Tonight I played hooky from my job counseling program. That's ok. I have had three weeks of Hell with my mother being hospitalized once and my partner being hospitalized twice, once after the two of us spent six hours in the emergency room. During those three weeks I was also going to school, taking my first course toward my certificate in Training.
Amazingly, I still found time to practice, and have continued to sing well, better than I ever have in my whole life.
Tonight since I had a whole evening (after spending the morning at Pilates and the afternoon at a Caregivers Support Group) I decided that before I dove into a pile of copyediting that I've been blessed by (income!) I was going to sing through Amneris's big scene.
It never ceases to amaze me how easy this is to sing. What happened?? I have been working my tail off with this teacher now since Christmas of 2005. I would get inklings of this sound from time to time, a high A here, a low B there, but nothing like this and I certainly never had this much stamina.
I think part of it is now that I'm not working in an office any more and being sleep deprived 6 days a week; eating healthy meals instead of cheese, crackers, and fruit on the run; and not squeezing my upper register to try to blend in with the choir sopranos (we now have a real coloratura soprano fresh from a conservatory so I can just be a mezzo now) my real, God-given, big, dark voice has been allowed to flourish. It's sort of hard to believe. I mean I'm going to be 60 next month. Many singers retire in their 50s and those who don't often scale down. But I'm just beginning to scale up!!!
Can it really be that Verdi is my niche?
I know when I sang Laura in La Gioconda at the age of 30 I felt like I was "home" and my voice was about half the size it is now and I was still obsessed with crash dieting. And the Principessa's aria from Adriana Lecouvreur really rocks despite some residual fear from bad memories of getting tired and not being able to nail that ending.
So maybe I really can sing both parts of that Judgment Scene back to back (actually it's unlikely I'll be doing that soon, since I'm singing one concert with a bass in October - no big deal, it's just in a nursing home - and then the concert with my teacher as a tenor next year). But it's sure great to be able to sail through that whole scene in my bathroom even when I've had a tiring three days.
I just wish I were 30, or even 40, so I could feel all this "matters"!
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