Summer time and the living is easy

Well, if you aren't a procrastinating writer/blogger/opera lover like I am. Remember when I used to update everyday? I'm amazed I had the tenacity.

Let's see, what have I done to keep me away for the last few weeks?

*Gone to teach at English Summer Camp, in the wilds of Buckow (right outside Berlin). If that was not the most sophisticated summer camp that I have ever been to, I'll eat my hat. We had an actual house, with our own kitchen and bathrooms, and catered meals. It was less like work than it was play English language games with the kids all day and eat really good food. And run around in the forest.

*Been to two operas (The Pearl Fishers and Attila and Erwin Schrott's Berlin Rojotango concert. The first two I wrote about for BachTrack, so I didn't talk about them here, and the third I just didn't have time to review, given the hectic schedule I had in June.

*Watched Jonas Kaufmann be Awesome and Badass in Il Trovatore (which was also hilarious) in the weird-but-I-liked-it new Bayerische Staatsoper production by Oliver Py. We had a Twitter Block Party for it, so if you follow me on Twitter, you can read my thoughts there.

*Got into a huge fight with a PR person over the meaning and use of the word "butthead". Rather lost my taste for the internet for a few days after it devolved into character defamation.

*Spent a week curled up in my armchair tearing through Ben Aaronovitch's hilarious and wonderful Rivers of London series. This is me while I read it:

It's just that good.

Oh, and I changed the URL of this blog to more properly reflect my current internet name. So there's that.

I have something up my sleeve for August, but I'm not going to say what yet. You'll have to stick around and see. :-)

Questions and Answers with Massimo Giordano

Occasionally in life, something so random and cool happens that it completely throws you for a loop. In my case, this happened two weeks ago (right on the eve of the worst Death Cold I've had in ages), when Massimo Giordano himself sent me a message on Twitter to ask if I would please write a blog for him, about his new album. I believe the correct response in this case is "Um, YEAH". Alas, the fact that I teach 120 students under the age of 6 worked against me, as I came down with the Cold From Hell almost immediately after this, and was out of commission for a week and a half. But at long last, and thank you for your patience, Signor Giordano, is my blog post. :-)

Massimo Giordano has finally come out with an album for those of us who love tenor arias (and let's face it, most of us do). Amore e Tormento, produced by BMG, will feature a selection of Italian arias by Puccini, Verdi and Giordano, including those from "Don Carlo", "Manon Lescaut" and "Andrea Chenier".

Giordano himself comes from a working class Italian family, and has managed to make a pretty phenomenal international career, singing in all the world's major houses (including my personal favorite, the Vienna Staatsoper). He's sung with La Trebs, Natalie Dessay, and scores of others.

But you thought this was going to be a press release, didn't you? Nope. I've always been rather forward, and having a fever of 102F didn't really help. I asked for an email interview. I got it. And remember those Silly Opera Interview questions I posted months ago? Yeah, I asked some of those. And the ever fabulous Signor Giordano replied, no problem!

If you could sing any role, regardless of voice type or fach, what would it be?

Actually, I really like the bass voice. I find it very noble and I would love to sing Philippe the II in Don Carlo even though if I have to admit that each voice type has interesting arias that I would love to sing.

What's the funniest mistake you've ever made onstage?/What's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you in a performance?

I have to say that nothing that funny ever happened to me on the stage until today. However, I remember a time I had a concert and 3 times I had to enter the stage and I completely tripped ALL 3 TIMES while going up the stairs to the stage!!!! … and then the Presenter of the concert immitated me by doing the same!!! :-)

Instead of the scariest, well I remember when I sang La Jongleur de Notre-Dame in Rome and at the end in order to show people that Jean was going to become an angel, I had to climb all the way up to the rooftop of the theater and I can assure you with or without security that was really scary!!!!

If you could turn any book or movie into an opera, what would it be and why?

Hummm ok this is what I call a nice question ;-)
I think that would be really interesting to make an opera about the political situation in Italy of the last 50 years because more then an opera would be a tragedy!

But seriously I love Boardwalk Empire this would be a great opera for the content of the story and the main character Mr. Thompson but especially because it is inspired by a real life story.

What's the last performance you cried over?
-------
Certainly it was Bohème in Paris with Inva Mula in the last act I finished always crying for real and it was a great emotion.

What made you choose to go with BMG for your debut album?

BMG gives me all the artistic freedom possible and the new Master Right model that Mr. Hartwig Masuch has invented is really effective. I also think that this will be the future for us as artists!

Which upcoming performances are you desperately excited about?

The exit of my album Amore e Tormento, because it will be a huge success :-)
But also the debut as Andrea Chenier in Wien this will be a great challenge and I am really looking forward to it!

Thank you, Massimo! Look forward to Amore e Tormento, coming soon to a record store near you!

Belated resolutions

One of the hard things about blogging is knowing what interests people. When I started this blog, it was as a joke really, poking fun at my family members who had suddenly "discovered" blogging after years of mocking me for having one of my own. I posted simple every day things-stories about school, quotes I liked, whatever-and didn't expect to get more than a couple of views per week.

Then, I moved to Europe. At the same time, I was researching how to market books, thinking that it will come in handy if (when?) "Fidelio" gets published, and decided to use this blog as more of a diary of this adventure. I decided, too, to try to focus its content on music and opera. There's one problem there, however: I don't get out to the opera very much. I'm currently in the just-starting-my-career-and-so-quite-poor stage of life, so I don't get to go to concerts and stuff the way I'd like. So there's a problem.

The other thing is that I am interested in so much besides opera. And so, for the last couple of months, I've been procrastinating with updates, trying new forms of update, and wondering if anyone actually bothers with this blog at all. Do I, I wondered, write only about music, or do I post my own writing here, and do people want to read what I think about traveling and life and literature and fandom things, in addition to the mere pittance I can add to the wealth of opera blogs out there?

This year, my one of my goals is to post more regularly on this blog. I'm going to experiment with posting a variety of things, and hopefully, any regular readers I do have will enjoy it. Here's to 2013!

Happy (somewhat belated) New Year!

Here, have a picture of Jonas Kaufmann in sparkles.:-)

Guys, I am home in California, and it is a riot. It's also really weird. I keep hearing English and Spanish instead of German and Turkish, and it's bizarre. Luckily, I am in the land of books, yoga, tamales, books, hot chocolates the size of my arm, books, my public library, my library's classical music section, books, In-n-Out cheeseburgers, funky avant-garde indie bookstores, buskers, books, and family. And books. Did I mention those?

I'm glad I brought home my giant, empty, suitcase, because it's being filled up with all of the lovely things (yoga magazine, a selection of my favorite books, organic soaps and shampoos that smell of peppermint and lavender...). I love California so much, especially the Monterey-Santa Cruz-San Jose triangle that I live in...but I find myself missing Berlin and the students I teach. Not the cold, though. It's so warm here it's disgusting (minimum 50 Farenheit, and people FREAK OUT about it, let me tell you).

More later, if anything interesting happens. Ciao for now!

Deutsche Oper 100th Anniversary Gala: a recap

And only a week and a half late. Sorry about that, but things have been incredibly hectic over here, and then for some reason I lost all blogging motivation I'd had, and that was that. But here is my recap, for what it is worth.

Guys, German audiences can be mean. The poor woman who hosted the evening, Tita von Hardenberg, kept getting heckled like you wouldn't believe. Don't come between the Berlin audience and their opera, baby, was the message. I thought she handled herself very well, considering the shouting that started whenever she came onstage to interview one of the conductors (Donald Runnicles, Alberto Zedda and Jesus Lopez Cobos) or the management of the opera. Several of the managers were loudly booed, though I'm not sure which ones, as everyone was talking too fast and in German. There was a nice video trailer about the history of the opera house itself: long story short, the perfectly lovely building got bombed out during the war, and instead of restoring it, they had to raze it to the ground and build a perfectly ugly modern monstrosity in its place. The highlight was Christa Ludwig saying something snarky about the "rocket man" sculpture they have out front (again, my German wasn't up to catching exactly what she said, but I get that it wasn't flattering). The audience whooped and laughed and applauded her for it. That was fun.

But the music is what we all care about, and so here is what I wrote down in my journal the night of the performance. It's going to be piecemeal, but it's better than nothing:

The Gala itself was great, although they were losing Florestan's left and right: first Jonas Kaufmann withdrew, and then his sub got sick, and then the sub's sub got sick, and so it was announced right before intermission that the part of Florestan would be sung by a man named MacAllister. There was general disbelief in the audience, as you can imagine. I will say that he did a fine job with the role, despite having had only a few hours' notice.

Heidi Melton (who was the mastermind behind my being able to attend, for which I am forever grateful) opened the concert with Wagner's "Dich, teure Halle". She was fabulous. For some reason, I'd expected the aria to be solemn, considering the character of Elisabeth, but it was loud and jaunty and gorgeous, and definitely going on my iPod. Melton wore a fabulous, sparkly blue dress, brand new that day: the airline had lost her luggage and her gala gowns, and so emergency shopping was done. You can read all about it on her Twitter page.

We were subjected treated to a world premier of an overture by Hans Werner Henze, who died just this week, thus making me feel a little bad that I thought his Ouverture zu einem Theater was a cacophonous mess. It was just, well, extremely modern, and I'm not quite there yet in my musical tastes. It was quickly followed by Rossini's Semiramide overture, which was a nice palate cleanser.

Afterwards, Vittorio "There's Not A Tenor in the World Who Can Compete With Me" Grigolo came on to sing and (Heaven help us all) act out Romeo's aria Ah! leve-toi, soleil! from Gouno's Romeo and Juliet. Yay. He has a good voice, I'll give him that, but the arrogance involved was (and is) extremely off-putting. And he kept coming back onstage to bow, which was a trifle obnoxious, as we were keen on getting on with the program.

Lastly, we were treated to the Falstaff finale, Tutto nel mondo e burda, which was funny and fun and loud and jolly. And then there was intermission. Thirty minutes worth of music took over an hour to hear, because each and every single piece was preceded and followed by interviews and film clips. It was an extremely disgruntled audience that hit the wine buffet, let me tell you.

Intermission, in which several women told me they liked my dress, everyone got a little hammered, and the German glitterati swept around sparkling like teen vampires at high noon. Seriously, I'm sure there were millionaires and actors and artists and assorted German celebrities there, and believe me when I tell you that I didn't recognize a single one of them. This is one of the advantages of not watching TV.

After the intermission, we all came back for a mercifully uninterrupted Act 2 of Fidelio. It should surprise no one that I am extremely picky about my Fidelios, to the point of being a bore. The fact that we were on our fourth Florestan of the night worried me. I needn't have worried, for our Leonore was Anja Kampe, and she was phenomenal. She carried the whole evening. She made me cry. Her Lenore was scared, but overjoyed to find her Florestan, and hardly ever stopped smiling. She was the only one of the singers to speak, and used the (now rare) line where she tells Florestan to have faith right before Pizarro attacks. Hers is the best Leonore I've ever seen, and I've seen every performance of Fidelio released on DVD and YouTube. Oh, she was a freaking rockstar!

Rocco was sung by Matti Salminen, who I'm given to understand is a baritone of some renown (don't laugh at me if he's extremely famous; I've only just begun to discover Wagnerian baritones) and Bastiaan Everink's Don Pizarro was virile, elegant, and scary as hell. Everink was a young guy, too; I'd have really loved to see him opposite Kaufmann, to see what it would be like to have two relatively young men at each other's throats. Alas, it was not to be.

Fernando, Jacquino and Marzelline were sung by Markus Bruek, Burkhard Ulrich and Martina Welschenbach respectively, and they were all very good. The finale was a miracle of sound and light and beauty, but frankly, if it isn't, something's wrong. The thing that I learned about Fidelio that night was the way that Leonore and Marzelline's vocal lines sort of play off each other in the finale, melding into a gorgeous whole. Again, don't laugh: there's only so much that you can get from a digital recording. Seeing Fidelio live was a real experience for me, because it taught me so much about the music that I couldn't get from a recording. It was stunning, beautiful, fabulous-and now I'm done unloading superlatives and will only say that it went by too fast and I wanted them to do it again when they were finished.

After the gala was a big reception, where they effectively killed the mood brought on by Beethoven by having a rock band perform in the lobby. It was a good band, really, but I was on a Fidelio high, so after wandering around for a bit and eating some of the Deutsche Oper-shaped cake (pictured above), I collected my coat and flats* from the coat check and left. I had wanted to thank Heidi Melton in person for the ticket, and fall at Anja Kampe's feet in general adoring veneration, but neither of them appeared. Unfortunately, I dropped and broke my camera, so the one photo above is the only one I have. Le sigh.

All in all, it was a great night and I'm glad I went.

*I made an elderly lady in the subway laugh by changing out of my heels into my ballet flats: I can't walk well in heels in general, and there was no way I was riding home in them if I didn't have to.

Preparations hassles and general glee

Running around Berlin does not rank high on my list of Favorite Ways to Spend Friday, but today was not that bad. I had to find a new slip to go under my '20s dress for the gala tomorrow-the darn thing is completely sheer, and I'd be arrested for wearing it as-is in any place that wasn't Milan during Fashion Week. So I had to have a new slip, and it had to be purple, and it wasn't happening. Not even white slips were happening. Slips, it seems, have no place in the Modern Woman's clothing arsenal, despite being imminently practical garments. I ended up trawling vintage stores by Schloss Charlottenburg, purely on a whim. And that is where I got lucky.

At one of the stores, I asked the lady owner if she had a slip. I showed her my dress, to give her an idea of what I was looking for (the nice thing about this dress is that it rolls up into a fairly tiny package & so I had it in my bag). She examined it, cooed over it, and then informed me that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell I'd find what I was looking for, especially if I needed it by tomorrow.

"I'll make you one," she informed me. "It'll be ready by 2 o'clock tomorrow."

That's cutting it a bit closer than I'd like, but there's something ridiculously pleasing about having something made specifically for me. I'm excited. :-)

And THEN, as if shopping wasn't enough, I had another important errand: to go to the Berliner Festspielhaus and pick up a poster. Why? Because this Twitter conversation happened:

Tinydooms (Me): "I like this @blnfestspiele poster so much that I may have to go out & secretly peel it off a wall in the night."
Berliner Festspiele (@blnfestspiele)[one month later]: "Hi did it work? Otherwise you can come to our Haus der Berliner Festspiele and get one free."
TD: "No, I couldn't get one. Where is this Haus and can I come on Friday? :-)"
BFS: "hi, yes you can. I'll deposit one at our stage entrance."

And they did! See:

Admittedly, it was a little weird to walk into the stage entrance and tell the lady on duty that I had a poster waiting for me, under the name "Tinydooms". I opened it when I got home, and there were two posters inside! How awesome is that?

All in all, my weekend is off to a fabulous start.

Thelonious Monk's Tips for Performing

Photo from Explorer.

I love this. The advice is so heartfelt and interesting. My brother, a jazz bassist who adores Monk, went through the roof with glee when he saw this.

Song of the Week: This is Halloween

It's not opera (not even remotely close), but I love this song. It's funny, weird, catchy, and it's about my favorite holiday. And Germany does October right, all chilly days, orange and gold and red leaves, general sense of eerieness, I'll even let slide the fact that they don't really celebrate Halloween here. It's quite all right; I've got my Halloween playlist, a couple classic films (Hocus Pocus, anyone?), cathedral candles and a stack of ghostly mysteries to read. In this apartment, it's All Halloween, All October.

And I'm much better from the flu, but it was a vicious little bug this year.

Die schöne Müllerin at the Berlin Philharmonic

There comes a time in every woman's life when she must swallow her pride and wait outside the stage door to meet her favorite tenor.

Some of you may recall that when I met Erwin Schrott, I didn't take a pic with him because I'm completely uncomfortable asking celebrities to smile at the camera with me. It's very high on my list of no-nos, to be honest (right up there with doing math and talking in the theater). But...it's Kaufmann. And I knew that if I didn't, no one would ever, ever let me forget about it. But let me start at the beginning.

The Berlin classical music scene has a great program for students/under-30s/the unemployed etc: the Classic Card. A certain number of tickets are reserved for Classic Card holders and go on sale an hour before curtain time. With this in mind, I arrived at the Berlin Philharmonie yesterday at 9:30 in the morning. The plan: beat out to twenty other people waiting and get a really good seat for the Barenboim Zyklus I: Die schöne Müllerin sung by Jonas Kaufmann, accompanied by Barenboim. And it worked: I got a fantastic, fabulous, normally hella expensive seat in Block A: right in the front. Row 9, to be precise. This is another reason why I love the classic card: the seats are always reeeeeeally good.

The program started shortly after 11. If this had been a rock concert, everyone would have been screaming, but seeing as it was the (slightly) more refined world of classical music, everyone settled for clapping loudly and squeeing to themselves. Kaufmann launched right into Das wandern ist das Mullers lust, and boy, can that man sing. He was the journeyman miller; you could see it in his eyes, in his posture. And we the audience just ate it up with a spoon. There wasn't a peep to be heard during the music: we held the coughs and sneezes for the breaks between songs, when all hell broke loose.

The best part of the whole performance was immediately after Der Neugierige. "Sag, Bächlein, liebt sie mich?" Kaufmann sang, and the piano sparkled away into silence. And then it began: a wave of coughing that grew and grew until it sounded like we were the inmates of a tuberculosis ward. Kaufmann was the first to start grinning, then chuckling, and a sheepish giggle swept the hall. Barenboim turned away from the keyboard and very exaggeratedly took out his handkerchief to cough into, and everyone just lost it. Laughter and applause swept the hall, and the concert carried on.

How can I describe the music? Die schöne Müllerin is a gorgeous, lush song cycle, telling the story of a young journeyman miller who falls in love with his employers daughter, but eventually loses her to a local hunter. The miller, in despair, drowns himself in the stream. The stream itself is a character, flowing and lilting under the miller's songs, until, at the end, it sings its own tender lullaby, soothing its "darling boy" and cursing the titular Müllerin for her cruelty. That is the song that always gets me when I listen to it, and yesterday was no difference. It's almost as though the Bächlein, as the miller calls it, is a woman, waiting patiently while the miller goes through this hellish ordeal, and finally comforts him. I could (and let's face it, probably will) write a whole story or novella around it. Kaufmann brought the entire cycle to life in such a way that I was emotionally wrung-out by the time he was done with me.

As you can imagine, we made der Jonas do three encores, and this is where it really began to resemble a rock concert more than a lieder matinee. He got a standing ovation, flowers, screeches, bravos, and general hysterical carrying-on (which, let's face it, he'd probably expected). There were three encores: the first was about a "fischlein" (I'm not good with lieder titles), then second was Der Jüngling an der Quelle, which was so sexy as to be borderline indecent. Half the audience just fainted dead away as Kaufmann caressed the name "Luise" (it's really common around here). I didn't catch the third encore because I was too bust recovering from the second. And then a wave, and a huge grin, and they were gone.

And this, dear reader, was where I shelved my pride and parked myself outside the stage door for a chance to see the man up close, in person. I admit, I had a mission: I wanted to ask why he'd withdrawn from the Deutsche Oper gala, with it's performance of Fidelio. So I joined the throng of German women outside and waited.

And waited. Forty-five minutes later, Kaufmann appeared in his street clothes, bag slung over his shoulders, and was mobbed. ("Did he have a security detail?" my mom asked when I told her all this, and was shocked when I said no.) I waited until he was shunted almost literally into me, and it was then that my super polite I'm-meeting-someone-I-admire attitude kicked in. I thanked him for the performance and got my program squiggled in. And then, because I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't, I summoned my courage and said, "Can I ask why you had to withdraw from the Fidelio?"

"Yes, we tried so, so hard to get the management at the Staatsoper to cancel a Tosca, but they just couldn't. And so I'd be singing three nights in a row, and who knows what would happen, maybe an airline would strike and I'd then be six hours in the train, and it just wasn't practical. So unfortunately I had to cancel." From the horse's mouth, people. He was then pulled away by the crowd, but turned back to me a minute later and said, "You have a camera. Did you want a picture?"

"Yes, if that's cool," I replied.
"Sure, if we hurry," he said, because every single other camera in the vicinity had suddenly turned on us.

Kaufmann put his hand on my back and smiled (sort of). So I shoved my camera into a random lady's hands and got my picture. And then I took pics for everyone else. And then I left the group and went home. Shaking. Because, you know, reaction sets in after an intense situation.

Altogether, yesterday was lovely. :-)

Song of the Week: Gwyneth Jones-Heil dir Sonne

Say what you will of the Met's new Ring Cycle, when I heard the last half hour or so of Siegfried, I was pretty much done in. I went drifting home in a Wagner-induced haze (along with half the population of Berlin, in the S-bahn) and promptly went searching for the music online. This is what I found: Gwyneth Jones, whose tone is so pure and gorgeous that she has pretty much become my favorite Brunnhilde (sorry, Deb Voigt). The tenor here, Manfred Jung, sounds a little shrill, but given that he's just sung Siegfried, we can forgive him for it.

Song of the Week

I've been on a real Papageno kick this past week, namely because his music is catchy and infectious, I can't help but grin when I hear it (even if it IS technically suicide music in this one). I think what makes Papageno such an endearing character is that he is so human, in spite of the bird suit. He wants a partner, someone to share his life with, and he's not particularly interested in mysticism (it also helps that he basically calls Tamino a goob, which is an accurate observation). That, and he's just so endearing, you can't help but love him.

So here is the fabulous Simon Keenleyside, complete with mallard hat, bopping around the stage and lamenting his fate in life, before leaving in the midst of a pillow fight with his girl and their future children. Happy Monday, y'all. :-)

Viennese Postcard

I have managed to fall completely, one hundred percent in love with Vienna. I love it even more than I loved Paris (which was a lot when I was 15 and not so much when I was 25). The sights! The food! The people! Vienna has an atmosphere of culture and history that Berlin lost in the last days of WW2. Oh, and it has everything-except Versailles-that I studied in college. For those who don't know, I specialized in the 18th century, with a focus on the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties. And I'm a massive music nerd. So, you know, everything is there, all in one gorgeous package.

Because I am a Hopeless Romantic at heart, I succumbed to the tourist trap that is the Sacher Cafe, home of the Original Sacher Torte (they're very particular about being the Original: they took everyone else to court about it forty years ago). Sacher torte is a decadent chocolate cake with apricot jam between the layers, smothered in dark chocolate immediately after it comes out of the over. Not chocolate frosting. Pure chocolate. Oh, and that's a chococcino beside it. :-)

The nice thing about Sacher Cafe (aside from the excellent cake and the sumptuous decor) is that it's right across the street from the Staatsoper (so I could have my cake and eat it, too...). The group I was with was none too thrilled to have to go see a "boring old opera house", so we parted ways and I spent a good half hour tooling around taking pictures and trying not to buy everything in the gift shop. I, uh, didn't succeed.

Yes, that is totally a Mozart Christmas tree ornament you see there. And "Faust" starred Jonas Kaufmann the night of the poster I bought (for 50 cents-what a steal!)

This is the kind of thing you see when walking down the street in the Innere Stadt.

I found the Augustinerkirche, where the hearts of 54 Habsburg emperors live. You can't tell from the picture, but there was a man absolutely rocking out to a Bach fugue up on this organ. The whole church was shaking; it was wonderful! I love old churches and cathedrals, and how they smell of old stone and dust and the wax of a thousand candles. Love it.

Finish off the day with some yummy goulasch and a basket of bread from a tiny out-of-the-way beisl. Perfection!

The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge

I've gotten lucky this summer with the books I've been reading: they're almost uniformly fascinating, sink-your-teeth-into-them stories with strong plots, strong characterization, and darn fine storytelling. I can't tell you how much I value that. One of the most recent books I read was the thoroughly enjoyable The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge, by Patricia Duncker.

This book tells the story of a French juge d'instruction, Dominique Carpentier, who specializes in gathering information on fanatical religious sects. When one of these cults, known only as the Faith, commits mass suicide, the Judge (as she is known throughout the story) is pitted against the enigmatic Composer, Friedrich Grosz, who is connected to every single one of the dead. Her quest to find out what he knows about the sect takes her all over Europe, from sunny Provence to England to the Lubeck Festival in Germany. And through it all runs music.

The entire book is a masterpiece of sound and color, light and darkness, heat and cold. Duncker weaves a vivid picture of sweltering summer days spent eating lunch on the terrace of a Provencal vineyard, shivering winter days wandering from one German bookbinder to another, and two magical nights at the opera. Because that's the thing: the Composer is world-famous, one of the heads of the international music scene. He's very clearly modeled on Herbert von Karajan (whom I pictured throughout) or Daniel Barenboim. And he is not afraid of the Judge, or angry at her for her pursuit of his knowledge: rather, he loves her for it. And he uses what he knows best to attract her: music.

The Judge has no use for classical music, but still attends two operas: the Lubeck Festival's Tristan and a concert performance of Fidelio at Royal Albert Hall. The author clearly has a fine grasp of opera, clearly enjoys it herself. As her Composer says of Tristan, when learning that the Judge has never been to an opera before,

"Madame Carpentier, you are a very corageous woman. I have conducted this opera many, many times in the course of my professional life. Yet each time I find something new, fresh and miraculous in the score. So, even for an old hand like myself, the familiar remains strange, uncharted, even obscure. Let me advise you how to listen. Do not rationalize. I know that you are a very rational person. A Judge must be so, to sift the evidence. But put that part of yourself aside. Do not assess things or try to calculate. Or really even try to listen. Let go of everything...Yes, let go. And give the music time to speak to you. ...If you are not an aficionado you will be harder to persuade. We will give you our best. Our very best"

She then goes on to describe a Tristan so sensual as to be almost erotic. The Fidelio scene is much the same. Duncker uses words in a way that you really do hear the music, even if you've never actually listened to either opera before. The writing is sensuous, elegant, and the story interesting. The characterization is strong, from the cool Judge to the passionate Composer to the overbearing chief of police and the sylph-like daughter of the deceased.

I give it five stars, and will be reading it again.

How I met Erwin Schrott

I had a surprise when I went up to Dussmann's Kultur Krafthaus this evening. Dussmann's is a ginormous bookstore in Mitte, the central part of Berlin, and I frequent it because it has an English Bookshop (which is just wonderful, but anyway). The surprise? Erwin Schrott, who was going to come and do a Q&A session and sing as a promotional thing for his latest CD, Arias. "Well," I thought, "that's a cool way to spend a Friday evening." And off I went in search of some dinner to tide me over.

Sitting in Starbucks, I made a few tweets about the evening, joking with a friend that "@erwinschrott is going to be at Dussmann's tonight. Maybe I won't be the only person there under 30!" Much to my amazement, Schrott himself tweeted me back, saying "If you're in Berlin, please do come!" I was like: 0_0.

At forty minutes to the hour, I went back across the street to Dussmann's, where it quickly became apparent that the place was full. They weren't letting anyone else in. I stood surrounded by a bevy of indignant German women, trying to decide what to do. Do I stay or do I go home? Luckily, looking over the event hall is the second story balcony, so I rushed upstairs and grabbed the best spot before anyone else could.

You see where this guy is standing? That's exactly where I was, just outside the main event room, on the balcony.

This was the view I had:

To kill time, I made a few tweets with my phone:
"Chilling on the balcony, waiting for @erwinschrott. Capacity crowd; I'm actually outside."
"Lol, now people are pointing at me like "There's a girl on the balcony! What!" My spot; not moving."
"One of the employees just moved a rack of calendars and offered me a chair. "You've got the best seat: you can see AND hear!" :-)"

And then Erwin Schrott came out, and everyone applauded, and he bowed, and said, "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for coming! I'm glad you could all make it. I want to say that I was reading on Twitter about my friends coming, and I'm so sorry you couldn't find seats and have to stand on the balcony! Where are you at?" And he looked straight up at the balcony, where I was standing with about fifteen other people.

With a shock, I realized that he was talking about me. I waved at him with my fan (I carry a fan in summer) and grinned. "There you are! I'm sorry you couldn't get a seat!" cried one of the most famous baritones of our day, and WAVED AT ME.

The lady standing next to me stared at me. "Do you know him?" she asked.
"No. I was just talking about this event on Twitter," I replied. And then I tweeted, "Dude, was @erwinschrott reading these tweets?! He totally mentioned people tweeting from the balcony."

The Q&A session was hosted by a woman from the local classical music radio station, and the topics were like those in any interview: how do you make time for family; how do you pick your music; etc, etc. Despite the microphones, I couldn't hear them very well. Mr. Schrott stood up to sing twice. The first time was Le Veau d'or ("Le veau d'or! I love this aria! And he totally blew a kiss to us all in the balcony. :-)"); the second was a Spanish song accompanied by a fierce accordian player:

At the end of the evening, Schrott asked the audience to ask him questions.
"Come on, I want to know about you, too!" he cried when everyone just stared at him. He got a few shy queries. It was very sweet. When that was over, Schrott settled at a table to sign autographs, and I figured that since he'd given me a shout-out about not having a seat, I should go down and say hello. I didn't have anything with me but the flier advertising the evening, but I got in line and waited until it was my turn. Eventually, I stood there before him.

"Hola," he said to me. (The man before me spoke to him in Spanish.)
"Hola," I replied. "Thanks for giving us all a shout-out on the balcony. That was really nice of you."
And Erwin Schrott, who is world famous, leaned over the table and said, "You're the one who said on Twitter that you would be the only person here under thirty! Aren't you?"
"Yes," I said, "and I think I was."
"I think so," he replied, laughing, and held out his hand for me to shake. "I'm glad you made it! I'm sorry that you couldn't find a seat. I love it when my fans from Twitter make it down to events like this. It's so nice that we get to have more contact."
"Yeah, don't you just love Twitter?" I said.
"Yes, it's wonderful," Erwin Schrott said, and took my small flier up to sign. "And is your name really Christie?"
"Er, yes," I said, amazed that he'd noticed that my name appears on Twitter. "With a C-H and an I-E."
He signed my program "Para Christie! Erwin Schrott." I thanked him, took it up, and wished him a nice weekend and good luck in Don Giovanni, which he's doing with the Staatsoper. He told me to have "a wonderful night" and "Ciao!" and off I went.

When I got outside, I realized that I was shaking. All that excitement had done me in.

But it gets better. When I got home, there was a retweet of my tweet, by Mr. Erwin Schrott: "Dude, was @erwinschrott reading these tweets?! He totally mentioned people tweeting from the balcony." This was added: "Of course I was!" So basically, the whole pre-event time I was clowning around on the balcony, he was backstage reading what I was saying. I about fell over and died. Can you say awesome?

Mr. Schrott, you have won a fan in me. Not only are you a fabulous singer, but you are a fabulous person, too, and I appreciate your kindness.:-)

Mein lieber Schwan

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories from university.

Back in the day, about six years ago now, I had a friend who worked as a waiter/organizer/jack of all trade at a ranch in California. This was not your typical rodeo ranch, though. This ranch catered to weddings. You could rent the whole shebang and get married there. There was a little outdoor chapel strewn with roses and ivy, a hall for dancing in, and-this was what won the brides over, I think-a horse-drawn carriage pulled by four elegant horses to whisk the bride from her pre-wedding cottage around the shining silver lake on which floated a flock of swans, and up to the chapel, where she could then process in all her glory to the strains of one of the most hackneyed pieces of music ever written*. It was immensely popular.

Now, my friend's job during these weddings was to seat the guests, act as waiter during the reception, and, crucially, make sure the swans stayed in the lake during the bridal drive. Because they didn't like to, you see. If a swan happened to waddle out of the water during the bridal procession, he had to run up and shoo it back in. Nine times out of ten, the swan went back in the water. But on that day, that hot, bright Saturday, as the strains of Wagner played in the background, the unthinkable happened.

The bride was coming. The guests were waiting. The music was playing. One of the swans got out of the lake. My friend hurried forward in the age-old pose of man trying to scare off poultry: knees bent, arms outstretched, hissing "Shoo!" This swan did not shoo. It looked at him. He looked at it. And then, in his words, "it made a velociraptor noise" and seized him by the crotch.

As any sensible 21 year old man will do when grabbed by the crotch by a giant waterfowl, my friend immediately began to scream and dance around, as the bird held grimly on and shook him. He said that it went on like that for an age, but in reality it was maybe twenty seconds before one of his colleagues ran up, seized the swan by the neck, and hurled it back into the lake. For a moment they thought it would come roaring back, but after some frenzied squawking, it settled back into the water.

"Are you all right?" my friend's colleague howled. They were clutching each other, shaken.
"I think so," gasped my friend, who had suddenly developed a perfectly rational terror of swans.

And then they heard it: a storm of applause behind them. They turned. There stood the entire wedding party, holding cameras and video recorders and applauding wildly. My friend straightened his suit jacket, bowed slightly, and hurried away. As he went he passed the bride in her carriage. She was laughing into her bouquet.

Later, during the reception, my friend was continually accosted as he walked around with trays of champagne.

"Are you okay, bro?" was the topic of conversation.
"I feel for you, dude. That thing looked like it wanted to eat you."

"I just wanted to crawl into the floor and die," my friend mourned when he told me this. "It was awful: first I was nearly emasculated by a swan to that damn wedding march, and then all the groomsmen got hammered and kept asking awkward questions. I'm never getting married! Not there! And there will be no swans!!" Swans, he concluded, are vicious, ruthless children of darkness.

I won't lie to you, I was pretty much on the floor crying with glee when he told me, myself. I'll never be able to sit through a production of Lohengrin without thinking about this story.

*How can anybody actually sing this with a straight face? I'd be grinning diabolically.

Sometimes, you just need flowers.

Flowers



And a lace dress


And a Strauss lied.

"Toreador, prende-garde!"

(Photo by The Sartorialist)

What do you do when you finish your Deutsch class, pwn the exam, and live in Germany? Listen to Carmen.

Personally, I find bullfighters fascinating. Not that I would ever go to a bullfight, but the idea of toreadors as public figures interests me. Who knows, maybe I'll write about it someday. For now, I will listen to the dashing Ludovic Tezier swagger his way through this fabulous aria.

Burn, baby: Gotterdammerung in HD

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone, but "Götterdämmerung" blew me out of the water last night. It was one of the most bombastic performances i've ever seen. I don't know why people whine about Wagner being pedantic and boring when his work simply clobbers you over the head with its greatness.

Musically, it was impeccable. The Met Orchestra under Fabio Luisi was ON, Deborah Voigt was ON, Jay Hunter Morris was ON, everyone was just (say it with me) on. Morris especially rocked the house-he's a very good actor as well as a great singer. He was appropriately bouncy (I found myself thinking "Oh, Siegfried" in wry amusement more than once), and I thought he handled the magic potion and its antidote very well. I loved the way he stumbled when he first drank it, and how he kept shaking his head as though to clear water from his ears, when his memories of Brunnhilde tried to surface. Siegfried is such a lovable meathead that you kind of have to forgive him for being such an idiot. I loved his ridiculous flower crown during Act 2: it struck me as a symbol of the tragedy of the whole thing, that he seriously has no idea what is happening as he blithely cavorts with Gutrune.

I also loved his interaction with the Rhinemaidens. The shy wave he gave them when they first popped up was hilariously teenage-boyish. And when Hagen stabbed him, and all his memories came back! Morris really played that scene well; it was simply stunning, especially with how the music echoed Brunnhilde's awakening in the previous opera. It was all so sad and beautiful that I was undone.

Deborah Voigt's Brunnhilde was also fabulous. I know that many people have panned her in this role, but I found her utterly believable. This Brunnhilde runs the gamut of all emotion: from love and cheekiness to bewilderment and grit to traumatized outrage and finally peace. Deborah Voigt had me in tears during the Immolation Scene-tears and chills. The dignity with which she walked onstage during Gunther and Hangen's fight just took my breath away. I think she deserved every single one of those bouquets thrown at her during the curtain call and more.

Let's see: Gunther and Gutrune. I kind of found myself wishing that Brunnhilde would take a potshot at Gutrune, because Wendy Bryn Harmer played her as such a devious, bitchy woman. That was what I got from her, at least. She reminded me of one of those high school brats who knows she's up to no good, and is having a good time until things start to go wrong. And Iain Paterson's Gunther was so much fun to hate: loathsome, spineless, self-pitying loser that he was.

Hans-Peter Konig is one of my favorite basses ever. His Hagen was a delight: you almost feel sorry for him. Konig's voice is rich and dark and powerful, and he is such a good actor that I'm not surprised they brought him back for every single one of the Ring operas. Irrevocably, unutterable fabulous.

I know that pretty much everyone has panned Robert Lepage's production, but I like it. I like The Machine. Yes, it's clunky and unwieldy, but it's still fun and innovative and interesting. It's appropriately grandiose, I think. And the way they use the CGI in the background is actually quite interesting. Anyway, it's the actors who drive the show, and they all did a wonderful job. That, too, is Lepage: he is not just responsible for the Machine, but for all the movements of the singers onstage, and let's face it, they're very good. I'm hardly a Ring connoisseur, but I feel that when you have a semi-traditional production that manages to avoid the stranger stagings (such as setting the whole thing during the Industrial Revolution, or whatever), the last thing we need to worry about is the way the set rotates.

Besides, this Cycle gave us the likes of Terfel, Kaufmann, Westbroek, Blythe, Voigt, Morris, Konig, Meier, Owens, and heaven knows who else. Really, when you have such awesome singers singing their hearts out, why fuss about the set?

This concludes my first ever Ring Cycle. I went into each of these operas with no expectations and came out blown away. For a first-timer, the Met's new Ring was a brilliant introduction to Wagner's weird, wild and wonderful world.

Back in the land of the blogging

It's been one week since I last posted, and so much has happened!

Last Saturday, I officially entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. We'll see whether or not I advance to the next round. Fingers crossed.

One of my good friends came to visit from England for a few days, which was great fun, even if we were frozen back inside by six o'clock every evening. Berlin has decided for the first time all season to act like it's, you know, winter, and so all of a sudden there is snow and ice and sleet and negative temperatures. This, luckily, allowed us to enjoy Purcell's Fairy Queen (bizarre baroque extravaganza) and Fidelio, which my friend had never seen. We also managed to out ourselves to the German populace as nerds while in the S-bahn, giddily discussing the antics of Goethe and Beethoven and Beau Brummel and various Victorian serial killers. Good times. :)

Lindsay also introduced me to the absolutely hilarious BBC radio show, Cabin Pressure, about a perpetually skint airline of one plane and four workers. It includes gems such as this: "Listen to this! This chamber orchestra we’re picking up – listen to what their conductor’s put under ‘Any Special Requirements’: “The first violins will not sit together; the second violins will not sit apart. The harpist will ignore you unless your aura is orange; there is nothing you can do to make your aura more orange. The tubist must on no account be given alcohol; the conductor must at all times be given alcohol. He will also require the toilet to himself for an hour before landing. And, most importantly, the bassoonist, Madame Szyszko-Bohusz, will be working under the presumption that you are trying to kill her unless proved otherwise, so avoid approaching her with blunt instruments, sharp knives or hot liquids.” Terrific! How am I supposed to serve her dinner?" Check it out:

Great composers reimagined

Continuing in the art vein I've been in lately, let's see how people are re-imagining the Great Composers (please note, the names are links to the artist's sites):

Beethoven:

Mozart:

Wagner:

Verdi:

I promise to make a real, substantial post soon (I've got one brewing on Don Carlo), but for now, enjoy!