me. I mean, come on. How many husbands would do that? He's a Good Man.