Repertoire Choices Pave the Road to Indispensability
A singer eliminates repertoire as he/she matures and the career advances (not everything for ever, even if one can still sing it well).
INTELLIGENT REPERTOIRE CHOICES help pave the road to personal and vocal indispensability in opera.
Looking for a Voice Teacher
Looking for a Voice Teacher is not a quick fix. You are looking for a partner who understands his/her field and can help you with your needs-just like a DOCTOR, DENTIST OR, if you will, LOVER. And, just so we are clear here, you would make a VERY big mistake if your lover were your voice teacher, so good advice would be, NOT to mix business with pleasure!
If you do not know your needs, then think about your wants, and try to understand what you expect of yourself and the help you need getting there. Have the patience to TRUST-just like with a DOCTOR, DENTIST, LOVER.
Look for someone with QUALIFICATIONS:
+ Training
+ Languages
+ Musical sensitivity,
+ Discipline
+ Past/ present career savvy
+ Someone who has vision & envisions YOUR success PATH & GOALS on the same level as you do, and understands a plan for success. This is NOT an easy order, and the better you know yourself, the easier to know for what/whom you are looking in a voice teacher.
Planning a Recital Program
Planning a recital program is like planning a dinner menu. You want to take into account your guests (your public) and their tastes and knowledge level, and you want to show yourself to your best advantage, so you plan a menu that not only appeases the sophistication of your guests’ tastes (your public), but also accentuates YOU, requiring accoutrements, décor, ambiance ingredients, theatrics, and proportion (however YOU see fit). Having learned the recital programming rules first (group ingredients, group length & number, program strong points & overall composer locations-creating the program arc-and contemporary composer placement), you will then know how to creatively and personally bend those rules to accommodate you and your program idea.
If your guests are a public in the making, you consider differently, as opposed to an experienced and experimentally tolerant public (different kinds of perception and reception)! Plan according to what your guests (your public) can comprehend, tolerate and digest while keeping in mind that we are constantly educating and building publics.
If you are one who feels the world should begin a dinner menu with an ice cream sundae, do it! A program can be designed that way if that’s who you are and what you can do best. It can work for YOU…always taking into consideration that which governs necessary recital programming rules (menu wise).
You want to put YOUR personal “thumbprint” on your recital, and you will. Then, creatively bending the rules, to suit YOU, is great fun and legitimate innovation, as long as you know the rules you are bending!
Jane Marsh Metropolitan Opera Guild Lectures, October 3 & 10
Metropolitan Opera Guild, to place orders for my lectures October 3 & 10,
E-mail=www.operaed.org/lectures.
Phone number= 212-769-7028 (orders taken between 10:00 AM & 4:00 PM)
Ticket Price=Discuss with Met Guild, when you call
Both lecture themes: "Bel Canto", Met Opera's productions of Donizetti's, La Fille du régiment and Rossini's, Il barbiere di Siviglia
Lecture(s) time & location: 4:30-6:00 PM - Di Capo Theater, 184 East 76th Street & Lexington Avenue
This is an interesting Metropolitan Opera Guild Lecture package idea and I am delighted to have "Bel Canto" as my lecture theme, what with singing a great many works in this inviting style. It would be lovely to have you all with me for these events. Join me!
Assets to Personal Success
In addition to personal talent, sense of direction, courage, inventiveness, and charitable love, the two most necessary assets to personal success are energy and self-esteem, in that order.
Paer's Leonora and Beethoven's Leonore & Fidelio
In Italy, with Italian sung and spoken dialogue-Singspiel Style of the day-a significantly worthy classical composer, named Ferdinando Paer, composed an opera with the story idea of a Spanish woman willing to present herself as a young lad in the household of the prison jail keeper-in whose prison her husband is being contained-in order to win household trust and liberate her husband from tyranny. Paer called his opera creation LEONORA (Fedele, Leonora as a lad)). Paer's opera, LEONORA, was viewed by an enthusiastic Beethoven, who, influenced by Paer, became interested to create his own rendition of the Paer opera story. In Beethoven's opera rendition, he composed the story, also Singspiel Style of the day, to be sung and spoken in German-Beethoven's language and that of the original Singspiel Style. Beethoven called his opera creation LEONORE (Fidelio, Leonore as a lad).
Both Paer's LEONORA and Beethoven's LEONORE reveal a stylistically busy vocal and musical floridity mass-respecting the story's Singspiel Style humor, though not underlining enough the story's strong expression of faith.
Beethoven, advised by friends, refined his opera LEONORE-clearly also feeling that his musical and vocal floridity were superfluous to the expression of faith in the story.
In Beethoven's ultimate refining of LEONORE, he clearly undresses the opera of extras altogether, convulsing it into an electric current of Beethoven's own devout humaneness. The opera becomes an imbalance, then, of emotional energies, but a magnificent thriller expression of faith in liberty and the loathing of tyranny. Beethoven calls this NEW creation of LEONORE, FIDELIO. The rewriting of LEONORE shows that, in the case of FIDELIO, less zaps winningly and exaltingly into more!
I recall, with huge excitement, the pleasure of my own catharsis with all three of these operatic pieces, having sung the Paer in Parma (in Italian, as written) and both Beethovens in Genoa (in German, as written). Each of these operas has a significance of it's own, still, and could win-each exclusive unto itself-large public interest, today, but the magnificence of FIDELIO remains overpoweringly exemplary of commanding potency.
Competitions
Competitions-whether seeking new compositions, conductors, singers, instrumentalists, or the like-need offer adequate time to view and hear the competitors. It is the competitor's responsibility to showcase himself utmost favorably-in his consideration of his showcase material-and it is the responsibility of the competition and it's judges to offer antiquate listening time, without rushing themselves or the participants through the process. Competitions are not about the competition's deadline and the judges' time, but the competitors' talents. If competitor numbers and lack of time are issues, add a day or accept less participants, in order to offer enough individual showcase time.
International Unrest & Table Manners
Ironically, I have often made comment that it could well be table manners that trigger international unrest. When one thinks that accepted table etiquette in one country is not at all accepted in another, it's not a bad parallel.
Unseen Powers
Trust the thoughts that come to mind, the falling open of book pages, the people who cross your path, the topics discussed...
These are answers to questions asked, or questions yet to be asked. The unseen energy forces are sending messengers!
Let's Touch Upon Chest Voice
'Chest voice' is a use of the voice, which seems continually at risk of being profoundly and globally misunderstood.
This concept of vocal color, entered into in the lowest vocal register in specific repertoire-particularly specific Italian repertoire-, is often a point of controversy as to whether it is a requirement for, or a danger to, singing. This topic is crying out for an open 'in group' discussion!
Singing
Singing combined with exceptional vocal beauty can create majestic enlightenment.
Style & Color
Every composer-every creator-has a personal style and color. This is the 'thumbprint' of individuality.
Laughing
Laughing is as infectious as yawning...One starts it and everybody follows.
Edith Piaf's Primal Singing
Emotional wrenching is evident in the new French film about French street/cabaret singer, Edith Piaf. The life of this 'force of nature' street urchin is born into tragic sadness and it also ends this way. Through it all, though, Piaf is sustained and comforted by a confidence and the personal self-worth she finds in her singing, naively comprehending life's call to give of love and be fulfilled by it. This simple, yet palpable, realization is Piaf's survival, during her short life.
Fortunate for Piaf is that she 'got' life's primal message, profoundly, and fortunate for us is that we 'get' Piaf's profundity!
The Color Orange
There's something about orange that invites me to launch into jubilant song. Such sunniness!
Discussion
I am so enthused in conversation, when there is an elevated discussion level. It is refreshing and fun to talk to those who are globally informed about the subjects with which they involve themselves. What universal topics have still gone untouched?!
August Vocal Coaching
What with my Mahler recital and master class, for this August '07 in Europe, having been postponed until next summer-in order to include more engagements, repertoire and master classes for next year's participants-I presently have the luxury and time to do some vocal coaching. Lovely fun with singers rather new to the game, as well as very seasoned artists. I'm enjoying myself.
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