2008.
So like anyone with a blog I figure it’s my duty to make a sort of year-in-review/best-of post.
First off, everyone says this year sucked, but I had a good year. I did like 10 new roles!! I was mad busy all year, and in this business that’s a good thing.
Most insanity: Singing Nedda and Serpina on a double bill- in that order.
Biggest suckage: My bass player Sashi’s suicide in April.
Most random adventure: Running around Bolivia trying to track down a score of Bastien und Bastienne.
Best performance: OMG I have no idea. The first night of Serva Padrona was amazing. Fledermaus was also pretty off the hook. That one at least there are videos of.
Role I most want to do again: That would have to be Marie from Daughter of the Regiment. I just discovered what an amazing role it is for me, and I’m dying for a chance to do it in a full production.
Don’t call it a comeback: Rejoining New York Circus Arts Academy after a year off for my surgery.
Best Classical Singer article: my interview with Opera Chic in January launched my column, The Tech-Savvy Singer.
Best new song by me: Monica’s Getting her Tits Done, of course. 
Rapid-fire role learning: While learning Serpina in a week was the hardest by far, my speed record is learning Madame Herz in two days.
Diva moment: either getting a private dressing room in the Smith Opera House, or hiring an assistant. In India.
Personal victory: Getting a new, fancier church job in a better choir with a good director a year after getting “not invited back” to my old church job. Nyahh.
OK I’m off to band rehearsal, you all be good and I’ll see ya next year!!!
Lessons and Carols
I was disappointed looking at my church schedule and not seeing any extra services for the holidays- Christmas Eve of course, but no Christmas Day, no evening Lessons and Carols services, no concerts. Doing extra Advent services are like the church singer’s version of getting a Christmas bonus. We did have a rehearsal, which I attended in my usual morning fog (WHY do church people insist I wake up in the morning?) but I assumed it was because we were going to be having some extra-long- I mean special- services for one reason or another.
I was half-right. I had been kind of wondering in my sleep-deprived funk why we seemed to have so much music for Sunday morning, but it wasn’t until I finally picked up my service leaflet that I figured it out- it had the title “Lessons and Carols” pasted all over it in huge bold letters.
I’d never heard of Lessons and Carols being done in place of a normal service. (Have I? Did we do it in Paris? I almost feel like I did it somewhere, sometime, once.) I always thought of L&C as being a sort of Advent version of Evensong- and thus, done in the Evening.
Perhaps I should backtrack for the heathens among us who don’t know what a Lessons and Carols is. Well, at least to my understanding, it’s a kind of service that focuses on alternating some particularly famous and narrative long passages from the Bible with singing- the kind of churches I tend to sing in will mostly feature anthems by the choir alone, but it can also be sing-a-long hymns. There is a tendancy towards very old English and Latin texts, for example anything from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols or other settings of the same lyrics. Oh, and for some reason, everyone likes to start with Palestrina’s Matin Responsory (which is really an adaptation of something else he wrote), often from somewhere weird like the back of the church. I guess that destroys my original thesis about Lessons and Carols being done in the evening, since Matin means morning. I guess that never occurred to me before.
So that’s the church lesson from me, I’m not an expert, just someone who’s sung in churches her whole life, mostly Episcopal and Catholic ones. The singer’s aren’t the experts, you gotta talk to the organists. They’re the real nerds.
So! turns out we had a Lessons and Carols service after all, except it was merged with our normal Sunday service. It worked out ok because we sang “Rejoice in the Lord Alway” ( you know the one, it’s like one of the greatest hits of English choral anthems) in place of the sermon. No, this did not help us get out of church early, but it did help us get out at the usual time, the painfully late 12:25 that I have yet to adjust to.
We also sang: this really neat Adam Lay YBounden setting by …Mosher… first name=? Dammit, and he was there, too! Now I feel so bad for forgetting his name. I should have struck up a conversation with him at coffee hour, but it didn’t occur to me- all I can think about on Sundays at 12:26 is getting home and ordering a pizza and going back to bed. Well, it was a really cool setting. With a bell tree. It looks really scarily modern on paper but it’s not as hard as it looks! We did Laetentur Coeli by Byrd, which was very tricky for Byrd. There was a three-voiced section in the middle that I think most directors would have made into solos (and apparently they had done so in previous years), but we did it tutti. Which is too bad because that’s the kind of solo I love to do. But anyways I haven’t been given any solos since I joined this choir, not even Gregorian chant, which I must say I do very nicely. This is OK because it keeps things low-pressure- at St. John’s in the Village I was always sight-reading my way through a page of chant, even frequently improvising my own tones for the Alleluia verse. (Actually I did that a lot of St. Clement’s too!). We also sang a Batten piece, but to be honest at this point I can’t remember it and I can’t find a sound clip online anywhere. I think I liked it?
We finally ended with Mendelssohn’s Im Advent, which was such a freak contrast to everything else (Anglican churches don’t do a lot of Mendelssohn anyways) that it was almost difficult to get the notes right, even though it would have been a really easy piece in any other setting.
And then I went home and had pizza and slept on and off for 24 hours. It was a looooonnnng weekend. If only I could sing in this choir without having to do mornings.
Here is where we were listed in the New York Times. Please bypass the second listing, featuring an event held at the church which fired me a year and a half ago. >:( >:( >:( For the record, it’s not the choir I belonged to in the listing, but a visiting choir. Wheras our Lessons and Carols features the actual choir of the actual church. And they are happy to have me, so :p to SJITV. Yeah I’m bitter, so?
Moby Dick the opera…
When reading this month’s Classical Singer, in which I have THREE ARTICLES, I enjoyed an interview with Jake Heggie and Frederica von Stade. Until I got to the last page, where Heggie talked about his current project, an opera on Moby Dick. It’s not the subject matter that turned my stomach, although I can’t profess much enthusiasm for it- I’ve never read the novel, but it certainly doesn’t spike my imagination as much as, say, Mortier’s commissions for a Philip Glass opera on the life of Walt Disney and a Wuorinen (the guy who did Haroun, which I saw, it was weird and enjoyable) on Brokeback Mountain. It’s the part where he says, “It’s an all male cast.” My head begins to ache. There is very little as thrilling as great male singing- in moderation. The last time I saw an opera that was an almost all male cast was Amistad, which I disliked. Not because of Mr. Davis’s music, but largely because almost all the singing was done by men, and it really started to grate on me after awhile. (I also recall it being boring, but I have a short attention span.) I can’t explain it, but opera needs a woman’s voice- or at least a countertenor. Mr. Heggie did not mention whether or not he was intending to use countertenors, which might help the timbre, but right now, the thought of this whale of a sausage fest makes me cringe.
Not to mention the availability factor of the two sexes- it’s much easier to come up with a barrelfull of good women singers than a couple decent men, and it seems from the outside that the tenor voice is the most delicate, prone to technical difficulties. You won’t see any colleges or Young Artist Programs putting this show on, or even semi-pro community opera companies. But that’s not my problem, as the listener. (It is my problem, as the soprano, but there are other fish in the sea… ouch…) It’s more the color of relentless male voices that offends my picky sensibilities. I’m sure Mr. Heggie will do a great job, as he’s a great composer, but… maybe he can make the whale a chick? A COLORATURA SOPRANO? Ha that would be awesome. You know I could handle it.
The Globolinks of Penzance
Ahhhh. My last performance of Pirates is over. And I just spend like wayyy too much time fixing my RSS feed. That should have been way easier than it was.
The Loew’s in Jersey City was incredible!!! I wish I’d had time to check it out. We (my fave chorus girl Maggie, her mom, and I) got there at 12:45 and I pretty much had to set to work on hair and make-up. It was byooooooootiful!!!! Agh!! I couldn’t bear it, it was so perfect and old-fashioned and charming and exquisite! I MUST GO BACK!! YOU MUST GO!!! No, no pics ’cause my camera was stolen in Bolivia. I tried to take one from the outside with my iPhone but I was too far away so it looks stupid.
Maggie’s mom is a hair goddess, and did my hair in wonderful curls that didn’t budge. Overall I looked quite charming. Hope to get pics?
So yeah, basically everything was great, everything I was involved with at least. Oh, my favorite part is during Climbing Over Rocky Mountain, when we got to our spinning parasol circle, the audience applauded. They’d never done that before, and it was so charming!! It felt, like, old fashioned or something. Not to mention, you do it so many times you forget that it’s awesome (I’m assuming; I’ve never seen it).
Everything was great. Less drama than before- I tested my parasol before I went on, all my clothes fit. It was still a little off-kilter working with Eric, as he still didn’t always do what I was expecting, but nothing bad.
I was starving like the whole time. I kept being like, “Oh, I’ll eat something after the next scene,” and never did.
I was expecting a ton of people, but I only found one friend waiting for me after it was over- I’m not sure if people bailed or if they came and left early. I heard from two people who called out sick, and someone who came with a friend but didn’t wait for me, so I’m not sure about everyone else. Like I said, I was expecting a lot of people who had never heard me before, so they don’t necessarily know that you can wait to see me afterwards, or that you should at least let me know you were there!
For future reference, all! If you come to see me in a show, at least everywhere I’ve ever performed, you can stick around and see me after it’s over- but if you’re my friend, let me know you’re there, or else I might take my sweet time getting dressed. If you are not my friend, yes, you should stick around and tell me how you liked the show. However, if you lack social skills, let me forewarn you not to overstay your welcome- a good fan is someone who sticks around, says hi says what they want to say, maybe we have a mini-conversation, and then you go home. A creepy stalker is someone who won’t go away. Don’t wait for a verbal cue, because I don’t want to give you one unless I have to. You can be as enthusiastic as you want, I LOVE it- Let’s just say, you don’t get to leave with me and my friends and my coworkers- you should have cleared out by the time we’re taking off. That’s a good rule of thumb I think. I don’t have a lot of problems, but it needs to be said. (I don’t mean my friends who come to see me- I had a friend there waiting for me today, that’s totally different.) I definitely see the value of writing a whole post about good fan vs. creepy stalker in the future, but I think I should wait til I’m more famous and have more fans and stalkers to bounce theories off of.
Me and Maggie and Maggie’s mom and my friend Dan went out to get really really good Thai food in the village, at which point my remaining energy totally crashed. Then I came home and decided I needed some chill time…
So I watched this:
Help, Help, the Globolinks!
I LOOOOOOOOOOOOVED IT!!!!!! I did this opera in college- I was Madame Euterpova, who is the star, even though Emily always seems to get billed as the lead. If I were to do it outside college, I would probs be cast as Emily, which is a much lighter role (obvs), but you KNOW I had fun with my Euterpova!
OMG the video was SOOOOO CUTE! OK so this is a really dated opera, and it’s a really dated movie. Like, in a really hilarious way. 1968. I SO wish there were some good clips of this on YouTube, because you need to see it to believe it. Just Netflix it. But I have to say, I am something of a hater when it comes to hearing other singers- I’m very picky- but everyone in this movie was PERFECT. I am especially critical towards people singing *MY* roles- largely because I grow so attached to my own interpretations, it’s hard to win me over- but Arlene Saunders was just to die for. Aghh! She’s adorable, I just want to eat her up!!!!!!! I recommend.
Love always,
Amanda White
It is, it is a glorious thing to be a Nachtigall
Hello my darlings.
WordPress seems to have changed it’s interface. We are ok with this. Change is nice. It’s kinda acting funny, though. I have faith. It’ll work out.
Wednesday’s Opera on Tap: I couldn’t think of what to sing, remember? Music from cold countries… So what I did was Poor Wand’ring One for my first aria, and for my second, I prepared both Prokofiev’s Ugly Duckling and Alabiev’s nightingale. Ugly Duckling I luuuuuuuuuuuuuv. I literally get blurry-eyed at the end. I probably wrote about this way back when, before I moved my blog here, but I first learned it in French in Paris. We did it for our final exam in my Mise en Scene class (which was basically Acting for Singers, except it was a really fabulous class), where we divided up the lines and told the story as a group. Then I pulled it out and did it in a recital a couple years ago, my show “La Diva de l’Empire” that I did in Brooklyn and in Glen Ellyn. Then I did it in English. Why didn’t I do it in Russian? 1. I don’t have the music in Russian! My version has French, English, and German. 2. I don’t speak Russian. 3. It’s a story, and a children’s story no less. It’s important that the audience understand the words. Yeah, you could just sing it in language X and see if people can figure out what part of the story you’re at, but it’s a long (12 minutes!), detailed, creative telling. They wouldn’t get the part about the Spanish duck, the wild ducks who thought he wanted to marry them, his attempted suicide at the hands of the swans… In many places- probably most- I like the French better. I’ve even changed some lame English lines to reflect the more poetic French version. But if I’m singing it in America it makes no sense to sing it in French.
The other piece I prepared was the Russian Nightingale. Again, language issues. My version is in German. I have another copy in English and Italian. But the German edition is a better version- better key, better cadenzas, everything. Yeah I could probably order the Russian but who has the time. So basically I hadn’t done this since LAST year when I sang it for Opera on Tap. I sang it twice (because we were performing more frequently then), and added some new ornamentations the second time, which I wanted to keep- but still wasn’t totally used to, as I had known it for years before I added them- so I pulled it out the day of, re-learned my ornaments (THANK YOU Amanda for writing them in!!!! Good girl!!!!), and packed it in the bag as well. When I got there, I said to Annie, “I have a short piece and a long piece to choose from, what’s our timing look like?” and she said do the short one. Which was a lot easier, even though it’s got extreme cadenzas, because it’s not a heart attack for the pianist like the Prokofiev would have been.
Poor Wand’ring One was sooooo fun. I made it into a sing-a-long, getting the singers in the audience to sing along the chorus parts. Come on, SOMETHING has to happen during “TAAAAKE HEAAART, NO DANGER LOWERS…” That’s like the best part of the whole song.
The Russian Nightingale, as always, was a true crowd pleaser- I swear somebody yelled “Ole!” at the end of each chorus, which is exactly what I was thinking- and I had a really good time. If you missed it, stop that! Come to the next one. Trust me on this.
Thursday we had our rehearsal for the Jersey City showing of Pirates, which is TOMORROW!!!! The dress rehearsal was fun and weird at the same time. It went very smoothly. I remembered everything. On the other hand, I’m singing with Eric Blank now, and I had gotten used to singing with Wayne Hu. They are very different, not least because Wayne is a baritone and had transposed things. They play very differently. Even some of the blocking was different. Eric’s is probably what was originally given, since he was there for the early rehearsals, and he’s REALLY GOOD at remembering this stuff. (In the last show, I depended on him for walking me through the dances.) Wayne came in very late in the game, so I figure there was more improvisation happening. (I also was only at half the rehearsals because I was double cast, so I don’t know if and when things were changed.) Anyways, it was really weird to change Fredericks this late in the game. I hope to have time to go over things with him tomorrow. He’s not doing anything wrong- actually he’s doing everything right- but it just feels so so different! It’ll be great in the end of course. I’ve worked with Eric before and can totally trust him on stage.
I’m excited about tomorrow’s show (today’s show, it’s after midnight) because a lot of my friends are supposedly coming, including people who’ve never heard me sing. Of course a lot of people always bail at the last minute, but still, I have a lot of people at least planning on coming! I hope you are there too. I should go do stuff. Talk to you later!!!
Love always,
Amanda White
Slackin
I’ve hardly practiced a note in the past week- hardly sung at all. I’m slackin! Well also the main thing I wanted to do is record and listen back line by line, but my microphone is now officially utterly busted, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it (except I went to 2 Best Buys and neither had it). I’ve mostly been concentrating on my athletic pursuits- and I have the bumps, bruises, and sore muscles to show for it. It’s been a day of ice packs, epsom salts, Tiger Balm, red wine, and Advil.
Time to get back into shape, now. This coming Sunday is my other big performance of Pirates! This is the one that all my friends (hopefully) will be coming to. It’s in Jersey City, right off the PATH train, so this is one show my posse can actually get to. Oh, and it’s free!! So, I have to sing well to show off for the people I know at least.
Also, this Wednesday we have Opera on Tap. I guess I’ve been singing with them for a year, because it’s the same theme as I started with last year: Music from Cold Countries. Bleh. Not my thing. I had to really blow the dust off some scores last year to come up with something, though it was fun to bring The Nightingale out of the closet. I guess I can sing Poor Wandring One to pimp my show, after that I’m not sure. Oh well I got a couple days to figure it out.
So back to singing with me.
I did sing in church today, which was nice. But I realized we’re not doing any Lessons and Carols or other special church services, except Christmas Eve. Sad! I want the bonus music, and the bonus paycheck. I wonder if it’s too late to get some sub gigs?
That’s my life, rap atcha later!
Love always,
Amanda White
