Spinning

Well, I made it through the orals - and passed! I'm very happy. Now I just need to clean up the aftermath that is my apartment. It looks like a Xerox machine exploded in here.

This coming week, I'm going to attempt to knock out the remaining academic and graduate assistant to dos so that next week, I can focus entirely on recital preparation. I also need to keep practicing and finding my mental pictures for the performance, continuing to work on being in the flow and in the moment.

On the upside, I've seen some amazing performances over the last week or so that are great examples to learn from! Last Saturday, I attended three voice recitals - all wonderful. Last night, I saw a phenomenal double bill featuring two professors from the voice department. The first piece was a Coffee Cantata that Bach wrote. It premiered at a coffee house in Leipzig during a time when coffee was the newfangled thing in Germany. According to the program notes, there was tension during the 18th century between the old guard, who thought good ole German beer was the only way to go, and the younger set that really loved coffee. In the cantata, a father threatens his daughter with old maid-dom if she refuses to give up coffee. She accedes :) It's a really cute 3 person chamber work (father, daughter, and narrator). They performed it with cello and piano.

The second opera was by Lee Hoiby. Called Bon Appetit, it sets an episode of Julia Child's cooking show to music. She makes a chocolate cake. The performer actually mixed up real ingredients onstage on a play set, singing the whole time. This requires incredible coordination. Backstage secrets? The egg whites she whips into peaks (in a race between the electric mixer and her hand mixing in a copper bowl) are really Cool Whip. (The professor said she tried real egg whites and couldn't make them work during the time allowed for the mixing in the music.) And the chocolate she melts on the "stove" has a healthy dose of Hershey's syrup so that it looks liquid when she lifts the spoon out.

It was an incredible performance.

And today, I went to see four hours of musical theatre, operetta, and opera at the Lotte Lenya competition. The contestants, who are judged on their ability to sing all three well, were all tremendous. Many are in young artists' programs at big name houses, like the Met or the Lyric in Chicago. Others have already been on Broadway or performing at Lincoln Center. The bios read like a "Who's Who" of up and coming artists. A great, great show.

Let's hope that some of these amazing performances trickle down into my own work for the recital!

~Hope