Tosca at Covent Garden

Came across a review of the Royal Opera's production of "Tosca" at Covent Garden in the UK's Telegraph. I get a kick out of reading these reviews. Most of them have a distinctly snooty tone, which makes them all the more fun. We laugh at Harold Duckett's reviews of KO productions, thinking them less reviews and more synopses, but I guess he's not any worse than some of these supposedly more sophisticated reviewers that work for more sophisticated newspapers and review more sophisticated opera companies/productions.

The nerve of this guy (Rupert Christiansen)! He's reviewing one of the world's top opera companies at one of the world's top performance venues, and he has the gall to complain about this and that! Yes, I know. That is the definition of "critic," after all. And were he to gush on and on about every production (compare his review to this), things would get boring very quickly. But, as it were, it's not necessarily a "panning" of the performance. He does put some positive spin on things. First, he says that this revival is better than the first in the summer of 2006 in terms of set preparation, stage management, and lighting. And then he picks his favorite singers of the evening to gush on about, sometimes throwing out rather presumptuous superlatives: "[Tenor Jonas Kaufmann] is without doubt the most persuasive Cavaradossi since Domingo's heyday." Yikes! Talk about the performance pressure! "You could be the next Domingo!" Well, I guess every tenor would die to hear something like that. Plus, it makes a great blurb for your bio. My favorite quote from the review is the superlatives aimed at Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia while simultaneously backhanding the Tosca, Micaela Carosi. I quote the paragraph here in its entirety:

Gavanelli makes an insidiously vile Scarpia, quietly sadistic but utterly ruthless in pursuit of his perverted appetite. If only he had been up against a rather more subtle Tosca than Micaela Carosi, an old-school Italian diva with a line in traffic-cop gestures and a sizeable and effective but rough-edged dramatic soprano which paid little heed to the nuances of the text.

I particularly love the "old-school Italian diva with a line of traffic-cop gestures." It kind of says it all.

It reminds me of a rather-well-known aging soprano that gave a master class and performance at UT when I was a graduate student there. In the master class, the very first thing she did after being introduced and sitting down was to throw up an admonishing finger at us and declaring, "Do not anger the singer!" She went on to recount some instance in which James Levine (James Levine!) did something to upset her and "I walked off the stage!" I knew we were in for a "treat," of sorts, and that the master class was going to be anything but boring. Things got worse that evening when she presented an amalgam of scenes from various operas under the moniker "Le Jardin d'Amour" (the garden of love) using the KOC apprentices to fill out needed characters. Suffice it to say that she had the "traffic-cop gestures" down pat, and that, combined with her horribly trite staging, her far-gone aging voice, and the most outrageous costumes imaginable turned it into an absolute riot of campiness and theater of the absurd. It was so bad, so incredibly, hilariously bad, that our director of opera at the time and the husband of a well-known UT voice teacher had to give up on holding in their laughter, dispensing with any decorum, and and just rolling in the aisles. So you can only imagine what we students were doing.

So, yeah, maybe we need critics. They allow us to put things in perspective and not believe the little worlds we create around ourselves and our performing groups... which is not to say I won't be guffawing at the next Duckett review.

The rich man's Rocky Horror Picture Show?

An Associated Press article chronicles Zurich Opera's problems with their current production of Fledermaus. Its general director, Franz Wesler-Möst, who is also music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, has refused to conduct the last two performances on May 17 and June 20 because of "artistic reasons." Apparently, Wesler-Möst is unhappy with vein of the stage director, Michael Sturminger's production, mainly, that the he has chosen to infuse the opera with vampires, complete with Dracula's castle.

Well, after all, it is called Die Fledermaus ("the bat"). lol! I guess the modern trend of juxtaposing operas against weird places and time periods goes against Wesler-Möst's staid, prude sensibilities. And one might see how he might think that. The thing that has always bothered me about Fledermaus is the lack of a direct connection of the story with the title. Those familiar with the story know that "the bat" has very little to do with the opera. The plot is based on Falke's scheme to seek revenge on his dear, old friend, Eisenstein, for leaving him passed out and dressed in a bat outfit one night when they were bar-hopping. So, really, there is no "bat" in the opera itself, just in the backstory. The opera story is based on the tried-and-true Mozartian plot of mistaken identities, character substitutions, and a big finale where all is revealed and all are forgiven.

Now, how Sturminger was able to bring his "vampirical" vision into the plot remains to be seen, unless you happened to have gone to the previous two performances, which Wesler-Möst conducted. Ironically, in one of those twists that Mozart's librettists would have been intrigued by, W-M's (I'm sick of typing "Wesler-Möst"--do you know how hard it is to generate an umlauted "o"?) performances will be seen by more people, as the two performances he did conduct will be edited for release on DVD in a few months. So... he won't conduct the remaining two live performances but will be forever perpetuated as the conductor of that production on a digital format likely to last for the next 25-30 years.

Of course, the production could turn out to be a hit, a tour de force destined to be brought up whenever opera cognisceti talk of Fledermaus or mentioned on some future, mutated version of Dan Berry's "Echoes of a Golden Age" radio program on WUOT... but, judging from the Vienna Times (Wiener Zeitung) review of it (or, rather, Babelfish.com's machine translation thereof), that doesn't appear to be the case. The review is generally lukewarm, which is what the review says of the production: run-of-the-mill, humdrum, "phoned in." (BTW, Orlofsky turns out to be the Dracula, I think.) So maybe W-M's rep is safe.

Maybe the Zurich will forgive him, or those that have seen the production, sympathize with him. He's due to direct Carmen this summer and Rosenkavalier, Figaro, and Così next year. One would think that those would be tame productions. (Though, with Carmen, we KOans can speak from experience on outré performances.) I guess if some stage director was off his/her rocker, they might have a red-painted horse and rider (naked?) on stage for Rosenkavalier. After all, those northern European houses are well-known for their bizarre productions. Considering that, a few years ago, I was reading in Opera Digest about a Handel opera at... maybe Vienna State Opera?... and looked down to find a picture of a giant dinosaur on the stage, a Dracula in Fledermaus wouldn't be quite so odd.

The Future of Opera?

Happened to catch this story in the British paper The Guardian. The Royal Opera House is looking for talented film-makers to produce a version of Romeo and Juliet. The catch: The film can only be 40-seconds long! It's true! The short, which can be filmed with camcorder or--get this!--cell phone camera can be uploaded to the Royal Opera House's YouTube site and voted on. The most popular entry will be featured all over England in a set of advertisements promoting the Royal Ballet's production of R&J.

I mean, there's the popular Complete Abridged Works of William Shakespeare play, but this is a whole 'nother level! This is like The Inquirer's version of the Reader's Digest version of R&J as edited by producers from MTV! How comprehensive can you be in 40 seconds? Sorry, that's "up to 40 seconds." It could be shorter!

I think I can give a shot at the script. Feel free to borrow and adapt this for your entry. I'm not entering. I never can hold my cameraphone steady enough.

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Romeo (to Juliet): You looked really sexy in your nightie on that balcony.

Juliet: You're kind of Studville yourself in those tights. Is that a sword in your pocket? Or...

Romeo (interrupting): But our families hate each other.

Juliet: Yeah, and you killed my bro, dude.

Romeo: Sorry 'bout that. Let's run off together.

Juliet: Great idea!

Lord Capulet (to Juliet): As if! You're marrying Paris!

Juliet: I'd just as soon fake my own suicide.

Friar Lawrence (to Juliet): Seriously? Here, drink this.

Juliet: I'm sleepy.... (nods off).

Romeo: Did you say you were dying? Then I'll die, too! (Takes poison, dies.)

Juliet (rousing herself): What? Romeo's dead. Alas! (Stabs herself, dies.)

Capulets, and Montagues: How sad. Let's not fight anymore.

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Yeah, you're probably right. Too long for the contest and the YouTube generation. But, maybe, if I get LonelyGirl15 and the "Leave Britney alone!" guy to play the leads...

Postlude

Hard to believe that the Tosca is already over, much less the whole season. You just get in the "habit" of seeing everybody every couple of months during the year, and then at the end, bam! Gone for the whole summer. Of course, some we won't see again. Graduations, new jobs--either a new one here that will require a greater amount of time or one in another city far away--marriages, and other of what my tax preparation software calls "life events" will contribute to the attrition.

Of course, Jennifer and Aaron, long-time (long-suffering?) members of the KO chorus, who have paid no attention to that snotty "You'll never get anywhere if you sing in the chorus" attitude that a few nameless students at UT have, are graduating and moving on to the University of Wisconsin to pursue higher degrees of learning... that is, after they get married up in Buffalo. I didn't hear honeymoon plans, but, then again, I'm a guy, and we guys don't ask those kinds of "touchy-feely" questions very often. Of course, it's common nowadays for college kids who get married to put off the honeymoon for awhile, either due to financial or time constraints, so that might be the case with J&A. And they'll certainly have lots of places to explore once they get up to Madison. We wish them the best. A quick check of the web tells me that Madison has a city opera company. They're doing Butterfly, Così, and Faust next year, so it sounds like a fun season if the happy couple decides to pursue continued opera chorus (or better!) membership. And the university opera program presents two major works and many one-acts and opera nights.

Every year at this time we say, "We ought to get together and do something this summer," but we rarely do. It's rather ironic that summers, historically looked upon as a season of relaxation and leisure, have become one of the busiest times of the year. We try to cram everything that we've been missing out on throughout the year into three months of nonstop action. Apparently, there is a congratulatory party for Jennifer and Aaron's wedding scheduled sometime in July, so that will be one opportunity. Another, and one I certainly hope can happen (Oh, Lawsy! I hope can happen!) is that my brother and I are planning on throwing a grand bash to celebrate the completion of the renovation of our house. One hopes we have enough money left over to do so! Stay tuned, either for that announcement or for news of my commitment to Lakeshore Mental Health Facility. ("I don't know, doctor. He just wigged out and starting yelling something about cabinets not coming in on time or something.") One or the other will happen, I fear.

Well, I was planning on doing some kind of synopsis of the year, but that will have to wait for another day. I have a very large, furry, black kitty at my feet currently that is demanding her Fancy Feast Grilled Chicken Feast ASAP. TTYL!

Here We Go Again

So, Monday night's the big night! The first evening of staging... and, knowing the speed at which David Bamberger works, probably the last. Certainly, Carroll Freeman I admire for coming into staging completely prepared, but David takes it to another level. He comes in knowing exactly how he wants things to be staged. Not only that, but he also has figured out each character's inner dialog. (Sometimes it's as simple as "You've finished singing and so you go off stage.") I imagine that Carroll will get to that level when he's as old as David.

Not that there's much staging to do or learn. The sops and tens probably get the most complex staging in the sacristy scene. We'll probably need to dart back and forth, yadda-yadda. Certainly, with the kids on stage, there will be enough pandemonium to get the point across. The Te Deum is pretty much park-and-bark. We might get to process in during the initial intonation of the Te Deum, but I'm betting that'll pretty much be it.

Pregnant with Art

Since last week, I'd wanted to write a bit on Verdi's recitatives, but I couldn't think of enough to say. I'm working on a fairly difficult Bach recit and aria right now for church, so I was kind of attuned to the recits in Forza. However, performance practice is one of those long-winded topics that requires copious research and long references to obscure articles written in in the 1930s. Believe it or not, it's something hat I find not all that unpleasant; nevertheless, I wrote all the research papers I'm going to write getting my Masters. Plus, I'm not sure I had a solid point to make with it, except that Bach and Handel wrote recits, and Mozart, and Verdi. How they were related was where I began running into problems.

So, here we are in production week already. Everybody's happy-go-lucky mood has turned to dour and dim. Trying to remember new staging, you forget the new dynamics; trying to remember the dynamics, you forget the words; trying to remember the words, you forget to carry your prop on stage; trying to remember to get your prop, you forget your staging. It's a vicious cycle--a vicious cycle that you hope will get better in the two rehearsals we have left. But you're so frustrated by things, you just get "over it," "it" meaning everything that you've been working on for about two-and-a-half months total, not counting the holiday break. You're saying to yourself, "Let's just get this over. Tonight's and tomorrow's rehearsals I can just plow through. Then I'll have a glorious evening off--except for making something for the cast party--and then I can survive Friday night, have a little fun at the party, then enjoy Saturday and plow through the last performance on Sunday to enjoy going to dinner or (dare I say!) going home to bed."

To be honest, I get that way nearly every production. Maybe if I wasn't struggling with some problems with my vocal technique, maybe if I had a body that fell inside the bell-curve of sizes of costumes that Malabar has to offer, maybe if I was a better dancer, maybe if my years of experience with stage makeup meant I was getting better at it, maybe if I paid better attention... It goes on from there. Eventually, I get to the point where I wonder why am I still doing this if it's such a frustrating experience.

I mean, are we making a difference? Are we affecting people's lives with our art? There are people out there in East Tennessee that don't even know that Knoxville has an opera company. Heck! There are downtown Knoxvillians that don't know it! Will John (or Jane) Q. Public, who's still thinking about Tuesday night's "American Idol" and wondering what the praise choruses will be at church on Sunday morning care if "La Vergine's" dynamics are off... or will he even know it. It used to be you could almost bet that, at some point in a person's childhood, they would have had to take piano lessons; used to be at some point a person learned about singing in some choir somewhere; used to be people would listen in every Saturday afternoon for the Met broadcasts.

That's all in the past. Our lovely education system has failed to create an art-wise public. Yes, the three Rs are important, and, yes, it is important that we teach our children well enough to be competitive in the global market and changing technologies. It's also important that we teach them the value of exercise, the tenets of good sportsmanship, and the variety of activities, from football to table tennis, that allow us to burn off stress and have a little fun.

But it's also important to teach the history of art. Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? What was Mozart dealing with when he wrote his Requiem? Who's Twyla Tharp? Why did Beethoven only write one opera? How did others in the past express themselves? Over all, these questions amount to the question "How can I express myself in a way that is unique and says something about me?" Isn't that art? Shouldn't that be important? Wouldn't it make the world a better place for people to write, draw, dance, or paint their feelings of angst rather than expressing them with a gun?

Wouldn't it be great if, at some point on Friday night or Sunday afternoon, that one person in the audience be inspired with Verdi's story? Or touched by the tragedy of his characters in Forza? "How am I like Alvaro?" "Poor Leonora! I feel for her! I know what it's like to lose a loved one under tragic circumstances." "What a silly vendetta! ... But, you know that big fight I had with my sister last year? We haven't spoken since. I should call her."

So, here we are, back with ill-fitting costumes, a stage setup that wasn't really designed for acoustic music, ten-year-old-makeup, and a shoestring budget that gets thinner by the minute, not to mention whatever "baggage" each of us brings to the theater from our "real" lives. How in the world are we going to reach those people out there in the audience?

Maybe that's the truly greatest art: Creating art when you don't think or feel like you can. Art is not a sure thing. Sometimes something we strive to create just doesn't turn out as well as we'd imagined it. But, then again, is it our job to decide that? Sure, we are educated in all the aspects of what it takes to make "good art," and we certainly wish for something that satisfies our own idea of what "good art" is. But, ultimately, it's not up to us. We'd like that control, but it's the opera-goer that has the final say.

Recently, in remodeling our parents' house, my brother and I had to move our dad's paintings. Dad was a graphic artist by trade, but enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time. (My brother inherited Dad's ability to draw and, assumedly, paint. Mom's side of the family was the musical one; I got that.) When we started pulling his paintings out of storage, we realized that he had done many paintings that no one else had ever seen before--not even immediate family! All told, there were about 60 paintings, maybe a dozen or so that were new to us. He'd just painted them, taken a look at them, said "Nah, that's not too good." and put them away. And yet they were beautiful! When we donated them to our home church to be auctioned off to raise money for missions programs, people went absolutely nuts! "Oh! Your dad was so talented. I have seen several of his landscapes, but I had no idea he had done seascapes. And this portrait of an old Native American woman is just wonderful." Dad hadn't been satisfied with his output, but the people that mattered, those that saw his art, that consumed it, certainly were.

So bide that jacket that doesn't fit too well, try to keep the dynamics down during the monastery scenes, don't worry too much about how well you can move your feet, and so what if you can't sing that high G absolutely perfectly, you are creating art! And someone out there is listening!

Convoluted Doesn't Begin to Describe It

I was just rereading the Met's plot synopsis of Forza. Either late-19th-century Italians had masterful memories or the opera houses had scoreboards so that the audience could keep track of the plot and characters. ("So, you say Leonora has already sung three arias and it's not even the end of Act I yet? Incredible!")

I guess, maybe, in our TV-plot-soaked society, we're used to bad writing. We've learned to recognize it. "Sarah Conner Chronicles" on Fox? Yep. Pure drivel. "Survivor IV"? Supposed to be real, but c'mon! They haven't picked regular people to be on that show since the original. "Walker: Texas Ranger" (on Hallmark family channel for some unfathomable reason)? Chuck Norris: Who started in American "B" chop-suey movies and went downhill from there; best acting so far is done in the "Classy, but Strong" Honda commercial where he doesn't say anything. There's a reason "Walker" is on an obscure cable network!

But in the 19th century, most people, if they were able to read at all, didn't have the National Enquirer at the local market. So they had to read books and treatises and things like that from the great classicists of the time. They hadn't read any trash, so a plot like Forza would seem very intriguing, different. There was probably a cultural predisposition, too. Americans don't have a whole lot of banishments in their history. (I vote we start with "W.") But Italians, aside from the fact that they have about 1,000 years more worth of history behind them, are used to hearing about a princess or marquis being turned out, and every family's gone through at least one Hatfields-vs.-McCoys blood feud at one point or another. So maybe opera plots would make more sense to them.

In addition, the world has gradually "sped up" over the years. The last vestige of arts patience was probably with Wagner operas or Mahler symphonies and things begin to get shorter and shorter from there on out. Nowadays, a pop star can't possibly write a 6-minute song and expect it to get any airplay. You can't even find an unabridged version of "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio anymore, despite this or that station's "Classic Rock" moniker. No network with any sense would even dare propose a miniseries in this day and age.

I think about the early American settlers and how they endured months and months and months of hardship and toil just to get where they could find a home; today, I get irritated when I have to go all the way out to Farragut to check on the remodeling my late parents' house. Oh, that Cedar Bluff and Turkey Creek Traffic! I'm certain that any Oregon-bound conestoga wagon driver would be equally vexed at having to drive all of 15 minutes on a well-ordered, extremely smooth and relatively flat interstate highway along with a thousand other wagons... or would he or she? They probably wouldn't enjoy passing convenience stores every two minutes, too. I, likewise, would merely laugh if I saw a snake bite my Honda Accord's tire. It would more than likely kill the snake rather than vice-versa. The to-be Oregonians' horse would be another matter entirely.

So, yes, maybe operas don't make sense to the modern acclimated mind. Think about how little we know about Biblical times, how we struggle to understand why people did what they did in that period. Will Verdi's operas be collected and published a thousand years in the future? Will anyone even begin to understand them then? I imagine people asking things like: Why would Don Carlo want to kill Alvaro? The whole thing was just an accident. Can't he see that? And, after all, Alvaro does make his sister very happy. Why would Don Carlo be so hung up on the color of Alvaro's skin? Why didn't he let the authorities track Alvaro down instead of traipsing all over Europe haphazardly trying to run into his father's murderer? And c'mon! He doesn't even recognize the guy when he next sees him?! Plastic surgery must have been more advanced than was originally thought back then, but Verdi makes no mention of Alvaro's operation. (There is that surgeon character in there, though.) That would be the only way Don Carlo wouldn't recognize him, right? Wonder how many people Don Carlo killed because he thought that they were Alvaro? Seems like that kind of anger and indiscriminant use of a weapon would get him locked away in a Super-max pretty quick.

Ah, well, I just get paid for acting the story out. Not my job to play Roger Ebert... or even Tom Eberts, for that matter... and attempt to understand Verdi's plots.

It's Always the Guys

Wow! An unexpected (Monday) night off for the guys. As Don said in his email, "A rare occurrence." Normally us guys are there, seems like, 24/7, or at the very least every night. I keep waiting and hoping for an opera, or at least a scene. where the men aren't involved and, thus, get to come late or leave early. I think the last all-x-chromosome scene we had was in Flying Dutchman, way back in 2000. I suppose in an art form that is largely male-dominated it's to be expected. But it would be nice for the guys to occasionally get a night off while the women toil away. Since I don't see Dialogues of the Carmelites being performed in the near future, I guess I'll just have to dream. (Trust me, you thought Salome was a snoozer!)

Here we are in the second week of staging and we haven't even met the full principal cast yet. What kind of opera did Verdi think he was writing? Granted, tons of chorus numbers have been cut to get the show in under the three-hour musician's union "service" time allotment, but this is just plain weird not knowing who your co-performers are. Wouldn't it be strange to not have met a principal until opening night:

"Excuse me, you don't look familiar. Are you hear as someone's guest?"

"Oh, no. I'm so-and-so and I'm playing so-and-so."

Awkwarrrrd!

Ah, well. Hard to believe we'll be moving into the theater and doing the stiz this weekend. I see we're doing the sitz on Sunday at 2:45 and then Teching the first two acts at 8. Waitaminute! The only chorus in the first two acts are the men! Great planning! Superbowl Sunday, perhaps the most masculine holiday (C'mon! It's time we admitted it) of the year, and us guys are going to be at opera while the womenfolk sit at home and attempt to ignore the next to last vestige of football until August (the Pro Bowl being the last). I mean, it's being touted as an incredible mismatch and, statistically, will probably be a rout, but a bad day with an uncompetitive game on the tube is better than a good one without a game.

Besides, as a Vol fan, you gotta feel some kind of genetic kinship for Eli, and even if you're not comfortable with that, he's a former SEC player. Surely Eli won't embarrass himself any worse than he and Peyton (and Archie and Olivia) do in that goofy "Double Stuff (Oreo) Racing League" commercial. (Cooper and the dogs, apparently, were the only family members with enough sense to bail on that one.)

Well, opera time. Gotta go. Sorry about the spazzed-out entry.

A New Year, A New Production

New Year's. The cold, clean air is cut by cheers from numerous stadiums as college bowl games are played out in a seemingly endless progression of television hype; whereupon, the fans come to the numbing thought that the season is over! The fever pitch of the NFL season, content with Sundays, Monday nights, and an occasional Thursday night, begins to monopolize football fans on now-vacated Saturdays; finally pundits can begin their speculation on Superbowl teams backed up by myriad statistics and not just their "gut instinct." College basketball teams, content to crush hugely inferior teams for the past two months, now turn the season toward the dreaded foes, conference opponents.

And, for those of us involved in Knoxville Opera, there comes the realization that the holidays are over and, yes, our (unmemorized) music is buried somewhere under several hundred Christmas cards and the first rehearsals of the new year are only days away.

Anyway, that was a month ago. Now, we're already a full week into staging. (One would hope that music has been memorized by now, though there are always a few laggards.) And, with the always-active staging of Carroll Freeman, comes the realization that we ate waaaaaaaayyyyy too many Christmas cookies over the holidays and are huffing and puffing about the rehearsal stage, having to make the decision between sucking in sweet oxygen to keep cell in our bodies alive or singing the choruses with appropriate gusto. Oh, well. We didn't need those brain cells anyway. We didn't lose any more than we did with a week of binge drinking our freshman year in college. Eventually, we'll start to drool out of our mouths and wonder why that's happening, but by then we'll believe that it's 1907 and we're singing in the Met chorus, doing Butterfly with Farrar, Homer, and Caruso, with Puccini himself in the audience.

Ah! Madama Butterfly. Now there's a fairly understandable plot, despite all the years that passed during the second intermission. At least Puccini used plot lines that, while rather melodramatic (Duh! It's Puccini!) and trite, were at least plausible. I would like to think that worst screenwriter in Hollywood--that is, the ones that haven't "made it" yet and, thus, are still non-union and writing--could pull together a less complex, believable, and coherent plot than the one Verdi used for Forza. One might posit that Forza's plot line is as, uh... "great" as the music to the Hymn of the Nations. At least we have the amazing plot twists that we've come to expect from Verdi to fall back on. We know, even before the curtain goes up, that the lead character is either going to unknowingly kill a sibling or child or the sibling or child will unknowingly kill them. That's a given, right? M. Knight Shyamalan should write plot twists so well. I suppose that, had UFOs and aliens been a source of discussion in mid-19th-century Italy, we'd probably be watching a Verdiesque adaptation of Signs. We'll leave that up to a future episode of The Twilight Zone or the next incarnation of Jean Cocteau to imagine.

You know, it's kind of nice to be able to work with the same director again and again. You see facets, subtleties in the various productions that you might've missed had we been on the one-opera-one-director treadmill that was previous de rigeur at KO. Carroll is, more or less, a known quantity, which is not to say that Carroll's productions are staid and predictable. I mean, it's like, over the holidays, as you're eating those previously-alluded-to Christmas cookies, you know you're thinking, "Oh, man! I'm going to pay for eating these when Carroll starts staging us at the end of January. I'll be so out of breath." Caveat emptor.

Adio, Luciano

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070906/ts_nm/italy_pavarotti_dc_9;_ylt=AkV_RoTJmsDMj1Zedm9K8h0E1vAI

That's the Reuter's article on Pavarotti's death.

What an amazing voice! And his technique was flawless! Can you ever remember his sounding being forced or pushed? It always flowed from his mouth like water. There was energy, there was intensity, but at no time did he ever sound like he was out of control.

I remember watching a Met broadcast on PBS. When they cut to a closeup of Pavarotti, something caught my eye: his jaw. I literally looked like his mouth was just hanging open. How many singers can claim that?

In voice lessons, George Bitzas used to make me grab my jaw and move it around while I was singing. I never got good at it. (George, on the other hand, could move his almost halfway to his ears, seemed like.) But, in watching Pavarotti, I realized why I had that tension: lack of breath support. If the breath, the sound is properly supported down in the torso, there's not need to "squeeze out" notes from the mouth. They just flow. (I did get better, BTW. I found out that--and it's a stupid thing that so many of us don't do it--practicing a lot helped develop breath support.)

As singers, we've always heard about the Bel Canto style of singing (I'm speaking of the first Bel Canto school in the Baroque era) and the horror stories about the teaching technique. An examples: students were forced to sing only one tone over and over again for weeks on end until they were able to sing it perfectly before advancing to two notes, three notes, etc. Pretty wild, but I guarantee you that that kind of tedium would motivate you to focus on proper breath support. There's no way around it.

I don't know how Pavarotti learned to sing. According to his bio, both his parents loved to sing, though not professionally. (Did have an autobiography out? Have to check on that.) But somehow he developed a tremendous amount of breath support that allowed him to do amazing things. What was it? Nine high Cs during a performance of Daughter of the Regiment at the Met? Incredible. And I'll bet that none of them sound forced or strained. I can't say that, on the occasions I hear a Met radio broadcast, many singers can claim that kind of sound. You always know when they're pushing like heck to get that note out.



I recall when Joe Wolverton was here doing Tales of Hoffman. That was my first production where I was an actual performer on stage. I had done supertitles for about a year previously, and if memory serves--not that it does so much anymore with me--Joe had done a Pinkerton with us with aplomb. But with Hoffman, it was his first attempt at the role and, as terrific a singer as he was, by the Third Act he was, as Mr. Bitzas used to say, "living on the principal and not the interest." I guess a more well-known addage would be "writing checks his body couldn't cash." But I'm willing to bet that Pavarotti never had a problem. (Though I can't say for certain whether he did the role. Google revealed some arias from the opera on CD but I didn't see a complete work.)



In cielo.