Busy Week!

Last night's second performance of Evgeny Onegin went quite well. The Wednesday night crowd is always a good one, they say, and I believe them. The production had a mellow feel to it, and that extended to the warm, appreciative audience. Everyone sang their best last night, which is a good thing, because that was the performance for the DVD!

I'm still encountering problems with my Matthew Pena interview. We retaped the interview and put it into three different sections, but the shortest one still exceeds the MB limit allowed by blogspot! I'm thinking of putting them on my website instead, which will most likely not have the same limitations in size....Fast forward 2+ hours: OK, I tried that, no success...AAAAARGH!

In the meantime, let me tell you what a joy it is to work with this terrific cast. There's not a diva in the group! Everyone is very real, very honest and open with themselves and their work. Each one brings a sense of commitment to the role and to the drama and elevates the rest of the cast. I have been inspired over and over by these singers, and have been challenged to sing better, to act better, to think through my staging so that even more meaning can be brought to the drama. And I'm so very grateful, so blessed to have been given this opportunity, not only by Anchorage Opera, but by Shorter College who saw the value in this for me and allowed me to spend this much time away perfecting my craft and luxuriating in this glorious music. I am a lucky woman!

Having said that, I'm ready to be back at Shorter! I've rediscovered that teaching is my calling, and singing is my medium--not the other way around. I will return next Wednesday after Winter Break with renewed energy towards inspiring my students to apply themselves with discipline to this art form that they profess to love so much.

At the top you'll see more pictures of me with old friends, both Alaskan and Russian. The "red-haired" guy (it was dyed for the production) is one of Alaska's most gifted singing actors, and his cameo performance of the Frenchman Triquet draws laughter from the crowd every night. I have known and worked with John Fraser since the mid-1990s. The three ladies with me are all Russian women who moved to Alaska around the same time; the thing that makes them so unique to me is that I met them all in March 1992 in SIBERIA! And here they are, 18 years later, singing in the opera chorus in the same production with me. I love them all dearly and consider them to be life-long friends. They are Olga, Zlata, and her mother Natasha. The lady in green with John and me is Linda Bethon, who was in my very first Voice Class at UAA, also in the early- to mid-90s. Friendships run deep when the weather is cold!

Keep your eyes peeled for the next installment, and my apologies yet again for the lack of video, or perhaps I should apologize for my inability to manage the upload. I'm grateful to Matthew Pena for graciously talking to me twice about his background and career.

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.

Snowy Day

Today is a snowy day, with 3-4 fresh inches on the ground--it's so beautiful and pristine! It's a "dark night," meaning the theatre is dark tonight, with no rehearsals or performances going on. Bruce and I plan to drive down to Girdwood, where the Alyeska Ski resort is, for a pre-Valentine's dinner at The Double Musky, one of Alaska's premier restaurants. It features Cajun food, of all things! It's so fattening and rich you can really only eat there about once a year.

The Student Dress rehearsal was a huge success last night. I say "huge" because the students did NOT fall asleep, clapped and laughed at the right times, and cheered enthusiastically at the curtain calls. They obviously had their favorites, especially the Romantic young Lensky, the "rock star" of our Onegin. With his longish wig, he looked like every BBC Jane Austen hero ever seen, and the girls all but swooned when he came out for the curtain call. That role is beautifully sung by Matthew Pena, whom I interviewed last night and will post on tomorrow's blog. Matt is originally from California, attended Oberlin College and the Manhattan School of Music, and will be at Santa Fe as an apprentice this summer. His career is definitely on the rise!

One of the most fun things about opera is the make-up and costuming. EVERYONE loves that! So I've included a couple of pictures of our performers and our hair and make-up designers at work, always a fascinating process.

Tomorrow is opening night, and we expect a wonderful crowd and a party afterwards--then we are off until the next Wednesday! All of a sudden the intense rehearsal process comes to a rapid halt! That is the hard part of this job: there's a lot of down-time. It's easier for me because we have a condo here, Bruce has been here for his 2 weeks off, and our daughter lives here now (since last March). It's hard for 3 adults to be crowded into a 1BR condo, but it also gives me a touch of a "real" life; at least I'm not living in a hotel room, which is always so sterile, and eating every meal out.

Student Dress rehearsal tonight

Our final dress rehearsal is tonight, Thursday, Feb. 4. The director of Anchorage Opera told me the 700+ hall would be completely filled with students and their teachers from elementary through college-age. I'm not sure how "appropriate" Evgeny Onegin is for elementary children, only because it's an intellectual opera, telling the story of missed opportunities, rather than stage pratfalls and physical comedy. It's tragedy is the tragedy of love missed, not love lost; the onstage death is tragic only because it was so stupid and unnecessary, yet forced to happen by silly tradition and pride. I'm afraid they'll be bored, this post-MTV generation. Well, at least the music is very beautiful and will be easy to sleep to!! The opera is 3 hours long, in 3 acts.

Tchaikovsky wrote Evgeny Onegin between The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, so think gorgeous musical themes that resonate throughout the action. My role of Larina is a secondary lead, which is pivotal to the setting, but not necessarily to the action. Larina (accent on the first syllable, pronounced LAR-i-na) is a widowed estate holder, whose peasants love her (remember this is Russia in the 1820s) and the action of the first two acts takes place on her property, and involves her two daughters Tatiana and Olga. Olga is promised to Lensky, while Tatiana is a singular, solitary person who loves reading and harbors an intense inner passion towards all things "romantic" in nature. (Again, think 19th-century Romanticism, not romantic as we think of it today. Think the poetry set to music by Schubert, Schumann; think Goethe; think the operas of Weber, Berlioz, and early Wagner. DON'T think gratuitous romantic situations as in most TV shows today.) Lensky is a young poet (think Werther, Goethe's hero) who has grown up near the Larina estate and has always loved Olga. Everyone "knows" they will marry eventually. Onegin is also an interesting and dispassionate character. In many ways, he is the opposite of Tatiana (passion vs. dispassion). By denying himself his own feelings he has developed a life based on sarcasm and a sneering attitude towards anything emotionally based. Tatiana falls in love with him immediately upon meeting him; he represents the unattainable, the forbidden, that which she cannot understand and dearly wants to. She decides to write him a love letter that very night of meeting him, and this was a very brash thing for a young girl to do in this time. And, no, she did not text it: she wrote it in French (which all Russian aristocracy learned BEFORE they learned Russian in this era!). She persuades her nanny, Filipevna (accent on second syllable, not third: Fil-IP-yev-na) to get her grandson to deliver it. Onegin's response is slow in coming, and Tatiana suffers a great deal, before she bumps into him in the woods one day. He gives her a "sermon" on allowing her feelings to guide her life, and tells her that if he were to marry anyone it might be her, but he has no intention of living the kind of life she dreams of. They continue to run into each other, with much embarassment on Tanya's part (Tanya is a nickname for Tatiana). At the party which Larina gives, Onegin dances with Tanya, then flirts with Olga. This enrages Lensky, his younger friend, who quickly pushes this perceived slight into a full-blown argument, and forces the situation to a duel. In these days, duels were to the death, not just to wounding. They were based on honor, and were outlawed in most countries, but took place anyway. There was a code of honor that had to be followed: which guns were used, who was present, who called the duel satisfied (with or without death), etc. Many duels were fought which did not result in death, and the person who demanded the duel could determine whether his honor was satisified if both people missed their shots, one was wounded, but not killed, and so forth. Pushkin himself fought in over 30 duels before the one that killed him in 1837! Many people think that Evgeny Onegin foreshadowed Pushkin's own death; the duel which killed him, like Lensky the young poet, was fought over a slight he perceived given to his wife at a party.

So this is probably more information than you ever wanted or needed to know about duelling and Romanticism! But it also goes to show how much research you need to do to truly understand the era and zeitgeist of the opera in which you're performing. This is a singer's duty, her responsibility, and her pride, to know these things! Next time I'll tell you how it all ends.

The video posted below here is Janice Meyerson as Filipevna. Notice how gorgeous the Alaska Range is in the background. This view is to the west of Anchorage, the ocean is the Cook Inlet, and the mountains you can see contain two active volcanoes (Mount Spur was smoking on some rehearsal days, and erupted only a few months ago, like August or September.) The Alaska Range stretches from the Aleutian Islands and culminates in Denali some 1500 miles later. Also known as Mt. McKinley, at 20320 ft it is North America's highest peak. Many days we could see Denali from our rehearsal space, nearly 200 miles away! Imagine seeing something in Macon all the way from Rome....

Keep up your good work--next week is the last one I'll be without you, and we'll get ready for Georgia NATS in Athens.

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!