Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Rice pudding and other fun desserts

Friday, Feb. 27, 2004
8:10 p.m.
I attended the Karina Gauvin/Michael McMahon masterclasses all day and enjoyed them immensely. Michael is such a nice guy and so incredibly insightful in the art of accompanying that the students couldn�t help but learn tons from him. He talked about orchestral reductions and how the accompanist has to be aware of the actual musical score so that he can play the horns or the violins or the oboe on the piano. He made one of the students play a Scarlatti accompaniment in various interpretations, as though it were Brahms or Schubert or Debussy, before asking her to play it like Bach, which she did, and the differences were marked.

Karina was amazing. She got the kids to be expressive, sing in tune, get their high notes, make real phrases, all with just some simple tricks, like speaking the line before singing it, or keeping their bodies still and improving their posture. Mind you, she did make one girl burst into tears. This is the girl who dresses inappropriately with the short skirts and the bulging-boob tops. She has a lovely voice and sings with an ease those of us who have struggled for years envy. As a result, she doesn�t feel the need to work at all. The song she was doing was Reynaldo Hahn�s Si mes vers avaient des ailes and Karina kept asking her to be more expressive, to do more with the text, dynamics, etc. She was relentless, saying that this girl was capable of so much more, that she had a responsibility if she were to be a professional performing on a stage to an audience which had paid money to hear her, and the poor thing just started crying in front of everyone. It was a little embarassing and a lot uncomfortable, to say the least, especially for the student. But Karina gave her a big hug and recounted a story about how she had experienced a very similar thing during a master class when she was a young singer at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a very famous accompanist. He had also expected more of her, and kept pounding and pounding on her until she could handle it no longer and burst into tears. She also ran from the auditorium and has never been able to sing Fr�lingsglaube since.

We all went for lunch to Shalimar and partook of their Friday noon buffet. I love Indian food, and Shalimar�s is very fine. Unfortunately, I didn�t get to have my rice pudding for dessert because time was marching inexorably onward and the class resumed at 1:30, so I had to leave without it. Sigh� I love their rice pudding.

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