How Much is Too Much?

Admit it. Those of you who did Carmen were exhausted by Sunday. Yes, yes, some of us did work the Rossini Festival on Saturday, but even without that, I'll wager everyone was glad when the curtain fell late Sunday afternoon.

Two performances. That doesn't count the weeks of rehearsals required to stage those two performances. "But," you say, "What performances... and what rehearsals!" Yeah, yeah. I hear you. It was grueling.

But, to put things in perspective, check out this NYT article about the Kirov Opera doing two concurrent Ring cycles at the Met this summer. Yes, on consecutive nights! The four Wagner operas! Twice!

Okay, let's just about this for a moment. What kind of forces would be required to do such a feat? Well, you'd probably want two groups to do each cycle, and you certainly wouldn't expect the major roles to be done by the same people on consecutive nights. One analogy I read said you wouldn't ask a soprano to sing Brünnhilde on consecutive nights any more than you'd ask a major league pitcher to start on consecutive nights. So, you'd need two of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, at least. (One might be pressed to find one set of singers for those roles.) Then there's the folks in the pit, which may or may not be interchangeable, not to mention tons of IATSE (production) folk and all appurtenances thereof.

What's amazing to me is that there was only one conductor: Valery Gergiev!

How many people have tried conducting? Show of hands? A few? Maybe you conduct your church choir in an anthem or two Sundays and rehearsals on Wednesdays. Of course, Christmas and Easter presentations require a little more preparation and length of time on the podium--a 45-minute cantata. Or maybe you teach choir in the schools. That's a little more conducting. Daily rehearsals, concerts for PTA and other civic groups, and one or two performances at semester's end.

Now, imagine waving your arms in the air for 4 hours a night for eight nights in a row! (There was a day off in there somewhere.) And people say, "Oh, music! That's a profession for wimps!" Ha! Think you're in shape? Workout at the gym? Free weights, you say? Two or three games of tennis or racquetball a week? (Maybe racquetball is passé nowadays.) Ooo! You're pumped!

Let's get an idea of what Maestro Gergiev had to do. Stand up and just put your arms up in front of you. They don't have to be out all the way, just out from you in a comfortable position. Now, stay that way for, oh, let's just say, 15 minutes. After 5 minutes, you begin to get that burning sensation that means that oxalic acid crystals are building up in the muscles; at 10 minutes, your arms begin trembling; at 15, you're probably on the verge of cramping.

Okay, rest a minute. Now repeat the experiment. This time, flail your arms in the air. Vary the amplitude--sometimes large, grandiose general movements, other times small precise movements. Maybe this time it's not quite as painful, as your muscles are at least getting some variance. If you're feeling fine after 15 minutes, try aiming for 30 minutes. Still going? Try 45, 60... Maybe, if you're lucky and have the biceps of Mr. T., you might get through an hour.

But Gergiev? Four hours! Every night! For 8 days! I would think that, rather than training for a single attempt at your best dead lift, one might take a leaf from marathon runners. You'd probably want to pace yourself, and learning perfect form would certainly be a must. The strength of economy. Still, that's a lot of arm waving.

The moral of this story is, if you see Valery Gergiev anytime soon, I'd refrain from challenging him to any arm wrestling.

Pete Townsend Writes New (Rock) Opera

Espied this article on my Yahoo portal. (Portal - an opening home page that serves as an aggregate reader for news and information. The 1990s equivalent of RSS feeds.) Yes, I know. You're hardly likely in your lifetime to see the Met do Tommy. But, you have to give credit to a guy that probably has taken every illicit drug there is at any one time and still has enough brain matter to live to old age and compose another rock opera.

I have to admit, I have only seen bits and pieces of Tommy. And it seemed like, as a child of the 70s, Elton John was blasting out a version of "Pinball Wizard" every five minutes. I vaguely remember the "buzz" (as in, a gnat at your ear: something you, and the rest of the world, hardly notice) when Quadrophenia came out, but, again, that was more about who was playing the main character: A guy named Sting, lead singer and bassist from an up-and-coming band named The Police. But, like so many "old" composers, Pete Townsend instills a sense of respect from the musical community. People are willing to listen to whatever the aging composer puts out.

Handel churned out work after work in his old age. He had become famous in England by then, and there was no shortage of royalty during the mid-18th-century willing to pony up the money for whatever he wrote. By then, he had developed all of his formulaic techniques and could just churn out the pages for whomever. I wonder if the phrase "Sold out" existed back then. One could make that argument for Handel, as one might make the argument of any rock band in the 1970s.

Yadda-yadda...

What's that? You know I'm tech-head and gadgeteer and want to know what I think of the iPhone? Well, thanks, but I don't have one and have no plans to purchase one. And from the reading I've done, that's a good thing. Sure, it looks cool, but it's not the vast jump in technology that everyone was hyping it to be. As a matter of fact, as a phone, the general consensus is that it's awful. The sound is bad, it's difficult to dial manually or send text messages on the "virtual" keyboard displayed on the smooth glass face, and said face gets caked with oily fingerprints, making viewing a movie or a web page a less-than-stellar experience. The last complaint has been a continuing complaint about the iPods since they were first released.

Now, you have to understand, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC guy. I'm not an Apple-head. My heroes are (well, in some cases, were) Carly Fiorina and Bill Gates. Yes, I know, "artistic" types are supposed to swoon over every word that comes forth from the mouth of Steve Jobs and rush out to buy every product that he sells.

And I have to admit, I did break down and buy an iPod Nano, begrudgingly. And I've been very impressed with it. I probably have it two-thirds full of albums from my own "old" CD collection and have even bought a few things off of iTunes. I think iTunes says that adds up to about 2.2 days worth of music (about 58 hours of constant listening to music). And, though, you'll find quite a bit of rock and stuff, you'll also find a lot of early music, some jazz, and a little opera. To me--a guy who lugged around a 10-pound "boom box" throughout much of the late 70s and early 80s, then a large case of cassettes when the Sony Walkman came out, then a large case of CDs when the CD Walkman came out--the idea of holding two straight days of music in a box smaller and less-hefty than an old-style cigarette lighter, it's a dream come true. (I own a couple of non-iPod MP3 players that are equally amazing in their size but lack the intuitiveness of the iPod.) Yes, I do record the music in a compressed format (as opposed to Apple lossless), but the quality doesn't degrade that much. I love my Nano!

But when it comes to computers, I'm a PC guy. I was much more excited about the release of Windows Vista than I was OS X, and I'll scoff at the people that stand in line to buy Jaguar, the next Apple OS release, coming, well... whenever Apple gets the kinks out of it. (In Apple's defense, they do put out a polished and complete product, as opposed to Microsoft's release-it-and-we'll-work-out-the-bugs-later philosophy.) Part of this bias is that the particular field I work in uses PCs almost exclusively. I make my living off being able to make Microsoft Office stand up and beg for people. And what office productivity suite do most Mac-based-businesses using? Office for the Mac, which is very different from the PC version. Yes, there are alternatives to MS Office, but none of them have yet been developed to the point of overtaking the capabilities of the Microsoft product--this includes Corel's WordPerfect suite.

So, no iPhone for me, thank you. At least, not for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, I recently purchased a new Samsung phone which I'm very happy with. It can surf the web, sort of. I can play games on it, should I be so inclined, which isn't very often. And I have a contacts list on it, but just to facilitate dialing numbers. (If I need more in-depth knowledge of names and schedules "in the field," I have my trusty Palm Pilot, which, incidentally, syncs up very well with my copy of Outlook on my home PC.) The call quality on the Samsung is excellent, and it's Bluetooth enabled. So I have a wireless earpiece/mic arrangement which makes me look a bit like a cyborg. And the light on it blinks, which tells everyone around me that, yes, I am that important a person.

I happened to catch an old video of Beverly Sills singing "The Willow Song" from Ballad of Baby Doe on the ARTS channel yesterday. (I don't know anything about the ARTS channel, except that it broadcasts on the Knox County Schools channel when the school system doesn't have any programming, i.e., at night or during the summer. They show old videos of classical music performances.) It was an old, old video, judging by the look of things, probably the early to mid-1960s. She was on what appeared to be some kind of talk show, with a couple of hosts in director chairs and a small studio audience. That kind of genre of show was popular in the 60s, so that's what made me think it was from then. Anyone who has seen Monty Python lampoons of talk shows from the BBC in the 1960s/early 1970s will know the format I mean.

I wish I'd caught the whole performance instead of the last minute or so. But, c'est la vie. It was wonderful to watch such a consummate singer as Sills. The key to good opera singing is to make it sound--and look--like it's just the easiest thing in the world. The next time you see a video of Pavarotti, check out his jaw. There's absolutely no tension whatsoever. It's just hanging there, even though he's belting out high Cs and Ds. Ditto for the tongue. And, of course, he sounds like, "Why, Cs and Ds are in the middle of my range." And Sills was no exception in this video. The closing high notes--I'm not familiar enough with the opera to know what they were--were just as easy as all the other notes. You could see that her body, the diaphragm, all the torso musculature, was doing all the work. But she didn't look like she was working hard at all.

The only thing I found odd was how much she dropped her jaw on the highest notes. It seems to me that the jaw has a natural range of motion, opening and closing. If you exceed your natural downward extension, you have to exert extra energy in those muscles that pull the jaw down. (Forgive me, Ms. Michaelopolis. I don't remember the names of them from vocal pedagogy.) That's tension. And any tension anywhere in the facial muscles affects the sound... not that Beverly Sills sounded that way at all. It just looked rather odd. I don't think singers today do that. It may have been an affectation peculiar just to Sills, or it may have been the pedagogical thought at the time. (Research on singers via endoscopy was probably just getting revved up in the late-50s/early-60s)

Pedagogy, like any science, changes. Any singers around with the weird, fast vibrato so popular in the 30s and 40s? Nope. Thank goodness! And though everyone reads Enrico Caruso's treatise on singing and the singer in vocal ped., there's a lot of things in it that don't hold water in this day and age. An example would be alcohol consumption, although a) this might be cultural (Italian vs. American), and b) Caruso doesn't say to drink it in excess. In his defense, also, many scientists today agree that a glass of wine a day has an overall positive effect. Other things he says have stood the test of time. He touts a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. (Don T. has related how Pavarotti requested large platters of fresh fruits and vegetables when he was in Knoxville oh-so-many years ago.)

For protein, Caruso said that he ate primarily lean chicken and fish.

I believe he also mentions taking a brisk walk every morning, though, given the air pollution in most major industrialized cities during the early 20th century, one wonders how the scale would weigh in on if that behavior would be healthy or hazardous. In any case, the plug for daily exercise is there. As I say this, I've been sitting at my computer drinking strong coffee since I got up 3-1/2 hours ago. My chief plan of exercise for the day is walking around my parents' house with the contractor and, possibly, lifting a Blue Coast Burrito or two... not to say that anyone would ever confuse me with either Caruso--or even Mario Lanza--physique or vocal-wise.

But, regardless, Sills treatment of "The Willow Song" is wonderful. And, if I may say, physique-wise, she was pretty much a babe. I don't recall ever seeing her in the media where she didn't look dressed to the nines, always elegant and composed. The paragon of opera sopranodom, or just femininity.

Ahem. I do hope that Britney, Paris, and Nichole will read this and take heed.

Sad Day for Opera

The Reuters article on Beverly Sills dying today.

Not growing up an opera buff, I remember Beverly Sills as the host (nobody uses "hostess" anymore, right?) of An Evening at the Met, at least, I think that's what it was called, on PBS. On the occasions I watched it, her enthusiasm was infectious. She obviously loved her craft and loved sharing it with others.

I was surprised to read that she was, at one point, on the board of Time Warner. Time Warner! And they say sopranos are airheads!

The last paragraph is so sad. Her husband died last year, which I'm sure took a lot out of her.

It's an all-to-common thing, people dying shortly after their spouse passes away. You hear stories about it all the time. The strain of dealing with living without someone you've spent so much time with just wears the physical body down, which leads to all kinds of opportunistic maladies. My mom had a stroke five months after my dad passed away. She managed to hang on another year, but, at the end, I think she just got tired of being on this earth without dad.

In a way, it's kind of sweet. Even in this day and age, when some psychologists and sociologists proclaim that humans weren't meant to be monogamous throughout their entire lives, it seems that, in so many cases, they're wrong. Homo sapiens seems to mate, literally, for life... or tries to, as the case may be.

It gives those of us that have not found that special someone hope. I have always felt like I had a very naïve concept of love, a viewpoint I attribute to watching too many Disney movies when I was a kid. (Didn't Dean Jones always get Suzanne Pleshette in the end?) What if love is like the early Disney movies and all those learned "experts" are wrong?

I know. I'm a hopeless romantic.

Leaue, me, O loue which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which neuer taketh rust;
Whateuer fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beames, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clowdes, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and giue us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth drawes out to death,
And thinke how euill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heau'n, and comes of heau'nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy vttermost I see:
Eternall Loue, maintaine thy life in me.
--Sonnet 150, Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)