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.