Feelin' seedy...

I had three- count 'em three wonderful composers ask to write me something last week. Respected men whose music I love. Totally different situations. I said yes to everyone and hope that somethin' works out. I am a bright-eyed realist.


Post-script: nothing panned out. Must have just been the cute red tights worn to VOX.

Craftsmanship.

I get to play a real human being now. No caricature or plot-forwarding woman- some woman the soprano is measured against, but a real woman. A real human being with duties and conflicts and multiple loyalties, loves and responsibilities.


I am terrified.

Happy Halloween/I happen to like Barthes.

The work that is the most important- that shows the most—takes months and years. I’m not able to think myself to a place of ease.

I envy the Hahns and Denks that can bring transformative thinking into their practice rooms with the apprentice culture of their respective instruments supporting the idea that this thinking is worth doin’- that it will show and support their status as a career-level musician.

Singers subject one another to a complex social dance around the idea of intellectualism. You have your Ian Bostridges and then you have your Luciano Pavarottis and everyone claims to know which one was the intellectual- the one with the Phd in the history of witchcraft.

A professor of mine used to say that any group relieves anxiety and competitive tension by taking the truth and dividing it like pie. The more anxiety- the smaller the pieces of pie. You take Brahms and I will take Contemporary Music.

It is impossible- having come up through conservatory to consider a life as an opera singer without picturing your classmates and crushes from fourth semester theory sniggering at your successful debut as the red woman in some tomato sauce opera that lots of old ladies love but whose composer never made it to the MHist 101 Syllabus. I feel this way particularly after large doses of Denk, yummy as they are.

It’s good to form a plan and then to study it until it is organic and inevitable and doesn’t show and until the studying itself dissolves into play and you are just a little craftsperson up there having some fun and perhaps exorcizing some demons or if it's Handel, slaying some monsters.

Happy Halloween.

Such a poser.

I am playing a confident woman right now who wants to maintain her youth and glamour and who wants to have fun. She sees herself mainly as a sexual commodity. Her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. She feels a little trapped in her town and I've been exploring the physical aspect of this character-- how she would stand and move.

The self is so fluid: I had trouble shaking this woman off at the end of the day. This evening as I sat on a box waiting for the C. An educated looking older man said to me as he passed "That's quite a pose." I was slumped with my legs crossed leaning back on my hands with my shoulders thrust high to my ears in a posture that said "slightly contemptuous female alpha dog in heat."

Normally I would be much more self-conscious and would have had on the New Yorker "Don't approach me, I'm no one to bother about" mug that we all practice daily. But this evening-- without knowing-- I was still the prettiest girl in town surveying the peasantry of my Sicillian village.

That whole line about how theater allows the audience to live out dangerous sides of themselves in a safe way... imagine how we feel! Who knows where this girl came from...

In the mean time.

Funny that singing thing. We want it all, we want it now. I wanna sing every role in my rep at every house and whenever I hear of anyone else doing same, though I may respect her immensely as an artist and know and love her as a person, a tiny part of me goes, "Humph."

Hilarious, huh? I was in the middle of tragically musing "Oh, I'm in this tough transition right now where no one's helping me." and generally whining to the Please Hire Me Gods when I realized I have thirty minutes to get to the subway to go to the first stage rehearsal of a great role in a fantastic opera with an A house that I respect, among colleagues who sound amazing.

That old underdog sense dies hard.

Fleisher on the team...

Mr. Fleisher describes the performer as three people in one: “Person A hears before they play. They have to have this ideal in their inner ear of what they’re going to try and realize. Person B actually puts the keys down, plays and tries to manifest what Person A hears. Person C sits a little bit apart and listens. And if what C hears is not what A intended, C tells B to adjust to get closer to what A wanted. And this goes on with every note you play, no matter how fast you’re playing. It’s a simultaneous process that advances horizontally. When it works, when it all meshes, it’s a state of ecstasy.”

My person C is always on ritalin.

Aren't these new General Managers just darling?

The photo at left is airborne Gerard Mortier, the future head of New York City Opera. I had this photo on my bulletin board for about a year of undergrad.

Mortier was one of the instigators of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, an opera that I was doing a lot of research on at the time. Mortier had not only commissioned the opera, but had put on the Peter Sellars production of St. Francois D'Assise that had convinced Saariaho that "if they could put it on that way"... she could write an opera.

What a great example of how to administrate (administer?) your way to great new opera. You want the best composers writing your opera, not just the ones who feel a stylistic affinity to Madama Butterfly (which I happen to sing in and love). But to get that, you have to present a wide swath of the repertoire that already exists. The 20th Century classics and all that.

I could scream for the number of fabulous composers my age who give me "I don't really see myself ever writing an opera." If companies don't create an environment of dynamic, evolving theater before the commission, everyone gets confused about where the boundaries of the art form lie. Saariaho thought she would never write an opera because she thought her style of composition would never be viable under the theatrical construct she thought that opera required. Because she saw a great production of St. Francois, she's working on number three.


Postscript: I wrote this waaay before the insane Mortier debacle at NYCO. I still stand by the ideas here. Zachary Woolfe's awesome piece in the Times last month said better (and post-disaster) some of what I was trying to get at in 2007.