On Friday, I recorded podcasts with two formidable women — very different from each other, but each brilliant, and a leader in her field.
My Q&A is with Angela Gheorghiu, here. She is a Romanian soprano, and one of the starriest, and most controversial, opera singers in the world. She is also a great interviewee — a journalist’s dream, really. Very blunt, for one thing, and often very funny. I did a piece on her in 2012, here.
For this Q&A, Gheorghiu was in Palermo and I in New York. She has a new album, Eternamente, which is stocked with verismo arias. We talk about the album and various other things. I tell her that I haven’t heard about any Gheorghiu scandals lately, which is disappointing. Has she slowed down? In response, she provides new material.
Let me also say this about Gheorghiu: She is a legend, yes, and a piece of work, yes, and great fodder for the media: but she is also a great singer, which is the thing that will be remembered — and heard on recordings, and seen on videos — after everything else has passed.
The other podcast from Friday: Need to Know, with Mona Charen (and me). She is in superb form, as usual. Among the topics are Trump, Kelly, Bush (43), Weinstein, Putin, and the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, murdered for reporting the truth about government officials.