From Maria Callas
to Freddie Mercury

From Maria Callas to Freddie Mercury, from Bellini to ABBA, from Casta Diva to The Winner Takes It All, this Clash Diva explores a single realm: that of iconic voices, unforgettable timbres and emotions pushed to their highest pitch. For opera and great pop share the same intensity: a taste for drama, for momentum, for excess, for fragility laid bare. In Bellini as in Queen, in Verdi as in ABBA or Michael Jackson, to sing is to give everything — to turn the voice into theatre, the breath into tension, the word into immediate truth.

These are arias and songs we know by heart, melodies that run right through us, voices we recognise in a second. Here Bizet crosses paths with Dalida, Puccini meets Barbra Streisand, Verdi reaches out to Whitney Houston, while Madonna, Kate Bush, Björk and Amy Winehouse each carry on, in their own way, the brilliance of the great operatic figures. The meeting between Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé remains its perfect emblem: that of a world where lyricism and pop come together in virtuosity, theatricality and absolute emotion.