7 days

On Thursday, I was hit with the realization that my recital was 9 days away, and a fresh burst of terror struck me. The past couple days, I have been in the hall where I'll sing, watching other students perform their juries. Just walking in, my pulse speeds up and my palms start to sweat. I sit there in the audience, picturing myself on that stage, feeling every ounce of fear if any of the performers are showing it, and hoping against hope that I will stand there 7 days from now with a clean voice, a healthy voice, and breath that doesn't fail me like it did 8 years ago.

In my senior year of college, I gave a recital. It was a disaster. I walked onto that stage in the 1000 seat hall that looked like an amphitheatre (placing me in what felt like a low-power position - below everyone), and started to shake so badly that I couldn't hit and sustain notes above the G above G above middle C. My program was liberally sprinkled with high notes, so this wasn't good.

Part of the issue was that the deck was stacked a bit out of my favor. My main voice teacher had moved after my junior year, and I switched to someone in the community whom we thought would be good. She was helpful in many ways, but one thing that she didn't realize was that a senior recital should be no longer than 40 minutes. Mine was 2 hours. Also, a dress rehearsal should be at least two days ahead; you need one day to rest your voice completely after singing a program. My dress was the day before. So I walked into the performance already exhausted.
I also wore a dress that was too tight around my ribs, constricting my ability to breathe.

I know all of these things, and I know that my recital here is different. I am no longer 22 and light of voice. I have performed literally hundreds of hours more than I did in college. My program this time is 40-50 minutes, and it is carefully structured so that I don't have too many big pieces or too many small pieces. My technique is infinitely more solid, and I have excellent teachers here who will not let me fail.

All that said, I still look ahead to next Saturday, and I worry. I want so badly to do well, to express the full impact of these two wonderful years of learning, to put into practice all of the things my teacher here has taught me so that I don't get the same reaction I did 8 years ago when my teacher then said, "You could have knocked the *@!$ out of that and you so didn't!"

But that's only part of it.

In truth, I think I have largely been able to shed the ghost of the old singer who gave that awful performance. I know my music well, and I am concentrating more now on expression, on being inside the text and the flow of the characters rather than on the perfect tone or breath or resonance. Still this performance looms large.

I think the rest of the weight of the day has to do with this being the end. It is the final touch of two years of music making, two years where all I've thought about has been sound and characters, notes and words, expression and breathing and being. This is it. I am not going to make performance my career - and for very good reasons. I don't want the travel, and it is too financially unpredictable. I like bits of my other professional life, too. But I will miss this.

I will miss waking up in the morning and deciding where and when to practice.

I will miss walking the wood-paneled halls and hearing a cacophony of classical music sifting through the air, various instruments all played at their highest levels of proficiency striving for that extra spark that most people can't even define but will notice as an extra-special performance by a really gifted performer.

I will miss sitting in studio class every week, crammed into a one-armed desk in a classroom typical in every way but for the Steinway at the front that serves as a backdrop for some of the most talented singers and actors I've ever known.

I will miss walking into my voice teacher's studio, collapsing into the cushy green armchair and talking to her as she eats lunch.

I will miss standing in front of a music stand in front of that teacher and watching her joyful eyes dance as she instructs me in some musical or technical nuance. "Mean what you say!" she'll exclaim, and suddenly my sound will round out and sparkle.

I will miss breathing and singing and listening to my extraordinary accompanist who knows just how to support me to bring out the best expression.

And so this upcoming recital is vested with all of that, too. It is the culmination of and it is my goodbye to these incredible two years of music. I'm trying to hold off on processing that part of it too much because I'm not sure I'll be able to focus on the music itself if I start thinking of that during the show.

So instead I look at my pictures. I've printed paintings and photographs for each piece in my recital, visual images that I try to place myself within so that I can evoke the character and mood better. I will stand backstage and study those spots of color, and I will walk onstage and spin the stories that describe those pictures. I will sing not to make a pretty sound or to display perfect technique but because it is the only medium that fully expresses the emotions and colors of these characters. It breathes life into the words and makes them vivid.

I just hope I can convey it all. I so hope it goes well.

~Hope