When I began investigating classical music about seven years ago after 25 years of blues, jazz and rock, I plunged magpie like into orchestral, chamber and instrumental repertoire but had this problem with the operatic voice ( for want of a better term ). It seemed alien to my pop conscious ears. I could just about handle Beethoven's 9th but then found out that, yikes, some Mahler symphonies had singing in them.

Change started when I forgot to cancel a recommended recording of the month and Strauss' "Four Last Songs" landed on my mat ( Karita Mattila, probably nobody's building a library choice but good enough ) Having got it, I listened and found it not to be too scary. I was also a regular Later Junction listener and with their penchant for the occasional choral piece ( Part, Tallis etc ) another area opened up to me.

Add in the obvious baroque repertoire from Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and co and I was well on the way to overcoming my phobia, so much so that the Choral and Song reviews in the monthly music mags are now often the ones with the most disks highlighted for investigation.

I still have two sticking points however. I can appreciate the art of lieder but struggle to overcome the residue of my original aversions. And my appreciation of opera seems to stop at Mozart, not for musical reasons but for what I might call "fat lady syndrome". You know, "it ain't over 'til she sings" ? I think it is mainly the voice type. Without being expert, I can handle mezzo, contralto, counter tenor, lyrical tenor but find a full on tenor or soprano blasts me out of my seat. Oh well, I guess we can't like everything.

Bjorling - fantastic.

Try Beecham's Boheme with Bjorling and de los Angeles - not too much wobble there!

I think different people find different parts of the "trained voice" hard to deal with - for me it was vibrato, and the way that vowels have to be "purified" which makes languages like English sound unnatural when sung.

There are still some well-regarded voices I can't bear - Renee Fleming comes to mind - and my natural leaning is towards the purer sound of an early music vocal ensemble. But I couldn't imagine Wagner sung like that, just as I wouldn't want to hear, say, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto without vibrato. But there's a difference between warming the sound up expressively, knowing what pitch is intended, and the oscillation of some singers between notes a third apart which sounds like (un)musical botox!

Why that happens must be to do with training; maybe forcing the voice to make a bigger sound than it naturally can, not enough "support" ie use of the muscles or diaphragm, and - connected - not breathing easily enough.

I think Russian basses are usually good. Also baritons are good. Russian tenor used to sound like German tenors. I remember one singer Atlantov, who studies in Italy and he sounded like Italian tenor.

Bobbyz. Did you try to listen to this?

I am not fan of Russian way of singing. May be they are better now, I don't know. Netrebko seems to be good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AdN7qwjpUw

One of the problems is that singers don't train their voices to that kind of strength so they can be heard a couple of feet away (where the microphone is). They train their voices so they can be heard tens of metres away even when a 100-piece orchestra is going for it. (Although of course no sensible composer gets the whole orchestra actually to be going for it at any moment the singer actually has to be heard...)

A trained operatic voice is meant to be heard in an opera house, not in a loudspeaker (and even less so in a pair of headphones). Of course there are well- and less well-trained voices, and sometimes the latter have elements of their production which would be acceptable in an opera house but get magnified under microphonic scrutiny. But sometimes so do the former...

It's audible sometimes with instrumental soloists as well - hear for example violinist Sarah Chang's recent Shostakovich concerto recording with Rattle. It's a concert recording and she's doing what she needs to do to be heard over the orchestra - but through the microphones it often sounds scratchy and her vibrato sometimes sounds like a trill.

One thing that helps is some familiarity with the animal in its natural habitat - in other words, hearing some operas in the opera house. That doesn't need to be expensive; many houses have good and cheap standing-room tickets (if you're ever in Vienna, make sure you have a night off to go to the opera - it hardly matters what's on). It can be disconcerting at first if you're used to recorded balance - there will be moments when you simply can't hear the singers. But with any luck there will also be moments when you experience a human voice bringing you glorious music and drama over the top of an orchestra unaided by technology of any kind.

I'd go further than Ollie and suggest that recording and live performance demand quite different modes of rhetoric, projection, etc.

Thanks for that Oliver, I appreciate the difference. The Sarah Chang example was interesting too, I've often heard it said one of the reasons for so few guitar concertos is the difficulty of making an unamplified guitar heard over the orchestra.