Perfect Italian Diction for Singers
Perfect Italian Diction for Singers: An Authoritative Guide provides the steps and tools for singing beautifully and expressively in this language.
Timothy Cheek and Anna Toccafondi systematically home in on the essential features of the most beautiful Italian, pitfalls of non-native singers, and how to overcome those issues. In addition to delving to the heart of Italian sounds and inflection, they present controversies, misconceptions, and various approaches—often conflicting—that have arisen throughout the last century. Chapters also address:
Italian style and legatoBest use of supplemental resources and dictionariesRecitative with suggested, short Mozart excerptsWorking with textSinging diphthongs, triphthongs, and hiatus
Also included are a plethora of audio and video examples and exercises (over seventy QR codes), exercises for group or self-study, and self-assessment summaries. This book will help singers and students lay a solid foundation in beautiful, lyric Italian.
Timothy Cheek has taught Italian lyric diction at the University of Michigan since 1993. As collaborative pianist, he has performed throughout Italy, and worked for nine years in Tuscan summer vocal programs, both at Cincinnati Conservatory’s Opera Theatre and Music Festival of Lucca program and at the University of Michigan’s spring term program in Sesto Fiorentino. Cheek has written books on Czech lyric diction and opera, and he is the series editor of Rowman & Littlefield’s Lyric Diction series. His long association with Italian pianist/coach Anna Toccafondi extends to over three decades of collaboration and consultation.
Anna Toccafondi performs regularly in major festivals and theaters in Italy, Europe, and Japan. She recently began a cooperation with the Municipality and the Teatro Garibaldi of Modica (Sicily) for the project Cantare in Perfetto Italiano, Singing in Perfect Italian, a series of masterclasses devoted to foreign singers and collaborative pianists. Committed to unpublished or lesser known compositions of the Italian vocal repertoire, Toccafondi has done research, transcriptions, revisions, and recordings of important composers.