Audition today

Thursdays and Mondays seem to be the time for reflection, so here's today's post.

As I may have written before, the homeowners are living in Washington DC for a year, but one of them has a private psychotherapy practice that she carries out in the front office of the house, and has arranged to return for four one-week periods over the course of the year. We're almost through the second of those periods this week. It's been a challenge, mostly in the evenings, to keep the children quiet; during the day it's been fine because the kids are at school, and Maggie is at work. I've still managed to get in singing practice, warming up over a longer period of time, in between clients, but I'll definitely be happy when we are on our own again, to reestablish the routine; the children are happiest when there is stability and predictability at home.

This afternoon I have an audition at La Monnaie as a soloist, so I hope everything goes well. One good thing is that the accompanist will be David, who I have worked these arias with already, so that's confidence-building, and helps puts me at ease. I've met and spoken with the General Director before, so that helps as well. This audition isn't for any particular part, just to give the casting team a sense of what I look and sound like; just getting the audition is a small triumph for me, since I had to really be persistent in soliciting it. I already sang one audition for the chorus master of the house last week, so I'm feeling relaxed in the rehearsal space.

I had another bit of good news this week; Hilary (a friend of Bruce's who I coached with back in September) is a repetiteur in Liège with the Opera Royale de Wallonie, and she let me know that they were auditioning next week for the roles of the Flemish Deputies in Verdi's Don Carlos. These are small or comprimario roles but the audition gives me a chance to be heard by the new director there, and if I were to get a role, it would be a chance to sing with the company, something that would please me enormously. Of course there will likely be a long line of singers vying for those roles, but as before, one has to take the step and put oneself out there for consideration. As I said before, it really is a success just to get the audition.

Interestingly the arias I present have to be all Italian, and I have to learn a Verdi aria for the audition. I haven't sung any Verdi arias before, although I did play several parts in a concert version of La Traviata a few years ago, and did the Rigoletto quartet in a staging of opera excerpts, so I'm scrambling now to get something ready.

I had an interview last night with Sara Beck, and journalist, writer and and old friend of mine. She writes for the Queen's University Alumni Review, and is doing a podcast on me and my singing adventures in Belgium for the electronic edition of the Review. It was fun to talk to her again, and she tells me that podcast will be published in a couple of weeks.

It's been great to get the attention and encouragement of my friends, family and colleagues, not to mention the confidence boost of actually getting to sing some auditions.

Talk to you on Monday!

Groundhog Day

The 2nd of February is still almost a week away, but then that's not why I used Groundhog Day in the title of this blog entry.

Instead, it's becase of an interesting conversation I had with my friend Greg last night, who called to catch up with me, see how the whole Belgian adventure was unfolding, and check availability of a guest room at Chez Rose-Zad0w. In the course of the conversation, Greg likened my pursuit of an artistic lifestyle as living the life of a groundhog.

Seriously.

The gist of his metaphor was that the moments when an artist's work is visible to others (individual performances, art exhibitions, publishing a book, singing auditions etc.) are like those brief moments when a groundhog pokes his head up out of the burrow and looks around in the sunlight, maybe eats something. That's all people see of him, and all that many imagine his life consists of. However, those visible moments are tiny fractions of his life. The rest of the time he's digging away furiously underground. Nobody sees this work, but it's going on all the time, and the funny thing is that the groundhog has only his own gut feeling to guide him. Is he digging in the right direction? Who knows? He just has to keep going...

Greg was lamenting the fact that so many people don't live an artistic (or "artisanal" as he put it) life, but instead get stuck on the "empirical" track. They take the brief moments of sunlight that they can see, and think that's all there is to a gopher's life; they don't realize that those moments are really incidental to a process that never really ends. What's more, simply following the process is itself rewarding, or can be if one decides to let it. In other words, if you're going to spend the rest of your life digging, you might as well start getting excited about dirt.


Greg views life as continuous development and exploration for the long term; people stuck in an empirical rut are following an aquisitive, materialistic, I-want-it-now path. Another way of saying it would be to say that some people are focussed on a comfortable life, while others want a meaningful life. Empirical people will always want the new model of car, the next big-screen tv, the newest computer, because they only see the things in front of them, and not what they mean. If you want to live a life that means something, you have to give up some of those empirical things.

Heavy thoughts for a Monday morning, I should apologize to those of you just waking up. You might want to get another cup of coffee and read through this blog again. One last extension of the metaphor, though: I have lots of people telling me that I'm digging in the right direction, and in that I'm very, very fortunate. Greg, my painter friend Darren, Bruce my teacher, his teacher Pierre Fleta, my musician and writer friend David, my colleague and pianist Dina, and many others. Even the auditions I've sung result in people telling me that I'm following the right path (or digging the right tunnel, I guess).


Happy digging!

Auditions for the new year

I had my first of the new year's crop of auditions yesterday, with a conductor here in Brussels... we spent the whole hour and a half working through one aria (the Count's Hai gia vinta la causa) page by page, which was great, and then spent some time talking about Brussels as a base for an artistic career. He came to the same conclusions that I did regarding its suitability both for career options, easy mobility to other European centres of opera and for raising a family (he too has transplanted his young family to Brussels, and loves it here).

It was good to get his take on the aria; each person I have coached it with has different ideas about how it fits best in my voice. The way I sing it at any given moment is really an amalgamation of a lot of different approaches to each particular challenge of the piece, each one tried out and considered to see which makes the most sense for me (as the singer and as the character), and then adopted or discarded, and finally fused together into something that is my own, unified and consistent throughout.

He was quite encouraging, saying that my voice was well placed, youthful and energetic. He confirmed that I was on the right track in my audition searches, encouraged me to continue, suggested some people to sing for, and said that he'd definitely keep me in mind for comprimario roles and additional chorus work as they came available, most likely in the next season (2008-2009). He also suggested that I keep in contact and let him know how the career was progressing. All in all, a very energizing evening. Encouragement and support are critical when you are trying to start your career, under your own steam, especially in a new language, in a new town.

Now for the next several auditions in the pipe: one at La Monnaie as a soloist on the 31st of January, one for an agency in Antwerp on February 23rd, and one for a Parisian conductor who will be doing an opera at La Monnaie here in March, and who very kindly suggested that rather than me travel to Paris, he would rather hear me here. So I've got lots to look forward to, plus time to continue to refine my audition pieces and think about who I'll call next.

Now it's off to the shopping I think... it's near the end of the January sales, and the boys need clothes...

Trip to Ghent/Gand/Genk

So Duncan's off to school this morning after three days at home last week plus two on the weekend. After such a leisurely schedule, you can imagine it was like pulling teeth to get him out the door on time.

It started around 7:00 with a refusal to get up, then a refusal to come downstairs, to say "please" at the breakfast table, etc. There was one bright point in that he got dressed without complaint, but then he tried to dictate the walking route to school and balked at walking the regular way. At one point I had him in the fireman's carry going up the street with him hollering his head off, if you can imagine. In any case, he's back in school for the next few hours, and I'm back to work.

Saturday we had a great Lithuanian-style meal at Malcolm's friend's house, with lots of conversation with his family, who are from Vilnius. The boys ran around like maniacs, they were so excited, and made lots of noise... Duncan wasn't left out of things, which was nice, although he did spend quite a bit of time quietly playing lego, while Malcolm and his friend acted out increasingly loud ways of killing each other in duels. We need to find a friend for Duncan to go visit with and have play-dates with. It was a nice time, but a little bit of a late night for the boys.

Sunday afternoon Malcolm and I got on the train to Ghent, which is about 70 Kms from Brussels, to go see a matinee of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. The season sold very quickly, due no doubt to the recent restoration of the Antwerp opera house that Flanders opera also uses, and the only tickets I could get were very cheap ones up in the fifth balcony. Malcolm wasn't too impressed at the restricted view: he said, "Dad, what's the point in going to see an opera if you can't SEE the opera?" I must say I agreed, and so after two acts worth of listening to the beautiful music and admiring the right-hand third of the set (I don't think we ever actually saw the characters of Bartolo, Basilio, Marcellina or Antonio, because they never were on that side of the stage) we left at the intermission following act II and walked back to the downtown area, had dinner and then got on the train to come home. All in all it was a cheap afternoon; opera tickets were 5 euros each, the train ride was free for him, and only 7 Euro 30 for me return. One cool thing; if you show your opera ticket to the transit driver (bus, tram, etc.) on the day of the performance, you don't have to pay to use the tram. Pretty smart idea, eh? How's that for an incentive to reduce traffic and encourage transit use?

Cabin fever

It's 8:30 on Friday morning, and Duncan is still asleep upstairs... he had quite a fever early on Wednesday morning, waking him and me up around 2:30 am, and it's really taken it out of him. Today is day three of staying home, and while you wouldn't think he's a sickie during the early and middle part of the day, when the Ibuprofen and Triaminic are doing their job, he really crashes in the evening. Last night he fell asleep on the couch with Maggie while I was making dinner, and that's very unusual; he was crabby as could be when awakened. I tried to get him up this morning and he wouldn't budge, and seems to need the sleep, so I've let him take it.

This means I haven't been able to leave the house much since Tuesday, and also means that I haven't been able to have face-to-face contact with Malcolm's teacher daily, to check on his progress. The policy of regular status checks is something I learned at Bell Canada, strangely enough, and it works. Malcolm made great strides during the last part of school before Christmas vacation, and worked hard over the Christmas holidays, and he really did well the first week of school. Now, however, he is into new material and the battle for understanding begins anew. There are no more complaints about me making him do homework, however, he buckled down without complaint for three hours on Wednesday afternoon, and another two hours yesterday, although he still has a tendency sometimes to be lazy and daydream if he can't figure out how to answer the question, rather than reading it again.

I did get out briefly to shop for some supplements to the turkey noodle soup I made yesterday ("turkey in the straw" as my mother calls it), and took both boys along. I hope to take advantage of Duncan's better periods today to get a few things done, but the usual 9 am Friday morning shopping by car with our very kind and generous neighbour won't happen this week. I guess Maggie can take care of that tomorrow, or I will.

I also haven't really had time to think. I don't just park him in front of the television; that kind of luxury treatment will practically guarantee weeks of sham illness in a bid for a repeat. Instead I'm encouraging him to play, do some art, write letters to his friends, read, etc. He feels well enough during the day to play guitar and sing, and play piano. Yesterday I did park him for a bit so that I could get some singing in, but it's been pretty much impossible to get my head together for calling new houses and requesting auditions.

We've been looking around for houses; there are several for rent in the neighborhood. One bit of news is interesting; a colleague of Maggie's is moving away from Brussels with her family at the end of the school year, after a stay of several years, and is planning on purchasing new furniture at her new house; there's a possibility that we might luck into enought stuff to allow us to rent a house vide (that is, unfurnished) rather than meublé (furnished). It would mean
some purchases, but we would have a much greater selection of houses, and likely a cheaper rental cost. Fingers crossed!

Tres civiliseé

This blog is sooooo turning out to be a food blog. Opera singers have to eat too you know...

We had a great time this past Saturday. There are two different grade five classes in Malcolm's school, and the parents of one of the fifth-graders owns and operates a very nice restaurant. This couple, along with another, organized a dinner party for both classes and the two teachers and the associated families. Jonathan and Christine were nice enough to drive us, and the two families left for the party around 7pm. The restaurant was closed down for the evening, and we all enjoyed cocktails while the children ate, and then we sat to be served our delicious meal while they watched a movie. We had a great conversation with the other couples and the teachers, and the kids had a chance to see each other in a non-school context. The night wound down around 10pm, and we bundled our two sets of kids into the cars and headed home.

Sunday was a lazier day because of the late night, but we still got tidied up to go around the corner and have lunch with Francis and Thérèse, our neighbors. I met them one morning just before Christmas, on the way home from walking the kids to school, and found them trying without success to push start their car. Naturally I helped them push it, and while we were unsuccessful in starting the car, we did make introductions. As it happens, their house had been broken into early that morning and their wallet and purse stolen, along with their car keys and other car.

A few days later Malcolm and Simonas were playing in the tree fort and came across a pile of small documents that had been discarded in our hedge. Turns out they were the documents from Francis' wallet, including some irreplaceable family photos. We also spotted the purse of Thérèse across the street, and called the police to check it out. They were so happy to receive their personal items back that they invited us to lunch at their place, which turned out to be drinks and munchies, followed by a huge plate of different cheeses and a green salad. Other neighbors, Daniel and Christiane came over as well. They have three children who are musicians, and their son-in-law is a singer, so they were eager to meet us.

They were very nice, and we spoke most of the time in French; Maggie did very well, although both couples were very gracious in helping us when we were stuck. They were very encouraging and we had a great time... all the Belgians we've met have turned out to be very friendly, polite and welcoming people; Christiane even came over the next day with a wrapped present of a cookbook that we had mentioned we were interested in! It's really been great.

I went to the doctor yesterday and got some antibiotics for bronchitis and sinusitis. Not a real problem, surprisingly for my practice, since I often have to sing with some bug or another (that's what happens when you have small children) but something that does sap one's energy, and the sinusitis in particular has been there since early December. I also want to be in optimum shape for those auditions in later January.

Singing practice has been actually quite good. My new french aria is feeling very good, and I've been able to do some new phrasing things which actually make it much more effective dramatically when I review it afterwards on my audio recorder. I also solved a little technical problem today. I was getting some annoying tension in my neck and shoulders recently, and it was tiring me out while singing the more difficult new aria, but I realized while singing into the mirror that as I was using an intentionally more "forward" pronounciation, using the lips much more than is normal in English, I was actually unconsciously thrusting my head forward very slightly, which introduces tension and makes it harder to sing. Tilting the head very slightly back when this happens does three things: 1) it removes the tension, because the head naturally moves back into a relaxed position, 2) allows me to sing up towards the second balcony, which is where you want to be aiming for, and 3) allows for more space to drop the jaw, which improves tone and note placement. Not bad for a non-teacher!

I've been cracking the whip with Malcolm since he got home at 1:30 (it's 5:30 now), doing nothing but homework, multiplication tables, addition exercises, and some other math practice. Tough going; he had his times tables pretty much learned back in November but we let it slide, and now he's in trouble. It'll come back.

Speaking of Malcolm, he was thrilled to have the responsibility a few minutes ago to run to the patisserie around the corner to buy a baguette for dinner. I must say it is pretty civilized; I like the lifestyle of being able to send my eight-year old out to pick up a baguette from the corner bakery, and 9/10ths of it actually made it home!

Auditions

This week was my first alone since mid-November, and I needed it to get refocussed on the task of audition hunting. I got some good news yesterday; I've been able to schedule two more auditions here in Brussels, one for the week of January 22nd and another for January 31st. I've got a couple more irons in the fire but no other confirmed auditions yet.

In another bit of good news, we heard today that our Belgian identity cards have been issued and are ready to be picked up. I may have written before about the application process, but to review, you need lots of documentation, including long-form birth certificates (most people who I talked to in Canada didn't even know what that is, but it's a certified photostatic copy of your birth record), long-form marriage certificates, health insurance, etc. etc. as well as three passport photos. You submit these at the maison communale and then they send a police officer around to verify that you do live where you say you do, that your passports and visas are in order, etc.

The police officer who came by is well known to us; he's Erik, who conducts traffic each morning at the boys' school crossing. I was a little surprised at his reaction when he asked me my profession and I replied that I was an opera singer, because he was enthusiastic about opera! Turns out he goes to the opera quite frequently, his wife is an amateur soprano, and we had a long talk about art, the theatre, music, how audiences have changed recently, and the effect funding changes have on the arts. I think that's really cool, that the neighborhood "beat cop" can speak in an informed way about art. I like it.

back into our routine

Here's a picture of Duncan taking a crack at the Queen Mab aria from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. He's been banging away at the piano every evening after dinner for over a week, and often sings along; last night he got the idea that he needed music so he took down my opera anthology and "played" it. He's got a good sense of music and doesn't just bang on the keys, but plays repeating patterns, and actually found the first few bars of Chopsticks by accident, which made Maggie and I both sit up straight... isn't there some theory about a million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually writing a Shakespeare sonnet? He actually reminds me more of Philip Glass than Shakespeare, but I think I will investigate piano lessons for this particular little monkey...

We're falling into our daily routine again... each morning we are up early, and the kids come down for breakfast and see Maggie off to work at 7:30. By then they are usually dressed, and are therefore allowed to watch part of a movie prior to putting their coats on and walking the five minutes to school. Duncan goes in first, and Malcolm and I stand in the playground until his class lines up to go in at around 8:30.

Then it's back home for me to clean up from breakfast, make a second cup of espresso and maybe eat something myself while I plan my day. I usually start to warm up around 9:00, and then have a shower and get dressed, and am ready to sing by 9:40 or so. Yesterday for example, I did some word-for-word translation of a new italian aria, marked in all the double consonants, and then ran it line-by-line several times before singing it through twice.

Then I took a break, went through my list of opera companies, emailed a couple of them, called a potential agent, and then went back to read through one of my french arias, and tried out some new phrasing. By 11:30 I was back at the telephone to call another couple of companies.

As it was Wednesday, Malcolm came home on his own around 12:00, and after lunch (a croque monsieur made with tortillas) he was rewarded for good work on his dictée with 45 minutes of a film of his choice. At 2:30 I took him back to the school for an afternoon programme of social games, and took the opportunity to head off to the library to return some DVDs, took out some musicals for the boys and a Lieder DVD for me, then shopped for dinner, got Malcolm at 4:00 and was home with him to start cooking dinner (bangers and mash with a forest mushroom gravy and snow peas).

At 4:15 Malcolm's friend Simonas came over, and they had fun listening to rock and roll at high volume levels while acting out their roles as musicians. During this event, I had a nice talk in the kitchen with Johnathan, our neighbour and Maggie's colleague, who is successfully balancing his career as a teacher, and his family life with a need to cultivate his own writing. It's great to have a friend here who truly understands the challenges and obligations of pursuing an artistic life.

Speaking of art, Malcolm is busy with painting; he did portraits of Maggie, Bruce and I as our Christmas presents. Bruce's was the best; I think he really captured his "look" while singing, as you can see below:



This is turning into a long blog entry, and it's eating into my morning, so I'll wind it up here with one more thing. This past Sunday was Epiphany, and on Saturday evening we had Johnathan and Christine and their daughters over for a big curry dinner, with Beef Jalfregi (mine, after a Bruce recipe), Aloo Gobi (Maggie) a yoghourt and cucumber dish, pappadums and mango chutney, and a clove and turmeric rice. The climax of the evening was the cutting and serving of the gateau du roi, which was frankly incredible! Imagine the flakiest, butteriest croissant that you've ever tasted, in the shape of a cake, with delicious marzipan in the base, and that will give you some idea. Yum! This was brought by Christine from the famous bakery Le Pain Quotidien, a bakery/cafe that started here in Belgium but now has spread to France, Australia, Kuwait, the UK, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries. Guess who got the little ceramic king that had been baked into the cake, and got to wear the crown? Yours truly! I hope it's a good omen... maybe I'll get to sing the role of a king in an opera sometime in 2008? But which one? Hmm....

You know, on reflection, maybe I should change the name to "Matthew's Food Blog"! A bientôt! Bon appétit!

Happy New Year!

I guess that I've been so busy with things that I haven't really taken the time to write much since late November. When you have guests in the house who've taken the trouble to come overseas to visit you, it really doesn't make sense to sit in front of a computer when you could be spending time together. So it was with my parents until they left for Paris, and then it was so again when Bruce arrived for three weeks back on the 13th of December. Bruce left for Canada a few days ago, and as you can see in the photo above, he left evidence of his presence here (including a tendency to drink out of one's ear in photographs). Now that we are on our own for the first time in several weeks, I can catch up on my correspondence...

While Bruce did live in Liège for many years, and even sang at La Monnaie (the opera house here in Brussels), I don't think he'd seen much of this city, so it was nice to take him around to see different things in our current "home town" when we weren't working through some new roles for me, including "Valentin" from Gounod's Faust, or "Malatesta" from Verdi's Don Carlos, or tweaking "Count Almaviva" from Le Nozze di Figaro.

Bruce has been getting ready to sing "Sharpless" in Madama Butterfly out in Victoria in February, so we shared a couple of hours coaching with a repetiteur at La Monnaie, and I think I'll make a monthly visit to him, just to make sure the voice stays in the right place. That's something you really can't judge on your own, as I've told my family and many friends; the one thing you can't really count on as a singer is the sound of your own voice, as you don't hear it as the rest of the world does. Instead you need to sing by feel, or sensation, and have regular sessions with someone with a good set of ears to keep your sound at its best.

Some of the things we did included a visit to the antique market at the Sablon, a visit with our Canadian tenor friend Keith Boldt to Grand'place, and we even had a chance to go see an opera, the baritone version of Massenet's Werther here at La Monnaie on December 23rd. The visit to the Sablon was noteworthy because Bruce found an old engraving of La Monnaie that he could add to his collection. The shopkeeper lit up when he heard we were opera singers, and immediately put on a recording of "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma, sung by (who else?) the immortal Maria Callas. It was hard to get out of there on time, and on budget, with all of his enthusiasm for showing us engravings of famous actors and singers and musicians...

On the 24th itself we took a trip down to Glons to have a fantastic Christmas eve at the Cloes with 36 guests at dinner, including a kids' table that sat nine. Things got going around 7:30 in the evening, and there were many rounds of canapes and kir royales, followed by salmon appetizers done two ways, delicious soup, followed by the triumphant arrival of the turkey around midnight. This was followed by presents for everyone, and then two huge yule log cake, each at least a metre long. We finally got the kids and ourselves to bed by around 1:30 am.! It was a great party, and reminds me a lot of having a dinner with my own extended family.

After our Christmas exertions we decided to opt for a more relaxed New Year's Eve at home, with a simple meal of steak frites, salad, cheese, and champagne. On New Year's day we cooked the marcassin (wild boar) filet that had been marinating in red wine for the previous two days. It was flambéed in cognac, then cooked in the marinade, and we had it with cranberry-stuffed apples, mashed potatoes and a variety of vegetables. Malcolm felt just like the cartoon character Obelix (who is seldom found without a wild boar on his platter) and had a healthy portion of the marcassin both that evening and the next day in a sandwich.

The kids have been enjoying the time off from school, but we have been trying to keep them on a routine in preparation for their return to classes on Monday. Malcolm in particular has been reviewing his mots a retenir or "words to remember" in advance of his test this coming Wednesday, and he's doing very well. Duncan has been very active artistically, doing a lot of collage art, playing my guitar and singing his own rock compositions in his own patois of English/French/Duncanese, and even playing piano... he seems to be very interested in making music, and told me this morning that he wanted to be on the stage. We'll see if this is something that persists, and I'll be looking into music classes in the new year; the conservatory system here in Belgium is extremely well established, and music classes are paid for by the commune, so there's really no reason not to take the opportunity to teach both boys the rudiments of music theory, singing and an instrument.

That's it for now. Happy New Year to you all!