March 18, 2014
We had our Caramoor show on Sunday, and today [Tuesday] was the first of our two at the National Opera Center. The opening was full of surprises—mainly that the audience was so responsive to the songs, and that so many of them went superbly. We didn’t hit the bull’s-eye on every single tune but they all landed, the highs were high indeed, and nothing serious went amiss. The Caramoor crowd has not been notable for animation in the past. The room itself has the kind of austere beauty that doesn’t encourage stuff like applause and laughter. On Sunday they were definitely giving us more than I anticipated, and they were even quick enough to catch the dry, campy humor of Noël Coward’s lyrics. I had a very good afternoon at the piano—started well, and kept the energy humming just right. This is a complicated show for me because Leann is playing a lot of it, so my bouts at the piano are very discontinuous. But on Sunday every time I settled back into the keyboard, I was in gear.
Tonight’s show went really well for the singers—even more five-star performances across the boards. Everyone in excellent voice and spirits. Leann was on fire too–wow. The audience likes the National Opera Center; I kept hearing people say, “Oh, it’s so great to be up close like that to the performers.” And the voices do sound good in the hall—no, there isn’t the rafter-ringing reverb of bigger spaces, but apparently words are clear and voices sound opulent. The program itself plays like gangbusters, and the combination of all the different genres of songs plus the connecting prose and poetry does have a built-in magic. That was lucky because I had the most peculiar night of it; I started well, really hooked up and dancing with the Yamaha. Cooking with gas. But two-thirds of the way through the show I felt I went a little dry. I got a little weirded out by….something I can’t define, and I was working hard to play my easiest songs in the show, stuff I can toss off in my sleep. It was like having an existential tummy ache. By the encore it was gone.
I am eager to tackle it all again tomorrow [Wednesday!], and I think the performance will be the best of all. We have some very distinguished folks coming to the hall and all of us plan to entertain them royally. I’ll be sad to put this program to bed, and I hope you’ll hustle down and catch it.
–Steven Blier
Theo and Miles have been reveling in good health and good spirits, and the music has been like an artistic aphrodisiac for them. But Annie and Olivia have been fighting various ailments all week—the tail end of colds and flus that seem to have taken up squatter’s rights in their bodies. I too was sick last week and am puzzled to find that I’m still coughing as if I were overplaying the role of Mimí in some regional production of La bohème. Coughing doesn’t affect my piano playing all that much, but it has challenged both of the women in the program. Today we had to change one of Olivia’s numbers. Truth to tell, necessity was the mother of invention: I much prefer the song we’re going to do (by Granados) to the one originally planned (by Turina). It’s far more appropriate to the theme of the program, and it plays into Olivia’s strength. She studied Granados’s songs with the great Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza a few years ago, and brings a patrician authority to the material—or will, once she sings it for a couple of days!
A day of highs and lows. In the morning we had some visitors—a small cadre of Caramoor donors and board members, and also the General Director of Caramoor, Jeff Haydon. He’s the fellow who took over Michael’s old job, and I admit I have a soft spot for him. He’s a very decent guy with wonderful energy, and things always seem to shine a little brighter when he’s around. I like it when Jeff comes to rehearsal because none of us are afraid to do real work (i.e., screw up) in his presence, yet our hearts remain light and buoyant. Jeff always makes me feel talented and worthy and I appreciate that so much. He and the other visitors, including the appropriately named Vivian Song, were a sensational audience and the cast gave some of their best performances so far. Olivia suddenly morphed into a Brazilian sex-kitten in “Nenê,” Theo brilliantly channeled Noël Coward in an amazingly stylish rendition of “Uncle Harry,” Miles poured out vocal gold in his Grieg song, and Annie stopped time with “Calling You.” By the time we went into lunch Michael and I were feeling that all was right in our corner of the world.
As it turned out, God was not asleep. He sent us the art-chiropractor we needed: our guest teacher for the week, soprano Amy Burton. She hadn’t worked at Vocal Rising Stars since the first season five years ago, but I remember how sharp she was on every level: language, voice, interpretation, staging. She dispensed some much-needed vocal wisdom to the singers, and she instantly fixed two of the biggest problem spots in the group numbers. My favorite moment? A critique of the Hoagy Carmichael song, which had been absolutely stellar yesterday but which abruptly lost its way this afternoon. “Theo, ‘Hong Kong Blues’ is about opium. You look like you’re strung out on crystal meth…or coke. Anyway, wrong drug. We’ll work on it tomorrow.”
(1) We had a morning visit from about twenty students from a nearby high school, all of them members of their school chorus. They were amazingly attentive, asked a lot of good questions, and gently kicked all of us into performance mode. Sure, they were watching us rehearse, and we let them see us change keys, talk about vibrato, place vowels, fix problems. But inevitably you don’t rehearse the same way when you have an audience—you have to deliver the song, and that was a good boost to our energy. They also gave us an idea for a dance break in the Hoagy Carmichael piece that had been eluding us–it’s something called the Bernie…? Anyway, it comes from a movie, I think, it rang a bell with Miles and Theo, and it covered sixteen bars we’d been struggling with. I have found with high school students that a tiny, tiny touch of bad language and a soupçon of irreverence go a long way to earning their trust. I was all too happy to oblige.
(2) Both Olivia and Annie asked for a day of vocal rest. They have been struggling with some fatigue, and Annie is still getting over the same cold I just had. They devoted all their energies to the ensemble numbers, in which they sang lightly but acted with amazing commitment. Annie has to play a dowager in “A Bar in the Piccola Marina,” and she is already channeling Maggie Smith and Patricia Routledge. Today we got her to speak so she’s always straddling her register break—upper crust perfection, slightly crocked. Everyone’s great in that piece—Miles and Olivia as her very strait-laced children, and Theo double-cast as her boring (and soon dead) husband, and also her libidinous Italian boy-toy.
(3) With the girls pretty much on “mute,” Miles and Theo had breakthrough days. I gave Miles a pretty wide range of songs, from the gentle to the forceful, and he’s rising to the challenge quite beautifully. I always say that song is the great arena for expanding your vocal art, because you can safely go into uncharted waters in the span of a two-minute song. In his Grieg piece Miles is stepping into what I call his Helden-lyric voice, his big-boy sound, and it’s perfect for his juicy Scandinavian Stimme. And Theo is breaking through barriers, sinking into his music, his voice, and his art in the most moving way. The warmth and passion of his music is so satisfying.
(4) The cast decided they wanted to sing their a capella Stenhammar piece lying under the piano, just as we’d done two years ago rehearsing the Blitzstein quartet “In Twos.” They’d read about it and seen the picture on this blog, and they decided they needed to revive the tradition. This time we made sure Gabe Palacio, the photographer, was around to capture it. And I got a shot of Gabe on the floor with them as he took his pictures.
The first day is always the honeymoon; and on the second day I can see what the week’s work is going to be about. These singers all have such fertile imaginations that they are sometimes bombarded with thoughts, ideas, images, impulses. They’re gifted and young, and they are still building the wiring to handle their own artistic electricity. Their capabilities are enormous. Some singers would be daunted by the eight languages in “Ports of Call”; others would need to be shown the subtleties of melody and style. At Caramoor, though, everyone has a tremendous instinct for music, and no one has raised a fuss about the languages, not even Danish or Russian or Brazilian Portuguese. But in these early rehearsals, the cast tends to overreact to their material with bursts of passion that can knock them slightly off-kilter.
So today was all about simplicity, legato, bel canto. “Just sing the notes, everyone,” I finally told them. “It’ll ALL be there, just sing. Especially the little notes—make ‘em long and fat.” It’s the kind of advice you can only give to people who are natural stylists. The song is in there already, it just needs to be allowed to emerge.
Highlights? Miles stopped time with his “Song of the Indian Merchant” from “Sadko.” Annie has amazing command of Bill Bolcom’s “To My Old Addresses”—so does Leann, who hops through the piano writing as if it were child’s play, which it definitely is not. Theo is devastating in Guastavino’s “Pampamapa” and naughtily dapper in Noël Coward’s “Uncle Harry.” And Olivia is making a beautiful thing of the Brazilian tango “Nenê,” her first foray into Portuguese. She got a language lesson from Portugal-native Merceds Santos-Miller during which I quietly freaked out—oh lord, the Portuguese accent and the Brazilian one are even more different than I thought. But God is good. Merceds approved of the way Olivia learned the poem under my guidance…
As if to reward us, the sun came out after lunch. I was outside for about three minutes and I felt something I had not experienced since October: warmth. I’ll never forget that feeling—nor the music that came afterwards, equally warm.
No Song Is Safe From Us 