Married for 25 Years?!

Where has time gone?

My wife, Elizabeth, and I are getting ready to celebrate our 25th Wedding Anniversary. She and I both think it's crazy that 25 years has passed by in what seems like a handful of years.

We had had a crazy time leading up to our wedding.

Beyond the seven year dating that led up to our nuptials - which included a few big break ups, long distance bills totalling in the thousands of dollars, multiple cities, and four college degrees - we decided to finally tie the knot mostly because she had "found the dress" while visiting Iowa during the summer of 1991. I was suffering in an internship position in the upper MidWest while waiting to move to New York City to join my on again girlfriend. Elizabeth called me up one day and asked me to marry her. Over the phone. It went like "So, I found the dress..." pause "And..." pause "I think we should get married."So Romantic.

You see, I had asked her to marry me two summers previous, on a very Romantic afternoon on a mountain in Colorado, with a ring and all. She had said yes, but then a year later we were breaking our engagement. Long story. Let's just say it's hard to commit to each other during seven years when you had only been together about 12 months total during those seven years...

But we decided it was now or never! We were going to get married or risk losing each other all over again.

So the plan was for me to move to NYC to start my fellowship at the Juilliard Opera Center (joining Elizabeth who was already a member of the JOC), live "in sin" (as it used to be called) and then get married a few months later. Simple. However, a few too many operatic events tried to prevent that plan from being implemented. First off, the same weekend I moved to NYC, Elizabeth flew to Chicago to audition on the stage for the Lyric Opera of Chicago's young artist program. She signed a 12 month contract with LOC that weekend which began two weeks after our planned December wedding. Oops.

Then she was cast as Vanessa in Barber's Vanessa at Juilliard. It hadn't been performed in NYC since its premiere with Steber and Elias, so everyone came to the performances (two weeks before our wedding, yikes) including the NYTimes (great review), Carol Vaness (rumoured to be among the cast of a never-happened Vanessa at the Met), and many others. In the cast was a young Jay Hunter Morris as Anatol, Jane Gilbert as Erika, and Carlos Conde as the Doctor. Richard Bradshaw conducted and it was directed by Ed Berkeley. Wow. Then just to make things really interesting, two weeks leading up to the premiere, my Dad had a major heart attack (but managed to recuperate and be at our wedding less than 4 weeks later.) Crazy month, eh?!

The night in question, December 28, 1991, was a cold, extremely typical, winter's evening in Burlington, Iowa. We chose the Saturday between Christmas and the New Year in order to accommodate our friends and family who, we'd hoped, were free that week. Outside of disappointing my parents, as their wedding anniversary was December 26th ("Why not just get married Thursday?" my mother would whine during the preceding months), the date was perfect because Bethany Lutheran Church was decorated to the nth degree with Christmas poinsettias, a lovely tree, and that holiday "air".

So many friends came, our relatives (my family: small, hers: ginormous), and our wedding party looked marvellous, from Maid of Honor Lisa to Best Man Rusty and all the rest. We did a very traditional wedding, complete with communion (in order to garner more time for more music), a church reception with requisite punch and the big white cake. The evening, though, ended in a totally unique family potluck party graciously hosted by one of Elizabeth's cousins. A keg was donated and the DJ was also a cousin. Lots of dancing into the wee hours. We honeymooned at a local Bed and Breakfast for two nights.

We could not have had a more perfect wedding, really. The music was provided by a bunch of our friends from Simpson College singing many favourite madrigals and Christmas Carols. The most memorable one was a totally unique rendition of "Good King W" that had to be heard to be believed! Anne Larson, our voice teacher extraordinaire from Simpson, sang our favourite Sven Lekberg song (look him up - amazing art song and choral composer!) and blew everyone away with her voice and musicality. We wish we had a video of her singing (we could barely afford the photographer).

Speaking of afford - the wedding was really "given" to us by so many others - our parents, yes - but more so by our musician friends, Elizabeth's two amazing cousins who provided the reception space and all of the flowers as their wedding gift, and all of the family that brought food to the second reception. We were unbelievably poor and were getting ready to embark on the next few months with practically no money in our pockets, living in two separate cities (Chicago and NYC). What were we thinking? In fact, we drove home from Iowa to NYC and then a week or so later back to Chicago on the cash we'd made during those many dances at the reception where people would put dollar bills in our wedding finery.

I remember thinking we had it all. We didn't need money, we had each other, we had our futures.

Those futures, at the time, seemed boundless. Elizabeth was at the height of her success as a young artist, going from Santa Fe to Juilliard to Chicago in only a few years. I had finished my masters in KC and had gotten the JOC fellowship, spending the fall playing for Marlena Malas, Frank Corsaro, Nico Castel, and making my collaborative pianist debut at Alice Tully Hall. All was well. I foresaw many years living in NYC, getting onto either the Met or NYCO music staff and just, well, succeeding.

But that was not to happen as I envisioned. A year later, I was on tour with Opera Iowa and getting ready to start my own contract at the Lyric playing for Maestro Palumbo. Elizabeth and I never returned to NYC, except to visit or for auditions. Our careers happened far and away from that city.

Which was totally okay, in the end. I think that it's important to go with the flow, go with what doors open, but especially to not have regrets in life. First off, if you're a fan of the movie About Time, going back to change something in your past typically changes the rest of your life and why in the world would I want to do that?!

So years later, twenty-five in fact, I sit in Alexandria, Ontario typing these words in front of a roaring fireplace as an ice storm rages outside. My wife is listening to "Time after Time" from the movie soundtrack from Julie and Julia sung by Margaret Whiting (it occurs at the end of the movie as Julia finally gets her published cookbook delivered). It's an apt song for us:

"Time after time
I tell myself that I'm
So lucky to be loving you
So lucky to be
The one you run to see
In the evening, when the day is through
I only know what I know
The passing years will show
You've kept my love so young, so new
And time after time
You'll hear me say that I'm
So lucky to be loving you."

Here's a link in case you'd like to listen to her sing it:
Time After Time

My wife and I are a team, something many still don't quite get even after I've blogged about it for years now. She is my muse, my harshest critic, my heartiest fan. Her voice sits in my head whenever I coach Mozart or Puccini or Barber or Schumann or Handel or, let's just admit it, any kind of music. We both come from the same place: southern Iowa (I'm Missouri River coast, she's Mississippi River coast) and that gives us a massive commonality that is our glue. We also have mirrored talents - she's a great singer who could play and I'm a great pianist who could sing; she can teach belting equally with the more refined classical style and I move in and out of opera and musicals with a great deal of ease. She was an amazing actress onstage and I direct my operas thinking that she's playing all the parts (male and female). She is the butter to my bread, and the breath to my life (to quote Julia Child.)

So we sit comfortably together in our living room, and it is now December 26, 2016.

Twenty-five years later. No party plans. No big trip. We want to spend our time together with our sons while they are still at home and so have decided to spend the evening together, maybe go out. We will play it by ear.

If anyone out there is lucky enough to know what it's like to spend 25 years together as a married couple, I tip my hat to you. Looking back, it seems like it was an inevitable journey that I can't imagine making with anyone else.

Here's to 25 more!

Opera's Summer Lovin' !

There are hundreds of singers currently just starting summer programs, or getting ready to head out to one. From the west coast to the east coast, from huge cities to teeny-tiny one-stoplight towns (shout out to Cherry Valley, NY!), from large opera companies that spend millions to small companies that wish for six figure budgets; singers, pianists, assistant directors, stage managers, administrative interns, orchestral musicians -- all are arriving fresh as a daisy, with a smile on their faces, anxious for that first musical rehearsal to happen, all the while hoping no one sees their floppy sweat, or notices they've lifted all of their ornaments from the same YouTube video featuring a certain mezzo named Joyce.

Yes -- the beginning of the summer is all about optimism and energy. It's about sexual attraction developing during staging rehearsals, it's about discovering that perhaps your vocal "technique" may or may not be holding up during 9 hour days. Summer programs are unique - no summer is the same, and no program is the same from summer to summer. It's all about the chemistry of those involved. Some years, the "yaps" are a fantastic bunch, really supportive, talented, energetic, on time, prepared. Other years you get a bunch of whiners, cliques, and singers who can't imagine that they'd be asked to sing the tenor 2 line in a "Libiamo" chorus being sung that night for some patron's event ("but I'm a baritone!").

I look back so fondly on my time at Des Moines Metro Opera as an apprentice coach being mentored by the likes of Stewart Robertson and Robert Larsen while discovering the wit of a Buck Ross or Reed Woodhouse. I pine for the 9am to midnight work days at Glimmerglass where I'd get to coach amazing singers, attend mind-altering staging rehearsals, sit and puzzle out the next day's schedule, eat a gourmet meal at Alex and Ika's, and then spend the evening at a piano dress rehearsal in the theatre, freezing to death in late June.

I have, over 30 years, discovered that there are some truisms I can summarize about young artist programs:

1) The singers who arrive with their chorus music learned are the singers who have the best chance of creating a professional career. Those who arrive super prepared, even if they're not the star voice or the Met winner, are the ones who end up getting managers and making it. It's called a WORK ETHIC. Makes all the difference!

2) The pianists who bitch, gossip, and moan about singers really don't like opera that much and they'll not be very successful down the road. (Well, with the exception of a few spectacular non-talents who do okay for themselves.) Go ahead and ignore the negative pianists, especially the ones who can't play the shows they aren't assigned to. Truly, they get weeded out.

3) Some assistant director or assistant stage manager at your program will, in about three to five years or so, have their own opera company somewhere in the world. Treat these people, who are working longer hours than you, with the best of all possible gloves. Bring them treats, or if you can't afford that, bring them smiles and kind words of thanks.

4) Bitchy, gossipy singers seem to be the core of the populace of young artist programs, but they are not. They're just really the most vocal and only seem to be "in the know". Walk away from them, go practice or go on a nature walk. Don't fall into their energy. It's infectious. The people who run these programs have seen this year after year after year. Gossips are kinda fun to have around, but no one really takes them seriously. So you shouldn't either.

5) You are not your casting ossia don't assume that just because you've been given a Rossini duet you're being told by the higher ups you should consider leaving the bass-baritone repertoire and become a bel canto baritone. In the same vein, if you've always been a Ferrando and all of a sudden you find yourself getting a Don Carlos duet, or being cast as Bacchus, you shouldn't consider moving into a heavier fach. Your casting is not your fach! Casting in a summer program is all about using the singers at hand who happen to have filled the various repertoire needs of that summer. I can not stress this enough! It is a rare program that really takes into consideration the individuals' vocal needs or current abilities.

6) You'll learn the most and network the most if you GO TO REHEARSALS THAT YOU ARE NOT CALLED TO. This means that when you'd rather head back to take a nap on an afternoon off, or spend the morning learning your chorus music (see number 1...), what you truly need to be doing is going to the staging rehearsal instead. Sit in on the show you're not in -- even if it's only for 30 minutes. Go up and connect with the principal artists. Get them to know your face. Introduce yourself to the production team. Ask them if they'd like a donut cause you're going out for a bite. Talk to the conductor and director! The singers who do these sorts of things network so much easier than the other yaps. It's hard to standout in a large program. It won't be your talent alone that gets you noticed. In fact, for many, there's no real chance to get noticed (unless you're a problem child and arrived ill-prepared, or you show up late day after day to chorus rehearsals.) You can learn so much by observing. Put away your smart phone. Don't sit and get text neck. Sit, watch, listen, observe, learn.

I was thinking about the most important part of my learning process in my early career. It was during the two years I played for Donald Palumbo, then the chorus master at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I played 15 operas for two summers of intense rehearsals with the god of opera, Maestro Palumbo. His was an artistic spotlight that seared through every piece of diction, every rest, every nuance, every fucking note of every fucking page. We'd spend what seemed like weeks on the opening entrance of the guests in La Traviata in order to get it right. I was in sheer terror of the man and in total awe. In two hours I could learn more from him than a year at Juilliard. I hung around those two seasons at the Lyric, sometimes in staging rehearsals, sometimes at the back of the opera house, sometimes offstage right listening and watching. Soaking it all in like a sponge.

It got me thinking about what I heard those two seasons, who I heard, who I saw direct and who I saw conduct. The list, off the top of my head and from memory, is staggering...

92-93 Season
Bryn Terfel
James Morris
Eva Marton
Leonie Rysanek
Chris Merrit
Placido Domingo
Tatiana Troyanos
Rockwell Blake
Neil Rosenshein
Barbara Daniels
Ben Heppner
Catherine Malfitano
Faith Esham
Teresa Stratas
Victor Braun
Jerry Hadley
Harolyn Blackwell
Vladimir Chernov
Fiorenza Cossotto
Sharon Sweet
Deborah Voigt
Ildebrando d'Arcangelo

93-94 Season
June Anderson
Dimitri Hvorostovsky
Susanne Mentzer
Sam Ramey
Jean-Philippe Lafont
Emily Magee
Renee Fleming
Richard Leech
Maria Guleghina
James Morris
Carol Vaness
Delores Ziegler
Gianna Rolandi
Siegfried Jerusalem
Tina Kiberg
Eva Marton
Susan Neves
Nancy Maultsby
Paolo Gavanelli
Chris Merritt
Dolora Zajick
Graham Clark

Directors/Conductors
Robert Altman
Robert Falls
Frank Galati
Bruno Bartoletti
Richard Buckley
Zubin Mehta
Leonard Slatkin
Donald Palumb, the great

I mean, what was I doing there?!
I wish, I wish, I wish, I'd walked up to these people and talked to them. I would give anything to spend another two hours with Palumbo. Just to be in the same room with him. I learned so much watching Dimitri H breathe through Germont's lines, I began to understand about the different levels of sonic boom hearing Zajick, Marton, and Guleghina (not to mention James Morris, Sam Ramey, or Leonie Rysanek!). I heard Renee Fleming struggle to be heard at the end of Susannah (don't get me wrong, she was radiant in the role), I saw singers ignore conductors and watch prompters instead, I listened as Eric Weimer played rehearsals of Wagner and Strauss with an ease that was jaw-dropping, I witnessed arguments between singers and directors that escalated to yelling fits, and I saw clearly that I needed to leave and go out into the world to learn more about what I didn't know (which was a lot!) about opera.

Summers are a great time to write a new chapter in your operatic life.  Each day offers new opportunities. It might seem like a summer is a long time, but it is a blink in your lifetime of learning.

Keep you eyes open, sleep after the program is over, worry less about getting to the gym, and head into where opera IS -- in that holy of holies called the rehearsal space.
Enjoy!

GRATITUDE & REGRET

REGRETs I’ve had a few…

Actually, I have no real regrets, only a few half regrets; more on those later.

I’ve wanted to write this blog for quite some time now, but regretfully have been hyper busy doing nothing. Well, almost nothing. The months of May and June were filled with looking for a new home outside of Quebec, looking for a new colleague to become the head coach for Opera McGill, and planning for the next season, which includes five operas at McGill: Adamo’s Little Women, Ching’s Buoso’s Ghost / Speed Dating Tonight!, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (which I’m conducting instead of directing) and Handel’s Rodelinda. Plus we are doing a special performance in September “Sondheim on Sherbrooke” and I’m cooking up a special extra project for May, 2016. I’m also looking forward to a return to Fargo for my 4^th opera production there: Suor Angelica / Gianni Schicchi (conducted by Michael Ching). Hopefully there will be one or two more outside gigs down in the states and/or here in Canada as well. At least 7 operas between late September and next June!

So back to regrets…

Each year around May or June, I receive letters of thanks, emails of thanks, or messages of thanks from students about their experiences with Opera McGill. These are always wonderful to read, and make all of the hard work and effort seem like it has meaning to many individuals. There are themes that run through most of these messages of thanks – how holding them to high standards helped them realize their potential, how the program’s professional bent helped them on their career path, and how giving them opportunities to grow artistically meant so much. But there is another theme that runs through these messages of gratitude, one of regret.

The main regrets seem to be that they wish they’d taken advantage of all the opportunities provided by Opera McGill, that they wish they’d not worried so much about what their colleagues or teachers thought about them, and that they wish they’d not judged their experiences so harshly because now that they look back on them, they see just how extraordinary those experiences were.

I have to say that I especially agree with that last bit. So many young singers today really over judge and over think their experiences instead of just experiencing them, fully committing to them, and bringing into their rehearsals and coachings a sense of joyous discovery.  Too often I see young singers sit back and quietly remove themselves from the moment in order to judge it. From time to time, I receive a few complaints that there isn’t enough this or that, or too much of this or that.  Some even comment that there is too much rehearsal (how can there ever possibly be too much rehearsal?!) In what operatic world – outside of the German system of 6 years of rehearsing one recitative – can a singer ever be bored in a rehearsal? There is so, so, so, so, so much to learn and listen to and watch. If you find yourself thinking that rehearsal is the thing to “get through” so that you can get your costume on and sing in front of an audience, then I think you should rethink pursuing a career in opera. The life is rehearsal. The life is endless learning – new roles, new stagings, new ways of collaborating with new/old colleagues. The amount of time one spends in front of audiences is extremely small. It’s like the vast expanse of space in between the planets in our solar systems – it takes years to travel to Pluto, but then BANG WOW: Pictures of Pluto crowd Facebook and Twitter for a few days; then people move on… 

That’s what it’s like to work in opera.

So my advice is to jump in with both feet, go to every rehearsal you possibly can! See every single recital, get to every masterclass and ask as many questions as you can! Take your professors and mentors for coffee and grill them for answers about the questions that are on your mind. Work with new pianists, read through your aria books and those musical theatre anthologies. Get out to hear concerts – classical and popular. Do as much as possible to avoid surfing on the internet or watching YouTube videos or posting on Facebook. You can do that later, after school ends.

Sounds simple, but sadly it is truly hard to do.  One could start with putting away the smart phone for hours at a time. Maybe just check FB every other day. Maybe save YouTubing until a Saturday morning. These are just thoughts. There is tons of expert advice on that subject available on the interweb… Oh…

My “half” regrets?

1) Not learning enough piano concertos back when I had the chops. Oh well.

2) Not spending enough time learning certain opera scores back when I was younger and had more time. By “learning” I mean being able to play the scores and storing their texts in memory. Scores by Wagner (Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Meistersinger) and Verdi (Ernani, Otello, and Luisa Miller), learning the big Strauss works (Ariadne, Arabella, and Rosenkavalier are the only three I basically know), and some of my favorite 20^th century operas: Pelleas, Grimes, and Lulu – love them, but I only can play certain sections now; the sections I learned back during my Juilliard days.

I really had the time back during those summers when I was playing at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, plus I was playing for the god of opera choruses Donald Palumbo. What was I thinking not working on these scores and then talking to Mo. Palumbo about them, or asking to maybe work on one or two with him? Imagine what I could have learned! I had oodles of time during my masters degree now that I look back and think about it. I had tons of time while an apprentice coach at DMMO when Stewart Robertson was running that program. He’d have been fantastic to work on Grimes or Ariadne, for instance. I could have conquered the big Donizetti works all at once when I was at Juilliard instead of waiting to learn them as the jobs came along.

Those sorts of regrets. Otherwise, my life’s journey has been charmed and wondrous! I hope everyone out there gets as exciting a journey for themselves!