Dear Mike and Lauren,
Katarina Karnéus, the mezzo I wrote about, won 1995 the Cardiff Singer of the world competitition. The article in BBC Music Magazine from April 2000 begins with: "Roger Vignoles was listening to Radio 3 when he first heard Katarina Karnéus, singing Mozart. 'I had to stop the car'." Soon he became her accompanist.
Later in the article about her, you can read: "Recently Katarina went to see the leading laryngologist in France, who put a camera down her throat and projected a film of her vocal chords onto a screen. 'He was amazed', she reports. 'He said he'd never seen anything like this in 20 years. My vocal chords are apparently asymmetric. He said he'd only seen that in the throats of impressionist, people who use the extreme reaches of their voice.'"
Given it some thought, I can imagine that an unequal set of vocal folds is a handicap, unless their lenghts have a harmonic relation, let's say 1:2, or 2:3. So Miller was probably right statistically speaking, but not absolutely. I should also add, that Katarina speaks about asymmetry, maybe they have the same lengths, but are different in other aspects, like thickness. I doubt that, because it does not explain the sentence about the impressionists, but sill.
It would be most interesting to know more about her, e.g. about her passagio points. Her most important singing teacher was Ulla Blom, who is Swedish, but I don't know where she lives.
This morning I listened to the recording of her in my car, and there the very special beauty of the voice could not be heard, simply because the speakers in my car are not as good as the ones at home (they're not bad though). Changing the bass and treble settings even made it worse. It was still a beautiful voice though.
About Caruso: of course his recordings are technically all very primitive, so you cannot expect them to reveal the real beauty of his voice.
But imagine: since a beautiful tone is all about harmonics, a set of of vocal chords that are harmonically assymetric, could be the means to produce both a strong basic tone and a beautiful spectrum of higher harmonics. In this way a voice could have both the clearness and bell-quality of a lighter voice, and the warmth of a heavier voice, and that's exactly what's the case with Katarina Karnéus
I'll keep you informed,
best greetings,
Dré
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