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.