Crazy Grateful

Cyrano wrapped up in Miami a few weeks ago and I remained to enjoy some of the South Florida sun while also learning new music. My husband and I work in the mornings on our various projects and then we enjoy a fun adventure. We are making sure to enjoy ourselves outdoors going for walks, kayaking in the bay, or with yoga. We've had a crazy two years (we've only been married two years!). The life of an opera singer has its ups and downs and at times it the most exhilarating experience and then there are others that make you want to hunker down bury your face and cry. The same can be said for being in the financial or banking world these days, which is the business my husband is in. After a long ten years with a company in Atlanta he was laid off in 2009 during the big kick of the anthill, as I like to call it. He was lucky to find another job fairly quickly and for two years we were in Philadelphia where he worked for a small company. Now, we find ourselves at a junction once again, at least this time with less financial responsibilities, no house tying us down, and now we are free to go where the southerly wind takes us. At least I hope it's southerly enough to take us to Atlanta or further south.
I'm writing this personal information because I've been thinking a lot about trust and acceptance lately. In the music business we never know from year to year what money we will make, how many jobs we will have, whether or not we will get sick and miss a performance, or if the company we hope to work for will go bankrupt. It is a rickety life as a musician and one must learn to live moment to moment trusting in art that it will sustain us as it always has. It is a constant movement of faith and practice of letting go. Trust. Living with fear all around us, thrown in our faces everyday by every way imaginable doesn't leave much room for fear in our jobs and means of stability. The thing is, eventually you come to standing with hands up, face to the sky, and saying, "I have no control over what happens to me" and this realization somehow, somewhere, gives you peace. After all, no job is ever stable and nothing is forever. I don't mean to be so preachy and philosophical. After all, this is a blog about music. However, I find that in our music making we are at our best when we trust, when we surrender. We make the best music when we permit the creative forces to have their way, just go with the flow and allow the music to happen to us and through us. It takes us on wild adventures, moves us to tears, transforms our minds, and connects us to others. Imagine if we could let that flow into every area of our lives?

So, even though we are voyaging into the somewhat uncomfortable realm of the unknown, I am filled with excitement and as my yoga teacher says, "I am crazy grateful." Our next stop along this beautiful life path just might take my breath away.

My Love of Cyrano

For three weeks now I’ve been rehearsing an opera that is very dear to my heart. The opera Cyrano, by David DiChiera, was premiered in Detroit in October of 2007. I had the enormous opportunity to debut the role of Roxane, an extraordinary part in a breathtaking story. I am more than delighted that Florida Grand Opera co-produced the opera and have included it in their season. The past three weeks have been filled with much joy as I dig back into this character and bring to life, with deliciously gorgeous music, this precious girl, Roxane! For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the opera is based on the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand. You may also be more familiar with the late 1980’s Steve Martin film, Roxanne, which is a loose adaptation of the story. As I mentioned, the world premiere took place nearly 4 years ago. It was performed a few times in Philadelphia in 2008 but with the hardships of the economy, several performances at various opera houses had to be canceled. I am thrilled things are recovering around the country and that we are now bringing most of the original cast back together for these performances in Miami.

When I prepare a role I spend some time listening to the singers of the past to gain familiarity with the score. I like to hear how different each performance can be and how the slightest change of tempo can alter the mood of the scene and intention of character. It is one of the most fun parts of learning a new role. Obviously, being part of a new opera meant that this learning curve was no longer available to me and that gave me an even more exciting learning opportunity. For the first time, I have been able to create a role from the bottom up, note by note with my personal stamp on it first! Dr. DiChiera wrote most of the role with my voice in mind. I remember in fall of 2006 when I was covering Natalie Dessay at the Paris Opera, I received a phone call from Dr. D. He was working on Act II and specifically my aria that would start the act. We talked about things that I liked to do with my voice, things that I thought made it unique. I remember telling him that I loved high notes! He asked for ones in particular and I told him that high D’s would be just perfect! I remember thinking of how extraordinary it was to request how a piece be written and it made me wonder how much other singers in the past influenced a composer’s writing. We do know that Mozart was highly influenced by his women! I felt honored to be continuing in such a long tradition. So much so, I had to pinch myself!! Roxane’s music has many arching lines and sustained high notes and the aria Dr. D wrote is exquisite. It’s a sensual explosion in reaction to the letters of Christian.

My dear character Roxane is a delight to play. Our director and librettist Bernard Uzan, upon being asked by me if I was being too cute and cunning with my character, kindly suggested that I need not to worry. He said they cast me as Roxane because I WAS Roxane. Bernard said, “You need not do anything but be yourself.” It’s amazing how we don’t see ourselves the way others see us! Of course, he is right. I only need to focus on those elements of myself that are most like the character. I love that she obsesses over beautiful things. It is most poignant that her allure to what is beautiful and perfect blinds her from ever seeing the possibility of love with Cyrano who was the most genuine love she could ever have known. I guess we all tend to miss the forest for the trees? She is elegant and intelligent and I love how passionate she is about Christian without even knowing a thing about him. She reminds me of my 16 year old self and maybe some of my 35 year old self who tends to day-dream and create wild stories of love and romance. These lovely parts of Roxane make the character pleasurable to play and it is easy to find myself in that realm of naïveté. The challenge of the role is the realization of Cyrano as the one behind the letters and the voice of Christian. The realization happens during a duet and can’t happen all at once. Finding the balance of when the tears come, the shock, or the desperation, has been the largest challenge. Sometimes just the beginning phrases of the music make me cry and I know I have a lot further to go, but I just go with it and hope that the tears can seem to be coming from many levels of emotions. Pacing emotions over bars of music can sometimes be quite difficult, but it has now become my favorite scene. The words in this scene are the most stunning. Cyrano tells Roxane that he was unaware of feminine comforts and that his mother didn’t find him handsome, he had no sister, and he dreaded the lover for fear of being mocked. He tells Roxane, “Je vous dois d’avoir eu, tout au moins une amie. Grâce à vous, une robe a passé dans ma vie.” (I owe you to have had at least one friend. Thanks to you a dress has passed through my life.) After this incredibly heartbreaking line Roxane replies with my most favorite line in all of opera, “Je n’aimais qu’un seul être, et je le perds deux fois.” (I loved only one soul and now I have lost him twice.) Well, the rest you will have to come to the opera to see. To say that I am completely infatuated with this role and this music is an understatement.

I know that it is typical to boast about how perfect everything is in an opera in order to lure the public into buying tickets. I do not take my words lightly. It certainly isn’t like me to sit and write a dissertation about an opera just to get you to come. I write these things because I believe in this opera AND because I do think we have the perfect cast. Our Cyrano is being inhabited by the extraordinary Marian Pop. I say inhabited because that is really what he does. It is as if all the great parts of Gerard Depardieu, José Ferrer, and Kevin Cline morph into Marian. If only any of these legends had Marian’s voice! He gives a splendid, exhilarating performance and is truly the definition of a singing actor. Our Christian is new to the role and comes from France. Sebastian Geuze is everything a Christian is supposed to be. Handsome beyond words, witty, and he is a formidable singer. The duet between Christian and Cyrano is stunning, reminiscent of other great tenor/baritone duets we have come to love in opera. I am thrilled to be singing again with the great bass Peter Volpe. Peter plays the role of De Guiche, a lustful, vengeful count who attempts to marry Roxane off to another man so that he can have his courtly rights with her. In my scene with Peter I get to trick him into keeping Christian and Cyrano out of harm’s way by suggesting it would be the best way to get revenge since Cyrano adores dueling and action more than anything else. It works and crisis is averted. I secretly marry Christian instead!

Since most of us have performed this opera before we have had the great opportunity to be adding layers to our characters. Whenever you perform a role for the first time you are really focusing 75% on getting the music and words right. The other 25% is spent on remembering where you go on stage, how to remove hats, capes, and gloves appropriately, and then add some layer of believability on the top. This time we have the luxury of knowing the part really well, so we have spent a lot of our time working as actors do. Our director Bernard Uzan has pushed us to find ourselves in our roles and to layer many more specific elements to our characters that we just didn’t have the space for when we performed it in Detroit. Not that our performances were bad, but this time we are coming from a place of knowing how it goes which gives us security in knowing we have room to play and grow. I’ve loved going to work each day trying to find new ways to say a word or new ways to respond to my colleagues. The level of commitment and effort put into this production astounds me and I am very proud of our work. Our conductor and orchestrator Mark Flint has helped us everyday stay true to the score and his orchestration is stunning. The colors he brings out in the orchestra really make this piece come to life. I know that I am very fortunate to be working in the arts these days. It isn’t lost on me that times are hard and we must enjoy the opportunities when they come our way. I hope that if you are in the Miami area you will come to see Cyrano. We open next Saturday night, April 23 at the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami. You can find tickets at www.fgo.org and you may want to follow my tweets this week. I’ll be tweeting all about the final rehearsals and be giving some backstage pictures as well. I can be found on Twitter as leahoperabird. Come join us and may I suggest you bring your tissue?

Singing in the Crooked Letter State

A few weeks ago headed south through thick northeast snow to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I was invited by my dear friends from graduate school, Kerrin and Taylor, to come and do a recital and master class at the University of Southern Mississippi. It was a great opportunity to perform the songs I am recording on my first recording project which is coming up soon. I loved being back in the South and being with old friends, staying up late, getting to know their three young children, and cooking all our favorite fattening foods. I had birthday cake three days in a row because Kerrin makes specialty cakes. I had to try all her new fabulous flavors. I also had the most incredible smoked barbecue made by Taylor which he cooked in the smoker for nearly 24 hours. I spent time playing doll house, reading books, and playing the Wii with the kids. I made fake lolly pops for Graces' birthday party and a wreath for Kerrins' front door of her new house. It was a great week for me to step aside from the constant climb up the singing success ladder and just be with people. It was important for me to get back to myself and remember other things I used to do a lot of, like cook, decorate, and sit in the sun and visit with friends. A lot of times I find myself working so hard and being focused that I forget the substance from which all of this music revolves. I loved every second of my visit even with one of the kids having the worst time with a bout of stomach flu, which thankfully and surprisingly, no one else got.
To be down there spending time in this way was therapeutic for this country girl currently caught up in the big city life.

Having the recital and master class was just icing on the cake! I had a great performance with Mary Chung, a doctoral student at Southern Miss. She was such a great collaborator and hard worker. We managed to pull together a really nice performance with such little time. I salute her for her hard work and fun spirit. We really enjoyed working together and laughed when we realized we were both married to men named Carlos.

I didn't' think the week could get any better or more rewarding and then it was time for the master class. I don't usually like master classes. More often than not they turn into episodes of American Idol with better music. I've never really liked the term 'master' as part of the class. I'd prefer it to be called student class , since that is what we all really are and should never forget we are all always learning and always searching for better ways to sing. Anyway...
The master class was incredibly fun and the singers were very talented and most importantly, extremely receptive to my suggestions. All the ladies who sang had such eager personalities and were good sports. It isn't easy getting up in front of people to sing. It is double hard getting up in front of people to sing knowing that critical thoughts are going through everyone's head. But, they did it and took my suggestions, and all in all, made some enormous changes fairly quickly. I didn't have any magical words to say. I mainly focused on having them take breaths that were part of the character and getting each singer to take their own time in the phrasing of the music. We often get ahead of ourselves as singers, trying to fit into someone else's tempo whether it be the pianist accompanying the singer or a conductor. Finding your own tempo and own space to breathe is a challenge and one that has to be incorporated in a young singers' practice. I loved my time with these ladies in Hattiesburg and heard some really great, mature singing. I saw eager students willing to put it out there and experiment with new ideas and I felt a true openness from them, too. There are good things going on at so many schools across the country and after this visit down south, I am hopeful for the arts knowing that they will continue through these fine talented young ladies! Bravi girls!

Roanoke Recital

On January 23 I had the wonderful opportunity to perform in recital the songs from my upcoming recording in Roanoke, VA. Last year while I was covering at the MET I was hanging out with conductor Steven White in the green room. We were talking career stuff and I started telling him about my idea for my recording and one thing led to another and he suggested I bring the program to Roanoke to try it out before I record it. Brilliant! I had been dying to get back to Roanoke since my debut there with Opera Roanoke in 2004 as Gilda if for no other reason than to see the larger than life sized picture of me and tenor, Scott Piper that hangs in the Roanoke airport just over baggage carousel 3. I heard about this banner from several people and was glad to get to see it in person and get my picture taken with it!


Putting together this recording and the gathering of these songs has been extremely rewarding. I was eager to get them into performance mode and Sunday afternoon was sublime. My pianist, Carol Goff, who was my first vocal coach and still teaches at the fabulous Townsend School of Music at Mercer University, flew to Roanoke with me to present these songs. This was my first complete outing of the songs and it felt incredible to sing them as one whole program. I was able to get a good idea of how the entire recording will flow and was also able to get a better sense of what order I should record them in to best suit me vocally. I'll have to pace myself in the recording studio and the beauty of a studio recording is that I don't necessarily have to record them in the order in which they will appear on the CD. I recorded the recital on my iphone and was able to get a good enough recording so that I could listen back and take notes. This week I'll listen a few more times and keep gathering ideas on how best to express and deliver these little gems that I have gathered.

This past week I was in Hattiesburg, MS to do the same recital at The University of Southern Mississippi. I like the idea of being on the road singing songs. It reminds me of when I traveled with the Gospel singing group, Jeff and Sheri Easter. I toured with them the summer before I went to college. I sang back-up, sold CD's, cleaned the bus, and babysat. We had Dolly Parton's old tour bus that still had the stained glass Dollywood butterfly skylight in the top. Yes, I wish classical music would be so popular that we could travel around the U.S. from state to state on large tour buses singing songs. What if? More exciting news from Hattiesburg to come!

BREAKING NEWS!

For the past three months since I returned from Germany I have been working on a new project that I am finally able to talk about on my blog. It took a lot of work to get all the pieces together and I am happy to announce that I am recording my first CD! Should I even call it that? Do people say it that way anymore, I mean, who uses CD's? I guess I should say I am making my first recording! For several years I have wanted to make a recording of American Art Songs. Singing songs was the first love of my life, as is the case with most singers, and I wanted to gather a collection of songs that expressed the joy of why I do what I do. Why do we sing? Why do I bother to play these crazy, yet beloved characters? What is it that we are trying to say throughout all of this? I guess it kind of goes along with the notion of 'How Can I Keep from Singing?' that I have talked about here on this blog. I also wanted to incorporate songs that dealt with spirituality and faith not associated with some particular dogma, but rather that spoke to a universal sense of these words and the essence of spirituality. As I searched for songs, some really important themes started developing dealing with all sorts of emotions that come with having a spiritual practice such as doubt, fear, and anger. I started making a pile of songs that I couldn't stop thinking of, ones that made me think, "Hmm, well, that says it all." I started to see other patterns emerge such as, themes of blessings and being thankful and songs about giving back to others. Oh, and of course love kept coming up in there too. Another theme that I keep coming back to is the idea of home and how the place of home changes as you grow older and as you move from place to place and meet different people. Some of these songs I have known for years and others have come my way just in the last month. It's a process that kind of baffles me. I combed through aisles in the New York Public Library in the spring of last year looking for just the right pieces about faith and never found songs that quite suited me. I had thousands of possibilities there, but none of them grabbed me. I found most of them randomly in old anthologies I already had or just casually looking through stacks in music stores. It seemed the less I looked the more I found. The cornerstone of the recording is a song cycle by Jake Heggie called Rise and Fall. I wrote to Jake in 2009 when all of these ideas started growing legs. I gave him the overall sense of the theme and he sent me these songs. They are AMAZING! They are perfect not only for the words and thoughts I am trying to express, but also for how they are written for the voice and how they suit me. I owe Jake a huge thanks for allowing me to use these songs for my recording and for pointing them my way.

I will be blogging a lot more in hopes to give you all a play by play of what is taking place with this truly exciting project. I feel an incredible creative burst happening and can't wait to share every moment with you. Stay tuned!

For the Joy of it!!!

I was simply in awe of this little boy.

Click here to witness the joy of music!!!

Optimum Performance

I have completed two performances in Dresden and I have written about my time, but I just haven't had good internet connection in order to upload my blogs. So, when time permits I am going to be uploading previous entries. They will be out of order, but you'll get an idea of what I've been up to over here across the great pond.

Last night I finished performance #2 with conductor #2. That's how they do it over here a lot of the times. People come and go out of the production. It doesn't happen much in the States but here a lot of the supporting roles are sung by people on staff. If someone gets sick or has to sing in another production, then that singer is easily replaced by someone under what is called a fest contract. They are singers paid by the government to be a member of an opera company and have what most people would deem a normal life. Kind of nice, huh? On the one hand it is nice because you can be home every night to see your family and on the other you don't get to travel. So, depending on who you talk to, the pluses and minuses are weighed differently. Most singers are like me and want the best of both worlds. I could certainly do six months at home and six months on the road!

Last night was a very fun performance for me because, with opening night behind me, my nerves and energies were back down to a normal level, thus letting me breath deeper and settle into the production more. I felt that last night I was really able to calmly sing and be a part of each note. I've heard football players speak about how when they catch a fabulous pass or run a long sprint to a touchdown, that they feel time stops or slows down as they are participating in it. That's right, participating. It's kind of like it is happening to you rather than you being the person making it happen. That's called being in the moment and that is what a lot of last night was for me. I could sense everything I did. I wasn't ahead of myself thinking of what difficulties lay ahead and I wasn't behind myself wishing for a little more time on a phrase. I was just there, doing my thing, and I had a great time. That's really what we work hard for as performers or athletes. It's called optimum performance. It doesn't mean that the performance is perfect, but it means that you are operating on a high functioning level, that you are in complete control and in a relaxed state of being while doing it. I've been working hard over the years to add this layer to my performances. Yoga helps me tremendously and so does just plain ole being nice to myself while I'm singing. Once I get Sue Sylvester to shut up I'm free to have fun and do whatever I want! (Click here for one of my favorite Sue moments!)

This morning I flew to Paris because I have an audition tomorrow. I spent the afternoon walking around visiting my favorite places. Paris is amazing in the fall. I wrote a handwritten journal entry that I will type and share soon. Until then, here it goes for this entry... Proofread and then upload. Come on internet, ignite!