opera summer 2017, #4

I actually have days off this week!  It's a miracle!  (no, Emily, it's just balancing out from last week.)  This is great, because I have a duet to work on that is definitely in the crunch-time category ... and also need to be off-book on the Mozart by Sunday ... y'know, no big.

Day 7, part 2 (Saturday afternoon, Suor): This was a focused session with myself and Sister Angelica, playing with and fine-tuning the scene where I announce the carriage has arrived and Angelica freaks out just a little bit.  (A lot.  But quietly!)  So we ran the scene  - which is ... four pages of music?  maybe a little more?  my score's in my office and I can't be bothered to move - something like a dozen times, starting with the rough staging and character decisions we'd worked out in the larger rehearsals, then narrowing our choices down, talking about what's being communicated and what isn't and how to tweak that, trying different choices, etc.  Do I clue into how high the stakes are for Angelica?  If so, when?  And when does Angelica really realize this might be her family?  How do I react to Angelica getting right up in my face, asking about the inside of the carriage (which I have no way of knowing about)?  How does Angelica react when she doesn't get the information she wants - and when she drives me away?  Repeating the scene with all these minor changes not only helps us feel what's right for our interpretations of the characters, but also what feels right with the music - and, of course, solidifies our synchronicity with the music.

Day 8 (Sunday evening, Idomeneo): Another run-through of all the chorus numbers.  We had both the bass and soprano soloists this week, so the quartet sections went much better this time, and everyone was tighter in general.  After we worked on the music for about an hour and a half, we took a short break, then got into staging.  The area we'll be playing this in isn't a typical auditorium or hall space: we're working with an open-concept rock garden sort of idea, and we'll all basically be on stage at all times (or at least visible to the audience at all times).  This makes it awfully hard to tape out on the floor of our staging building, for one, and also means that it's really hard to actually know where we'll be at any given time.  The staging will, be necessity, be loose.  I'm okay with this: as long as we have clear intentions, the movement should follow.  It is a little nerve-wracking though.  We also talked about setting and costuming.  The director is moving the story forward to near-present day Greece, bringing to mind the refugee crises in the area today.  This is going to be very interesting ... 

Tonight we have another full run of Suor followed by some more scene work.  Four hour rehearsal instead of three.  Today, I'm working on getting the Mozart off-book and also solidifying the Gounod duet.  

opera summer 2017, #3

Time sure flies when you have rehearsal every night.  zzzz .... 

Since last I wrote, I've had ... four rehearsals.  I think.  (coming back after writing: yes, four.)

Day 4 (Wednesday evening, Suor): staging the finale.  We have a short entrance and exit - most of us go out to the cemetery a little earlier in the show, so now we come back in, notice Sister Angelica is having A Moment, and we reassure her that her prayers are being heard and then we go offstage to bed.  (Actually we go offstage, sing a little bit, and then run around the outside of the church to go be angels at the back.  But there's 10 pages of music in between, so it's more of a relaxed saunter.  In nun habits.  In downtown Winnipeg.  We're gonna giggle the whole time.)  Then we have the lovely challenge of singing from the back of a church with the orchestra and soloist at the front of the church.  It's already a pain in the church we're staging in, but at least we have the ability to be as far back as we will be on the actual set - the building is shaped differently, so it doesn't quite give us the real deal, but it's a good exercise in watch the conductor's hands, don't use your ears.  It's really hard.  But we'll do it.

Day 5 (Thursday evening, Idomeneo): ahahahahahaha this was such a train wreck in so many places for me.  I knew some of the chorus numbers better than others, sure, but I definitely thought I had more of it down than I proved to.  I wasn't the only one.  It seems to be a bit of a theme - the first time you run Mozart chorus pieces, literally everything falls apart at the seams, we laugh at ourselves for a couple minutes, and then we run it again a couple times and it makes much more sense.  (The one-to-a-part quartet stuff I'm doing was 500% a train wreck ... partially because we were missing the soprano and the bass, partially because of the Mozart effect, and just partially because I need to learn my part better.)  On the plus side, though, once we all got our shit together we sound quite good.  The blend is nice.  We're gonna sound even better once we sing all the right pitches - and the right words.  Mozart scores are hell, especially the less-popular ones.  There are five million editions and a bunch of them have German overtop of the Italian in the score (a lot of German opera houses don't do operas in Italian; they do them in translation, in German - and guess where Mozart was from ... ), and the Italian in italics (ha) and often smaller text, and it's just a pain.  Does that read "ci"? "ei"? "vi"?  who the fuck knows.  (we do, now that we've gone through all the numbers and agreed on everything.)

Day 6 (Friday evening, Suor): first stumble-through!  Still no last principal, so we skipped the bit in the middle, but we successfully made it to the end of the opera without any derailments so massive we actually had to stop.  So that was good.  I personally completely effed up a couple things, but on the other hand a few things I'd been fighting with went off without a hitch, so I was happy with it.  Then I went home to bed.  

Day 7 (Saturday morning, Suor): we are now in the finessing stage.  We have the basic skeleton of the staging down (with the obvious exception of the section in the middle), so now we're going through scenes several times over and fixing what doesn't feel right, working out details, and above all paying close attention to text.  Everyone is 90-95% off book now, so we can focus on where we're going and where we're actually looking - who are we talking to? what are we talking about?  We got the note last night that we need to remember how we know things ... i.e., we know things because we saw them.  You can't relay information without first having that information, and that's a really easy thing to forget when you're on stage and you, as an actor, already know the show.  You know what has already happened, and what's going to happen because of it.  But you, as a character, do not know what's going to happen - and you don't know what's already happened to anyone but yourself (if you haven't already seen it).  I have to remember that I saw the carriage outside before I can ask about it, and I don't know already that this carriage is Sister Angelica's aunt.  It's not Big News for me - it's just a curiosity.  Don't give away the plot before it happens!  The audience wants to participate in a story, not a lecture.

I'm on a short break right now before going back for more specific one-on-one work later this afternoon.  I think I'm going to have a nap ... 

opera summer 2017, #2

I realized at some point since I posted last that I forgot to mention a super important part of score study: markings.  Tempo, dynamics, articulations, all that.  (The reason I forgot is because this is still the bit I don't do nearly enough.)  This is another reason to watch/listen to performances, because some of these things ... aren't actually written in.  They're just done that way.  Some scores, what you see is what you get; some scores, there's a whole slough of performance practice things that aren't written in, and you gotta find out or else you're gonna look a little dumb.  (If you're a newbie you don't usually get in much trouble, but you better fix it fast.)  This also applies to how much rit. you do in this particular measure, or how much freedom you get in this specific col canto, or how long this tenuto is, etc etc etc.  This is especially true for composers like Puccini.  You gotta listen, man.  You gotta.

Anyway.  Since last I wrote I had one more rehearsal...

Day 3 (Tuesday, Suor Angelica): picked up where we left off, staging the scene where I announce a fancy-ass coach is outside the gate, and everyone gets their knickers in a twist wondering who it might be.  Straight-forward staging.  We also reworked the opening scene and one other, since we had a singer drop out for health reasons (and also reworking things is important for us to remember them).  We got some notes on how to sound more like an angelic choir in the first scene (clean, early cutoffs, prep your vowels early, as much breath support as possible, be gentle with articulators bc there's a dozen sopranos singing more or less in unison and if we're not gentle we'll blow everyone away whether we try to or not), and I worked with the vocal coach on my solo lines (figuring out how to get my open o's after w-glides into my soft palate, 'cause right now they're slipping back into my throat and sounding old - one of those things that sounds good in my ears when I'm singing it, but doesn't translate well - also cleaning up a couple entrances and making sure of doubled consonants).

Tonight we are moving forward to the end of the opera, because our remaining principal still isn't in town.  So: finale chorus stuff.  I need to look over the page numbers and make sure I know what I'm doing - I marked one divisi part down wrong in my score so I need to go over what I'm actually supposed to be singing.  Then tomorrow night I start rehearsal for the other opera I'm working on, Idomeneo - and I need to look at all that again today too, as well as a stand-in solo bit that the music director asked me to do yesterday.  That'll be fun.

opera summer 2017, #1

A couple of people in my life have asked what exactly it is I do when I'm 'at rehearsal' ... and it's a fair question.  I never really realised just how mysterious opera is - just 'cause I'm in the middle of it, I guess.

Prior to day one of rehearsals... I got my scores a couple months ago, and began learning my parts.  I don't have a lot to sing in the operas I'm doing this summer - I'm not doing a major role - so the process isn't quite as long and involved as it is for some of my friends.  For me, the process was:

• read up on the opera - what's the plot, who are the characters, who am I? also, when was it written, anything interesting happening for the composer at the time, was it written for anyone in specific...
• read through the libretto - get a better sense of the nuances of the story/characters (also: are there any stage directions included?)
• watch a production (if any exist - if not, listen to a recording) - mainly to get a sense for the orchestration
• translate my scenes (presuming the opera isn't in English, which is usually the case) - it's great to have a couple of complete translations on hand, but it's a good idea to translate your own lines (and the people you're talking to/with) yourself so you know what each of the words you say mean ... translation's tricky because language is tricky, you gotta have as much information as you can
• write my lines out phonetically - you gotta sound like you know what you're talking about in more ways than one ... Nico Castell's books are a really great resource for this, especially for checking what's academically correct versus what's typically done.  diction often gets tweaked to make words more intelligible, easier to sing, more impactful, but that's later in the rehearsal/coaching process.
• usually by this point I remember more or less what I'm saying when, but if not the next step is getting comfortable enough with just the text that I remember.  repetition of the text both in the original language and in a comprehensible English translation of my own.  this is the remember-the-thoughts step.
• start adding the music.  I do more repetition of the text in the contour of the line, but not precisely on pitch, to match the verbal thought with the musical thought.  eventually you add the actual pitches and rhythms.
• if I were working on a role, I'd book sessions with a vocal coach where we'd work on putting the whole thing together, especially working on any arias.  looking at effective characterisation, starting to find those spots to tweak diction, looking at places to tweak technique.  since I only have small solo parts, there's time in the rehearsal process to get notes from the vocal coach and work them in then.  (I am doing a duet which I'll do some coaching on, though, over the next couple weeks.)

Once all that is done I'm ready to move into the rehearsal process!  :D

Day 1 (Saturday, Suor Angelica): we started with a sing-through of the whole opera, stopping and fixing spots that didn't quite work for one reason or another.  (also the place to double-check any divided sections for chorus parts.)  Since Suor Angelica is only about an hour long, we sang through the whole thing, got some general notes on diction and technique from the vocal coach, and then took a short break.  After the break, the director walked us through where things would be on the set and talked to us a bit about the ideas she had for the production.  Then we started staging the first scene.  This basically means we go where the director tells us to, and we run the scene several times to make sure the spacing/timing works and everyone knows where they're supposed to go.  After this first session (2pm to 5pm) I was released - turned out I wasn't needed for the second rehearsal (7pm to 10pm), where they were staging the second scene.

Day 2 (Sunday, Suor again): yesterday evening we had one rehearsal, 7pm to 10pm again.  We staged the next three scenes; I was in the last scene.  Again we started with a sing-through and had more detailed notes/fixing time.  While the chorus and a couple of the principals worked on staging the first scene for the day, I and another smaller role went off with the vocal coach to get some specific notes on our scenes, which were the second and third scenes to be done.  Then they staged the second scene, and then my scene.  I already have stand-in props for my scene (I bring in a crate of food), which is cool: often you don't get props until pretty close to showtime.  Granted, they're not the actual props yet, but at least I have the crate and things to pick up, which really helps to get used to moving things around while I'm singing.  After we finished staging, we had more vocal notes, and then the evening was done.

Today I don't have rehearsal, it's a day off.  My job today is to go over the bits I had trouble with in the past couple days: there are a couple entrances I'm having trouble finding, and a couple notes that aren't as steady as I hoped.  Tomorrow we'll be staging the second scene I'm in, and probably a couple more that I'm not in ... and after that, all my work is chorus in this opera, so I might have another day off in between?  I know one of our leads isn't in Winnipeg yet, she was finishing another role elsewhere I believe, and I know she has a couple scenes that will need to be staged.  I don't know if we're going to jump ahead to the chorus-heavy scenes first and then loop back to her - it'll depend on when she arrives, obviously.  And rehearsals will start for the other opera I'm in next week, I believe (need to double-check).  

I'm going to update at least once every couple days - every morning, if I can.  I was thinking originally I'd vlog, but taking a while to write is easier for me than editing video, so unless I get inspired I think I'll stick with text.  I'll see if I can grab a couple pictures while I'm not actively staging, but phones are, ah, strongly discouraged in the rehearsal hall.  XD