L’invitation au voyage
10:45 p.m.
So, having said all that, I was out at a recital of French mélodies tonight given by one of the other singing teachers in the department, a woman who is past her prime but who still knows how to “put over a song”, as my mom would say, and our own F. Piano. It was pretty good. F. Piano played beautifully. Along with accompanying the singer, she also performed a few solos by Debussy and Satie, and sounded wonderful. The soprano had, I found out later, been in a car accident this afternoon wherein her vehicle was totalled, but she was happily unhurt. It meant trying to get a rental car at the last minute so she could actually get out here to perform. So I can understand if she was not in the best of shape.
However, having said that, and this is going to sound incredibly catty because that is what we singers, and especially sopranos, sound like when we are critiquing our colleagues, my esteemed fellow music tutor, whom I love dearly, is a very fine musician, a wonderful interpreter, and really knows how to make a song her own. She is, as mentioned above, past her vocal prime, and things that once came easily to her do so no longer. As a result, she cheats. You can see it in the clenching of her jaw when she’s trying to control volume, or hear it in the tightening of the throat for a particularly high note which has to be piano. Her loud stuff was good, because she was relaxed for that, but the more difficult to control singing suffered from compromised technique. I hear this all the time in older singers. It makes me think that, instead of finding new solutions to problems, they just rely on what they’ve always done and when that doesn’t work, they get tense.
The weird part for me is that I see and hear these things. They are blatantly obvious. The rest of the audience is deaf and blind to them. They hear the once beautiful voice (which still has a lot of charm and vibrancy) and the artistry and don’t realize what it is costing the performer to pull it off. I often wish I could just relax and enjoy a concert for its own sake and not be so hyper critical. Heaven knows, I’m not a perfect singer myself. I probably do some terrible things onstage that people are too polite to tell me about. I just hope I’ll know to quit while I’m still ahead. That’s all.
Earlier in the day, I met Ed and my baritone, who had brought a sugar pie, and we celebrated Ed’s 23rd birthday. Then I took him and another student out for pho at the Captain’s (Ed wasn’t feeling well and only ordered green tea), and then returned to the department in time for the Duke’s lecture on DeIibe’s Lakmé, which we are all headed off to see tomorrow. I wasn’t even going to go, but Ed is feeling so poorly he decided not to, so I am buying his ticket from him. I’ve been on these opera trips before and had fun, so I anticipate that this one will be no different.
The temperature has risen to practically balmy heights, and there is an abundance of snow falling from the heavens. I imagine there will be a lot of shoveling in store for us tomorrow morning.
<~~~ * ~~~>
