Sitzprobe tonight!

I'll try to catch you up little-by-little as far as the first two weeks of rehearsal, but tonight is the orchestra sitzprobe! We're actually going to turn it into a little wandleprobe, which means we will probably "wander" about the stage a bit, but will not be in costume with props, etc.

Yesterday was a welcome day off, after 6 straight days of rehearsals. We've been doing run-throughs for several days, the tech rehearsal was last Saturday, and we open this coming Saturday, Feb. 6. I'm ready, and looking forward to it!

The pictures you'll see here include the Sunday night piano dress rehearsal, my Monday (day off) trip to Turnagain Pass, about 65 miles from Anchorage, and a fabulous view as we descended from the Pass--I call it my "favorite view" in Alaska, because I've hardly ever seen anything more beautiful, except perhaps Denali in all its glory in July. But this view we pass every time we return from building our cabin on the Kenai Peninsula, so it's special to me and I've seen it under many, many conditions.

The opera: what can I tell you? It's a beautiful production, the music is fantabulous, and the singers are all wonderfully cast for their roles. There will be a DVD made which I can loan out to you, if you'd like to see the production. Onegin is not a passionate, Italianate opera, like Verdi; instead the "tragedy" is an inability to make a choice when the choice was presented, and one life thrown away needlessly while another is lived listlessly and with regret. Tatiana is said to represent the feminine Muse in art; Onegin's character is based loosely on Byron's Childe Harold. The poetic novel that Pushkin wrote is an intellectual endeavor, and needs to be understood as such. I had the great fortune to attend a "house concert" last Friday night. Our Onegin, Anton Belov, sang a recital of Pushkin poetry set to music by Russian composers. At the piano was my former coach and mentor in all things Russian, Svetlana Velichko. For those of you who don't know, Svetlana graduated from the Moscow Conservatory (classmates were Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mstislav Rostropovich) and then taught there on the piano faculty for 29 years. She moved to Anchorage the same time I did, late 1990, and we formed a wonderful student-teacher partnership that I value to this day. Anton read the poetry of Pushkin and then told us circumstances from the poet's life that contributed to this particular poem. We learned so many fascinating and compelling facts about Russia in the 1820s and Pushkin in particular. I hope I can get Anton to come to Shorter in the next couple of years--he is a fabulous baritone.

Time to get going for the sitzprobe!