First Impressions, part III

When I was 17, towards the end of my senior year in High School, my voice teacher, Rosie, invited me to observe her Studio Class at the University to catch a glimpse of what I was about get myself into the following fall when I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Michigan School of Music. I watched one after the other of her student perform songs and arias for the class and listened as she worked with each student, giving them notes on what she heard. The one person who sticks in my memory to this day was a young soprano whose name escapes me now, but the reason I remember her singing so vividly was because it was the first time I had heard Purcell performed.

She got up and handed her music to the pianist who was playing for the class that day and announced, “I would like to sing ‘Hark! The ech’ing air’ from Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’.” The pianist began to play a sprightly tune that teemed with happiness. As he played the soprano began to tap her foot and bounce her hips to the dance-like rhythm, clearly enjoying the piece. I smiled, thinking that she was dancing along with her singing as though she were breaking down to some pop song on the radio. When she sang, her voice was so clear and bell-like, and she tossed off the runs of fiorature with flair as if they were the easiest things to sing in the world. I was entranced and fascinated – here was music that seemed to be the very definition of fun. I remember being so taken with how unselfconscious she was as she sang – she just seemed to be luxuriating in the sensation of singing and the song's joyful melodies, without a care in the world.

I was hooked – Purcell has been one of my desert island composers ever since.

New Arrival

To mark the last day of Summer yesterday, Myra (otherwise known as "Superwoman") and I decided to get back to work and resume rehearsing for our upcoming recital tour. We started up by working on our opening set of Purcell, assessing it's flow and digging deeper through it's dense, intensely emotional twists and turns.

Much more exciting than Purcell, though, was getting to meet this little one for the first time, who slept quite peacefully through most of our noise-makings yesterday afternoon.

Abby Huang

First Impressions, part II

For your weekend enjoyment, a few first impressions via YouTube...

The first 4 videos that appear after searching for "Henry Purcell" on YouTube:

Incidentally, number 3 is one of my favorite pieces that he wrote - partly because I love the poem so much.

The first 4 videos that come up when searching for "Benjamin Britten" on YouTube:

Funny that YouTube and I share the same first impression of Britten...Number 4 is a fascinating documentary most definitely worth checking out.

What were your first impressions of Purcell and Britten? What were the first times you experienced their music?

First Impressions, part I

I’ve been thinking a lot about first impressions lately – those moments that are so perfectly and entirely represented in all their awkwardness by those painfully cheerful stickers that say “Hello! My name is…”

My first night at Marlboro this summer, a young Italian pianist came up and introduced himself to me saying, “Ciao, I am Gabriele! I think we are working on Britten together – Michelangelo Sonnets, yes?”

“Yes! It’s nice to meet you!” I said, immediately charmed by his Italian accent.

“What else are you working on here?”

“Oh…Dichterliebe, some Telemann Cantatas, Britten’s Birthday Hansel, Britten’s second Canticle…”

“Whoa! You like the Britten, eh?”

• My first impression of Gabriele: young, disarmingly affable Italian pianist.
• Gabriele’s first impression of me: nice American singer with eccentric musical taste.

At our first rehearsal, after our first reading of the sonnets together, Gabriele said (again, with his rather charming Italian accent), “Wow…this music is amaaaazing - is incredible!” He paused, thumbed through the score and said, “But I don’t understand nothing about it yet.”

“Have you played any Britten before?” I asked. He shook his head no. He scratched his head, looked confused at the music and said, “Let’s try it again!”

• Gabriele’s first impression of Britten: strange, fascinating, confusing – amaaaaaazing!

My own first impression of Britten was quite different. The first time I encountered Britten was as a 16 year-old second violinist in my youth orchestra in Detroit when we played his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. At our first reading, I was immediately excited by the majestic beauty of his orchestration of Purcell’s initial theme which forms the basis for the piece. I was fascinated by how Britten showcased each section of the orchestra, exploiting each instrument’s range of color and expression. It was like being part of the an aural Wikipedia (had such a thing existed at the time). I was excited to be playing a piece that showed off and explained this incredibly complex and expressive musical entity that had become my life’s obsession since I started playing in orchestras at 11 years old.

• My first impression of Britten: exciting, beautiful, cool, brilliant – fun!

15 years later, at a rehearsal this March with Myra, my own first of impression of the Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo was not so different from Gabriele’s this summer at Marlboro. After our first reading of the songs, I said to Myra, “These feel really great in my voice – yet they seem kind of academic and strange.” Myra agreed – they did seem kind of dry and bizarre on first read, not understanding much of the Italian and having a missed a few (or many, at times) notes and/or rhythms here and there. Despite those initial impressions, I said to her, “Still, there is something in me that is really intrigued and excited by them and feels really drawn to them...I can tell that we are barely scratching the surface of what is here.”

• Our first impression of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo: academic, strange, dry – yet we’re intrigued without quite knowing why.

It turns out that, in this instance (as often happens), our first impression was wrong. The sonnets are anything but academic or dry – they are packed full of an intense passion that is both heart-wrenchingly frustrated and disarmingly tender in its confessional vulnerability.

But more on that later...in the meantime, I'll leave you with that first impression of Britten I had at our first meeting 15 years ago:

A Program

As my season gets off to a start, one of the very first projects I focus on is a short US recital tour in October and November - the very same recital tour that Myra and I were about to rehearse for when she went into labor the other day. The tour culminates in a very exciting event - our Carnegie Hall recital debut in Weill Hall. Much of my focus on the blog over the next two months will be focusing on the preparation for the recitals. Below is the program:

HENRY PURCELL

If music be the food of love (vers. 3)

If love’s a sweet passion

I attempt from loves sickness*

There’s not a swain of the plain*

Not all my torments

Sweeter than roses

*realizations by Benjamin Britten

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op. 22

Sonnetto XVI – Sì come nella penna e nell’inchiostro

Sonnetto XXXI – A che più debb’io mai l’intensa voglia

Sonnetto XXX – Veggio co’bei vostri occhi un dolci lume

Sonnetto LV – Tu sa’ ch’io so, signor mie, che tu sai

Sonnetto XXXVII – Rendete a gli occhi miei

Sonnetto XXXII – S’un casto amor, s’una pietà superna

Sonnetto XXIV – Spirto ben nato, in cui si specchia e vede

INTERMISSION

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Winter Words, Op. 52

At day-close in November

Midnight on the Great Western (or ‘The Journeying Boy')

Wagtail and Baby (A Satire)

The Little Old Table

The Choirmaster’s Burial (or ‘The Tenor Man’s Story’)

Proud Songsters (Thrushes, Finches, and Nightingales)

At the Railway Station, Upway (or ‘The Convict and Boy with the Violin’)

Before Life and After

arr. BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Come you not from Newcastle?

Little Sir William

Last Rose of Summer

The Salley gardens

The Ploughboy

Memorial

9 years ago today I was a brand new resident of New York City, having moved here two weeks before from the town where I grew up. I woke up thinking I would be starting another day of my new life at Manhattan School of Music, and woke up instead, like the rest of America, to a changed world.

And now, 9 years later, this is the view from my apartment tonight:

Pregnancy and Giving Birth

In January, during my sojourn in Düsseldorf, I was emailing back and forth with my manager and Myra, my pianist-partner-in-crime, about the program for our upcoming recital tour this fall when Myra sent a very short email saying: “Nick, I need to talk to you…please call me…”

I thought: Oh dear – this can’t be good news. What is she going to tell me?

I called Myra via Skype later that day and asked her what was up. “I’m pregnant, I’m due in mid-September,” she told me in a rather hesitant and worried voice. She poured her heart out to me about how she didn’t know if she could do a recital tour that started so soon after the baby was born, how she felt like she might be letting me down, and how she wondered what she should do. I told her that she most definitely not letting me down in the slightest, and that it was her decision to make. I also told her that of course I wanted her to do the recital tour, I told her that I thought of us as a chamber duo, and that of course I wanted her to share the experience of a Carnegie Hall debut recital with me. I also told her that, first and foremost, I was so happy for her and was so excited for her family. It provided a strange opportunity for us to reaffirm why it was that we wanted to keep working together and what was special about our musical relationship and our long friendship. I told her that this was great, exciting, and wonderful news. And I left the ball in her court.

After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, she eventually came back with her decision that she did, indeed, want to play. I assured her that I had an alternative plan, in case the baby came late, and we adjusted our lives accordingly. We looked at the calendar and plotted out when we would start working on the program – we decided to start rehearsing as soon as possible. We ended up starting to toe the waters of some of the newest repertoire in March. When May arrived, we dove in head-first, taking advantage of the situation to ease into all of this music and slowly find things in it, letting it come to us, letting the layers peel back of gradually and of their own accord. I left for Marlboro at the end of June, and we agreed to keep rehearsing after I returned until the baby was born.

Since I got back from the London a couple of weeks ago, Myra and I stuck to our rehearsal plan, and every time I would email her to schedule a session, I would jokingly preface the email with, “Are you still pregnant?” Myra would write back that, yes, she was still happily pregnant and that we should meet at 12:30 the next day.

After debating whether or not to try to pack in another rehearsal this last week, we eventually decided to meet once more this past Friday at 1:00. As I said goodbye at our previous rehearsal, Myra said to me, “We should try to get in as much as we can before the baby comes, since she seems to be taking her time…” I agreed and left, looking forward to our next rehearsal. When I walked in the door on Friday, I started to head towards the piano when Myra told me that she didn’t think we could rehearse that day. I looked at her and asked her if she was all right. “I think it’s time,” she said. So instead of rehearsing, we waited while her husband fetched their daughter, Elie, from daycare. Myra offered me a ride down to Midtown, which I found perplexing, but took her up on. We piled into the car and I entertained Elie while Myra and Ed debated which would be the quickest way to get to the hospital. Around 1:30, they dropped me off in Midtown, and I wished her good luck and a quick and easy labor, if such a thing is possible. Then, somehow they made it to the hospital at the speed of light, because at around 3:05pm, Abigail Emma Huang was born.

Many congratulations to the Huangs on their newest family member!

Myra at our "rehearsal" on Friday moments before the new arrival!

(I made her smile for this picture...)

Flying Time

A friend posted the obvious on my Facebook Wall the other day: “Last blog entry, June 17th. Just saying - I don't get to see you, I don't get to read you.” Feeling justly scolded, I wondered to myself: where has the summer gone? Intense, mind-blowing, and action-packed, I realized I had been so immersed in music-making, I barely had the capacity to think about anything else all summer. In the last month alone, I have performed 9 different concert programs, 7 of them from memory. The list of composers I’ve performed this month has been thorny and dense: Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Robert Schumann, Alma Mahler, Hugo Wolf, and Alexander von Zemlinksy – so much for the typical “light” summer-festival fare. The constant study, rehearsal, memorization, performance, and travel all pulled me into a vortex in which the days sped by while I barely noticed the passing of time. All of the sudden – or so it seems to me – I am sitting in Heathrow waiting to fly home, and it is the end of August. I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun.

Shortly before I left for the summer, I met up for drinks with a friend and colleague who is an artist manager of singers at one of the big artist management companies in New York. We don’t get the chance to catch up often - our busy schedules and my limited time at home prevent that - but we finally had managed to carve out a moment to sit and catch up over a few glasses of wine. As we caught up, he asked me what my summer plans were, and I told him that I would be coming back to Marlboro. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me over the rim of his wine glass and said, “Oh? Wow! Really? You are?” He seemed surprised that I would be going back for a summer of rustic dorm-living and communal cafeteria meals at this point in my life. I chuckled and pointed out that that was, in fact, much of the reason to go back to Marlboro: to say hello to that inner child, to greet the perpetual student in all of us.

I understood that he didn’t really have a total and complete understanding of what Marlboro is – it’s so difficult to explain to people who have never visited. You don’t have to perform? No one is a student, while yet everyone is a student of a sort? You just rehearse? You share a bathroom? Yes, all of these things are true, and yet somehow they don’t sufficiently describe what Marlboro is. Marlboro is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

Seventy–five or so musicians convene at the little, elite, isolated musicians colony that is Marlboro every summer for 7 weeks. We live in dorms on the campus. We serve each other dinner in the cafeteria. We maintain a meal schedule that we joke bears a striking resemblance to the mealtimes at a retirement community (although, ironically, it is the oldest members – who are in their 70s – who complain the most about how dinner is too early). We throw napkin-balls at each other at meals. We relax over beers in the coffee shop after longs days of rehearsal. We climb the roof of one of the dorms at night and stargaze, discussing life, love and the pursuit of music. And more than anything else, we rehearse.

About a week into the festival, one of my colleagues and I were discussing the cultural adjustment from our busy, frantic lives in New York to our quiet, close-knit, think-tank situation in Vermont when she said, “You know? I think the roughest adjustment for me is that I only have myself to deal with here.” At first, I was surprised at her comment. For me, the only time I ever feel like I am a part of a community, a part of something larger than myself are the summers I spend at Marlboro. The rest of the time, I am running from concert to concert, hotel room to hotel room, spending countless hours alone. At first glance, the whole point of being at Marlboro is to play and interact with others, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood what she was talking about.

Coming back for a fourth summer, I had certain expectations about what my experience was going to be like. As I had pointed out to my friend over drinks earlier in the summer – I knew that the point of coming to Marlboro is to learn, to discover, to dig deep. But what I was unprepared for was how challenging it would be to be that open. When I first arrived, I felt like much of what I was realizing was how far I have come on my journey. I was able to see how much I had grown over the past years since I started coming to Marlboro. But having that much more knowledge and experience, not being a completely clean slate anymore, I found it hard to be open to finding the next level. My ego would rear its prideful and lazy head inside me, and I found that ultimately, I was in a constant battle with myself. As I eased into the pace of things there, I found myself praying every morning for the grace to be beginner again.

As the summer progressed, I found I was grateful I fought that battle for openness. Worlds opened up to me in rehearsal that I never imagined, and I felt myself discovering layer after layer of emotion, depth, and beauty in all of the music I was rehearsing. Through all of this musical digging, I began to see what a difficult balance it is to maintain both self-assurance and humility as we progress further into our “adulthood” and how challenging it can be to discern the difference between ego and confidence. Confidence, like true strength, is a flexible, open, eager, and wise thing. Ego is what is lazy, entrenched, closed, prideful, and deeply stubborn. Oddly enough, ego can look an awful lot like confidence at times and trick you into getting stuck.

The radio program, Performance Today, came for a few days this summer to do a feature on Marlboro and what happens there. They interviewed many of us and played many performances from this and past summers, doing an excellent job of painting an aural picture of what Marlboro is. The thing that I found so moving while listening to the interviews was hearing so many different generations of people talk about how they had found themselves at Marlboro. Marlboro certainly held the same special place in my heart before this summer began, yet somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that finding oneself is an ongoing journey. This summer was no exception in guiding me further along that path.

The World of Song

I spent yesterday immersed in songs – not Barber arias, not Beethoven 9’s, not Bach recitatives – only songs.

In the late morning, I rushed down to Jersey City to rehearse for a huge and exciting recital project that my pianist partner-in-crime, Myra, and I have started to dig into this past month. At the end of our rehearsal, we started to talk about former teachers that we had studied with over the course of our lives, reminiscing about the teachers who opened up the world of songs to us. After bidding her farewell for the day, I headed home to my own piano and began to sift through the pile of music sitting on my desk that comprises my various and copious assignments in song for the summer. I spent the rest of the afternoon deciphering Hugo Wolf’s incredibly rich and dense musical language, as well as reading some Zemlinksy and early Berg. Exhausted by dinnertime, I went out for a drink and meal with friends and then came home a bit more refreshed and a tad bit nostalgic. My thoughts were still drifting through the land of lieder, and I started to troll YouTube. My ventures led me to the video below, and I sat staring at YouTube screen with tears rolling down my cheeks:

The last time I heard this song in a live performance was two summers ago at Marlboro. It was part of a very long evening of various songs, and having been the first performer of the evening, I had the luxury of sitting on stage while the rest of my colleagues performed. I was really happy to see that the song was programmed – I think it is perhaps one of the most beautiful of all German Lieder. Having not heard the song in many years, my memory played a trick on me. Thinking it knew what was coming, being so well-versed in the land of lieder, my mind mistakenly remembered the final line of the song being: "Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel, in meinem Leben, in meinem Lieb!" (I live alone in my own heaven, in my own life, in my love!). While that would be a lovely sentiment of sorts, I felt the wind knocked out of me when I heard the singer sing “…in meinem Himmel, in meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!” (in my own heaven, my love, and in my song!”), instead. Hearing that final “t” of Lied, I was breathless, my eyes suddenly wet with tears, and the song was instantaneously and entirely changed - so much more powerful than I obviously remembered. I thought back to the last time I heard the song live, and it was back when I was a junior at the University of Michigan, in a studio class with my former teacher, Rosemary Russell. I worked with Rosie from when I was a nerdy 16-year-old teenager until I was a musical young man of 22. During those formative years, she opened my eyes and ears to the world of lieder and art song, feeding me as much repertoire as I could devour. She showed me the power of these little pieces, teaching me how each one was like a genie lantern that, once rubbed, yielded multitudes of magic.

Rosie passed away unexpectedly back in 2005. The last time I saw her was at a concert of songs and chamber music I performed in at Ravinia that she came to see that summer. After the concert, she joined my family and me for dinner at a nearby restaurant, and we talked in depth about the concert. We chatted at length about how much she liked the new songs that we premiered at the concert that night, where my diction could have been a little cleaner, how happy she was with the progress I had made since my college days of studying with her. At the end of dinner, we dropped her off at her hotel, and I gave her a hug, telling her that I would see her when I came home in the winter. She passed away before I made it back home that winter, and I still miss her dearly. Nevertheless, I still hear her voice inside my head, especially on days like yesterday and that moment in Marlboro, reminding me of the lessons she taught me that unlocked this universe of music and song.

--------------------------------------------------------

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, 

Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben, 

Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen, 

Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!  

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen, 

Ob sie mich für gestorben hält, 

Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen, 

Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.  

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, 

Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet! 

Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel, 

In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied! 

----------------------------------------------------

I am lost to the world 

with which I used to waste so much time, 

It has heard nothing from me for so long 

that it may very well believe that I am dead!  

It is of no consequence to me 

Whether it thinks me dead; 

I cannot deny it, 

for I really am dead to the world.  

I am dead to the world's tumult, 

And I rest in a quiet realm! 

I live alone in my heaven, 

In my love and in my song!

 - Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866)

Ode-to-Joy-ing

"For a moment, death let herself go, expanding out as far as the walls, filling that whole room and flowing into the room next door, where a part of her stopped to look at the sheet music open on a chair, it was suite number six opus one thousand and twelve in d major by johann sebastian bach, composed in köthen, and she didn't need to read music to be able to know that it had been written, like beethoven's ninth symphony, in the key of joy, of unity between men, of friendship and of love. Then something extraordinary happened, something unimaginable, death fell to her knees, for she had a body now, which is why she had knees and legs and feet and arms and hands, and a face which she covered with her hands, and shoulders, which, for some reason, were shaking, she can't be crying, you can't expect that from someone who, wherever she goes, has always left a trail of tears behind her, without one of those tears shed being hers."

- Death with Interruptions, Jose Saramago

I posted this quote a little over a year ago, but on the occasion of my very first performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony this weekend, it feels just to post it again.

It had been years since I had heard the 9th Symphony live, and experiencing it in rehearsal last night was quite overwhelming. As the orchestra and choir played and sang away, and as my heart started to pound at a quicker and more excited pace in my chest, I was reminded of the Saramago quote above. Yesterday, in our conductor-soloist meeting, Maestro Honeck kept pushing me to bring as much unbridled joy to my brief solo, and I almost felt as if I couldn't bring enough happiness, excitement, and jubilation to the two pages of music. Hearing the movement with full forces last night, I saw why. The music demands that we (both the audience and the performers) give in completely to hope, happiness, joy, celebration, and elation. It insists that we live completely in the positive for this one moment, which, perhaps, might not be a bad thing to aim for in every moment after, too.

On Being Out

Last October, after one of our performances of Falstaff in Glyndebourne, someone said to me (having spent an entire evening watching me manhandle Nannetta as I portrayed her lover, Fenton), “You are quite convincing as a heterosexual!”. While I know that they meant this as a compliment, and I laughed it off at the time, it touched on a sensitive spot for me. It is not the first time that I have heard a comment like that, and every single time I hear it uttered, I hear the same hint of surprise and awe in that person’s voice.

The moment has stuck in my memory as the season plodded onwards from my sojourn in England, and a couple of moments since have picked at it, causing it to repeatedly place itself in the forefront of my mind. A few months after the Glyndebourne incident, the pianist Stephen Hough wrote this blog post about gay pianists, discussing whether it was possible to tell a pianist’s sexuality from their playing. And then, a few weeks ago, this offensive post purporting that gay actors are not able to play straight was published in Newsweek.

There is a debate about whether a performer should come out – many performers argue that it is important to keep their private lives private so they don't interfere with people’s ability to suspend their disbelief and to buy into their characters more fully as an audience. On the flip side, many people argue that it is important for performers to be open and come out because of their profile, so that they can set positive examples for the rest of the world. I can see both sides of the argument, although (while I do believe in maintaining a sense of privacy) I very obviously fall into the latter camp when it comes to my own life.

I was debating this with a gay friend the other day, who was arguing for the other side, and pointing out that there is a bit of a price to pay in terms of career. I found that, while I would never say that my openness has ever concretely stood in the way of my career, I would say that it has had, in incredibly subtle and hard–to-describe ways, an effect. That comment after my performance in Glyndebourne would never have been uttered were I straight – it would have simply been noted that we had good chemistry and that I had given a convincingly passionate performance. I had to concede to my friend – when it comes to casting, it is important for people to think of the actor or singer in a certain way. In a way, the less a casting director knows, the easier it is to simply assess the artist based on their work. When it comes to my repertoire as a lyric tenor, most of the roles I would be considered for operatically are heterosexual romantic leads. I’m lucky to be in a position where there is nowhere near the same kind of competition and breadth of possibilities that face gay actors.

But all this has me wondering – does it matter? And I find myself vehemently thinking that it should not. Of course, an artist’s personal life and experience informs their artistry, but isn't the point of performing to communicate to as wide an audience as possible, to share part of the common experience of what it is to be human? I think that part of the beauty of music is that it expresses the inexpressible and the indefinable. It heightens emotions that are universally felt and can touch each and every one of us as humans. Why the need to put a performer into a labeled box?

There is a double standard – we easily suspend our disbelief when a 40-year old, white woman plays a 16-year old, virginal, Japanese geisha. We have no problems watching a pudgy, Italian or Mexican tenor wear dark make-up and sing Othello. We can watch endless hours of actors in their mid-to-late 20’s portraying angst-ridden, privileged high-school teenagers on the CW. We know so much about the personal lives of so many heterosexual stars. We know how politically left-leaning Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are and how many children they have had and adopted, we know that Renee Fleming is a divorced mother of two, we know all about Jennifer Aniston’s latest break-up – yet none of that seems to matter when we watch these people’s performances. Nor should it, really.

A young singer asked me the other day on Twitter: “is it harder for us gays in the opera world, getting gigs and such? Not to mention being a tenor and gay?” I wasn’t sure how to answer him in a tweet, but my initial instinct was to say no, it is not harder. That initial reaction is based in the way I try to think artistically – I attempt to be grateful for all of the experiences in my life, doing my best to keep my focus on what opportunities I have had, rather than the ones I didn’t. Yet it’s a question that has been posed to me twice before – once when I was interviewed by the Advocate, and once when I came out to my parents years ago. When I have mentioned this to people, they almost always laugh, saying, “but there are so many gay people in opera!” Sure, in some ways that is true, but more often than not, I look around the room on the first day of an opera rehearsal and note that I am the only gay person in the cast. And while I consider myself lucky to work in an extremely tolerant work-environment, it is a reminder as to why it is that much more important that I perform to the best of my abilities at all times. Hopefully that will show people that a person's sexuality really doesn’t matter – despite the fact that we live in a world and a society in which it seems to.

Barber 2.75

This past month of rehearsals has been a very special experience for me, and I am really looking forward to seeing what happens tonight at our opening performance. I have a feeling it is going to be a giddy, fun, and exciting evening.

I've been trying to figure out how to use my camera in low light - and not with much success yet. This crazy picture is the best that I could do while we were rehearsing in the theater. I know it looks like someone is singing an aria about seeing dead people, but it's actually Jenny singing "Una voce poco fa", if you can believe it. We've all got to start somewhere, right?


Hopefully, tonight's performance won't feel that blurry. I hope instead that we have sharp focus and bubbly energy, so that we can savor every moment we are on stage and show the people who come tonight a really fun time.

A huge toi, toi, toi to all of my amazing colleagues here in Portland. Thanks for the endless laughs, the great working atmosphere, and for helping finally figure out how to really enjoy singing Rossini.

Good Times

If you see the back of my left hand, you'll notice that there are two small wounds that are in a rather unattractive stage of healing at the moment. If I roll up my sleeve far enough, you'll see that I am sporting a bandage covering a much bigger (and slightly deeper) scrape on my elbow. Now, as much I wish I had some dramatic, violent, freakish stage accident story to tell, the truth is a fair bit more embarrassing. At our sitzprobe (our first orchestra rehearsal in the theater), I was chatting with some cast mates, and nearly missed my entrance for the Act I finale. I ran down the length of the theater and hopped up on the stage only to trip and skid spectacularly across half of the set.

What I find remarkable about this every time I look down at my very minor injuries is how relaxed I was when it happened. Rossini causes me stress. Full stop. I have never had an experience with Rossini in which I have not felt tremendous nerves and anxiety. As I have written time and time again here, it is some of the music that I find most challenging to sing. Part of that is the point of this music. In many of the Q and A sessions and interviews we've had here over the past few weeks in order to publicize the opera, a lot of what we have talked about is how virtuosic this music is. It is in the bel canto style, and it is meant to show off the virtuosic extremes of the voice. Virtuosity equals pressure – there is just no way around it. In the past, when I have performed Rossini, I've been anxious, on edge, nervous, and my way of dealing with it is to be hyper-prepared and have a humorless, razor-sharp focus in rehearsal. The idea that I was relaxed enough to be even a little distracted is mind-boggling to me and makes me smile.

My little injuries have gotten me thinking about how there has been a rather unique atmosphere in rehearsals here, though. While we have been working hard (and quite seriously - most of the time), everyone in the room has really seemed focused on the fun of what we do. In the various acting classes I took and theatrical experiences that I had at the theater departments at both Interlochen (back when I actually thought I wanted to be an actor) and the University of Michigan, I found there to be an incredibly conscious effort to maintain a positive energy in the room. It was constantly emphasized that the rehearsal room was a safe haven – a place to explore, take risks, and – most importantly - find the play (i.e. the fun) within the play. Most often in my experience, I've found that, while we are practicing a form of theater, there is little room for this kind of process-oriented, fun work in Opera. As singers, we have been taught during the course of most of our young artist programs the importance of showing up "prepared" on the first day of rehearsal. It has been drilled into us that we have to know every single note and rhythm, be memorized, and have fairly strong ideas about who the characters we portray are and how they should act. Many singers often refer to the first day of rehearsal as the "first day of school", but not with the excitement of students coming back to school after a summer of vacation. Instead, there are the sigh of having to deal with schoolmarms and the dread of preparing for an exam in their tone. From the minute that first rehearsal begins, the pressure is on. Every single "role preparation" discussion or session that I had in my training focused only on what and how much I needed to know for that first day of rehearsal, and, yes, those things are important – when a colleague isn't properly prepared, it can cripple a rehearsal process, making it excruciating. All the same, there are so many more layers to discover in order to make it a great run of performances, and there is a danger in the expectation to be so prepared for that first day – that we close ourselves off to exploring the myriad of possibilities and the fun that lie within the covers of our scores.

What has made this experience so unique is that theater-like emphasis on the positive that I felt when I was young has been really prevalent here in Portland. Our rehearsals have been filled with laughs, smiles, hugs, jokes, and just good fun. We've been blessed with a conductor and director who have both maintained a perfect balance between being being laid-back and focused and a cast full of incredibly supportive, positive, and very funny colleagues. All that has allowed us to find our ways through this piece and come together as a cast quite organically. Every rehearsal has felt like a building block, each run-through has felt like an opportunity, and every note that has been given has only been framed in the positive. It's always been, "why don't you try this instead and see how that works?" Never, "don't do that." It's been a very empowering and fun atmosphere, and I feel that our performances over the next ten days will be quite special as a result. Since our first day of school here, I have gone to rehearsal everyday feeling like the possibilities are limitless and safe enough to try different ones out each day, and it has felt like the pressure is somewhat off. At least, enough for me to feel relaxed and have fun with it – it is a comedy, after all, right?

Incidentally, I'll have you know that despite my sliding across the stage, I didn't miss a beat, and we made our way through the scene just fine, laughing at ourselves the entire time.

Rehearsing the Haircut

As our rehearsals in the the staging studio have wrapped up over the past few days, I managed to get a few snapshots (with the help of Jenny's camera one of the days, as mine was at the camera doctor) of some of my colleagues at work. I'm new at the whole taking-pictures-of-moving-people thing, and I happen to be on stage most of this show, so my pictures are a bit limited in in terms of what scenes I could photograph. Nonetheless, enjoy some tidbits of our rehearsals - we certainly have been!

Rosina

Rosina writing a love note to Lindoro (and maybe singing an aria)

Rosina and Figaro

Bartolo and Rosina fighting over paper and pens

Rosina two steps ahead of Figaro

Rosina looking mighty sure of herself

And now we move to the theater...