Down Time

This is the longest period I've had in 3 weeks where I haven't had my nose in Tchaikovsky, but that doesn't mean there's nothing going on! First of all, we got a wonderful review in the Anchorage Daily News. Here's the link: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/147601

Remember how I told you I went to a "house concert" where Anton Belov sang the poetry to Pushkin? Last night he performed the same concert in a beautiful 250-seat recital hall to a packed house. He was accompanied by my Russian mentor, Svetlana Velichko, and two pieces by Sviridov were performed by the Russian American Colony Singers. Svetlana also played two Rachmaninov Preludes, including the C# minor, which I'd never heard her play. It was truly fabulous! I do hope I can get Anton to come to Shorter soon, perhaps tying it in with the English department in a study on the poetry of Pushkin.

Tonight (Tuesday) there is a concert of two one-act operas presented as part of the Dark Night Series. They'll be performing Barber's A Hand of Bridge and Lehman Engel's Malady of Love, directed by Andrew Sweeney. Wednesday night is Evgeny Onegin for the second production, Thursday is another Dark Night Series fund-raiser for military families' support (Anchorage has both an Air Force and an Army base, built in the '60s to ward off the Soviet threat). Friday brings me back to the theatre for the third Onegin, with the Sunday afternoon performance finishing the run. I believe I'm free on Saturday night!

At the top is a picture of my first act costume with make-up. I haven't written before now because I have reached a conundrum with my Matt Pena video interview! I paid for and downloaded software to edit it, but can't figure that out either. I told him that we will probably just have to re-do the interview and keep it under 100 MB, however one does that....My Shorter students will find his story invaluable; he has a BM from Oberlin in voice performance, but also a BA in political science! There are many, many paths that one can take to get to the top of the mountain, and Matt proves it. He is a joy to work with, and I wish him all the best in his future career.

Many of our cast members have taken the opportunity to bring family members up for the performances. Lara Stevens, our Olga, will have her boyfriend and her parents fly in from NYC and LA respectively; they plan to stay on for a few days after the opera closes to tour into the i

Interior. Alaska is such a special place that it makes sense to take the opportunities to explore it as they arise...and Alaska in the winter is very different from Alaska in the summer, when most of the 1M+ tourists descend upon it! Veronika (Tatiana) Mitina's husband arrived in time for opening night, but she found out yesterday that her mother is very ill in Russia and this causes her some angst since she cannot just jump on a plane and go, performance or not. Anton Belov's daughter (age 8) was in the hospital with a kidney infection which delayed his arrival by a couple of days at the beginning of the rehearsal period. She was fine as soon as she got some serious antibiotics pumped into her, but all this goes to show that opera singers are normal people with normal family obligations who are working hard at their careers and trying to make life work, just like engineers, or teachers, or accountants, or...college professors.