Emma Shapplin - Ira di dio
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Emma Shapplin
(born Crystêle Joliton on 19 May 1974, in the Paris suburb of Savigny is
a French soprano coloratura who primarily performs contemporary
classical crossover.
Emma
Shapplin started her music career in classical music but then moved to
hard rock. When she was 18, singer Jean-Patrick Capdevielle convinced
her to return to taking classical lessons so as to improve her singing
technique. She discovered that although rock had given her more artistic
freedom and hedonistic lifestyle than classical music, it was still not
enough for her, so she decided to create her own style. This became a
combination of archaic opera and modern trance and folk traditional
Scottish and/or pop music. Shapplin and Capdevielle subsequently worked
together on her first release, Carmine Meo.] Capdevielle wrote Carmine
Meo as the first part of an Atlantis themed opera, Atylantos, whose 2001
staging and CD release promoted the careers of four other gifted young
singers: the French sopranos Chiara Zeffirelli and Jade Laura Dangelis,
the Romanian soprano Elena Cojocaru, and the French tenor Nikola
Todoravitch.
Although
Shapplin was raised speaking French, and sings some of her songs in
that language, most of the songs on Carmine Meo were translated from the
French in which Capdevielle wrote them into Latin and ancient Provençal
dialect, in which Shapplin sang them. On her second release, Etterna,
she decided to perform in old (13th-century) Italian. She did so
because, according to her, "It's a language that sings naturally"; and
because this is closer to the modern Italian language she used in some
of her first classical singing lessons, while the older Italian "lends
itself more to poetry, to dreaming, and to drama too". In particular,
she used the spelling "Etterna" for the album and track title because
this is the way Dante wrote, rather than the modern Italian "Eterna".
She occasionally performs one of her hit songs, La Notte Etterna, in
Spanish (as La Noche Eterna). Her single "Discovering Yourself" is in
English. Shapplin has co-operated with Greek singer George Dalaras and
she visits Greece almost every year for concerts in Athens's ancient
Odeon of Herod Atticus.
Shapplin
was relatively unknown in the United States until composer Graeme
Revell used her voice on his score for the movie Red Planet. They later
collaborated on her second album Etterna, with Revell producing all of
her songs. That album was written in breach of her contract with
Pendragon Records, which owns the trademark "Emma Shapplin" and had a
six-record contract with the singer.
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