Auch kleine Dinge

The title of this post means "Also small things". It is a song by Hugo Wolf that a friend sang on her senior recital tonight. The poem basically talks about how small things can also delight us and be wonderful -- pearls, olives, and roses all fit the bill.

So did the recital, which was chock full of small, exquisite things, from K's dress (a chocolate brown with an asymmetric strap), to the little notes her accompanist rippled on the piano in the ending Gershwin set, to the expressiveness of K's eyes as she sang, to the creamy richness of her voice, to the lovely little German pieces on the program, to the coloratura she tripped through so perfectly in the Rossini "Laudamus te", to the warmth and excited applause of the small audience. (We were few in number because the program started at 9 pm, a casualty of a late lottery pick, I think. The performance halls here are so scarce that they hold a lottery for the students to choose their recital dates. Some people get lucky with a weekend afternoon or early evening time. Others, like K, end up with 9 pm on a Monday night in November.)

It was a wonderful evening.

And then I came home and finished some other small yet wonderful things:

Love those pomegranate seeds! (I do admit to cheating and using a picture from last week's pomegranate adventure. But that's probably more exciting anyway since it's the first fresh one I'd ever eaten.)

~Hope

Right-side Up Again

For various reasons, three weeks ago the world turned upside-down. Happily, nothing was lasting, and all is mostly back to the standard classes-practice rooms-rehearsals world of before.

Little happy highlights:

• I ate my first fresh pomegranate this week. (Pictures forthcoming. It is a remarkably beautiful fruit.)
• Opera casting for the spring was posted. I get to play a nymph named Naiad in the first bit of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. (We're only doing a scenes program instead of a full opera this spring.)
• My apartment is finally (relatively) clean. Laundry is now (almost) manageable again.
• Two teachers accepted my proposal to do a Shakespeare outreach program for their classes. I get to talk about Strauss's Drei Lieder der Ophelia with high school kids on December 7th, and then I get to play with Debussy's La Romance d'Ariel with 7th graders on the 14th.
• I'm learning the Pie Jesu from the Faure Requiem for an audition on December 2nd.
• The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous. It's often cold, but the sky has been oh-so-blue, and the leaves are just glorious colors against that sunny backdrop. I love the way the sunlight glints off them, especially in the midday period when everything is bright. About 3:30 pm is pretty neat, too, because fall always links with (younger) school in my mind, and that's the time I'd be going home from grade school or high school.
• A very pesky technical problem involving .mod files and conversion to a tv-playable DVD got resolved! Many hours of turmoil - solved! (The secret: get one of those hard disk camcorders yourself, install the software on your PC, and convert all the files on your own computer rather than struggling with doing it on a Mac.)

Tomorrow: my digital portfolio class with some video editing in the morning, followed by Italian conversation at noon, a meeting with one of the professors I'm serving through my grad assistantship, the full "memorized sing-through" of the Impresario, and then a voice recital at night to attend. It should be a fun day!

~Hope