Kathryn
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kathryn" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:10 am
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The Popular Monsters
My brother, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) daspatrick, is a . . . well, let's just say he's a ridiculously cool individual. I have a whole set of anecdote fragments that I tell to try and convey to people how cool he is without monopolizing the conversation, including the fact that he drove across Asia in a tiny car, that when he was 17 we had UWTV on pretty much constantly because they had a feed from MIR and he had a crush on one of the cosmonauts, that he makes movies sometimes. . . and that he's in a band, the Popular Monsters.
Now, first of all, let's ignore the fact that I have the MySpace page up to link to it, and it started playing Turtle Rock and Lily FREAKED OUT with joy and began to dance wildly while wearing Erik's hiking boots, and how cute that must be. (although I tell you, it's pretty damn cute.) Patrick does most of the songwriting for the band, and as someone who's always fancied herself to be moderately musically talented, it drives me to sick jealousy that he is as good a songwriter as he is. Liberty Lake is a really good encapsulation of that weird period in a group of friends' lives where everything is kind of awesome but it's becoming brutally clear that something's going to change pretty soon; No Love for Plants and Cats is a sweet, sad eulogy for a relationship that ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
So, anyway, hit the MySpace page and give them a listen, will ya? Maybe then you can realize the Coolness that Is My Brother too.
Tags: family, music, patrick
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08:41 am
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General Update
Wow, Lillian is totally walking now. She started walking about a week and a half ago, and I've just been too busy chasing her to update. She still falls down all the time, but she makes pretty good time. Now I need to get her shoes with treads on them. *snif* my little baby, growin up.
She also has a TERRIBLE cough right now, for like the fourth time this winter, complete with fever and retracting, so we have a doctor's appointment this afternoon, which is super annoying because I'm still trying to go to the Garden Show with solarbird. Everyone assures me that it's just fine for little kids who play with other kids all the time to get sick this often, but I feel so bad for her.
In other time-consuming news, we're performing the B-Minor Mass with the Symphony. Now, the last time the Chorale performed this s work, we had 18 rehearsals for it. This time, we have 11 rehearsals, and one of them got snowed out. So we're kind of in the weeds with this. Monday's rehearsal was like masturbating with a belt sander -- "Ow! This is supposed to be fun! I do this for fun! Why does it hurt so much?!" There's just a lot of notes, and a lot of parts -- it's 5 part chorus for most of it, and 6 and 8 part sometimes -- and it's long, like 2.5 hours long.
In addition, we had the brilliant (seriously) idea to split all the women equally into 3 parts for the SSATB stuff, which is good because then we don't have to maintain a huge-ass soprano section for the rest of the season. The problem with this is that the soprano II part is really almost as high if not just as high as the soprano I part, and the alto part is quite low, so for those of us who are floating, the range of the piece covers 2 octaves plus a third. I've forgotten how to transition well into my head voice for choral singing, though I'm remembering, and as a result the rehearsals are very vocally fatiguing for me. I need to practice more, but the only solid focus time I get is when Lillian is asleep, and it's hard for me to sing full-voice without waking her up. What I need to do is knuckle down and practice more when Erik is home, but I value my time with him so much.
I took 2 days off to go to the Madrona Fiber Arts festival and take a two-day class with Nancy Bush and Judith Mackenzie McCuin on gloves, mittens, and other handcoverings -- the history, construction, and spinning of yarn for them. To say that it was a fun class is a complete understatement. I had a hell of a time, I learned an absolute ton, and I am now fired up beyond belief to knit enough gloves to keep everyone I know's hands warm.
I think that's the news from Lake Burning Hand right now. I'll let y'all know if I think of anything else.
Tags: family, health, illness, knitting, lillian, music, singing, spinning, symphony, wool adoration
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10:24 am
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Public Service Announcement
If you attend a classical music performance, PLEASE don't take pictures. Flash or non-flash. The flash pictures can actually be dangerous to the soloists, who are standing quite near the edge of the stage, but for all of us, the afterimage of the flash can obscure our view of the conductor. But even without a flash, the amber light for the autofocus still sings out like a beacon, and it is INCREDIBLY distracting. Everyone on stage can see it, and though we may not move beyond a flick of our eyeballs, we are all sitting there trying to come up with an organization we can donate money to to develop a stage-to-seat asshole-seeking missile.
(Who would be that crass, you ask? No less than SIXTEEN PEOPLE in Sunday's matinee show. And I started the count late.)
Tags: assholes, concerts, i hate matinees, music, photography, psa
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10:08 am
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yesterday is fired.
Lillian is still sick. I caught her cold, and I was sick. I had one of tWO rehearsals for B9, and we were getting new music, so I HAD to go to chorus rehearsal. Just as I was getting Lily down for her afternoon nap so that I could shower and eat before Erik got home, he called -- his bike light was burned out and he needed me to come get him. Great. Pile into the car with unhappy babe, I'm filthy, still in bedroom slippers. Go get Erik. Get bike loaded on top of the car, despite Erik's fucked up wrist and the cold. Drive into town. Look around for dinner, settle on getting something from the Metropolitan Market. Drive into their OPEN AIR PARKING and
CLANNNNNGGGGGGG THUNK
They have a totally unnecessary architectural gate, with a totally unnecessary steel plate hanging down from it by two and a half feet, and this has struck Erik's bike and knocked it over. Now it's dangling over the side of the car and I am in the middle of the parking lot and Erik has to scram and hold the bike up to keep it from damaging itself further -- this is his $2500 custom bike -- and he's left his passenger door open, and there are people coming and going out, and this is on Queen Anne, and everyone is very annoyed but NOBODY IS FUCKING OFFERING TO HELP. And so Erik is taking down his suddenly non-Euclidean bike, with one hand, in the freezing cold, as people are coming ohsoveryclose to hitting him with their fucking great cars, and he has to get it into the trunk, and then I STILL have to get dinner -- which I did -- and then Erik took me to rehearsal, which was really good, because we got new music and I would have been up shit creek without a paddle had I not been there
and then halfway through rehearsal I started running a fever and I had to have erik load Lily BACK up into the car and come get me.
FUCKING YESTERDAY. FIRED.
the ONLY good thing is that at no point did Erik and I start screaming at each other.
Tags: family, food, lillian, music, petty first world problems, singing, symphony
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10:05 am
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Holy Crap
You know the old trope about a musician selling his soul to the devil to gain the ability to play his instrument at an astoundingly high level? It's associated with a couple of blues guitarists, and alluded to in "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," and probably a thousand other sources.
It's older than that, though. Niccolo Paganini was born at the end of the eighteenth century, and was a ridiculously capable violinist. He wrote many pieces that he alone could play; his abilities were so far above those of his contemporaries that it was widely believed that he had, in fact, sold his soul for them. Modern fans are pretty sure that his extraordinary virtuosity was due instead to his ginormous hands (he probably had Marfan's Syndrome), his use of non-standard violin tunings, and, well, an unbelievable degree of talent and a willingness to attempt and master techniques largely considered to be impossible.
He's no longer the only one who can play his pieces. In fact, some of his "secret" techniques are now routine exercises for high level students. But when you see a master play Paganini -- this is Jascha Heifetz, playing Caprice #24 -- it's pretty easy to understand why supernatural involvment might be suspected.
Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
Tags: music
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12:52 pm
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This just in
Lillian loves Kraftwerk.
Tags: lillian, music
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11:34 am
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YES! YES! YES! YES!
The 2007-2008 season is announced! And CHRISTIAN IS COMING BACK TO DO MESSIAH! *squee* *runs around in excited circles*
Also: Bach's B-Minor Mass! Three hours of fugal goodness!
Tags: music, symphony
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01:06 pm
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mmm! Prokofiev!
So yesterday, it was my very great privilege to present an _awesome_ performance of Alexander Nevsky with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. It was a really ambitious program in a lot of ways; the music is more challenging than one often expects for a youth symphony, and the chorus was a patchwork pickup ensemble from everywhere we could dredge people who could either sing OR speak Russian. Many of the singers had never performed with an orchestra before. Many of us had never sung in Russian before. It coulda been really bad.
It was NOT really bad. It was splendid. The kids young musicians are really, really good; professional, focused, high-energy. The concert started off with a John Adams piece called "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" which is really, really hard. I mean REALLY hard. The kids were apparently calling it "Long Walk off a Short Pier," and everyone I spoke to said it was crazy difficult, but that they loved it. And it was really fantastic, really really excellent; they played it with great mastery and verve. Next up was a Vaughan Williams tuba concerto, which is not something you see real often. The writing suffers a bit from textural similarity across all three movements; it's kind of all much of a very lovely muchness. But the performance was sensitive and nuanced, and the eighteen-year-old tubist did a really beautiful job. When he started playing, the Sprout started kicking, which is kind of cool. Rounding out the first half was a Britten piece called Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. I'm not always fond of Britten, and this wasn't my favorite piece on the schedule, but it was undeniably well played.
Now, see, here's the thing about the SYSO this year: Christian Knapp is conducting. This is the same guy I've raved about here over and over again, an absolutely brilliant conductor who has musicianship coming out of his ears and is a joy to work with. He has an uncanny ability to inspire and motivate through challenge, and to pull the absolute best performance possible out of any given ensemble. He got his graduate degree in Russia, and has a deep, deep love for Russian music. He never gives less than 100% -- I saw him end a scratch read-through session dripping with sweat -- and I was really excited to see where he was going to take the SYSO. My experience in youth ensembles is that frequently, the expectations of the people in charge are the limiting factor in what the ensemble can achieve; Christian has no limits to his expectations.
Um, yeah. So we walked on to do Nevsky, a ragtag chorale ranging from quasi-professionals to people who had never sung outside of the congregation in church, some of whom had had as little as two hours' worth of rehearsal on this piece, fronted by a bunch of high school kids. And what we delivered was a motherfucking tour de force. Now, the choral music isn't really that hard (outside of the Russian) and the "bunch of high school kids" is the most talented orchestral youth ensemble in the region, so this wasn't exactly far exceeding expectations, but oh my God, Christian. He left blood on the podium, I swear; he certainly left both sweat and tears. At the end of the cantata, after the Russian peasant army has surprisingly defeated one of the most well-trained invading armies in Europe and Christian was conducting the huge swell of mighty music that accompanies our proud victory, he was leaning back, face turned skywards, in tears, conducting with his whole body, a look of agonized ecstasy on his face, and we all gave him every single thing we had. That kind of inspiration from the podium can turn a good performance into a great one, and a great performance into an unforgettable one.
We lose Christian this year; his contract with the Seattle Symphony is up, and if he wants to have a career worthy of his talent, he can't afford to wait around. He has to strike while the iron is hot. There are so few positions for world-class orchestral conductors, and Christian is only 33. He's doing a TON of guest conducting next year -- Itzhak Perlman asked for him specifically for one concert -- and he is talking with the Auckland Symphony in New Zealand about a music directorship there. He's too good to stay in Seattle working with the Youth Symphony and the Chorale, as much as we would desperately love to have him. Every single person who shared the stage with him last night walked off sparkling and pumped full of joy; I wanted to go to each of the kids individually and say "You may all become professional musicians and have splendid careers; God knows you're good enough. But for the rest of your lives, you may never work with a more spectacular conductor than this man. I hope to Hell you all took notes."
Tags: music
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10:18 am
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More Music News that Someone Might Be Able to Use
As part of the ongoing Made In America festival that the Seattle Symphony is doing -- this year's edition focuses on composers who are still living -- the Symphony is performing the Philip Glass Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists this Thursday. This is a small concert, so the upper tiers are closed; rear orchestra seats are $10, and the Sooper Neato Founder's Tier Box seats are $30. (For my BSG peeps out there, Philip Glass was the composer of the piano piece that Starbuck played in her apartment, the one she said her dad wrote.) There is some really fascinating contemporary American classical music out there, and it is almost universally better experienced live; plus, the program (which includes four other pieces and a post-concert discussion with Gerry and the composers) is not something you'll have a lot of other opportunities to hear performed.
$10 is the price of a movie ticket these days. You could go see Mission Impossible 3, or you could come hear some of the best of what America is currently offering the world.
Tags: music, symphony
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02:58 pm
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Missa pro Defunctis
Missa pro Defunctis. Mass for the Dead. We don't call it that, any more, we call it the Requiem Mass; the Defunctis part is maybe a little too literal for our death-averse culture to be comfortable with. Mozart wrote his Requiem as he himself was dying, dying of syphilis or food poisoning or straight-up poisoning or an overabundance of the Divine Spirit, wrote it for himself as well as his patron, an Italian whose name is known only by music history geeks. We are singing this piece on Friday, January 27, 2006 -- Mozart's 250th birthday. At the baton is Maestro Itzhak Perlman, one of the great musicians of our time; his conducting is not as strong or as expressive as his violin playing, but his musicianship comes through and is a great inspiration to us all.
The Seattle Symphony Chorale has performed this work every year since 2002, when we put it together for the Rolling Requiem to commemorate the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. That was before my time. I've only sung it this year and last. But for a work we've done so many times, it never seems to get old or stale, despite the singers' groans when they see the work on the schedule again. We all moaned and whined when we worked the fuges AGAIN, when the chorusmaster got on the bassi to be sure and keep the dotted rhythm from tripletting on the Confutatis AGAIN, when the altos have to be prodded to keep the A in the open fifth high enough AGAIN. But when it all comes into place and we really begin to feel it, it bubbles up from within us and soars out of our throats and our chests as true music.
Part of that is, we all have someone to sing it for. Some are still singing it for the 9/11 victims. Many of us are singing it for Mary Ann Bisio, who taught it to us the first time for the Rolling Requiem and died so tragically of lung cancer less than three years later at the age of 50. There are people singing for more recent losses; two singers down from me is Shannon Huffman, who is singing it for her father and stepmother, killed last June in a freakishly rare predatory grizzly bear attack, despite taking every precaution. I am singing for a baby who never actually made it here, who was conceived but who never grew, and who will never be born.
We are singing the Lacrimosa, one of the most powerful movements in the piece. It is written in D minor, considered by many to be the saddest key there is. The time signature is 12/8, beat in 4, a time signature more common to blues with its triplet subdivision, but the the violins have a repeated line of eighth notes that leaves the first of each group of triplets naked, bare, and silent. The void is acute; each beat starts with a loss, an emptiness. The vocal lines have the same sense of of strain and sighing, echoing the lyrics:
Lacrimosa dies illa
There will be such weeping on that day
The chorus moves to a new pattern, in which we sing only the first eighth of each triplet figure, full of air and breath, hushed, as a person talks after sobbing for hours. The line leaves the diminished sigh of the violin lines open and naked against the chorus:
qua resurget ex favilla
when He rises again from the ashes
Now, we find our center, we sing the full value of each beat. Mozart was no fool; he wrote for an even crescendo across this line, but it starts low in everybody's range, making the beginning of the crescendo strained and tight until we explode upwards into our full voices, with an anguished diminished chord that ends on an uncompleted cadence:
judicandus homo reus
To judge all mankind
And then, Mozart died.
From here on out, the piece was completed, orchestrated, arranged by Sussmayer. Mozart left extensive sketches, and how much of Sussmayer is in the work is a subject of much debate. emmacrew thinks that the direction of the piece towards the F major resolution is a bit of a cheat and a cop out, but in the absence of the master, that's what Sussmayer did, repeating again the lyrics of the first three lines:
Lacrimosa dies illa qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homoreus
and then moves to a D minor diminished seventh chord, a painful chord, an agonizing chord, made more painful by the exquisitely soft tone of the chorus, for the real intent of this part of the text:
Huic ergo parce, Deus. Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.
Therefore, in this, spare him O Lord; Holy Lord Jesus, grant him peace and rest.
We return to the sighing cadence again to repeat the last three words many times, an anguished plea. Mozart's music rips the cry out of your throat as you sing, and I cannot help but think of all the tears I have shed, all the tears Shannon has shed, all the tears shed by all the people in the world in this most intense and unfair of losses. No matter how inevitable death is, it's always sudden and always painful, as painful as Mozart's own death with that cadence left unresolved. (Once, at a musical salon given by Mozart's father, a piece was interrupted before a cadence could be resolved. Three-year-old Wolfgang flew from his bed, ran to the harpsichord, and resolved the cadence not once but twice -- once to the tonic, and then again to the dominant minor. Three years old! our chorusmaster repeated, telling us this story before the concert.) We finish the piece with an Amen, sung full voice but again in an uncomfortable midrange for most voices, and ending again on an unresolved cadence.
The last note hangs in the hall like a living thing, a shroud over performers and audience both. We have only moments to put the genie back in the bottle, to reset our emotions and our expectations and ready ourselves to sing the Domine Jesu Christe, a ringing song of praise and tribute to the glories of the God who watches over these losses and allows them to happen.
Tags: music, spirituality, symphony, writing
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04:04 pm
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With apologies to the Asshat Opera Company
With apologies to wrog, the Assistant Asshaberdasher soi-disant presents:
The End of The Affair
[Opening number. Very jazzy and upbeat.]
MAURICE:
Everything sucks.
I am miserable and lost in London and I can't figure out where my life is or why my girlfriend left me.
OTHER PEOPLE, STANDING IN A LINE:
Yes, everything sucks.
AUDIENCE:
Wait, then why do you sound so happy?
COMPOSER:
Look, it's only the fourth revision so far, you want everything to be perfect?
AUDIENCE:
Fourth?!
COMPOSER:
Look, everybody does this, it's just that Verdi never talked about it.
AUDIENCE:
Uh-huh.
COMPOSER:
How many operas have YOU written?
AUDIENCE:
Fine.
( It probably just gets worse from here. )
Tags: ahoc, music, writing
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05:14 pm
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Star Wars. . . nuthin but STAR wars
I'm singing in this weekend's Star Wars Spectacular, as put on by the Seattle Symphony. Nobody realized it was supposed to have chorus until really pretty late in the game, so we all got mail in July and August saying "Hiya! Sign up for this thing and you can sing five performances in four days, and rehearse in the middle of the day on a weekday! Doesn't that sound like fun!" Of the 150 chorale members, they got about 30 people to commit to it.
It's a Pops concert. I have mixed feelings about Pops concerts. They don't really have our most critical audience, and they aren't really opportunities to show off our most sensitive musicianship. Pretty much the only color they ever want from the chorus is "loud as hell," which means they mike us, which means that it's a completely different ball game, vocally -- when the sound goes from your voice to the microphone 10 feet away, and then speedy like light to speakers that BLAST it around the audience from all sides, that's really different from having the full airspace in Benaroya Hall to let the sound bloom into. So it can sometimes be a real essay on missed opportunities, because nobody really cares about bringing the music to its full potential. Those of you who were reading this journal while I was performing the Lord of the Rings score probably remember a lot of this -- mistakes that would have been deal-breakers in any other REHEARSAL were absolutely not an issue in this PERFORMANCE. After doing something like our most recent Mozart Requiem performance, which was a shimmering triumph, it's sometimes sort of a downer to go back to the "Enh, just sing loud" kind of standard of the Pops shows. This one has sound effects even. Lightsaber noises. Saints preserve us.
Then the orchestra played that big brass fanfare that opens up into the main Star Wars theme -- you know the one, the one that Bill Murray sang with the words from my subject line in his Saturday Night Live skit -- and my face split into a RIDICULOUS grin, and I burst into tears. Yes, I am that big a dork -- I cried onstage at the Star Wars theme. During a rehearsal, but still. It was completely shiveringly wonderful; the sound onstage is unbelievable, and instantly I was nine again, begging my mom to rent the movie AGAIN. It was a good reminder; Pops concerts aren't as deeply musical as our main season, because there's all this other context already sitting there waiting for us. But the opportunity to hear music like the Star Wars soundtrack, or the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, or whatever, live and by an excellent orchestra? That's bitchin cool. Just because it's easier and less fiddly doesn't actually make it any less cool.
Then, of course, the kid who played the young Boba Fett got up to introduce the next segment, and I looked at the stand of the bassoonist in front of me and realized it was "The Adventures of Jar Jar," and my heart sank again. Oh well.
Tags: music, symphony
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01:16 am
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All operaed out.
Ahhh. On friday we finished the last of the Ring Cycle operas, Götterdammerung. It's a little bit daunting to get to the last of four huge operas in six days and realize that now, the story Wagner originally wanted to tell can begin.
I haven't talked much about the Ring cycle, because the whole thing has left me utterly poleaxed and quite short on words. Despite the long-ass nature and reputation of these operas, even the longest of them is slightly shorter than the director's cut of Return of the King. And that doesn't have intermissions. (On the other hand, they let you eat during the show, and if you have to leave to pee, they let you back in. But still.) There were only a couple of moments during the entire 15-hour opus where I felt that the action was dragging a bit, particularly after I realized that the orchestra has a very active role in the opera, and that many of the stretches where our lead singers are just looking at each other longingly aren't dead space -- the orchestra is filling us in on his secret motives, and her secret motives, and the unfortunate likely outcome of their deception, et cetera. Wagner really did influence everyone who came after him, particularly the entire notion of film scores. You know that bit in Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda says "No, there is another" and then Leia's theme music plays? TOTALLY straight out of Wagner, that trick.
The whole thing is epic, but it comes by it honestly; it runs from the beginning of time to the end of time, basically. There are some bits that drag a little ("Yes, he's your nephew. Yes, you used to be a god and a warrior and you aren't now. Yes, you're conflicted. We know this, because you've spent the last 45 minutes on it. We also know you end up schtupping him, so get to it") and some bits that are a little weird ("Who now with the magic potion what?"), but it's all in all quite lovely and engaging, and a beautiful story of how hubris can bring down even the gods, and that a man divided against himself cannot stand. At the end of Götterdammerung, I was high and giggly and infused with the magic of the art, but it's taken me a full 48 hours to recover from the experience. And I really, really wish I had another day, a cooler one this time, to keep dragging myself back to reality.
Current Mood:  satiated
Current Music: nothing at all. blessed silence.
Tags: music
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11:35 pm
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A Very Musical Weekend
There was a fair amount of visiting yesterday; we visited my father-in-law's friend Dwight, who is housesitting while my FIL and his wife are in Hawaii, and then we visited Erik's grandfather in the dementia care facility to show him our wedding pictures. Then we visited wrog and emmacrew, and Emma told us the story of the Ring Cycle while Roger played us the various leitmotifs on the piano. It was delightful, and dead cool, even though the Wagnerian goodness of it all was occasionally interrupted by the "BONK! WOOPWOOPWOOP!" noises of one of Philip's toys. Then we went to see daspatrick's band Xander at the Blue Moon, which ROCKED LIKE A ROCKING THING THAT ROCKS A LOT. I'm completely biased here; Patrick is my brother, and I see everything regarding him through sibling-colored glasses, but he's a really good bassist and a really good songwriter, and is quite the enjoyable performer. At one point, they were playing a song a lot of people knew the words too ("Laika". . . the chorus goes "Good dog, Laika come home") and we were all dancing and singing along, and I caught Patrick's eye and he looked back at me with this look like "This is pretty fukn awesome, this right here." And you know what? It was.
Then TODAY we had the first of the Ring Cycle operas, Das Rheingold, two and a half hours with no intermission. It rizzocked the hizzouse. I mean, there are mermaids swimming in air, an evil dwarf, and Loki throwing fire around, what's not to love?! I wasn't super thrilled with the tenor singing Loge, but I'm not necessarily overly fond of tenors to begin with. Wotan was very good, and Stephanie Blythe as Fricke was fan-fucking-tastic. The sets were jawdroppingly beautiful -- leenerella, tell Luke that we spontaneously gasped and applauded when the forest set came on. We are way the hell up in the cheap seats (where "cheap" == "$500 for both of us to see all four operas"), and I think we might invest in some opera glasses before tomorrow, but there really isn't a bad seat in this house. It was incredible, as good as I could have dreamed. I'm very excited about the rest of them. I am starting to see why people are such wicked hott Wagner fans.
Current Music: Neutral Carrier Hotel -- Xander
Tags: music, patrick
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12:26 pm
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NW Mahler Festival Concert
The NW Mahler Festival concert was last night, and all things considered, it went extremely well. The program was very long, and rehearsal time had been cramped as a result. Between the Barber work Prayers of Kirkegaard and the Mahler 2nd, the singers had quite the workout. My voice is a little swollen today around my break, and I have to either push or support like a mofo to get anything out at all. Since I'm singing Carmina Burana tonight at Summer Sings, I'm guessing I'd better start doing my crunches now.
The crowd was really appreciative, and even though I did the first four movements of the Mahler with earplugs in (we don't sing, and I was seated directly behind the tam-tams and the bass drum), it was a pretty fun performance overall. If you didn't see it, you missed out! Next year's concert is July 18, mark your calendars now.
Tags: music, nwmf
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12:02 am
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Wheeeeee there goes all my time again wheeeee
Yesterday, the Northwest Mahler Festival called. I'd indicated interest in being in the chorus, even after I fruck out and bowed out of the soloist audition, but then I realized that fully more than half of the rehearsals conflicted with Chorale stuff, so I decided it was not a good idea to make that commitment.
Well, uh, they called me yesterday and said 'um, we still need you, if you're willing to come down. Concert's a week from Tuesday. You come recommended, so, we hope you can learn fast!"
so, four big rehearsals over the next coupla weeks. I really hope emmacrew decides to do it too, because I need someone to coach me on the German. If she doesn't, uh, anyone else know German?
Tags: music, nwmf
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09:34 am
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Verdi's Requiem
We had our first orchestra rehearsal for Verdi's Requiem, and it was AWESOME. It's the first time during an orch rehearsal I've ever messed up because the amazingness of the soli and the orchestra was so overwhelming, I forgot to sing. However, most of my messups were only mine, modulo a bit during the final Libera Me fugue where the altos demonstrated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in that we knew either where we were going, or how fast we were going, but not both. The soli are all excellent (the tenor soio? Vinson Cole. The soprano solo? Sally Wolf. The mezzo solo? Some woman whose name I can't even remember but who is righteously incredible. Yeah, baby.)(ETA: Her name is Robynne Redmon.) The only issue is that Gerry is taking both fugues FASTFAST -- closer to 145 bpm than 120. (and in the double fugue, those beats are half notes, not quarter notes. The sucker MOVES.) Which means we have to rework all our breaths and really practice getting into and out of chestvoice in a hurry. These are musicians' details, though; the overall experience is incredible. When the Dies Irae started, and then again at the tutta forza before the Tuba Mirum, I could feel my toes curling. The mezzo solo and Vinson Cole both approached the chorus at the break and said this was the most fabulous chorus they'd ever sung with.
http://www.seattlesymphony.org! $15 tickets might still be available. This is going to be hella amazing.
Tags: music, symphony
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12:20 am
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I'll write more about the Requiem later.
For now, here's the link to the Seattle Times review.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/musicnightlife/2002284855_requiem23.html
Tags: music, symphony
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10:52 am
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I thought I was out of tea! & concert review
I thought I was out of tea! But I am not out of tea! Because Emma gave me some Emergency Backup Tea a while ago! Thanks be to Emma!
We had an interesting and beautiful concert last night. The Seattle Symphony Chorale has performed Mozart's Requiem many times now, and most of the group knows it really, really well. Fortunately, we had Christian prepping us on it, and he is a flippin' genius at getting us to look at a work we could sing in our sleep with fresh eyes. He prepared us brilliantly, and we brought an interpretation of the Requiem to the stage that I would defy anyone to be unmoved by. There were funny moments; in the Rex Tremendae, we switch back and forth from doing the rhythm as written (dotted-quarter and eighth notes) in the homophonic sections, and in a baroque double-dotted interpretation (double-dotted quarter note, sixteenth note) in the polyphonic section. The first time we ran this with Gerry*, he stopped us halfway through the polyphony and said "Start again, please," so we did; he stopped us again and said "Chorale, these notes are too short. These are eighth notes, right?" and we said "Sixteenth, we're doing this part double-dotted" and he said "Oh." (loooong pause while he looks at his score; then he looks up at us again.) "In that case, too long." Heh.
Last night's performance was dedicated to Mary Ann Bisio, which meant we were all in fine choked-up emotional form for her. We ended the piece with the Ave Verum Corpus, a perfect little jewelbox of a work that was the last thing Mozart actually completed before his death. (He had sketched the Requiem, and nearly all of the musical ideas you hear in the piece are his, but it was orchestrated after his death by Süssmayer.) Gerry took the Ave about twice as slow as anyone normally takes it, which meant we had these huge soaring lines, and when we ended the piece on an ultra-pianissimo chord, the whole house was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Gerry held his hands in the air to savor the moment, and then gently lowered them to release us; as we put our music down and the audience prepared for applause, we heard a gasp from the soprano section and a sickening thud. One of the front row sopranos had keeled over unconscious.
The poor audience didn't know what to do; they didn't know whether the piece was truly over, or whether we were suspended because of the accident. (It was over. She waited until Gerry released us to pass out.) The stagehands had the Chorale clear the stage very quickly so that the medics could get in, and someone got on the PA and announced that the concert was over. As we filed out, the audience was beginning a rousing standing ovation, and poor Anna was juuuust starting to come to. She was as white as a sheet; in fact, her lips and fingernails were slightly blue. She had been utterly unresponsive for nearly a minute.
She had just plain old fainted, it turned out. She hadn't eaten, hadn't really slept, hadn't breathed deeply enough during the huge lines in the Ave, and had locked her knees, all of which is a recipe for a faceplant. Her parents were called (she's 17), and an ambulance as well, but it was mainly butt-covering; as emmacrew said, if she dies of anything, it'll be embarassment. Still, it was a dramatic and unsatisfying end to the piece, and I kind of feel emotionally raw as a result. I have another concert tonight which I hope will give me some closure on it.
*Gerry is Maestro Gerard Schwartz, Artistic Director of the Seattle Symphony.
Current Mood:  uncomfortable
Tags: music, symphony
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12:00 pm
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Happy Fun Audition Time
We're re-auditioning the entire chorus in September. This is frankly not a big deal, and I suspect that to a certain extent I could get up there and sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and be fine, but all auditions are worth putting time into. Since we're reauditioning something like 160 people, the primary candidate for an aria is "How long is it?" They want SHORT SHORT SHORT. The shortest piece I have in repetoire is Tu che di gel sei cinta, from Turandot; it clocks in at just over two minutes. I love it, and I can probably perform it very well. The problem? It's higher than hell, which is great, except that I sing alto in the Chorale, and I have this slight consternation about auditioning for an alto role with a high soprano aria. (Tessitura is from B-flat to A-flat.) My great "look how awesome my range is" piece is Una voce poco fa, from Barber of Seville. That piece covers two and a half octaves, with ornaments. But it's like seven and a half minutes long (when I perform it; i have to take it somewhat slower than Ms. Sills). RIGHT OUT, they'd kill me. I could learn something new; I have no mezzo work in rep at the moment, and Saint-Saens has some beautiful work in Samson et Dalila, and it is months and months away, but even the shortest piece I could find there would be like 5 minutes long.
Emma says don't worry, just sing Tu che di gel. Emma would know. I should listen to Emma.
Edited to add: OK, Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix is DEFINITELY going into the repetoire, even if not for this. This is stunning, and I think very suitable for my voice.
Current Mood:  intimidated
Current Music: la la la LA
Tags: music
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