Blier’s Blog: NYFOS@NorthFork / Day 1

DAY 1: August 17, 2015

There is a lot of drama surrounding the beginning of any project, and today–the official day one of NYFOS@North Fork–is no exception. Three of the singers arrived yesterday. and two of them (Anna Dugan and Alex McKissick) jumped gamely into rehearsal, clearly too cowed to say “I don’t want to sing after traveling all day.” Amanda Bottoms showed up a bit later–blessedly in time for supper chez nous. And singer number four (Dimitri Katotakis) arrives by ferry this afternoon. Bongo-master Josh Vonderheide gets here Thursday and moves into the little pool house on our property, which we’ve referred to all summer as “the Bates Motel.” (Actually, it’s a very sweet cabana with a lot of privacy and, obviously, a pool outside the front door. And a Murphy bed.)

A project like this feels a bit like writing a cookbook without having an actual kitchen. You look at the ingredients, the proportions, the temperatures, the timing, you know you’ve made this dish before, everything should work. But there comes the moment when you see if your predictions and educated guesses pan out. The dough will rise, won’t it?
To wit: The singers live in a donated house: will they get along? Will they burn a hole in the floor? Will they tell me if they burn a hole in the floor? Oh, and then there’s the program: did everyone get the right song to show off his/her unique talent? Does it flow, or are the little traffic jams I didn’t see in advance?

So far so good. Anna and Alex made a nice showing yesterday. I’d never heard Anna sing–just a bit of Cole Porter online, scarcely a way to evaluate her suitability to an afternoon of Brazilian, Argentinean, and Cuban song. But she came highly recommended, she has a great resumé, she’s of Spanish descent, and all of my correspondence with her had been encouraging. (She’s also Alex’s significant other–a recommendation of a very different nature.) But I didn’t know what to expect when she opened her mouth to sing. Verdict: oh Lord, what a gorgeous sound. Big, steady, opulent, rangy–wow. My Crackerjack toy turned out to be a diamond ring.

Everyone seems to be arriving here without having worked with a pianist on their songs, so the accompaniments are proving to be a slightly de-railing factor in their first renditions of the material. I am a lousy répètiteur, and have to resist the urge to bark “FIVE-SIX-SEVEN-EIGHT” like a hellish ballet teacher. But the atmosphere is so lovely here in Orient, and singing Latin American and Caribbean song one block from the Peconic Bay is not what I’d call a hardship. Peace reigns.

Mostly. It seems that every year my computer decides to die right around this time. No warning, no signal that anything is wrong. It’s fine when I go to sleep (or last year, when I got up to have dinner), but inanimate when next touched. I have chosen to behave like Gandhi about it. There is actually a computer repair place in our tiny town, and a man named Vincent whose shop is just down the road now has possession of my Mac Book. I proudly kept part of its hot pink cover on–the top. But I removed its pink hot pants so that he could have his way with the machine. Wish me luck.

–Steven Blier

Come see the product of all this hard work! NYFOS@North Fork: Latin Lovers, August 22 and 23rd >

Song of the Day: August 14

Christopher Reynolds‘ final pick of the week for August 14.

If there’s anything Jessye Norman is known for, it’s taking things slow. The breath control this woman has could probably supply power to a small village for a week. While sometimes it can be overbearing, at can also elevate trivial moments in music to something profound. Take this cabaret song by Poulenc – usually nothing more than a sweet fleeting moment in time, elevated to something mystical and profound. Jessye milks every phrase, scoops and swoops to no end, and takes every advantage of the French language’s sensuous qualities. This is something that if done by anyone else would be bizarre, but somehow in the hands of this artist is incredible.

Next week: Steven Blier is back with his behind the scenes blog from the NYFOS@North Fork residency.

Song of the Day: August 13

(Curator: Christopher Reynolds)

This song has been covered by many an artist including Duke Ellington and Stanley Worth. There is something about k.d. lang’s rendition here that resonates with me. Her voice here is delirious, drunk on the fumes of love. She slips in and out of consciousness, sometimes singing as though half-asleep, sometimes completely present. Her voice is velvet, ethereal. She recorded this on her album Drag, which is entirely covers of songs about smoking. While the whole album is a fascinating study in reinvention, this track has always been my favorite. The refrain is so cleverly thought out, it straddles the border between humorous and tragic:

Love is like a cigarette
You know you had my heart aglow
Between your fingertips
And just like a cigarette
I never knew the thrill of life
Until you touched my lips
Then just like a cigarette
Love seemed to fade away and leave behind
Ashes of regret
And with a flick of your fingertips
It was easy for you to forget

Song of the Day: August 12

(Curator: Christopher Reynolds)

Leontyne Price is the love of my life. I find myself coming back to her in times of trouble, in times of happiness, in times of doubt. Price and the German language are not two things usually thought of as going together, as she made her career out of singing Puccini, Verdi, and Samuel Barber. Here we find her out of her element, yet at the same time completely in her element. This is one of my favorite songs – Strauss sets a poem told from the male perspective – a husband speaks to his wife as she dies – thanking her for everything she has done, comforting her, telling her that she will visit him in dreams. Such a sad song is full of utterances of “Oh Glück” (oh, happiness). It seems strange at first that this is part of an otherwise morbid subject, however the way Leontyne delivers it is anywhere from cheerful. I think one of the greatest moments in musical performance comes towards the end when, on “weinen” (cry), she drops suddenly to the quietest possible dynamic before delivering one of the greatest crescendos in the history of music. This live performance is a rare treat, and contrary to popular belief Leontyne Price delivers one of the greatest performances of a Strauss song.

Song of the Day: August 11, 2015

(Curator: Christopher Reynolds)

Beverly Sills was one of the first singers I fell in love with. I was sitting in freshman music history at Juilliard when my teacher introduced us to an opera I had never heard of – “Roberto Devereux.” He showed us a video of a 1975 production with Sills in the title role at the Wolf Trap summer festival. I was electrified. I had never seen such phenomenal acting from a singer, coupled with a voice that shot through me like an arrow. Not that it was always pretty- her character at that point was driven to such a point of mad anguish that her voice took on a similar quality. Here we find something quite different. This is Sills from two years prior on a television broadcast singing one of my favorite songs, “All the things you are.” This is pure vocal beauty, combined with the most glorious B flat you will ever hear.

Song of the Day: August 10, 2015

This week’s Song of the Day selections come from pianist and NYFOS Emerging Artist alum Christopher Reynolds. Here’s his pick for August 10th:
One can never have too much Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. One of the qualities I so admire in her voice is the ability to suddenly be present out of nothing – there is silence and then suddenly, without realizing it, her voice has seeped into the void. And then just as magnificently, it evaporates back into the night.
This song from the Rückert Lieder has always been special to me. Mahler was never particularly adept at selecting text; he had in his collection a few volumes of poetry that he tended to stick to through most of his life. However he found something special with this. It is an ongoing debate with this song – is the poet lost to the world, or is the world lost to the poet? Who failed whom? Whatever the answer, it is clear by the end that the poet is at peace living in his own world, his own life, his own song. Lorraine is now lost to the world. But I suspect she too lives now in her own world, her own life, her own song. In the final “in meinem Lieben,” her voice enters in a quiet unison with the piano, sounding so ethereal and inhuman it’s heartbreaking. At this point she is already lost to us.

Song of the Day: August 7, 2015

Andrew Garland wraps up his week curating NYFOS Song of the Day:
“So viel Liebe fehlt auf diese Welt” sung by Hermann Prey
The song of the day is about making discoveries: discoveries of greatness in unlikely places, discoveries of different types of voices and new depths of emotional commitment. Today my discovery is that this exists:

I remember when a baritone colleague first played this for me. My first reaction was “that’s funny: a German singing a carefree American pop song.” But this colleague, who is usually quick to point out the faults in all things musical and even quicker to find the humor in any situation – especially at someone else’s expense – said, “This is a man having fun singing.” Yes. Yes he is.

This week I hope you have had fun (maybe even laughed especially at my choice for Monday’s song.) Do what you love, love what you do and we will laugh with you.

Song of the Day: August 6, 2015

(Curator: Andrew Garland)

It’s all relative.
In my first year of undergrad my voice teacher would have me over to his apartment to listen to opera recordings. I remember our first session vivdly: I had just decided to change my major to voice performance and was suddenly ready to listen to as much opera as I could, where previously I had heard almost none. One pair of examples proceeded as follows: he set up this first clip, telling me the name of the singer, (Sam Ramey – of whom I had never heard) with a short summary of the character and plot. *In order for me to tell this story you must, if at all possible listen to both of these examples on some quality speakers. “Le veau d’or” from Gounod’s Faust. (Welsh National Opera, Carlo Rizzi, 1994)

Seeing the expression on my face that I had for the first time heard the voice of Sam Ramey he said “That’s a pretty big voice, right? Well listen to this…” and then he played the same aria sung by Nicolai Ghiarov (London Symphony, Edward Downes, 1968)

Imagine you are just beginning to study vocal technique, just starting to learn precisely how to make a beautiful, projecting and yes, loud tone. Imagine that you had never sat down and critically listened to an opera recording. Imagine that you had never listened to a true bass voice. Imagine that you had never been presented with the difference of a formidable bass-baritone and a hulking, dark true bass. *And imagine that you’re listening on a really good stereo. I know I already told you, but you probably didn’t go listen to these examples on a good stereo*. It was like the difference between hearing a subway car approaching the platform and standing directly underneath a 747 as it takes off. Both strong, formidable, irresistible, but one is undeniably bigger than the other.
This same teacher invited me to his native Chicago over the winter break. There I heard a concert by the Chicago Symphony and a performance of Faust at the Chicago Lyric starring Richard Leech, Renee Flemming, Dimitry Hvorostovsky and, of course, Sam Ramey. It was, as he said, like having ten voice lessons.
In that same listening session he played me a recording of this song: “Charlie Rutlage” by Charles Ives. Sung by Mr. Ramey with Warren Jones on piano. Here it is, a bonus track for today:

Song of the Day: August 5

(Curator: Andrew Garland)

“Urlicht” From Symphony No. 2 Resurrection by Gustav Mahler
Marilyn Horne, mezzo-soprano, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado

In 2007 I had the privilege of taking part in Marilyn Horne’s The Song Continues. I attended a masterclass where she coached Jamie Barton on Gustav Mahler’s Urlicht. Ms. Barton’s performance was, of course, unforgettable. Anyone in the room who hadn’t previously heard her voice (myself included) knew she was destined for a greatness. More vividly than the singing, I remember Ms. Horne’s charge : “When you sing these words you have got to believe them…or act like you do.” She then shared how this music brought her comfort when her brother died. She would put this on with headphones and pace around the room.

      That moment brought so many discoveries for me: the symphony, the singer, Ms. Horne’s relationship to the piece and her charge to all those who perform it after her.

Song of the Day: August 4

(Curator: Andrew Garland)

“Ich Habe Genug” Cantata BWV 82 Johann Sebastian Bach

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, Emmanuel Music Orchestra, Craig Smith, conductor

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is my hero. Nay, she is my superhero. Much has been said about her, I cannot add to that.

There is not much I can say about this selection either. Many of you are familiar with this piece, the recording and its circumstances.

I never met her.  I only know great musicians who have worked with her and I have recordings like these that transport me. Some great singers are characterized by an undeniable, physically dominating sound, others have an impressive technique, others still have convincing acting communicative abilities and beyond that, a genuine sense of living the music and its message. Lorraine has all of these.

While I have Schubert on the brain (preparing for NYFOS’s Schubert/Beatles) I want to share this recording of Lorraine singing “Erlkӧnig”

There are many recordings of this popular yet daunting song. Again I hear voice, character and communication like from no one else. And kudos to anyone to dares to play this on piano. Bravo, Robert Tweten.