When I was fifteen on an exchange student visit to Austria, my host family took me to The Magic Flute as the feature opera at the Salzberg Festival, Europe's major Mozart festival. This was absolute top-drawer stuff in front of half the Cabinets of Europe, in a vast auditorium.

The whole thing was a dream from which I have never really awoken, but when it came the aria of the Queen of the Night, they had opened up the entire backstage space, which looked the size of an aircraft hangar, and constructed a stage mountain on the back wall, on the top of which was standing I think Victoria de los Angeles. I turned to my host and whispered '"What are they doing? She can't possibly sing to us from THERE!" (Opera singers of course rely entirely on voice projection.)

Then this kind of electrified light blue element filled the entire auditorium, it was like being underwater, you couldn't tell where it was coming from and it was felt more than heard. I just thought - "Oh my God, can the human voice do that?"

So I am a singer, though of folk, not opera, and I can't do THAT, but I have no idea whether there are limits.

So if you get the chance, whatever your views about opera, if you get the oppotunity go once (taking any impressionable kids) to a top class performance, and just listen to what they are doing with the voice alone. Recordings, even very good ones, are incapable of conveying the impact of it.

Chris