Some hot types of guys (and gals)

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Emmanuelle Haim(above) fits Sir G's definition of one hot chick: she's got big hair; and, sir G imagines, one heck of a butt, too. (Sir G's female detection device is an extremely primitive mechanism, pre-Cambrian, really: big hair plus a good butt are like oxygen and sunlight: they are all one needs to sustain life).

Now, the hair he can see in her promo above (but why not remove that ugly birth mark?). But the great butt he supposes on the basis of the way she conducts Orfeo:


Which is with hell of a lot oomph.

But Emmanuelle Haim is not what Sir G wishes to rave about. It is something out of his line altogether: Ian Bostridge.

Check him out:


Definitely not what you'd call another pretty face. (And never mind the hair and butt)

But what a damn voice, though. And what fantastic diction.

Sir G has lived with Monteverdi's Orfeo these four hundred years, it seems, mainly Nigel Rogers' and His Imperial Highness Nicholas Harnoncourt's; but Ian Bostridge's is the ticket: how about understanding the words as Orfeo sings them?

The effect is absolutely shocking.

Bostridge is kinda cool in other ways: his PhD thesis was on witch hunting (does he note the considerable economic incentives for witch-hunters and how their disappearance led to the end of the practice?) ; and his wife is some doctor or other of some obscure academic science. (Thank you, Ian, for not dating a super-model celebrity).

He can also write. Here is the archive of his contributions to the Times' Literary Supplement.

Brains. Wow.

Listen to the Orfeo. It's incredible.



(PS. Why is it that all my posts on music sound so... dumb?)