Opera in Memphis

Sorry I haven't blogged lately. It's been a wild, wonderful new year and I've spent most of it down in Memphis Tennessee directing their production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice -- or as they are billing it "Orpheus". It is being sung in a new translation by Michael Ching (the conductor, orchestrator and General/Artistic Director of Opera Memphis) and Hugh Moffatt (google him and be amazed!) Opera Memphis' website is: http://www.operamemphis.org/

One of the twists to this production is that we are presenting it with a counter tenor (Nicholas Tamagna), mezzo soprano (Kathryn Cowdrick) and tenor (Marc Schreiner) in a new adaptation that works for all three. It's mostly the Vienna premiere version, with Parisian arias thrown in and keys changed to accommodate the difference between the treble voices and the tenor voice.

I'll post pics soon. Tonight is the final dress and tomorrow I'm off to Wichita Grand Opera to direct their L'elisir d'amore! Although I'm missing my family up in Montreal (and my friends, students and colleagues), I'm enjoying the warm Spring weather here. We'll see how Kansas treats me.

Opera McGill is in the final rehearsal stages for its production of The Rake's Progress. Julian Wachner conducts, and David Lefkowich directs. I've only heard fantastic things from the team and the students, so I'm looking forward to seeing the performances at the end of January.

Winter is a busy time for opera all over -- go out and see one!

2009 in Review

A year end review blog -- please forgive the bullets, but I'm just not in the mood to write sentences! Our new Wii is calling me and I must get back to break my personal score in Archery...

When I look back at 2009, I think of the following moments:

• The Rape of Lucretia at McGill in January of 2009, with a remarkable cast. Designed by Vincent and Ginette with lighting by Serge, I was quite moved by the last 10 minutes of the last performance. For this atheist, the question of "Is this it all?" has been in my mind for most of my life. As voiced by Aidan and answered by David, I must say that Britten wrote a compelling statement. The production caused me a great deal of personal anguish, as I was about to embark on a terrible few months - or as I refer to it: "my semester of misdiagnosis"! The day Lucretia opened, I was told that I might have an inner ear disease that would cause me to eventually go deaf, become bed-ridden, and make me unable to work any job. It was a tough way to end a wonderful production and rehearsal process.
• Dialogues of the Carmelites, again at McGill AND on the same weekend that we presented La Rondine and a scenes program! Try that I.U. ! The nuns were also the set, as there was no money for anything beyond costumes (again, wonderfully done by Ginette). If I were to do the "big-budget" version of this production, I wouldn't change my idea of using the nuns as the walls, doorways, hallways, and cemetery. Since the convent represented their lives, it was a perfect metaphor for their trials. Confession time: I have to admit that I don't remember staging this opera (done almost a month in advance of the actual production.) I was in and out of doctors' offices and trying various medications to try to get the ringing in my ears to stop, as well as the nausea and dizziness. If my wonderful wife, Elizabeth, hadn't been around to help out, I would have cancelled it. In the end, this was a great performance of a great opera and I certainly had fun playing that score again!
• Musical Theatre Workshop - another one of my "experiments" at Opera McGill. Students signed up to work on MT repertoire once a week. Lots of students made some amazing breakthroughs and also revealed their hidden talents. Highlights: JCJ singing "Giants in the Sky", Margot singing ANYTHING, Lily going for the big belt in "The miller's son", and Barbara getting Horton to notice her!
• Schulich School of Music teaching award. It was a great way to end a trying semester -- thanks to Meg, Lara, Aidan, and Philippe for nominating me and writing such incredible letters of recommendation. It was the most moving moment in my teaching career and boy I wish my parents would have been alive to know their teaching legacy lives on.
• The end to the ringing: Although I was losing my sanity during January, February and March because of the ringing in my ears, by the time May came, the ringing had ceased and I was able to drive again, use the Metro, and not worry that I'd end up a 45 yr. old invalid. It seems the various doctors in Montreal did NOT know what was wrong with me! Thanks to Dr. G for getting me to an ENT who got me on a simple nasal spray regimen.
• Camelot at Ash Lawn Summer Festival. What a GREAT show! With a GREAT cast and production crew! I was really worried about directing a musical, particularly working the book scenes that were quite long, involved, and Shakespearian in conception. But the casting was fantastic and Peter, Katy, and Christopher were a dream love triangle (backed up by the wonderful Corey and Christian). I had tons of fun working with Maestro Toan, and thank the gods that Mr. Laroche was an apprentice that summer, as he ended up in practically every scene!
• Brevard: So I showed up late and almost missed the UNCUT (not my idea!) Hoffmann. Lots of roles for lots of singers, but really not my favorite opera. Offenbach is massively overrated, in my humble opinion! But the set and costumes were rather impressive, as was the conducting by Maestro Larkin. We followed it with Hello Dolly, that was cast almost entirely with McGill students: Do I need to write about Ms. Piazza stopping the show practically every time she sang a number? Or about Nico and Margot stealing every scene they were in? Or what about DMD and his matinee idol looks and dancing? It was a TERRIFIC show with literally hundreds of costumes. Amazing that it all happened in two weeks! (Go David Gately.) Followed quickly by a scenes program that was directed by David, Dean, and me while the three of us were trying to rehearse a Puccini double-bill. Truth to tell: I agreed to conduct the double-bill the night before the first rehearsal was slated to begin. The conductor had cancelled last minute. It was fun to wave my arms again, with a wonderful cast and orchestra. Going into it, I was mostly worried about the Suor Angelica, but ended up loving conducting it much more than Gianni Schicchi. An extremely moving opera, and once again the religious ideas behind it really seemed to speak directly to me in surprising ways. My Catholic past perhaps?
• Vacation in Iowa: The best thing about my life is that I can take my family to Burlington, Iowa and get away from everything. My wife has a bazillion cousins in town and I am blessed with two wonderful parents-in-law. They are still in love with each other after 58 years together, embrace my need to cook 24/7 while I'm in their house, and are the most accepting, patient people I know. If you want to know how to be happy and content without HBO, Twitter, new cars, etc., look them up!
• Agrippina: a production that totally exceeded my expectations. Once again the design team put so much together and made the concept of "Dirty, Sexy, Opera" really work. The onstage dog, Colin, was the best actor I've ever worked with (had to write that!) Asking cast members to shoot up with heroin, snort cocaine, take their clothes off, drink lots of cocktails, while singing REALLY long Italian recitatives and arias by Handel, was such fun. SUCH fun! Once again, collaborating with Mo. Knox was a dream. The Nerone was sung by a coloratura mezzo named Emma Parkinson. Any artistic admins or agents reading this blog should look her up and get her signed. Her "Come nube" was the best thing I've heard sung live in 2009, aside from Aaron Tveit's performance as Gabe on Broadway in "Next to Normal". He is FIERCE, so is she.
• Kennedy Center: Thanks to Julian Wachner, I was invited to direct his "Essential Puccini" concert at the Kennedy Center in mid-November. What an AMAZING experience, with a terrific chorus singing Act Two of Boheme and the large sections of Turandot. Jill Gardner's Musetta was the best I've seen (that includes one recent version with PR), but her rendition of "O mio babbino caro" was the best I've heard - ever. Seriously, someone hire her to sing the Trittico now. Carl Tanner and Othalie Graham were fantastic as Calaf and Turandot -- both sending thrilling high C's into the sold-out audience. There was a children's chorus of 80, yes EIGHTY CHILDREN, that I had to stage. All of it conducted with great aplomb by Mo. Wachner. He should conduct more Puccini...
• Brevard 2010 auditions -- I'll have to blog about this sometime, but here are the stats: Over 90 sopranos, most presenting themselves in a black dress (sleeveless and above the knee), sang for us looking to be cast in about 9 roles. Wow. We had 25% more applicants this year, which is good. The singing, for the most part, would best be described as pushed and jumpy. More later!
• Looking forward to 2010: Orfeo for Opera Memphis, a whole BUNCH of craziness the first week of March for the contemporary music festival MUSIMARS in Montreal (directing a Pierrot Lunaire, an Aperghis one-act, a new piece for bassoon, four celli, and three double-basses, and Kagel's "Finale" where the conductor has a heart-attack and dies on the podium!), then musical direction at McGill for Brook's adaptation of Carmen and staging Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti. The summer at Brevard looks fun: Fledermaus, Le Nozze di Figaro, two scenes programs, a run-out musical called Tintypes, and a Pirates of Penzance, which I'm conducting. That's a lot of opera. I'll look forward to being in Burlington in August, grilling food on my in-law's barbeque!

Best to everyone out there in this weird world of blogging. Hope everyone has a Happy New Year. Tomorrow, I get to celebrate the 18th Anniversary of being the luckiest man on Earth for having married my wife. She's actually the TALENTED member of our family!

Hungry to learn

So Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I've eaten my fill. The dinner was great. The weekend over too fast, but the tree is up and we've got a fire in the fireplace and I'm onto glass #2 of a VERY nice 2004 syrah from Ojai.

During my undergrad years at Simpson College, Thanksgiving also meant a return to the campus on Friday to start preparations for the Madrigal Dinner. A huge, I mean HUGE event that happened every other year in the "Great Hall" on campus. Your regular type Madrigal dinner fare, but not your regular Madrigal dinner type of entertainment. First off, the madrigal carried hours -- HOURS of memorized literature. It wasn't just a few ditties by those English guys either, it was serious literature running the gamut from medieval chant to chants des oiseaux. Memorized -- did I mention that? We'd head back to campus, usually during the annual Thanksgiving blizzard, to put up the decorations (which took all day), and then have hours and hours and hours of rehearsals to get ready for the performances. It was the hardest thing I've ever put myself through, that first dinner...

Our madrigal was made up of the same group of singers who were cast in the operas, the same group who were the leaders in their musical fraternities and sororities (as well as the social frats and sororities), they were also the same group of students placing in the NATS and Met competitions, they were the same group who were performing hour recitals in both their junior and senior years, they were the same group who also sang in the choir and went on tour every year in the midst of taking graduate level history and theory courses (to this day I thank Larsen for his Med/Ren course!) I was in the Simpson Madrigal, but I was a piano performance major; and I wasn't the first pianist in the group, nor the first pianist to sing roles in the operas.

Okay, I'll stop now. What I'm saying here is that I learned how to make music, how to memorize music, and how to work hard and BE HUNGRY to work harder while singing in those Simpson madrigal performances. It is something I find lacking today, the hunger to learn. There is a work ethic I find lacking as well -- learning music seems to be something to get past instead of something to embrace and love. I'll know when I'm close to death -- it'll be around the same time I start hating learning music. There's so much music out there and I can't imagine not wanting to learn it ALL. Yes, ALL of it. Not just what you've been assigned or contracted for!

I can pick up a new opera and learn it rather quickly. Not because I'm some genius, but because I was made to do so in Madrigal and Choir at Simpson. I'm brilliant because I was made that way by an aggressive music department in the middle of Iowa. Thanks Dr. Larsen!

Let's all sing a round of "Matona mia cara" and get to the fun part where the bull...

Happy Thanksgiving 2009!

Semi-staged at Kennedy Center

I'm in Washington DC directing a "semi-staged" concert called "The Essential Puccini" for Julian Wachner's Washington Chorus at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, November 8th.  Okay, the plug is done!

Julian (with just a wee bit of help from me) has assembled a REALLY terrific cast.  It is a monster of a program as well:

Boheme, Act Two with Jill Gardner as Musetta.  Jill is simply a Rock Star -- such an amazing voice and a true stage animal (as Tito Capobianco used to say).  Jill then sings the best live version of "O mio babbino caro" that I've heard, followed by John Marcus Bindel's awesome Coat Aria; then there's the Intermezzo from Manon Lescaut followed by Puccini's 20-something attempt at a Gloria (with the wildest use of sequence in a fugue I've heard).

Intermission

Then comes Turandot Act One -- up to the entrance of P, P, & P; then a cut to the beginning of Act Two, scene Two and all the way through to the end of that act.  Carl Tanner rips one out of the park as Calaf and Othalie Graham is SIMPLY THE MOST REMARKABLE TURANDOT I've heard in a long, long, while.  The loudest, easiest high Cs out there folks.  Get her now, really!  

The encore is Carl singing "Nessun dorma" with a cut at the end that takes you to the choral finale of the show that is genuinely inspired (Kudos to Julian Wachner for that one!).  It should be the cut everybody takes in an opera highlights concert, if they've got a chorus to sing it.

And boy does Julian have a chorus.  They do a great job with all of the varied scores, and styles.

My job is to give the entrances and exits shape; manage the 80 kids in the children's chorus (and yes some are onstage with Parpignol, and we're doing a big ol' procession down the aisles of the Kennedy Center for their Act Two Turandot entrance -- complete with lit paper lanterns from the Montreal Botanical Garden.) Instead of Cafe Momus, we're at a Momus Martini bar -- so the waiter will serve only Martinis - which look classier in tuxes and gowns.  There's a live dog for Musetta, some play with Mo. Wachner's hair on the podium during "Quando m'en vo", a bit of a parade at the end.  Turandot is easy: Get them in, let them sing, get them out.

Along the way I've got an 8am lighting session before the dress rehearsal, will try to take in a White House tour, and have to get to the National Geographic building's Terra Cotta Chinese Warrior exhibit to get some cool souvenirs.

If you're around DC I'd say buy a ticket to this, but I'm told they are going to be SOLD OUT!

Empty Stage & a Ghost Light

The last two professional opera productions I've seen were VERY interesting. The first left me so exasperated over the terrible conducting and second rate Italian coming from seasoned professionals, that I was a bit undone to be honest.

Then a few days later, I saw Washington Opera's AMAZING production of "Falstaff". The show started with a mostly empty stage and a ghost light. I can't express how wonderful it was to see opera work the way it's supposed to! I was thoroughly entertained vocally, musically, and dramatically. Alan Opie was the Falstaff and he was simply perfect in the role. I've seen a number of Falstaffs, including Paul Plishka's debut in the role (with Freni, Horne and Susie Graham back at the Met in the early 90s), and Mr Opie was just what the doctor ordered. The Ford was simply the best I've heard live - a young baritone named Timothy Mix. Check him out. The Quickly and Meg Page were Nancy Maultsby and Betsy Bishop and both were fantastic - funny and full-voiced seasoned professionals wielding their craft easily and with aplomb. Down to Bardolph and Pistola (a great new bass, Grigory Soloviov), the cast sang a very difficult score in a completely engaging and light-hearted manner.

The concept was funny, and had a fresh take - at least to my mind - on the idea of actors who dress up to be characters who then later dress up to put on a practical joke in a forest. The set was cool and funny - including a tavern that transformed itself into the great oak. There were hysterical touches - from Bardolph eating old pizza from the floor to the male dancing fairies who practically stole the show. It all ended with Verdi's tour de force of a fugue and it was given a visual tour de force to match. Usually it's "park and bark" time, as the fugue that ends the show is tough to keep together. The director took no prisoners and marched the chorus and cast through an endless array of moves - including a pseudo-conga line. It really gave the musical components of the fugue a visual illustration unlike I'd seen before. And of course, this Falstaff worked because there was a wonderful conductor down in the pit with a wonderful orchestra. I stood up and yelled bravo.

Maybe I had to experience an off-the-mark opera to fully appreciate the exciting night had at Falstaff.

The Slippery Career Path

I've given two talks this week, first to my students and then later in the week to the young artists in the Atelier at L'opéra de Montreal. I spoke about young artist programs, summer programs, opera company structures, career advice, etc. It was interesting to take the questions about specific programs, interesting to uncover for them the mysteries of Musical America, NFCS, Opera.ca, various blogs, and particularly interesting to dive into the trials of being a young Canadian singer with no paid summer apprentice programs to apply for - here in Canada that is. But that's a whole other blog!

So what about career advice? I've been thinking about this a lot for the last few years. Does climbing the young artist program ladder actually work for most singers? If it does, how is it possible that each summer the U.S. programs employ hundreds of aspiring singers, and yet the majority of those singers simply do not end up with careers? Why are there successful singers out there without any major apprentice programs on their resumes?

I do not believe there is an actual career path that leads to success in this business. I think just the opposite. In fact, I think there may be an illusion many aspiring young singers believe: that if they move from degree A to degree B to summer program C to summer program D to resident young artist program E to professional gig F they'll find "success". It looks to be a most logical and sane path to undertake, it's true. It is certainly a plan that I've heard described by many at various seminars on the subject. Success is simply more complicated - the books to read are Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and Hugh MacLeod's "Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity." (The "Martha Stewart Rules" is quite illuminating as well...!)

My wife once asked a rather important person in the opera business which summer apprentice contract she should take, Santa Fe or Central City. She was told that "young artist programs just delay young singers from actually becoming professional singers." We didn't get it at the time, (she went to Santa Fe), but it's a point worth contemplating.

Getting Started

AGRIPPINA is a long song. Opera McGill is producing it this November for many reasons - foremost because it's a fantastic opera, we have incredible singers to sing the roles, I have a good take on it (at least I think I do!), and there are two anniversaries: 300 years since its premiere in Venice and 250 years since Handel's death. That's reason enough for me.

Getting going on it is tough. Hank Knox, our chef, and I sat down a few nights ago and worked hard to make some cuts to the score. We ended up taking out only a few arias, reducing a number of them by not taking the returns, and did figure out how to make some cuts in the recits (thanks to Hank's gifted skills with figured bass!) Tonight I spent about three hours pouring over the score with calendar in hand trying to figure out how to get it staged and to make sure there are enough reviews along the way so that the cast doesn't forget what we did way back in early October. For a variety of reasons I'm starting this the last week of September, even though we open November 20. There's a five day hiatus during Canadian Thanksgiving, plus I'm gone almost a full week in November. It's not something I've ever done before - start blocking a show, then leave it to go and stage another show (actually it's a semi-staged concert "Essential Puccini" that's being performed Nov. 8th at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.) only to return to finish the first. We'll see how the very long, yet rather casual rehearsal period either hinders or helps the students work on this fantastic piece.

So now the hard part is over - casting, organizing the staging and technical schedules, and making the cuts. The fun really begins during the next few weeks as I figure the details of how to move a baroque opera about the power struggles of Emperor Claudius' Roman court into 2009. It seems that these characters are all so power hungry and Poppea is an outsider to that power, yet she's the object of Nero's, Claudius', and Ottone's lust. Poppea has to be a celebrity of some sort and Claudio has to be some sort of super lawyer who's wondering who should take over the firm. The set and costume design team had a good suggestion: the TV series "Dirty, Sexy Money". I like the idea a lot and look forward to the cocktail parties, the paparazzi, the business suits, and having fun with that crazy kid named Nero!