Episodes
Saturday Jul 21, 2018
Diction Tip--Russian Series #4
Saturday Jul 21, 2018
Saturday Jul 21, 2018
Conductor and coach Yury Ilinov explains the tricky concept of "palatalization", the "softening" of consonants in Russian, as part of our mini-series on Russian Lyric Diction!
Saturday Jul 07, 2018
Diction Tip--Russian Series #3
Saturday Jul 07, 2018
Saturday Jul 07, 2018
While the podcast is on vacation for the summer, we wanted to bring you something special--a short series of Diction Tips on Russian Lyric Diction! In this third installment, conductor and coach Yury Ilinov explains the concepts of "ekanye" and "ikanye", the reduction of certain vowels in unstressed syllables.
Saturday Jun 23, 2018
Diction Tip--Russian Series #2
Saturday Jun 23, 2018
Saturday Jun 23, 2018
While the podcast is on vacation for the summer, we wanted to bring you something special--a short series of Diction Tips on Russian Lyric Diction! In the second installment, conductor and coach Yury Ilinov explains the concepts of "akanye" and "okanye".
Saturday Jun 09, 2018
Diction Tip--Russian Series #1
Saturday Jun 09, 2018
Saturday Jun 09, 2018
While the podcast is on vacation for the summer, we wanted to bring you something special--a short series of Diction Tips on Russian Lyric Diction! In the first installment, conductor and coach Yury Ilinov compares the 'и' [i] and 'ы' [ɨ] vowels, and gives us some exercises to practice [ɨ]!
Sunday May 06, 2018
Episode 112-SDU Tutorial
Sunday May 06, 2018
Sunday May 06, 2018
This will be our last episode for this season, and we wanted to do something special—so this will be our first Russian episode with a video tutorial! Ekaterina Sapega-Klein leads us through the text to Olga’s aria from Yevgeniy Onegin, talking about devoicing consonants, palatalized consonants, and what happens when a soft sign meets a vowel that starts with a j-glide.
In the episode I talk about the difference between a palatal consonant and a palatalized consonant--for the Wikipedia entry on this topic, click here.
The Diction Police podcast will start back up again at the end of August!
Saturday May 05, 2018
Episode 112-SDU Tutorial (audio version)
Saturday May 05, 2018
Saturday May 05, 2018
This will be our last episode for this season, and we wanted to do something special—so this will be our first Russian episode with a video tutorial! Ekaterina Sapega-Klein leads us through the text to Olga’s aria from Yevgeniy Onegin, talking about devoicing consonants, palatalized consonants, and what happens when a soft sign meets a vowel that starts with a j-glide. This is the audio version of the video tutorial.
In the episode I talk about the difference between a palatal consonant and a palatalized consonant--for the Wikipedia entry on this topic, click here.
The Diction Police podcast will start back up again at the end of August!
Sunday May 06, 2012
Episode 59
Sunday May 06, 2012
Sunday May 06, 2012
Russian Diction is back this week--Katja Sapega Klein discusses the texts to Olga's Aria from Евгений Онегин (Yevgeniy Onegin) and Tchaikovsky's "Нам звёзды кроткие сияли", the last song of his Opus 60. Our focus this time is on what happens when 2 vowels come together in Russian, the devoicing (or not!) of consonants and double soft consonant/vowel combinations. Olga's aria, "Ах, Таня, Таня! Всегда мечтаешь ты... Я не способна к грусти томной" can be found through an online libretto for Евгений Онегин, just scroll down to "page 16". If you want to check your homework after you've translated this aria :-) try Google translate--it does a pretty good job at quick translations from/to almost any language we would ever need and will even allow for alternate translations if you highlight a specific word. "Нам звёзды кроткие сияли" ("Nam zvjozdy krotkije sijali") is a text by Aleksey Pleshcheyev, a radical 19th Century Russian poet who was imprisoned and exiled. Be sure to look on the 7 Steps to Learn Music/Language Learning Tips page for this week's tips on studying foreign languages. The podcasts that I mention at the beginning of this episode are also listed on the Resources page. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions here, through the Facebook page, on Twitter @dictionpolice or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com
Thursday May 26, 2011
Episode 36
Thursday May 26, 2011
Thursday May 26, 2011
Russian Diction is our topic this week--baritone Dmitri Vargin helps us work through the text to Onegin's aria "Вы мне писали... Когда бы жизнь домашним кругом". Our focus this time is on unstressed Os in every position. Finally there's a working link to this libretto that doesn't need to be downloaded! So here is the libretto for Евгений Онегин, scroll down to "page" 37 to find the recitative and aria for today. If you have the book Russian Songs and Arias, be aware of two typos in their transcription of this aria: In the first line, кругом has the wrong stressed syllable so the O is unstressed On the second page of it, the seventh line, годам also has the wrong stressed syllable so in this case the O is stressed. Please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com
Friday Dec 03, 2010
Episode 25
Friday Dec 03, 2010
Friday Dec 03, 2010
This week we are back to Russian Diction, with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev, discussing the texts to two Rachmaninoff songs, Opus 14 No 1 "Я жду тебя" (I Wait for You) and No 14 "Весенние воды" (Spring Waters). We concentrate on the й (I-kratkoe), the devoicing of consonants, the hard sign ъ (not to be confused with the soft sign ь or the vowel ы!), another way to write the JE vowel - ѣ and a little on the soft consonant щ.
Since I'm a big fan of trying to read the Cyrillic, here are the links to the texts for "Я жду тебя" and "Весенние воды" in Cyrillic. If you prefer, there are links directly under the texts to get the Roman alphabet transliterations.
The two podcasts mentioned on this episode are A Taste of Russian and The Russian Sound System, both of which are available free on iTunes. I also found a nice website called Russian Language Lessons, which is free and many of the lessons have audio clips to help you learn to pronounce, it seems comparable to the Talk Now! CD-rom series of language lessons with more grammar rules.
Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com
Friday Sep 17, 2010
Episode 18
Friday Sep 17, 2010
Friday Sep 17, 2010
Today we're talking with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev about the text to Lensky's Aria from Yevgény Onégin. We concentrate on the vowels e [jɛ] and ё [jo], the hard consonant ж [ʒ] and the soft sign ь. For the text to Lensky's aria, you can download the libretto for the opera through the Wikipedia page here. Just scroll down to "External links" at the bottom and click on "Russian libretto in zip file for Word". I mention on the podcast that the Tenor Anthology has a lot of extra soft signs--I've discovered an older piano/vocal score online here (scroll down to page 58) that uses the old spellings including the hard sign (ъ) which we don't see much anymore. This letter is very similar to the soft sign (ь), and it seems that in the Anthology they use the same symbol for both, which is a little confusing; be sure to check the text with the libretto or the full score here (scroll down to page 115) if you are using this score to learn the aria. While there's never any singing on the actual podcast, I found a YouTube of Andrej singing Lensky's aria in Paris here. I really don't like the staging, but it's fine if you can ignore the woman on stage distracting the audience from the aria! Feel free to contact me here, on the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com with any questions or comments.