March Madness #6: TBT -- My 2nd most popular blog...

My 2nd most popular blog was called "The Chalkboard". It's a good choice for TBT (aka "THROW BACK THURSDAY")

It's been viewed more than 870 times, which is nice but not one I thought would be in the top five. Also, I love that I wrote about opera and musical theatre so casually!

Here it is:
"The Chalkboard"

Well it's the end of the summer.  For my boys, it's the tragic end of their great, wonderful, summer adventure in Brevard and at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Iowa.  They've both grown over an inch, our youngest has had to get new shoes, and our oldest seems oddly mature yet still a little boy.

My summer has certainly been a wonderful adventure as well: it seems so long ago that I landed in Charlottesville to direct Camelot.  Those rehearsals were terrific, my cast was a treat and certainly a gift, and our final product was entertaining, moving, and historic -- Ash Lawn Opera finally performed in a real theatre!  

The weeks in Brevard were packed, my wife loving every minute of teaching there, terrific performances in an a seemingly un-cut Hoffmann (not my idea!), standing O's for Hello Dolly (starring many McGill students), two scenes programs, and then my surprise conducting gig for the Angelica/Schicchi with my son singing a small role.  How did we do all of that in seven weeks?!

This vacation in Iowa has been refreshing and enlightening -- I realize I want more!  Recharging the batteries is good for my bags (as in under my eyes), and it seems also good for my artistic soul. I feel as if I've had more interesting ideas pop into my head while relaxing on my in-law's back porch the last few days than I've had in the last few years.

But now it's back to my chalk board at McGill.  Hopefully my students will understand the need to erase their chalkboards so that something new can be written!  I'm looking forward to exploring Agrippina, The Rake's Progress, Trouble in Tahiti, Carmen, and Dido and Aeneas with my McGill students as well as taking on the Orpheus project for Opera Memphis (I'm staging the Gluck with a mezzo, counter-tenor, and tenor triple-cast in the title role!) as well as making my Kennedy Center debut as a stage director in November.  

But before all that hits, my family and I have two more days filled with family visits, more sweet corn, a bit more grilling, and packing the car for the two day trip home to Montreal.   

March Madness #5: Drinking and Singing

SHORT & SWEET!

This is a silly little blog about a silly little subject that seems to be the cause of sometimes silly, and sometimes great concern among singers, coaches, and voice teachers.  

It's Ash Wednesday.

Lots of people are giving up things and telling all of us what they are giving up via social media.  As an ex-Catholic, I know this ritual only too well; albeit without the announcements on Facebook.

Some are giving up Twitter or Facebook, some coffee, some chocolate... Frankly, it all seems a bit boring with everyone doing it.

A few have decided to give up alcohol, in what seems a bit of a desperate attempt to deny it has anything to do with drinking too much outside of Lent.

And, of course, singers like to give up drinking from time to time as well -- especially while preparing or rehearsing an opera.

I don't quite get it.

There is a famous, famous voice teacher who feels that singers should either NEVER drink, or drink regularly - as in having a beer a day, or a glass of wine - and STICK TO IT!  None of that giving up drinking during rehearsals, and then on opening night having one or two or five glasses of champagne and then recovering from the shock for days on end.

I have no official opinion about this.

Just thought I'd mention that.

However, now that I think of it, most singers I know drink. And they do it rather well. Some really like to drink, and enjoy it. Others, I think, drink because it's the thing to do (particularly with Artistic Administrators, that special breed of humans who are especially talented in toasting with martini glasses).

Ultimately, everything in moderation seems to be the best advice. Well, not everything in moderation. Chocolate Cake, for one, is better not in moderation. I like to eat it until I'm stuffed, then rinse with bourbon on the rocks.

Cheers! ~~~

March Madness #4: 13 Steps for Learning Music

A Quickie, but oft-requested:

Hansen's 13 Step Method for Learning Music

1) Translate Text

Word for Word

Paraphrased into your own words

2) IPA the Text (even if it's in your native tongue!)

3) Practice speaking the text

Repeat until the text sits easily in your mind and mouth

Speak the text in sentences

Speak the text with intention

4) Learn the Rhythms ONE or TWO pages at a time

Without Text

With Text

Repeat until it is Correct, then move on

5) Speak the Text with the Correct Rhythms

Repeat

Is it memorized yet? It should be... If not, Repeat a few times more

6) Sit at a piano and play the notes as melody - out of rhythm

Work ONE or TWO pages only, or a small section

Repeat as often as possible until the melody seems organic and natural

7) Hum or Sing the notes on nonsense vowels - out of rhythm

First play along, then sing with less help from the piano

Repeat until pitches are more than familiar

8) Focus on All Musical Markings

Highlight or Underline all dynamic, tempo, articulation markings

Translate any markings or words you do not understand

9) Sing the Pitches in their correct rhythms - out of tempo

Work ONE or TWO pages only until learned

10) Add Text to Pitch - out of tempo

Gradually increase tempo until you get into the ballpark

11) Repeat Step #10

Working in small sections

Surely... it is memorized?!

If not, repeat and work in smaller sections

12) Sing the Section just worked on with Intention, making sure to sing sentences

13) REPEAT

Focus on any aspects that might be challenging

Focus on aspects that are NOT challenging

So – This might seem a bit tedious, or a bit of overkill.

It’s NOT!

After speaking with many, many seasoned opera singers a few patterns emerge. One is their attention to the meaning of the text, attention to details in the score, and a practice pattern of working in SMALL sections.

Too often, young singers start learning a new role or a new aria or a new song by opening the score and singing through it. This isn't all that helpful, IMHO.

They do this, for god-knows-what-reason, to see if it “fits” or if it “suits” their voice. While doing so, one risks learning, or singing in, bad habits, missed notes, fudged rhythms, etc.

The above method might seem like it would take FOREVER to learn anything. Ironically, by working so methodically – and in short sections – you will discover that instead of simply repeating ad nauseum the same mistakes, you will be able to be learned AND memorized in a fraction of the time!

I proved this method works years ago when I had students try out this method on a section of Wozzeck. I divided my students into two groups and gave them the exact same two pages of super-hard music. One group I let leave the room to work on their own for 30 minutes; the other I kept back and ran them through the 13 steps in about 20 minutes.

Guess which group learned the piece 100% accurately?

The other group came back defeated and confused.

A few still use this method.

I must say that it is a spectacular method for learning difficult music – things like Dallapiccola or Berg or Britten. 

Try it and see. I dare you!

March Madness #3: Art

I spent an afternoon at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC recently. Why do paintings move me so? Why does walking through a museum fill up my artistic soul, and leave me so inspired? Perhaps more than listening to classical music does (with the exception of piano music, that'll never change), spending time in a museum refreshes!

Artists and Art, two things that us opera and classical types talk about all the time, but seldom are we referring to actual ART (like Saint Jerome) by actual ARTISTS (like El Greco).  Strolling through the rooms of Rembrandt paintings actually made me giggle a bit. Giddy I was.

Better men than I have written about the great painters, and their timeless portraits and landscapes and fruit bowls and cubist thingies. I won't try.

But I do wonder about the connection between putting paint to canvas, physically creating life on a lifeless flat surface and putting pen to paper, physically creating a sonic world on a silent flat surface. Both paint and pen are nothing without the artist who handles them. Yet once the artist has painted and the frame hangs on the wall, that art is done. It's there. Timeless, hopefully. Forever, at least for the lucky few.

Composers' works, once bound, sit mostly mute and silent. Unless a musician is looking upon the notes, or unless the composer's music has entered the mind enough to warrant the memory being able to recreate those sounds in your head, or unless one gets the required ensemble together to play it live, or unless it gets recorded and re-played, or downloaded, or it comes into your earbuds by happenstance through one's shuffle moded iPhone.  Slightly different eternity for these scores of music. Books are more similar in that way.

Yet, there's a physicality to writing music (at least there used to be before the terrible invention of computers and software like Sibelius.) There's a penmanship, a craft with pencils, erasers, pens, ink, staff paper, scissors, tape and glue. It all is part of the making of a musical score.  I don't think that artists who create art via software that anybody can download is in the same category as what Van Gogh did. Certainly the same might be argued for composers. I don't know.

What I do know is that in those rooms, in that one museum called the NGA in DC, I spent an afternoon looking at example after example of humanity's genius. From the Flemish masters to the Impressionists to the unknown artists who made Byzantine icons, there was genius in almost every stroke, every pigment, in the forms and structures of the figures, and in the emotions on the faces and in the leaves of the trees. I was transported into these artists' minds and was a better mind for it afterwards.

I didn't want to leave.

Us musicians can travel around with the world's great music in our heads, if we so choose. Do artists do the same? Can they close their eyes and recreate the visual splendor of a Manet like we can open our ears with our minds to recreate the aural splendor of a Rachmaninoff etude?  For me, I need these museums filled with paintings.

And that's why, friends, others need music recreated for them in the most visceral way!

March Madness #2: Travel

And I'm already posting late!!

Yesterday was a whirl-wind of travel to the airport to change a flight, back to the hotel to pack, off to the Kennedy Center to meet up with Becky Henry and catch up with her post-McGill life (doing really well!), then backstage to wish the cast TOI TOI TOI, then to my seat to watch the concert, then off IMMEDIATELY afterwards with Othalie to DCA to try to catch our respective planes since SuperStorm Titan was barrelling down upon Washington, DC, and finally a bit before midnight -- boarding my plane to Montreal.

I got in around 1am and was asleep around 2am.

That was my day. Moving about, except the 2 hours in the seat at the Concert Hall of the Kennedy Center for the "Essential Verdi" concert given by Maestro Wachner, his wonderful Washington Chorus, and the National Symphony Orchestra.  Hearing Rigoletto, Nabucco, Trovatore, Traviata, and Aida (plus some Requiem excerpts) was a great way to spend a rainy afternoon in DC.

DC is a great city. I think, if I had millions, I'd want to live there. My hotel - the Hotel Rouge, about 8 blocks from the White House -- was perfectly situated near the Logan and Dupont neighborhoods. Great places for brunching, walking around, shopping (bought a great pair of Italian dress shoes in honor of Verdi and two pairs of pants at Brooks Brothers), and people watching.

Loved the people as well. Great people!  Nobody ran into me (like happens here everyday in Montreal), everyone was SUPER polite (I mean, like they were being filmed or something) and that certainly doesn't happen here in Montreal, either; but mostly, I didn't smell any cigarette smoke for the five days I was walking around DC.

It's one of my pet peeves about downtown Montreal. It stinks of cigarette smoke. I wonder what the rate of smoking here is, but it seems extraordinarily high. When I think about other downtown cities I frequent (Chicago and NYC), it strikes me that I don't have to walk through blocks of 2nd hand smoke like I do from the Metro stop to my studio at McGill.  And the weather was lovely in DC, you'd think everyone would've been out smoking. But I just don't think that's what is happening much down in certain parts of the U.S.

Travelling back to my homeland of America also reminded me about what an amazing country the U.S. is, and what a fantastic place DC is for tourism. I took Saturday afternoon to stroll through the National Gallery of Art and just kept smiling at every room: Rembrandts, Rubens, Monets, Manets, etc., etc.

Just. Wow.

I also picked up a cool book. Once read, I'll blog about it. I also bought home tons of Hershey's Chocolate bars for the boys cause the Hershey bars up here suck.

March 1st Madness!

It's March 1st -- and boy has time flown by since the closing of A Midsummer Night's Dream!

My "Twelve Days of Christmas Blogs" were a big hit, my readership went through the roof, and I got a lot of fun comments and emails about them. So I thought this month I'd try something along the same lines:

March Madness! 

31 blogs! One for every day of this crazy month. Some will be short, some not. I'll try to tackle some new topics and revisit a few old ones. I'll also do my best to keep everyone informed about the exciting things happening this month in Montreal - namely the grand finale to Opera McGill's Season of Shakespeare which features two performances of Bellini's bel canto masterpiece "I Capuleti e i Montecchi" (conducted by Boris Brott and directed by Nicola Bowie) and a not-to-be-missed special scenes presentation of excerpts from Shakespeare's plays and their respective operatic treatments (music directed by Tyson Deaton and co-directed by Paul Hopkins and little 'ol me) on March 20, 21, and 22, 2014 in Pollack Hall.

Currently I'm in Washington DC for a special concert conducted by Julian Wachner with the National Symphony Orchestra and the amazing Washington Chorus: "Essential Verdi". The performance is tomorrow at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall at 5pm. If you're in the area, you shouldn't miss it. Huge sections of "La Traviata" and "Aida" as well as favorite hits from "Nabucco", "Il trovatore", and the "Requiem" all sung splendidly!

Last night, I attended the Washington National Opera's production of Jake Heggie's latest opera: "Moby Dick". It starred Carl Tanner, Mathew Worth, and Stephen Costello among others. The singing was very solid, and the production was - for the most part - exemplary. The projections were very cool, especially the appearance of the almost three dimensional Pequod and the three whaling boats that the singers "sat" in by sitting on the raked wall (hard to explain, really). Some of the effects, like the Peter Pan effect of swimming and all those ropes going nowhere, were really overdone. Captain Ahab's pegleg was extremely well-executed and I don't know how Carl Tanner sang on, literally, one leg, while tackling some tough vocal writing.

It was the music of Jake Heggie's that I was a bit disappointed in. His songs are filled with dramatic music, yet the score for this opera sounded more like he was auditioning to score a film. Particularly the end of Act One (Starbuck's moment in Captain Ahab's quarters) where, out of nowhere, comes a theme that sounded like it was a morphed combo of the opening of the last act of "Tosca" and the theme from "The Godfather". It was a memorable tune, but perhaps too memorable. I thought most of the men's chorus writing was very poorly done. I never got that sonic boom that all those numbers onstage seemed to promise.  Lots of full-throated singing, but not much cut to get through the massive orchestra perhaps? And I really wanted someone to steal a tambourine and throw it into the ocean... 

With that said, I think it'd be a great opera for new audiences (except for the length -- just this side of too long) because the story was kept to its essence (and the diction was pretty impeccable!), the projections never stopped, and the set had some cool surprises to it. There were arias and duets and men fighting onstage and lots of pretty moments.

But ultimately, I kept thinking that for all the effort that went into this production, I'd rather be watching "Billy Budd". Particularly given that Matt Worth and Carl Tanner would be a superb start to a great cast of "Budd"!

Movies Young Opera Singers Should Watch

The inspiration for this blog comes from two sources: Me (I've been wanting to write this for YEARS) and conductor Andrew Bisantz (who was just in Montreal to conduct Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and who spent many rehearsals referencing movies).

Both Andrew and I (and frankly, so many others I know in the business) have way too many moments nowadays when, in rehearsal, we reference a movie that should be known but, for a myriad of reasons, isn't.  And then there's the musical theatre references that get made in opera rehearsals... (A whole other blog!!)

Art is not unique. All art - from Shakespeare's to Gluck's to Rossini's to Stravinsky's to Bernstein's to Spielberg's to Whedon's - is connective and, frankly, dependent on so much other art that has been or was created before by others. Being the most collaborative type of art, opera is very much dependent upon making connections beyond the score's music and text.

It happens in rehearsals and in coachings. Someone says, "I need you to enter into that doorway just like Kate Hepburn did in the penultimate scene of The Lion in Winter"; silence usually follows, and then a blank stare... No idea who Kate might be, or that the movie ain't about a lion in Africa.

The reason these references get made is because they are tremendously visceral moments that might help a young actor/actress access an image or a vocal colour or a physicality that could help create an operatic moment that works in the director's (or conductor's) imagination. These references also help to show how connective the operatic art form is, plus it's rather a fun thing to do.

Points of reference help create community.

So -- my list of Movies that I think all young opera singers should watch. Of course, there are many left off, and some you might disagree with, but I have my reasons!

1) Moonstruck: Too important a film to ignore. Cher and Nicholas Cage making terrific choices, most of them physical. Great old actors showing how it's done. Lovely screenplay. And the soundtrack is all La bohème!
2) The Lion in Winter: Two lions of acting at the top of their game: Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. Film debut of Anthony Hopkins (playing a gay Richard the Lion-hearted), plus Timothy Dalton. Every scene in this film is a masterclass in how to play a scene.
3) Indiscreet: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman put romance on a whole new planet.
4) Any Hitchcock film: Learn about delayed gratification from this master of suspense. James Stewart and Cary Grant were brilliant in their films with Hitch. Aspiring directors of opera can't really aspire to direct opera without knowing his films.
5) Babette's Feast: A film about what it truly means to be an ARTIST. You have to wait for it, but the speech at the end of the film is inspirational for any of us; plus there's an opera singer played in the film by an actual opera singer: Jean-Philippe Lafont.
6) The Godfather: I don't need to explain why this is a film that should be basically memorized by one and all looking to act on the stage in any genre. The sequel is even better.
7) Singing in the Rain and American in Paris: Gene Kelly dances, sings, and acts in his own athletic way that I think is rather operatic. Kelly is a good actor to watch and study to learn how he moves and communicates emotion with his body. He's a gesture king, fyi.
8) Star Trek and Star Wars: Epic sci-fi series are always great for research into archetypical characters present in Epic operas (or even in the non-Epic ones).
9) Since I've mentioned a TV series - other TV series that are absolutely essential to commit to memory: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; Fringe (Walter!); Rome (great for research); Downton Abbey (terrific for WW1 and 1920's research); and the best TV ever --- Sherlock (multiple viewing only increases my love for the acting and writing and directing in this series!). While you're at it -- Golden Girls, Mary Tyler Moore Show, St. Elsewhere, and... ThirtySomething (angst in the late 20th century.)
10) Others to contemplate and watch at least once: A Room with a View, Gosford Park, Forrest Gump, and movies by Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson (his Tolkien movies are excellent for pseudo-historical research into anything that lives in the world of Nordic mythology.)

So get on Netflix and spend some quality time enjoying these films and the performances in them. Take notice of the editing, the writing, the lighting and cinematography, the acting, the physicality of the characters, and the directing. It all informs the end product and, as artists who sing and act, you can learn so much from just watching!

Plus, the next time you're in a rehearsal with me, or Andrew Bisantz (or frankly anyone who loves movies) they'll be a few more connective fibers between everyone in the room.