Nonstandard Monday
Today has been a long spectacular hurtle that even almost six years with hellhounds ill-prepared me for. I am expecting to fall off my chair and lie on the floor moaning and twitching feebly . . . probably before I finish this blog. I can possibly semaphore to Darkness what buttons to press to hang it* but I do not guarantee my usual elegant peroration and epigrammatic finish.**
I was so unnerved by Oisin’s praise last Friday that I’ve hardly known how to practise. This is that old ‘something to lose’ thing. The great thing about beginnings is that you don’t know how yet. It’s all good. Once you start learning anything . . . you have somewhere to fall. Down. It’s very frustrating having no particular talent—or in this case, voice—but it’s also liberating. I don’t have to take it seriously. I can obsess, because I will obsess, frivolously. La la la la la la. And (for better or worse) it’s not like I’ve discovered my inner Beverly Sills or anything.*** But there are increasing numbers of (fleeting) moments when there is maybe even something going on with my singing . . . and occasionally, thrillingly, a few of these moments string themselves together. It’s not the high F in Che Faro—F is not high—it’s the terrifying sticking your head above the parapet. This is your big moment . . . Noooooooo. Eeeeeeeeep. And I tend to sing it accordingly.† Plus that ratbag ‘ben’ you have to sing it on, which is not singer-friendly and which does not help. The other song I particularly wanted to look at is The Minstrel Boy—yes, I am a sap, sue me—because I start the run up to that first (unhigh) F without much trouble and it’s like ‘okay I can do this’ and then on the second run up to that same F I lose my nerve and get all thin and squeaky. I think it’s something about emotional engagement—you may remember that this song got mixed up with Diana’s death for me—and it’s like suddenly, whoa, uh, no, maybe not. But I love the song. I want to sing it. Singing is so frelling revealing, even when you do it badly. Your Blasted Body Is Your Blasted Instrument, Get Used to It. Um. And I don’t know what Nadia did—I never know what Nadia did, even though she tells me††—but my last go through was rough and raw and rather awful, but there was something there, you know? My problem is mostly about shutting down. This was about opening up to the extent that I could no longer control it. Speaking of eeeeep. Eeeeeeep.
The day was already going a lick. I’d got down to the mews late (of course) and had my head down over my computer slightly longer than I should have and thus fed hellhounds lunch slightly later than I should have. But they were milling around my feet looking for Mysteriously Dropped Chicken Bits Oops so I (foolishly) wasn’t expecting trouble. Whereupon Chaos decided not to eat. This was absolutely classic Chaos—he was clearly hungry, it wasn’t that he’d picked up some bloody tourist’s dropped chicken bones in the street yesterday—but some frelling ritual or other for a Monday in an even-numbered year when Aldebaran is in the ascendant and Jupiter aligns with Mars had been left incomplete. ARRRRRGH. At slightly after the last minute he ate after all YAAAAAAAY, and we then tore back to the cottage because I had an errand to run on my way to Nadia†††.
I was at best going JUST to make it back to New Arcadia for Niall to pick me up and blast off to Curlyewe. But I made it. And then we sat outside the Curlyewe church for fifteen minutes because our handbell apprentices were late.‡
We rang handbells till people started showing up for tower practise. And then I grabbed my new tower. And . . . the worst of it is, I like Curlyewe. Nice bells. Very nice bells. And, furthermore, eight of them. We rang Grandsire Triples.‡‡ The last thing I need is another Monday tower that is, furthermore, too far away.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to fall out of my chair.
* * *
* No, you’re wrong. If I can learn to circumvent the WordPress gremlins and hang a blog post . . . so can a moderately intelligent dog.
Of the local selection, Darkness is the one who is willing to find problems outside his immediate self-focus interesting. Chaos . . . not so much. Chaos does not speak the standard human-canine language. There certainly are days when I shout YOU ARE THE DUMBEST ANIMAL I HAVE EVER MET . . . but I’m speaking to myself.^ Sighthounds have been bred for thousands of years^^ to make their own decisions. They can’t be asking you for help when they’re flat out after a gazelle. This has its drawbacks in modern urban life. Darkness, however, is clearly trainable as most of the world understands dog training, and I am a Bad Owner because I am neglecting this because I don’t know what to do with his brother. Chaos has his own view of the structure of the universe and while I am the centre of it—more theatrically so than I am Darkness’ holy altar of all—manifestations of his zealous dedication are his own and not particularly open to negotiation or adjustment.^^^
Anyway. If this post ends abruptly and there are a few short dark steely-grey hairs drifting across the margins, you know why.
^ Today, for example. I had a major hissy fit meltdown this afternoon—worst in some time. Worst since I started singing when my computer is really pissing me off because screaming hurts my voice. + The cause is that most of my ME symptoms, barring the really life-stopping no-brain, what planet is this, no-energy, never mind I don’t care worst ones, have all come back in a mean-spirited rabble, as a result of . . . wait for it . . . my daring to eat a little restaurant food with Fiona the other night. I ordered carefully, it was a small meal and there was nothing in it I’m not allowed.++ All my joints hurt, sleep is something that happens to other people, and anything I eat makes me ill. THIS IS SO GREAT. THIS IS SO, SO, SO GREAT. I was running upstairs at the cottage just before I shot off to a long rest-of-day series of events and one of my frelling knees gave out and I had suddenly Had. It. Paroxysm ensued, complete with radical and substantial screaming. This was right before my voice lesson. It’s also a really idiotic waste of energy, when you already have ME.
I’ve never met a dog this stupid.
+ I admit this works better some times than other times. There was a fair amount of shouting at the Metropolitan Opera last night.
++ Okay, what was in that tea bag?
^^ No, really. Salukis have been around recognisably since 7000 BC or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluki
^^^ See: eating.
** What?
*** All right. I admit it. Siiiiiiigh.
† Siiiiiiigh. Another category of sigh.
†† Except occasionally. When she invokes Teacher Secrets.
††† My watchband broke. Months ago. It’s a perfectly good watch. And they don’t make watchbands for it any more. Finally about the third jeweller I took it to said that she thought their repairpersons could do it. And they did. But it still doesn’t close correctly and I predict the mend is not going to last long. Then what.
And so to cheer myself up, on the way back to Wolfgang, I made a lightning raid on WH Smith and bought . . . five knitting magazines. Just to see what they’re like, you know? The one I was looking for was Vogue Knitting, because they keep trying to sell me a subscription to my iPad, and I have this nostalgic craving to see it in hard copy first.^ On first glance, VK wins hands down for the yarn porn aspect.
I need more stuff to read.
^ One of the ones I bought is American, so it’s not that imported knitting magazines are too subversive for the UK market.
‡ It’s okay. I was knitting.
‡‡ Only a plain course. But something went Horribly Wrong and I thought nooooooo I can’t even ring a plain course any more, kill meeeeee, but Niall told me afterward it wasn’t me, it was someone else. Well, I’m sorry for the someone else, but I’m relieved to be permitted to go on living. Even if I did make a, ahem, dog’s dinner of Cambridge.
YESSSSSSSSSSS.
I have brought Hannah over to the DARK SIDE. She is going to LEARN TO KNIT. —Well, relearn. She, like so many of you—my family of origin seems to have been a knitting-free zone—was originally taught by her grandmother. But when she and I were festive, swinging, cutting-edge young things, knitting was antiquated, déclassé, extinct. Your grandmother still did it, but nobody else did.* And then other things like career, family, and the need for at least three and a half hours of sleep per night, get in the way of rediscovering your handcrafty roots: How to knit, how to sew a fine seam, how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. And then one day you look up from your desk and think, I can make publishing CEOs on the other side of the city/planet** tremble but I’ve never (re)learnt to knit.***
Or possibly you’ve been moaning on the phone to your best friend about how you spend too much time on airplanes.† And how when things go well you can read or watch a film†† or even get some work done, but things so often don’t go well, and you’re sitting in the gate area and the PA system is telling you every five minutes that you will be loading momentarily, and then when you finally do get on the frelling plane you have a really annoying seatmate who is afraid of flying, freaked out by whatever was holding up loading, and needs to chat. And the requisite screaming baby is in the seat behind you.††† And then, because the plane loaded late, you’ve lost your place in the take-off queue, and you’re going to be frelling around here on the ground for quite some time and I hope there isn’t a connecting flight at the other end and . . .
At which point your friend may say smugly, You should learn to knit.
Which is what I said to Hannah tonight. And there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said, You’re right. That’s exactly what I should do. . . . So then we both spent some time looking up knitting shops in New York City‡ and she’s totally going to do this thing.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.
I am glad today has had a chance to go out on a high.‡‡ High moments in the last fourteen hours have been somewhat thin on the ground. To begin with it’s been a gorgeous day . . . the first non-dire day we’ve had in about a fortnight. I COULD GET SOME GARDENING DONE. I COULD POT UP THE MILLION LITTLE GREEN THINGS WAITING TO BE POTTED UP.
Except I can’t. Mondays are voice lesson and ringing at Colin’s. I haven’t got time for more extracurriculars. Tomorrow it’s going to rain again. Indeed it’s warming up to raining again tomorrow right now.‡‡‡ I did slam in a few sweet peas this afternoon in the little gap of time between getting hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to sweep them away and when I need to leave for my singing lesson, but ‘slam’ is the operating word here and remember I said they needed to be potted on? Yes. They’ve got a good quarter-inch of white root showing around the bottom of the porous plant-in-situ pots I put them in weeks and weeks ago.
And . . . I think I told you that I had gone to Oisin’s on Friday positively charged with tragedy, and was going to amaze him with my profound aural empathy with Orfeo mourning his lost Eurydice. Ha. Frelling ha ha ha. About 95% of all that rich, blossoming cornballery went away the moment Oisin raised his hands over his keyboard.§ GODS FRELL IT. I knew some of it would go away as soon as there was Someone Else Listening but I was pretty depressed that nearly all of it did. This demoralised me sufficiently that I never really got it back over the weekend, and the Che Faro I took to Nadia today was a poor thin shadow of its last-week self.
It was not all bad. In the first place, Nadia knows. She’s a singer, and when she says ‘you’re your own worst enemy, Robin,’ she says it sympathetically. In the second place she’s a girl. (This was pretty funny. She was saying ‘I’m a girl’ simultaneously as I was saying ‘he’s a bloke’.) In the third place . . . she was serious about letting me work on it with her.§§ And in the fourth place . . . I went in saying, you know, even at my cornball best last week when I really was ( . . . I think . . . ) producing some vague, uncertain drama about the whole thing, that top F is an utter ratbag . . . and F isn’t high enough to inspire this amount of angst and perturbation. And she said immediately, it’s on ‘ben’, isn’t it? (Yes.) That’s a really bad vowel sound for singing. —So at least I wasn’t just being hopeless. And she gave me some stuff to do. And I love my voice lessons, even when they’re on THE ONLY GOOD DAY WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALL MONTH, and when I’m singing like a slightly defective robot.
And then tonight’s ‘tower’ ring was in Colin’s garage, with his inverted flower-pots. I am so useless with those ridiculous bells.§§§ But tonight uselessness was general. We all went home healthier than we came because laughter as we all know is the best medicine. But in terms of ringing. . . .
OH GODS IT’S SHEETING OUT THERE.
But at least Hannah is learning to knit.
* * *
* And the things your grandmother knitted for you—I had friends with knitting machines for grandmothers—made you cringe in fashion horror, as you drew up your leopardskin spandex with the roses and skulls,^ and snicked on your stud bracelets.^^ A lot of white rats and guinea pigs belonging to dashing, contemporary young things with knitting machines for grandmothers slept extremely well in those days.
^ I had a pair of jeans-equivalent in this fabric until fairly recently.
^^ I still have most of these. I amuse easily.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png
. . . Whew. Read the caveats at the bottom of the page. Art is harder. You can’t excerpt 200 words from art. If you just drew a square with ‘Kansas City’ written in it it wouldn’t have the same effect.
*** Or how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. Your grandmother probably didn’t teach you that one.
† Uh-huh. There was that convention in Hawaii you went to several times. There was that other convention in San Francisco that gave you enough free time to go on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley. I’m pretty sure that last trip to Paris—when you came home with the fabulous dress—was work-related. My heart frelling bleeds.
†† On your iPad. In hindsight I realise that I should have known that when both Hannah and Merrilee not only bought iPads but adored them, that I might as well embrace my doom. I don’t think either of them plays computer games though. And I’m afraid to ask. I think they might yell at me.
††† Or the requisite screaming baby is being held in a parental lap behind your really annoying seatmate so that the requisite marked-for-death toddler with legs just long enough to kick the back of the chair ahead of it every time its parents are looking the other way can be behind you.
‡ Oh gods look at that gorgeous yarn. Thank the gods it’s three thousand miles away.^
^ No! I don’t want to know if they ship overseas! Nor do I want to know the brand so I can see if anyone over here sells it! NO!
‡‡ I say nothing about the night. Which is young and full of dreadful promise.
‡‡‡ All right, all right, it’s after midnight, it is tomorrow. The frelling rain doesn’t have to be so sharp off the flapdoodling blocks.
§ Or keyboards, in this case: he suggested he try the organ. The accompaniment sounded really nice on the organ. What we’re doing here is giving a miss to the main event, which would be me.
§§ YAAAAAAAAAY. Sorry. But . . . YAAAAAAAAAAAAY.
§§§ From the sublime to the ridiculous or what. Colin’s entire garage would fit inside the mouth of the abbey’s biggest bell.
Wet wet wet
It’s okay. I can write a blog tonight. Darkness ate dinner. *&^%$£@#~}+!!!!!!!!!!! Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief. She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.* Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating. Yesterday.
I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know). Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally. It’s not a big deal. It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history. And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history. And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating. And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary. But. . . .
If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. I’m used to this. I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it. Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom. If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic. It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.
AND THEN . . .
It has not been a good day. Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells. And it rained. Again. It’s been raining all week. It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.** It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.*** It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours. It rained on my voice lesson.† It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin. It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.†† IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER. IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.††† It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.
AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
It has not been a good day.
But Darkness ate dinner. Enthusiastically. So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . .
* * *
* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000+ words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.
** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late. Of course I was late. I’m always late. And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza. I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^ Eeep. This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification. I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to. So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me. Oops. Now I’m for it.
In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight. And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.
I may have a bell tower again. That is, I admit, may. I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.+++ And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY. However, I’ll take what I can get. And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard++++, my best practical choice for a new tower. Hahahahahahahaha. Ouch, that hurts.
^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed+ it The Force of Destiny.++
+ I invent a verb. I feel it could have wider application however.
++ It could be a lot worse. I could have named it La Traviata or Aida.
+++ Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything. Anything. But we are not considering this possibility. We reject it.
++++ And its name may be Doomblade.
*** With a spectacular escort of guards. Yeep. We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either. But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again. Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.
† Yes. I took Cathy to my voice lesson. And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^
It was pretty interesting though. I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening. It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either. Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff. Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing. The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces. Feh. I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week. EEEEEEP. This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again. I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now. And it probably is, you know? I’ll take it in to her and . . .
^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.+
+ And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so.
†† More *&^%$£”+=}]~#@!!!!!! Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post. And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by. I’ll get there in the end. And then I’ll write a blog post about it. Grrrrrrrrrr.
††† I tell myself, rain is good. We’re in a drought. We need this rain. I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.
Singing and a ’cello
I had FOUR new songs to learn, or to try on for size and choose from, the last fortnight, since Nadia, the lazy slut, was taking Easter Monday off,* they just don’t make voice teachers like they used to.** And then I had flu.*** I’ve only been really singing for about the last three days.† So, at rather a pelt, I learnt a song and a half: Long Time Ago arranged by Aaron Copland†† and half of When Daisies Pied by Thomas Arne†††.
In some ways the increasing gap between what I do or can do at home and what I do or can do for Nadia is INCREASINGLY FRUSTRATING. I do my most emotive singing . . . mostly over the washing-up. Please. But there’s something about having something that is just slightly distracting‡ to do with your hands and about one-tenth of your brain, as well as no audience‡‡, that enables all kinds of freedom. I caught myself breaking my heart over the dead Eurydice some time this weekend . . . and of course the moment I noticed it went away and I couldn’t get it back. Arrrrgh. But in terms of sheer howling frustration at the perversity of self-consciousness . . . I was doing scales at the sink. It was, again, some time this weekend. I’d been singing for a day or two at that point but this was my first attempt to get back into my top end. Oh dear, I thought, that A is still very squeaky. So I went to the piano because sometimes having the piano to lean on is comforting. And it wasn’t the A. It was the B. I don’t have a B—yet—but I’ve thought I probably will because I have the A# most of the time at home and an occasional chalkboard squeal above that. This was definitely a B, and while it was far from a thing of beauty, it was real enough that if I could make it on demand it would be useful in a choir where I’m being covered up by a lot of better Bs.‡‡‡
Of course it only lasted long enough for me to go, glibberglingglang, that’s a B! That’s a real, live B! Whereupon it went away so emphatically I could barely hack my way to the A. Siiiiiiiigh.
When I went in today the first thing Nadia did was make me do a lot of physical stretches to get the bits reconnected since, post-flu, they’ve all shut down in postures of rigid defense. The point being that I was even singing badly . . . but I had still managed to produce that top B I don’t have (yet) simply because I knew I had had flu and wasn’t expecting much. ARRRRRRGH.
She then asked me what, of whatever I was singing, I’d most like her input on, and I pulled out Long Time Ago. And here’s the thing . . . she didn’t say anything about the notes and all that basic stuff (despite the fact that they are not perfect). She went immediately into phrasing and interpretation.
You know this improvement scam is kind of intimidating. . . .
blondviolinist
|
cicatricella wrote on Fri, 13 April 2012 22:02 |
| Re: the violoncello thing. I know not how it might apply to voice, and why there would be both a ‘cello’ and a ‘violoncelle’, but ‘cello’ is actually an abbreviation (or was originally anyway). ‘Cello’ is a diminutive in Italian and a ‘violoncello’ is a ‘little (contra)bass’. That’s why some books (especially older ones) write it ” ‘cello” |
Yep. So the performer who listed it as “cello” was probably a nice enough person, and the performer who listed it as “violoncelle” was full of themselves.
I did wonder. It’s the ‘violoncelle’ performer that we missed. The cello player was a nice young man—and I think I remember he placed in the instrumental category. I did know about the “ ’cello” from reading lots of old books, but I assumed that since this was in some other language it must be some other instrument.
Diane in MN
Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.
How good are you at subverting voice teachers?
SNORK. That approach hadn’t occurred to me. Well, the family have been threatening to move south, to be nearer the rest of the clan. . . .
I didn’t hear Traviata this afternoon and from your description, I would have disliked the production a whole lot. As when:
[. . .] she realises he’s asking her to give up Alfredo forever SHE TAKES HER DRESSING-GOWN OFF and trails around in her slip. Oh gods how I hate the wandering around in your underwear to indicate vulnerability and innocence thing. (She does it again later at the party. [. . .])
This would have taken me right outside the performance,
YES. THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT DOES. ‘Surreal’ has rules (even if I’m not sure what they are) just like ‘fantasy’ does, and if you break them, you ruin the story, and the spell. The end of the first act, when she’s singing about how she has to be free, and then she hears Alfredo off stage singing about the power of love, in his wet way, and it stops her . . . in this staging, he comes on stage and confronts her, although I think you don’t have to know the standard set-up to recognise the dream-like quality of it here: she is confronting herself really. And it works. That’s one of the things that works a treat. It’s hard to believe that someone who came up with this would also come up with trailing around in your slip.
even if other elements (like Alfredo in his underwear) had failed to do so.
Indeed. I was having a little trouble, although I would have coped, with the cabbage roses. The boxer shorts broke my suspension of disbelief snap. Reasons Never to Be A Stage Actor: your director can make a fool of you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I dislike and am distracted by staging that wants to trump the music or libretto or both. Aaargh. It’s too bad that on top of that, the singers were not at their best.
Yes. And part of the frustration is that a good deal of this staging was really interesting. But . . . I was talking to someone else who saw it, who agreed that Dmitri sang like a stick. It may have been characterisation—Papa Germont is a stick—but it was not a good choice.
Blondviolinist
I haven’t seen many productions of La Trav, but I’ve yet to see one in which the 2nd act didn’t bore me. (Well, except for Papa Germond’s aria. He’s being a jerk, but oh! is it gorgeous music.) This includes two of Zeffirelli’s stagings. Maybe the act is simply hard to stage effectively.
We-ell. . . . I wouldn’t say boring, myself, but then I love the opera too much. I do absolutely know what you mean. For me the music, well sung, can deal with anything (and Dessay, even not in top voice, was well worth watching, and I’d see her in it again without hesitation). What I guess happens with me is that I look forward to all three scenes, and I would have said that it’s pretty hard to get both Germont and Violetta and the party scene wrong, they’re both oozy with easy drama. All right, it’s not hard: put Violetta in her dressing gown, and then make her take it off, and then wander brokenly around the rest of the stage pulling all the cabbage roses off the furniture. ARRRRGH. Anyway. It shouldn’t be hard to stage both those scenes. The rough one is the one between Papa the Thug and Alfredo the Wet Brat.
And yes, since you ask, I’m insane, we knew that, I’d love a chance to try. . . .
* * *
* I think this was a toddler-minding problem rather than a desire to loll around at home in her dressing-gown all day eating bonbons and watching soap operas.
** WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WHILE SHE’S ON MATERNITY LEAVE FOR TWO MONTHS? I’LL FORGET EVERYTHING.^
^ Drama queen? What? Clearly you don’t take music lessons from a Nadia.
*** I know. I still owe you a what? blog about how the New Thing came to be. It may be some help if I mention now that ‘raving with fever’ had something to do with it.
† And I still have one spectacularly blocked ear which is very, very boring.
†† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D8wqsmkYT8 So I have a thing for baritones. Sue me. Of the half dozen that come up immediately on YouTube this is my favourite. And having listened to all of the ones I liked twice (and this one three times) I have STOPPED because Nadia doesn’t like me listening to YouTube—I told you this, that she believes that you pick up interpretations without meaning to and she wants her students making their own mistakes. And their own not-mistakes. As recently as when I was first learning Dove Sei I thought she was straining at gnats with me—I could certainly see why she’d be thinking about this with a student who, you know, had a real voice and was really singing—but . . .
Um. Okay. Yes. I’ve crossed that line too.^ Granted that Long Time Ago (or When Daisies Pied) is a simple song, but my excuse for heading for YouTube was to learn the actual line as quickly as possible without worrying about my eccentric piano-playing. But I was pretty much ignoring the melody because I knew I could pick it up, and listening to the phrasing. How does he do that—oh. Oops.
EMoon
It is amazing, as I take more lessons and crawl slowly forward in the singing, how much more I can hear in others’ singing.
Yes. Exactly. I’ve been aware of it increasingly—as I mentioned again on Friday after the Pan-galactic finals, that your listening is different in kind if you’re having even a feeble and talent-free stab at doing whatever-it-is yourself. But I don’t think I had realised till I started listening to good professional singers singing Long Time Ago the other night just how far down this road I’ve come. Oh wow. Look. Elephants. Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.
All I need is more work, more work, more work, and no other things interrupting it. (Bwah-ha-ha-ha! she sings, with expression and only the right amount of vibrato. . . .
Well . . . that might be true with you people with voices. It’s certainly true that I could use more practise time to good effect but . . . I’m still going to hit the wall with this voice-equivalent sooner rather than later. Good reasons to keep singing off the McKinley Obsession List.
My friend Susan . . . mentioned today that a great contralto died a few days ago at age 90, Lili Chookasian. I knew nothing about her, but Susan gave a link to one of her recordings and I was completely wiped out by it, tears and all. Well below both our ranges, on the low end, but in case you’re interested, here’s a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrZTUm8IUAU&feature=relat ed
Oh my. Yes. (Which is why I’m sticking it in here, for musical blog-readers who don’t look at the forum.) I would love Kathleen Ferrier anyway, but I also love her because she’s the only true contralto I’ve pretty much ever frelling heard of.
I also sing Blow the Wind Southerly and even though I love the song and there’s no reason I shouldn’t, still . . . why? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjvHg9cBriw ^^
^ For better and worse. Generally speaking I’m fine with the fact that I’m not going to be a (very) late-flowering Beverly Sills. But I do kind of catch myself wishing that I had the chops+ to be a big frog in even a very small pond. Some of this is worrying about the future of the Muddles: I’ve told you we’re going to be getting a new director and Who Knows. And thanks to having more throat trouble this last year than I have had since I was a bronchitis-prone preteen and that the Muddles have lots of long breaks from rehearsal, I’ve never quite fully committed to them. If our new leader wants us singing medleys of old Beatles hits I’ll be out of there so fast I’ll give myself road burn.
+ Er . . . croaks?
^^ And Che Faro. And He Was Despised. And O Waly Waly. She sang a lot of my favourite repertoire. And I am a glutton for self-punishment.
††† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiTrRwsW0E
‡ There are good musical moments out with hellhounds too.^ But you can never afford to be too distracted from continuously scanning your surroundings for sudden perils. And I’ve never had a spoon or a tea mug leap out of my hands and go scalding off after a rabbit.
^ Even if Chaos will not stop looking up at me earnestly when I sing. When we’re out hurtling he trots at my side. At home he gets out of the nice comfy dog bed to stand near me and stare. No, I’m not in pain. Go away.
‡‡ Other than a deranged hellhound.
‡‡‡ Or at least Griselda. You really only need Griselda.
Pan-galactic finals
Grandson did not win. Grandson came fourth in the vocal category. I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance. He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*
But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think. The first thing that happened was a reprieve. The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows. And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break. So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .
Except we didn’t. We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.*** And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats. I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch. But. Wow.
In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy). But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated. I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself.
There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material. And there were a few real jaw-droppers. The girl who won looks about twelve. She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing. Big major yeeeeep.††† Golly she was good. She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat. And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love. She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance: an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy. It was extraordinary. She came second. The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡
And I got a lot of knitting done. I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡ Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§
* * *
* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before. But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here. His voice has got amazing over the last few years. I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone. He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching. Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too. Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time. Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.
** My gods. The Jaguar. Yeep. I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget. The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels. The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.
Caligula
What sort of Jag was it?
I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.) I did ask.^ Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^ I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well. But speaking of charisma. . . .
^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know. Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity.
^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides. You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it. Hellhounds need not apply.
*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain. There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds. The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately. The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder. No violinists? No pianists?
^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French. Is it the French word for cello? There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello?
† !!!!!!!!!!!!!
†† Someone sang Dove Sei. Snork. But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy. You come in on a fermata: Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it. Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment. You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end. I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity. And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata. This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.
Speaking of the accompanist(s): most of the performers brought their own.^^ There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed. Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill. Yowzah. Suddenly he’s a hero too.
^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA.
^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.
††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms.
‡ Yes. It’s a trouser role for a mezzo.
‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing: Se Tu M’ami. She did it a lot better. Surprise. Not. And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off. Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are.
‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.
§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?