L'Étoile and Little Women come to fruition

After four plus weeks of rehearsals at the Opera Academy of California, both L'Étoile and Little Women opened at the end of this week. L'Étoile, an opéra comique by Emmanuel Chabrier, has naturally been heavily on my mind, as its rehearsals have been an integral part of my daily routine. Yet as much time as I have spent with it, Thursday night's première, which I did not sing, offered me the first opportunity to watch the show in its entirety. I was able to realize how decadent and funny the opera is, in no small part thanks to our director Yefim Maizel's exuberant and detailed staging. His insistence on our doing gestures precisely resulted in a continuous and logical thread of motion; all of the starting and stopping in rehearsals came into focus when I was able to see the finished product. With simple props and furniture, the stage became lush. Our limited numbers (and budget!) did not impede his cohesive vision.

King Ouf in disguise in L'Étoile.

Maizel has been crucial in shepherding us into our larger-than-life characters (not least of all because he has the ungrateful job of taking charge of the summer program as a whole), but he was not alone. In rehearsals, our conductor David Sloss and pianist John Ballerino, had the patience to lead a wily troupe of singers through the treacherous phrases of French operetta, along with Marcie Stapp, our language and diction coach. As French is my mother tongue, I have an unfair advantage, but I do recognize how difficult it can be to navigate the clipped, wordy and extremely idiomatic texts, as well as the musical gestures that accompany them. And my cohorts largely have risen to the occasion, producing clear pronunciation and intent. I cannot speak for everyone else, but after the trials and tribulations of rehearsals, piecing together numbers and dialogues, I am excited to perform the show when I arrive at the theater, excited to bring this wonderfully weird world to life: a buffoon king, a young princess, a lovesick pedlar, etc... that manage, for all of their over-the-top hijinks to be earnest and likable characters. Watching the opera on Thursday night from the audience made me look forward to my own Saturday début all the more.

Act II opens with feather fans and the adulation of court ladies.

As we have been preparing L'Étoile in one side of the building, Mark Adamo's 1998 opera Little Women has been rehearsing in the other. I've not had any part in the creation process, so I watched the opening on Friday night, as well as last night's cast, purely as an audience member. As with last week's Idomeneo, I was amazed at the preparation and polish of the endeavor. The singers have tackled music that can be vocally challenging with gusto, no doubt aided by Maestro Jun Nakabayashi's supportive and encouraging conducting. The straightforward, human, element that Nakabayashi has culled in his treatment of the score, director David Cox has found in his approach to the staging. Once again, the means are meager, but he has created in a small, dark theater a warm setting for the March family. He has masterfully ensured that the scenes in which multiple conversations overlap are clear but connected. And he has charged his actors with bringing the characters to life without artifice, a challenge that my fellow singers have met beautifully.

Beth's moving death scene in Little Women.

I watched and took part in this weekend's shows with a sense of pride and accomplishment. The witty, uproarious Étoile and heartfelt Little Women were good complements to each other, and, judging from the enthusiastic applause, both appealed to the impressed audience. For those of you in the San Francisco area, I highly recommend catching both shows: Little Women closes tonight at Fort Mason Center's Southside Theatre at 7.30; L'Étoile plays in the Northside Theatre this afternoon at 2.30, as well as the next Friday (7.30), Saturday (7.30) and Sunday (2.30).

Sick day

We're in the most tiring stretch of the program: the final rehearsals, and the openings, of our three productions. Last night was the opening night of Idomeneo; next week Little Women and L'Étoile kick off. These are busy times!

I watched the Idomeneo production with a great deal of admiration and pride - I was rather amazed at what they were able to create with few people, few means and little time. But by the second act I could also feel something far less pleasant brewing as my nose began to run. I was coming down with a head cold.

via cuteoverload

I was was granted permission to miss today's rehearsal run and instead stay at home. The woman with whom I am doubled graciously filled in for me, and I've been staying in bed sleeping and reading The Imperfectionists. Fittingly, my character has a short aria about sneezing, so let's pretend I'm working on my interpretation. Friends, I am quite determined to be in fighting shape within a few days as we head into dress rehearsals!

Language in two masterclasses

The masterclasses keep coming! This week we had two additional classes, each dealing with text and language.

On Thursday, Erie Mills gave class at Old First Church to some of our Little Women cast members with a focus on [American] English diction and, more accurately, phrasing. Far from spending hours nitpicking at vowels and consonants, she urged the performers to sing their text, not as a series of syllables, but as full phrases, concentrating on prosody. This is the same work that we must do in a general musical sense: seeing beyond the collection of individual notes to the phrases they make up. The former instance turns syllables into sentences; the latter pitches into melodies. In both cases, the result is actual meaning.

Looking for fluidity and strength.

Her insistence that the singers approach their pieces naturally and organically extended to the technical issues she addressed as well. Mills urged them to use their entire bodies to support their sound, thinking of a breath's trajectory as going beyond just mouth to lungs and back. Her approach was both energetic and relaxed as she reminded the performers to pace themselves and not to attempt super-human feats: "Remember you love to sing." "Human beings breathe. It's okay."

This emphasis on "humanness" in singing is one I take fully to heart. Yes, we are training ourselves to do extraordinary things with a body part that most people take for granted. But we must also remember that our voices are natural extensions of ourselves after all. Why not approach them in singing, both physically and psychologically, more like we do in familiar, spoken territory?

French vowels.

Marcie Stapp's class on Saturday night in the Southside Theater at Fort Mason dealt with more of the nitty gritty aspects of languages. She tackled major themes of diction in Italian, German and French, each language represented by two performers. But although the focus was on very specific pronunciation questions, Stapp's aim was very similar to Mills': making the text come out, naturally, easily and with the character of its language in mind. The adjustments she made to the singers' approach to sounds were not meant to add more rigid rules to the task of singing, but rather to make singing less difficult. As in Mills' class, the ultimate goal was to communicate humanly, and to do so with as little interference as possible.

Masterclass with Sheri Greenawald

Last night was the first of OAC's masterclass series at Old First Church, and I had the opportunity and great pleasure of singing for Sheri Greenawald. This was my first time doing so, but I had seen her work with others before in San Francisco and Boston, so I had some idea what to expect. As always, Greenawald was detail-driven and supportive, and a riot to watch.

While she did address a few technical concerns as they came up, Greenawald concentrated the bulk of her efforts on reshaping our interpretations. She fastidiously focused our visions of the scene for our arias, our emotional arc as dictated by the text and the music. Especially in the context of a masterclass, where time is limited, reshaping the interpretative form of a piece can work miracles in transforming the performance, so much so that the singing often improves too. More often than not, this task is about honing on the specifics of drama (or comedy, as the case may be), and I find it invaluable to have a pair of experienced eyes to give me a fresh take. Ms. Greenawald, through her work both on and off the stage, certainly fits the bill!

Hatem Nadim, who dutifully braved The Rake's Progress and Roméo et Juliette alike.

I'm a great fan of masterclasses, both as a performer and as an audience member. Their quality, of course, relies largely on the personality and strength of the master teacher, and on the students' ability to implement new ideas quickly. Even the best masterclasses can feel long, as they can clock in at around three hours, often without intermission. But they are quite valuable, and not only for the musicians directly concerned. Most non-musicians I've invited to watch have found it fascinating to witness a piece evolve before their eyes. People with no particular connection to or interest in opera have said that they understand better the appeal of the art form because they've seen what goes into creating a skilled vocal interpretation. I encourage everyone to attend a masterclass!

Off to San Francisco

As of this picture, I had yet to fit my various sweaters and cardigans. Oi...

My bags are packed. The laundry and dishes are clean; the rubbish taken out (I forgot to do this before a two-month trip once, which resulted in a rather unwelcome homecoming surprise). Presently I will be on my way to the airport, and off to San Francisco for the next seven weeks.

Carry-on entertainment and necessities: books (About Town and Strong Opinions), notebooks, pens and cartridges, phone, wallet, haphazard embroidery, scores, passports.

I'll be part of Opera Academy of California's start-up summer program. We'll be presenting several master classes and scenes in addition to three full productions (I'll be singing Lazuli in L'Étoile). As the program is new, we will be a relatively small group of singers, so we'll be kept quite busy!

Going away also means finishing-off-the-contents-of-the-fridge meals:

Brown rice fried with lettuce, almonds and an egg for lunch yesterday...

... and eggs scrambled with cottage cheese, turmeric and pumpkin seeds on toast for breakfast today.

Procrastination

Somehow, my small break became a very long hiatus indeed. But, no matter – here I am now, back and promising not to ignore my Scrapbook any further.

I won’t go into the details of everything I’ve been up to. It’s like that awkward phone conversation with a half-forgotten friend after a long silence; there is simply too much to say, and so there is nothing to say at all.

And, somehow, it also became nearly Summer. To mark the event (driven home by last week's heat wave in New York), I went to Brighton Beach.

It's not surprising that this turned out to be such a long bout of silence on my part. Without the framework of deadlines, even loose, self-appointed ones, things easily fall by the wayside. After all, what's one more day without writing? These are the pleasures of Procrastination, my friends, that unwelcome house guest so familiar to so many of us.

I am a big procrastinator, but I am also generally productive. The magical ingredient is, of course, a concrete motivator. This is usually external: a paper deadline or the start of a rehearsal period. Breaking up the work usually requires a personal commitment to self-imposed micro-accomplishment, however, and I my track record is uneven in this department. A paper is generally relegated to an all-night typing binge, for instance, but I can't get away with this when it comes to memorizing music. I have a long history of cramming for tests, but there are too many factors to control when it comes to performance - movement, harmony, text and character conjured in real time - for me to trust a haphazard memory bank.

Ah! To live on the edge! Charley Chase rides a bike, via Rides a Bike.

Yet things do seem to pile up; I am not perfect, after all. Currently, I'm finishing the process of learning a fair heap of music for a quickly approaching summer program with a certain amount of panic. (As anyone who's had a conversation with me in the past month will tell you.) Therein lies the ugly side of simultaneous predilection toward achievement and procrastination!

Our hero, tired of practicing and memorizing.