A Good Lesson, A "Trick" I Pray Works, and Character Deconstruction

In my last post I wrote about how much easier it is to sing that bloody B flat in "Condotta" in the context of the duet. So at my lesson yesterday my teacher decided what we will do is: I will sing the measure with the high A. Then he has a measure with a high A. He will hold it an extra count, at which point I will come in securely on an A (something I certainly know how to do) and will portamento up to the B flat. The trick is to take a breath while he's singing. A good one, not a gasp that causes me to freeze because I'm scared.

In the context of the scene, the whole thing actually goes by very fast. You think it in "2", so the B flat is only two counts and then we are right into the next thing. In fact I realized I was so panicked over the B flat that I have no idea where my next entrance is so I need to work on those next few measures. It's actually in strict time - it just sounds hysterical.

Then my teacher and I were talking about the character of Azucena. I keep thinking of her as an "old lady" but really, she can't be more than 40 or 42. On the other hand biologically she is much older than I am. She sleeps outdoors and probably has post-traumatic stress syndrome if she's seen her mother and a baby burned to death. The beginning of "Condotta" is very monotonous (unlike in pieces where the problem is getting tired, the problem here is getting lazy because it's so monotonous) which my teacher explained is because this is a story that she's told over and over and over and over and even Manrico is bored, but then she starts getting into stuff he's never heard before and by the time it ends, no one is sure which baby was which.

Which reminds me. I cut my singing teeth on Gilbert and Sullivan. When I was in my early 20s I sang all the contralto roles with a repertoire company. I was smoking like a chimney and had the perfect low smoky sound. I remember playing Dame Hannah in Ruddigore and even at the time was pretty sure her opening song "Sir Rupert Murgatroyd his leisure and his riches" was a parody of "Condotta". In fact the whole operetta and also the baby mixup business in Pinafore are probably meant to parody Il Trovatore, which is the opera that the scene I am working on comes from (I just assumed all readers knew that but maybe not).

Toward the end of the lesson we talked about the program for the concert and decided we will make it all Verdi. We will start with the trio from Aida, the maybe the soprano will do an aria from Aida, then he and I will do the Trovatore scene which actually is quite long, then there will be an intermission, and afterwards he and the soprano will do a scene from Otello, then she and I will do the Aida duet, and then we'll end with the "Drinking Song" from Traviata which is how he and the soprano have often ended concerts. (I can sing Flora, which is really the chorus part).

So except for that bloody B flat, the rest of the program will be fun.

I probably won't do any singing today (I am going to the hairdresser and then my partner and I have free tickets to see the Broadway show Memphis.

Two Can Do It Better Than One

Some progress, although not as much as I'd like. I sounded much better today than I did Friday (two days of not singing, perhaps?) but still not good enough. My voice didn't feel coarse. I can partly see what happens. I get to the difficult spot and I freeze, which tightens all the muscles in my core and I hold my breath.

I need to maintain strength, but also a kind of bouncy buoyant energy.

Worst case scenario I will just scream. I am not singing this as an aria, I'm doing the whole scene, which means the tenor (my teacher) will be singing with me.

A pleasant surprise was that when I sang it with the recording (true, it was only that phrase) I did the best of my entire practice session. So maybe having my teacher singing with me will do the trick. I sing "Il figlio mio avea brucciato" and with the syllable "ciaaaa" on a high A (easy)then he sings "Quale orror" with the "or" on a high A, and if I just sing with him on an A and kind of slide up, I can get spin on the note. I've got three months to fiddle with this.

The unfortunate thing is that I don't seem to retain what I learn up in that vocal range. I panic, then I white out, and I don't, as Peg so aptly mentioned in her comment "observe".

The Battle of the B Flat

I'm sitting here basically just wanting to burst into tears. No matter how hard I work, how many new things I think I have learned, no matter how many suggestions I get about how to breathe, how to stand, what vowel to imagine I'm singing, what to do with my mouth, whether to think up, down, backwards, or sideways, I just can't sing reliably above an A natural.

Part of it is fear. If there's a phrase with anything higher than an A in it (or if there's an A in a choir piece that I'm supposed to sing softly - but that's another problem and it's probably a challenge I shouldn't be tackling) I have so many bad memories of failure that I panic, I freeze, I balk, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Added to that that my voice is just very coarse. I can't think of any other word for it. People say I sound "lovely" when I sing church music that doesn't go above an F or an F sharp, but when I sing above that it's, well, it's loud. Which is fine for most of the rep I sing but I just can't carry that high enough. I can on a good day. So what does a good day mean? No pollen in the air? No talking? I just don't know.

A few days ago I picked up "Condotta" and sailed through it, B flat and all.

But yesterday all I could come up with was a scream (and not a theatrical one either, but one that really sounded like I was ripping my throat out - which I probably wasn't, as I sounded a little better on the 8th or the 9th try, and the same thing happened today.)

But what's so disheartening is that whatever new thing I think I've hit upon works for a few days, and then it disappears. And I can't figure out what the problem is.

Overall, I know I sound better than I did several years ago. I don't have a break in my voice above middle C (although the one place I can't sing loud is on an E or an F above middle C), I have more "head" in my sound, and I have a lot more stamina (it's been several years since the sides of my neck have gotten tired, for example).

But my fear over that note is now spoiling all my enjoyment of anticipating this concert. All the other numbers are fun.

I just feel so like a big nothing. I just read that the woman who runs one of those group coaching classes got a big role with one of the small companies that turned me down point blank because I was too old.

And I don't know that I will ever get over how I was treated by the conductor of Carmelites. What the bloody hell did he want? I have no idea.

So will working on this phrase over and over and over yield anything?

My warmups sound better. I can now open my mouth and scream on a high C without singing any note before it. Of course to do that I take several deep breaths, jump up and down a few times, and just go for it, saying it's only an exercise.

And why am I so sensitive to things that other people aren't? Like not eating enough protein or missing an hour of sleep or talking too much (that's the biggie - I just can't do anything with my bloody speaking voice which is a cross between Lauren Bacall and Bella Abzug - I certainly don't sound like a singer.)

At least when I told my partner about the concert date and walked over to the wall and wrote it on the calendar she didn't kick up a ruckus. But she's not supportive either.

Prayers for Susan Eichorn Young and Her Husband Thomas

I don't know how many of you know Susan, or read her blog, but it seems that she and her husband have been in a serious accident (don't have more details).

If you want to know more, please read here.

I send all my thoughts, prayers, and love.

I don't know Thomas, but I was blessed to meet Susan last year when she posted a notice on Facebook that she would be doing "pay what you can" coachings. I jumped at the opportunity and she offered me a spot. To me this was a huge honor because she had only really met me through online groups where I wrote under a pseudonym, and I think a lot of people at those groups didn't even think I might be a real person.

I sang "Acerba Volutta" from Adriana Lecouvreur for her and she was very complimentary about my singing and helped me find more freedom.

I paid her what I thought was a fair rate and, if I could have afforded to, would have gone back for another session.

Condotta

I realize I've written a lot about working on the aria "Condotta Ell'Era in Ceppi" but have never posted a link to it.  Here is an absolutely mind-blowing version with the great Fiorenza Cossotto, who sang the role in the 70s.

Only thing is I think her wig is a bit inappropriate.  Azucena is a gypsy living in 15th Century Spain who sleeps outdoors in the dirt and I'm sure she doesn't even have a mirror, let alone a hairdresser!

Bouncing Ideas Around under the Weight of Family Disapproval

Nothing could be further apart than the excitement I felt today at my lesson, talking to my teacher about ideas for concert repertoire, and the reception I got from my partner when I tried to give her the concert date.

I think I have gotten my teacher really excited about this concert. He wants to sing this repertoire, and no longer has a venue (his relationship with the pay to sing group that he never paid to sing with seems to have gone belly up) and his wife hasn't been feeling well and has cut back on her singing.

He was thinking maybe not to do the Gioconda scene but to do the Trovatore scene instead, mostly because it's something new for me.  And he agrees that doing both might be a bit much.  Then if the soprano is available (if she isn't I'll try to get someone else) she and I can do the Aida duet (for a taste of it click here) and maybe the Gioconda duet which is a nice bit of bitchslap but doesn't go too high for me.  Then my teacher was thinking of ending with the trio at the beginning of Aida, which seemed odd to me but he said he has placed that scene at the end of a concert before.

During my lesson I sang another one or two high Cs off the cuff, which totally astounded me.  I have yet to be able to do that at home but if I can manage the B, maybe someday I can achieve what I thought was unachievable - singing "O Don Fatale". (To hear this, what is IMHO the most difficult aria in the entire mezzo canon, and which I have yet to try to sing, click here ).

Then we went through "Condotta", which didn't go too badly. I made it up to the B flat. Not lovely, but then the piece isn't meant to be "lovely". If I can get up there and hang on to the note that's all I care about. Then I can have a field day singing over and over and over again about throwing my son into the fire and yanking my hair and raising Cain. He wants to do the entire scene with all the recit, which is fine. It's not that much to learn and it's fun.

So I went from that to calling up my partner (who was asleep) and when I said I had a date for this concert she said "So when are you going to be rehearsing that?  Every time I mention anything to do with singing that's not church-related she sounds like an old lady (well, she is  one) from the 1940s responding to someone talking about sex.  I mean there's so much resentment there.  As long as I don't talk about singing we can have a nice time.  And we really have been having a nice time.  She's been trying to get her affairs in order (at a snail's pace, but she's doing it) so that she can move into an assisted living facility.  I went and helped her get sneakers and pants, and she bought us tickets for Billy Elliot for my birthday.  (I will try to get hold of those, which are paperclipped to her wall calendar, before I write the concert date down.)

But it's all so sad.  It makes me weary with sadness.  It's so hard to do all this anyhow at my age, and to feel I have to pay for everything I do somehow (by promising to do extra loads of laundry, or whatever), and dance around her tantrums, is almost more than I can bear. 

I'm so envious of people who have supportive families, or musical families or spouses. 

Tomorrow night is the last choir practice.  I'm dreading singing through that bloody Randall Thompson piece and not singing those high notes.  It's almost worse than singing them.  I think everyone will be laughing at me, which I guess is silly.

Falling Into Place

First of all, I am going to use this entry to say that this is the first day of my getting in shape for my concert, which is now scheduled for October 1.  We have the date, the venue, and the accompanist.  Repertoire is still not confirmed.  Doing the extended scene from La Gioconda is good.  It's lovely,  romantic (not that my teacher is a romantic figure, the way Mentor was!), and very singable.  I think of all the roles written, Laura suits me best, and I feel blessed that I got to sing it onstage, even in a situation so filled with discord as you can read in this entry Adding the Trovatore scene to that suddenly seems like a lot.  I count As and B flats the way a skater counts jumps and the Gioconda scene has one B flat and three As and in fact, that's the role total.  The Trovatore scene has one B flat and 5 As - two I didn't recall, but they're at the end of the duet.  In fact I can't quite figure out how the duet ends.  What's in the score is not what's on the recording.  I will ask my teacher tomorrow.  He has sung Manrico often enough that he would remember.  So maybe we can rethink this?  Particularly if I want to do something with the soprano (he is getting in touch with her to see if she's available).

Maybe I should learn the Carmen scene after all?  It's a strange scene.  Don Jose does most of the singing.  I think of it as being more something to perform onstage than something to sing although my teacher said he used to sing it in concerts with his wife.  Or we could always to the extended scene from Act 2 of Samson et Dalila. 

What I really want to start doing, is refining and honing a group of roles that I really really want to sing and know that I can.

When the pianist who plays at the concert venue got back to me he said he was starting a "repertoire group" that would do singthroughs of operas and asked me which operas I was interested in so I listed:

Carmen
Samson et Dalila
Werther (Charlotte)
Aida (Amneris)
Il Trovatore (Azucena)
La Gioconda (Laura)
and
Adriana Lecouvreur (Principessa)

Except for the Triumphal Scene in Aida (which my teacher assures me I can cheat in) there's nothing there that's beyond me. 

Of course I would have to pay to go to one of those singthroughs, but based on what this person's hourly rate is, if five or six people divide it up it would not come to very much.  And he invited me after having heard me (he played for a couple of the Saturday group coachings I went to).

So now there's the problem of my partner.  Things have been so pleasant (sigh).  We both have summer birthdays and have been making plans how to celebrate them.  She hates  the whole idea of my singing this concert.  I haven't told her the date yet.  I was thinking of waiting until after my birthday but that's passive aggressive and silly.  I will tell her tomorrow when I come back from my lesson.  And will wait to see if I get invited to one of these singthroughs before I mention that to her.

Bummer

Well, last night was the pits.  It was in the mid 90s, roasting hot outside, and almost as hot in the church because - I guess - they want to save money on air conditioning (this is a familiar situation, nothing new and shocking).

Although I no longer sound as good as I did a week ago at my lesson, I thought I had some kind of a handle on the bloody ascending phrases in the Randall Thompson piece but by 9 pm I was wiped out (we hadn't done much difficult singing up to that point, it was just hot!)  So I managed three high A flats (standing up) but when we got to the A natural it was sort of got "stuck" and sounded like a scream.  The choir director played the piece slow as molasses (I'm not criticizing his judgment here, just that the more slowly that thing inches upward, the harder it is to support it) and I either lost my support, lost my nerve, or was just bloody tired!  Finally on the last runthrough I went for broke and sort of pushed both the notes (the A flat and the A natural) somewhere where they sounded halfway decent but apparently that wasn't good enough.

This morning I got an email from the choir director asking me please not to sing those two measures but to sing the alto line instead.  It turns out the day we're singing the piece the one soprano who can really sing up there won't be there so I don't think it will sound like much but then "no ma problemo".  So it won't bloody matter what I eat, drink, or wear that day because I won't have to sing above an F sharp.  (If I'm singing high I avoid tight pants or tight belts.)  I mean when all is said and done this is not the most important singing-related issue in my life,  My solos, and this operatic concert, are really what I need to keep my eye on. It's just that this feels like a "failure".  If he had asked me not to sing those measures when he first assigned the piece I wouldn't care, but now this, as I said, feels like a failure, which smarts even more when I think of the hours and hours and hours and hours I spent on that phrase.  On the other hand I guess I can put some of it to good use.

It seems that whereas I have a pretty good retention rate for various technical things I'm taught, if it involves singing above a G I have about a 40% retention rate, and, as they said about Kim Cljisters playing tennis, I'm very "streaky".  I have good runs and very bad ones and I just seem not to have a lot of control over the situation.  It's not as if I haven't gotten dozens of different pieces of advice re: how to stand, how to breathe, what my mouth should look like, what vowel (or consonant) I should imagine I'm singing, etc.

Anyhow, so this afternoon I decided that as there was nothing I needed to save a "pretty" sound for, I might as well take a crack at screaming my way through "Condotta".  Not too bad.  I mean regarding that B flat in the middle, all I have to do, worst case scenario, is scoop up from the A that Manrico will be singing, squeeze my glutes, and scream (and I don't mean scream in a way that will make me hoarse, just drop my larynx and if it doesn't want to spin that day, hey, I'm having a flashback about throwing a baby into the fire for Pete's sake! )  So now I really need to learn (and translate) all the words to the aria and duet, including all the intervening bits of recit.  And then I'll go back to Laura.

In other news, I hope to be singing the Bach alto solo "Erfreute Zeit" from Cantata 83 with the beloved octagenarian violinist from the church.  His health is failing, but we think he can still play if he has the violin solo part cut out of the score separately and it gets enlarged on the photocopier.

Breakthroughs

Yesterday and today were big breakthrough days.  I just hope whatever it is sticks.

First, thank you Zachary for your helpful and amusing comments on a new approach to support.  I tried it yesterday during my warmup and the two phrases from the Randall Thompson were a walk in the park.  Ironically, the choir director has now moved the piece from this Sunday to the final Sunday of the season (the 19th) because the subject matter of the piece is quite a downer (it's about aging) and this coming Sunday is the ordination of one our seminarians, so we didn't even rehearse it last night.

But we did sing an Alleluia by Pinkham that has 5 or 6 high Gs for the sopranos (and a high A for soprano 1 only that I don't need to sing) and we must have sung the piece about 5 times, so that's about 30 high Gs.  A G is not a difficult note for me but singing 30 of them in an hour and a half is not easy.  So I squeezed my glutes (and tried to think about Zachary's pooping buffalo without laughing), got rid of the tension in my lower abdominals, and of course chugged a small carton of Muscle Milk, and I popped out every one of those notes without tension or fatigue.

Today I had a lesson and my teacher said he had never heard me sing like that -ever.  We sang through the Gioconda duet and then he took me through "Stella del Marinar", an aria I first sang when I was 30 and which he hadn't heard me sing for a year and he said he was so excited by the big Italianate sound I was capable of making that this has now made him really excited about our concert (trying to get him even interested in it before was like pulling teeth).  And he worked with me on the aria more like a coach than a voice teacher, telling me when to use chest voice (I have always used it very sparingly), when to take liberties with the tempo, etc.  In addition to understanding vocal technique he also is a master of Italian verismo style (which I suppose includes Verdi) so I really really look forward to getting past some of the technical work and refining this repertoire.

We agreed that if the Amneris/Radames duet is still making me nervous we should save it for our next concert and at this one do the scene from Gioconda (she sings a high B flat practically at her entrance but I've never had a problem with it) and the one from Trovatore  that begins with "Condotta" (means I need to learn that duet!)

He said he would try to get in touch with a dramatic soprano who's sung with him numerous times (she's amazing and can sing everything from Violetta to Brunnhilde) who is around our age.  They have a repertoire of duets they know and maybe she and I can sing the Aida/Amneris duet which only goes up to an A flat (for me) and which I don't find difficult.

Oh, and I almost forgot!  We did descending scales (an exercise we've done for years) and for the first time in my entire life I was able to begin one of them on a high C!!  I have never been able to sing a high C at all other than in the middle of a run or a very "scoopy" arpeggio.

Some time during the lesson I asked him if he thought I was a dramatic mezzo and he said he was hesitating because I don't have a powerful lower middle register so he thought if I sang a role like Amneris with an orchestra my lower middle voice might not carry over it.  On the other hand he said that that sort of rep seems to suit the shape and timbre of my voice better than anything else and that as I would most likely only be singing it with a piano, I shouldn't worry.

So I hope I can make some of this stick!