After thanking Olga Kern for two amazing weeks performing the four Rachmaninov piano concerti and the Paganini Variations with me and the Phoenix Symphony, my daughter and wife took me up to the Phoenix Deer Valley Airport for my last general aviation departure as a resident of Arizona. The easy non-stop five hour night flight was a chance to decompress after an amazing spring.
Of course, my next project, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' Alice in Wonderland, has been on my mind for the better part of a year and it may stay with me for years down the road! There will be some sleepless nights. I can tell already!
After spending several months getting into the score, I watched the dark and intense world premiere performance available on DVD. Sometimes I'll start the process in reverse with an opera so I can both see and hear what is going on, but seeing the opening pages of the score, I realized that this piece is best served by one's personal imagination and sound concept. Hearing Dame Gwyneth Jones navigate the role of the queen from Munich was particularly exciting and certainly very individual to her. She is a force of nature!
Today we had the first musical coaching sessions I could attend (thank you, Greg Ritchey, for doing it the past couple of days while I finished up in Phoenix). It's always so interesting to meet a new cast. We all have such personalities, and it's interesting to see how a singer has prepared to present their role.
The things I am always negotiating are faithfulness to the printed page and the endless interpretative decisions each singer and director bring to the piece. There are some easy cues that guide me. A singer may have particular personality traits that I want to bring into the character so I may adjust tempo or dynamic. A singer's voice tells even more of the story. Relative lightness or heaviness in their technique impacts tempo and balance decisions, for example.
The dynamic here at OTSL couldn't be a better place to experiment with those options. The resident artists are at various stages in their pre-professional development and the visiting artists come from an enormous range of experiences.
Apart from making sure the music is well in hand and everyone understands how we are going to negotiate some very tricky music, I'm also looking for how those roles are developing over the course of the opera and trying to be mindful of that evolution or encouraging more of it if there is uncertainty.
I have my marching orders for personal study after today. There are several passages that have Rite of Spring rhythmical difficulty that I know will need extra care. It's one thing to conduct an orchestra or a singer alone, but put those elements together with the thrill of live performance, memorization and "x factor" type things that just happen, and I know I have to be especially ready.
Unsuk Chin has given us a work that can go in any number of directions. With Jim Robinson in the director's chair, I know this production is in great dramatic hands.
On to the staging rehearsals. Likely with musical brush-ups as we go!