Revisiting Chiaroscuro

I just got home from Philadelphia, a city to which I had never been before. One of the highlights of our mini-vacation was a trip to the beautiful Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was featuring an impressionism exhibition. I've always loved impressionist art, and this exhibit was particularly gorgeous.

One painting that caught my eye was Renoir's "Peonies." Renoir is usually known for his nudes and for pictures of people - I haven't seen that many of his still lifes. This painting reminded me of the blog I wrote several years ago in response to a performance given by a student of mine who had worked for months on the song "Astonishing," a long song from Little Women that requires layers of mood and the ability to switch vocal colors to match the journey that Jo is taking. The student and I spent months on it, only to have her director tell her, the night before the performance, that she wanted her to belt it all the way through, and, in fact, if she couldn't hit the high note (an e-flat) in a full, hard, no-mix belt, that she should just sing a different note. Which she did. It completely undermined our work together and showed a lack of respect from a colleague that, in all honestly, had a great deal to do with why I left Milwaukee. (But that's another story.)

I feel that what we had tried to get (and had succeeded!) in the three months leading up to the performance was akin to Renoir's painting duplicated below - a vase of flowers that are all in the same color family, but are not all one color.  Not only are there red flowers, but there are other colors, there is light, and there is shadow. The impressionists discovered that shadow was not brown or black, as had been commonly shown in paintings, but rather a reflection of the colors in the surrounding objects. A song shouldn't be all one color, or simply black and white, but reflect what is all around it. The text, the emotion, what has happened in the story and what is yet to happen. Having that palette of colors and the ability to draw upon them is what allows the artist to create and serve his/her art.

Strive for finding the colors within as you seek the right way to sing a song.  Those colors may change, depending on your perspective. Monet and Renoir set up easels at the same location and painted the same scenes, side-by-side - but the pictures are not the same (La Grenouillère, 1869). Each found a different way to interpret the same view.

*Caveat: I do not blame the singer for her decision to throw out all the work we'd done - she was under a great deal of pressure from an extremely intimidating director - who was an excellent stage director and choreographer, but was not knowledgeable of vocal training.*

Why I - self-care

This has nothing to do with singing but it just annoyed me this morning in a post on someone else's wall. This is my response.

If you think that I am not authentic because

1. I wear makeup.
2. I get my hair done. Cut and colored. 
3. I get my eyelashes done.
4. I may or may not have done injectables in the past and would do them again if I had the money. Assuming I've done them in the past. 
5. I like clothes that fit me well, are comfortable AND make me feel attractive.
6. I work out to feel and look better. Not as much as I'd like to or should but I do.

If you think any of these make me phony or superficial or less authentic than you are, then YOU DON'T KNOW ME.

And don't you dare suggest that I'm deceiving myself if I can take care of myself in the way that I like and also be a vital, creative, and damn powerful force of nature.

There. 

No Autotune Necessary

Here are ten isolated vocal tracks of pop singers (the link says 11, but the one of Idina Menzel has been disabled - pity).

While we all knew (I'm using the Royal We here) that Ann Wilson and Freddie Mercury were rock gods, it's nice to know that even contemporary artists like One Direction have chops. And that Beyoncé's voice can stand on its own. It's heartbreaking to hear how incredible Whitney Houston had been, knowing how her voice wound up, as well as how incredible Amy Winehouse was, knowing how she wound up - and wondering if she would've wound up going down the same vocal path as Whitney Houston if she'd lived as long.

And it's nice to hear isolated vocal tracks that are good, instead of ones we can poke fun at. And with that in mind, I will not post recordings of Linda McCartney or Britney Spears.

Why I sing OPERA

Last year, I returned to the stage after a ten year break. I did three shows - Edward II, Sound of Music, and O'er the Ramparts. One was a cabaret style frame for a straight play, in which I improvised a character, Sally Fitzgerald Kelly, owner and proprietor of the Black & White Bar. The second was a classic musical, and the third a world premiere musical. And then in June of this year, I did another musical, Music Man, in which I played Mrs. Paroo. This show had a special significance to me - it was the first show I was ever in, as a chorister at Hamilton High School.

Doing musicals was what I intended to do when I went into music. I loved all the classic musicals. But when I went to college, that wasn't the direction I was steered toward. There were no musical theater degree programs in those days. Everything was classical. So, I wound up being an opera singer, with my first professional gig right out of college with the Florentine Opera in Carmen. And I put aside musicals for the longest time - I sang for 7 seasons with Washington Opera (now Washington National Opera), I did Gilbert & Sullivan with the Young Vic in Baltimore and Victorian Lyric in DC, I sang with Wolf Trap Opera, Washington Concert Opera, Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, and then when I came to Wisconsin, I did a couple of shows with Lyric Opera of Chicago, toured with Opera for the Young out of Madison, did a show with Dupage Opera Theater, with Chicago Opera Theater, three shows with Skylight, and then.... everything stopped.  We won't discuss why. but it did.

But last weekend, I returned to the opera stage as Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro with Carroll Opera Theater. And I felt at home again. So - why do I sing opera when musical theater was my dream?

I sing opera because musical theater wasn’t an option back when I was in college. Not only because of the way education was structured in those days, but because the musicals on Broadway were dance-oriented. And in the case of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express, you had to be able to skate. I was neither a dancer nor a skater. So it wasn't an option.

I sing opera because that’s the way my voice seems to work. I don't have a timbre that lends itself to pop-y musical theater. It works with the legit stuff, and I intend to continue to pursue those kinds of roles. But I remember buying sheet music for a Stevie Nicks song and taking it home to play on the piano. As I sang, "Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom," I stopped and said to myself, "I sound... stupid!" And I'd never had a voice lesson at that point. It wasn't a question of being overtrained and losing my natural sound. My natural sound IS classical.

But most of all, I sing opera because I love opera. And I’d forgotten how much I love opera. I'm waitlisted for Washington National Opera chorus and I am kicking myself up and down the block for not making myself available for Carmen. I don't know if that would've made a difference in their casting decisions - but I've done the show twice before, and doing it again would be sheer heaven. It's a lot of work, true. But I'd love it.


And although I identify as a voice teacher who is a musical theater specialist and I do love musical theater and want to continue having it as part of my life, I am an opera singer.

Has musical theater been a boon or a detriment to my return to the opera stage?

• Musical theater has enhanced my performing. Having done dialogue has improved my ability to do recitative in a way that doing recitative never did for me doing dialogue.
• Although for awhile it seemed that my operatic resonance had retreated because of all the work I'd been doing in contemporary commercial music as a teacher, I have found the balance and I don't sound like a musical theater singer when I'm singing opera (and vice versa).
• The staging I did for my studio showcases in Milwaukee has improved my own acting in a way that years of performing at places like the Kennedy Center never did.

I'm hoping that more of this is ahead - although my next gig is Madame Dilly in Bernstein Remembered in NYC in October. But I'm coming up with a list of roles that I can see myself doing in both genres, which may be my next blog.

Because I will be blogging more. Count on it.

Catching up....

The ease of posting to Facebook and tweeting on Twitter means that I don't get around to blogging very often. It's been over one year since I last wrote, and in that time, I've done four roles (with another one coming up in a week), sung in two oratorios, performed on a couple of recitals, added a new college to my teaching load, given a workshop on musical theater technique, and moved.

I'm going to write about the process of getting back into opera and how it's not like riding a bike. It's work, and I definitely am out of the practice of preparing a role. And that will be the subject of my next blog, which will probably be after the show opens and closes (unlike musical theater, which usually has extended runs, opera tends to be a single weekend).

But I'm still here, and I hope to start writing again.

Bolcom & Morris

A few weeks ago, I had the honor and privilege of attending both a master class and a recital given by mezzo-soprano Joan Morris and her composer/pianist husband, William Bolcom. I have been a fan of Bolcom & Morris for a long time, dating back to my discovery of Mr. Bolcom's first two volumes of Cabaret Songs back in the early 1990s, when I performed them on the In Series at Mt. Vernon College as part of a quartet. (That was an interesting "3Bs" program - usually the "3Bs" are Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but in this case, it was Bizet, Brahms and Bolcom. I got to sing the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes and the Bolcom songs, both of which were staged. But I digress.)

Besides performing Mr. Bolcom's compositions, Bolcom & Morris are known for their recordings of turn-of-the-century (20th) songs and works from the Great American Songbook. These pieces were a large portion of the concert they performed at Howard Community College on March 1. They also did pieces from the Cabaret Songs and a few pieces by those great art song composers, Leiber & Stoller. (Seriously, the guys who wrote "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Hound Dog" wrote these fantastic pieces. But more about that in a moment.)

Ms. Morris is a true artist in her delivery of the American songbook. Her performance was nuanced and authentic, with unique interpretations of the material that drew in her audience. Mr. Bolcom balanced her at the piano, playing with bravado or intimacy as the songs required. In the hands of lesser artists, a lot of the material could have been just a bunch of old songs, possibly perceived as corny by some people. This was not the case in this performance.

While I did not attend Mr. Bolcom's piano master class the previous evening, I did attend their joint vocal master class in the afternoon. As giving as they are as performing artists, they were equally so as teaching artists. Each singer was given their full attention and appreciation, and Ms. Morris was particularly adept at finding the right trigger to bring out a deeper understanding of the text for some of the singers.

After the master class, I went up to them to introduce myself and told them that I had discovered a bootleg cassette of theirs via a friend years ago, and that I had played it so often that it broke. These were the early days of the internet for me, and I really wanted to find out who wrote these songs, and since I knew that they taught at the University of Michigan, I checked out the website to see if I could find their contact info. I then wrote to Ms. Morris, and was surprised when I got a response from Mr. Bolcom telling me that his wife was on vacation, and that the songs were by Leiber & Stoller, and that I should write to them and tell them that Bill Bolcom said it was okay for me to have them. And then he gave me their address and fax number.

So I did just that and didn't hear anything back for a couple of months. And then, when I had forgotten about it completely, a package came in the mail with photocopies of hand-written music and a note from their secretary apologizing for the delay, but that Mr. Stoller (or Leiber - I can't remember which) had been out of the country and she had to wait for him to come back to get his permission.

The song that I was particularly anxious to have was a piece called "Humphrey Bogart," which is the only one of the packet that I've performed so far. I told Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris that the recording of that song gave me the idea for my cabaret show about movies and movie stars (that and Christopher Berg's "Poem," which begins with the line "Lana Turner has collapsed"). As a result, I had the beginnings of the show "Oh, to be a movie star!", which Ryan Cappleman and I performed together in Milwaukee as the inaugural show of our duo, MezzoPiano.

I thanked them for that and for all the wonderful music they have introduced or re-introduced in their 40+ year career. I'm hoping to be in touch with them and ... maybe make a road trip to Ann Arbor to coach with them?  

New Year, New Directions, and Keep Using Moisturizer

Of course, the term New Directions reminds me of Glee, and also of what I can only imagine was an intentional double-entendre. But I feel as though I'm taking some steps to do things differently.

First of all, I've decided that, for now, I'm not going to focus on developing my private studio. I'll take on students if they call and I can make it work. I'll build up my studio at Howard Community College and teach primarily during the day. But I don't want to be in the place I was in Milwaukee, where I had so many students that I didn't make time to practice, seek performing opportunities, and put myself out there to perform.

(The cynical part of me says, "It's not like anyone was coming to hear you sing anyway, even when you did." And that's true. But that is bitter, and I'm trying to put that behind me. So this is the last time I complain about that.)

So I recharged myself personally and professionally this past few weeks. I went to Jamaica a week, which was my personal recharge. And before that, I recharged myself professionally by going to NYC for the NATS/NOA Joint Workshop at the Roosevelt Hotel. I sang in a master class on belt (which I'll write about later), attended fantastic master classes by Andrew Lippa and John Bucchino, both of whom I spoke to (and I have Bucchino's card and might go up and coach his songs with him), and went to terrific sessions on finding the truth in your interpretations in auditions and performances.

I'd like to write a bit about the last part, in particular regarding two sessions on the final day.

One was taught by Stephen Wadsworth, who is a well-respected opera director and teaches advanced acting techniques at Juilliard. He was also the Skylight's co-artistic director in the late 80s/early 90s - right after I left Milwaukee the first time, but we'd met numerous times and I'd sung for him. In fact, he remembered my face (which means my moisturizer must be working, because it had been 25 years since I saw him last!) when I spoke to him after his session.

His focus was on boiling down your material - musical theater song, aria or monologue - to a single sentence that had a universal message.

When I returned from NYC, I had an audition for Washington National Opera. I prepared two arias, one of which was "Seguidilla" from Carmen. So this was how I approached the aria, by creating this sentence:

"This is a person who wants freedom from an authority figure, and will use charm to manipulate that figure into giving it to her."

Then I translated that to:

"I am a person who wants freedom from an authority figure (Don Jose), and I will use my charm to manipulate him into giving it to me."

Later that day, I saw Nicholas Muni, another well-respected director at the head of the opera department at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. He spoke of the 5 magic questions that needed to be asked when preparing an aria. So I applied these to Seguidilla as well:

FIVE MAGIC QUESTIONS
1. What do I need/want at this moment (Goal)? My way and freedom. Maybe some fun.

2. What course of action would give me the best chance of obtaining it at this moment (Action)? Being sexy and teasing, making my jailer think it'd be worth his while to let me go.

3. What is the obstacle (Obstacle)? Don José, my jailer

4. What must I do to transform the obstacle (Tactic)?  Seduce him. Let him know how much fun we could have together if he not only let me go, but came with me.

5. What are the positives/negatives of success/failure (Stakes)?
Positives/success: Get my freedom, have sex
Negatives/failure: Stay in jail, be bored, no sex

I also applied this to "Voce di donna" from La Gioconda, my other audition aria. I worked on the Seguidilla more because that's what I intended to offer them.

And of course, they didn't ask for that one. But I still felt like I was more prepared and comfortable than I'd been in a long time. And rather than thinking of it as an experience where I'd be judged, I thought of it as a performance opportunity (another thing that Muni encouraged the participants to consider).

And Stephen Gathman of the WNO remembered me, even though I hadn't sung for him since 1996, when he was an assistant chorusmaster.

Yay for recharging my energies and yay for moisturizer!