Prayers answered by the insanely variable weather of Brussels

Yesterday was Good Friday, and the children were in school. That was surprising for us, since the four-day Easter weekend is customary in Canada, but here they have a two-week Easter vacation instead, starting today. The international school was closed, however, and so Maggie and I were home together in the daytime with no kids, something that happens very infrequently, so we decided to go out, run some errands and have lunch together. As you can see by the photograph above, taken around 11:30, our excursion started without a cloud in the sky, the magnolias were starting to bloom, and it looked guaranteed to be a nice day.

Twenty mintes later it was snowing furiously, and the tram became packed with people trying to escape the large sticky snowflakes. When we got off the 94 tram at the Louisa stop the snow had stopped and it was sunny again, but we decided to eat lunch first, and stopped at the Brussels Grill, sort of the Belgian version of The Keg. Attractive modern pub style decor, and inexpensive but good quality meals. I had the lunch special, a blue steak with green peppercorn sauce, salad and frites, and Maggie had the salade avec lardons, and we each enjoyed a Westmalle trippel. The whole thing came out to just under 30 Euros, not bad at all.

After lunch, our first stop was to pick up some accessories for Maggie's new sewing machine, and drop off the French instruction manual which they had agreed to exchange for an English one. The shop is located on the Chaussée d'Ixelles, near Toison d'Or, just around the corner from where my parents used to live.

Then we went to the Veritas store for some interfacing for a skirt she's making, scissors and some patches for the boys' jeans (they are so hard on clothes, especially Duncan). Then we picked up some Easter chocolate at the Leonidas shop on the corner, and split up: Maggie headed back home to meet Malcolm after school, and I went to the Royal Conservatory of Brussels to sign up for a library card.

The joke is you can get anything you need in Brussels with seven euros and two photographs, and this was no exception; since I'm not a member of the faculty or a student of the conservatory, I had to pay a small fee for my card, but it lets me take out four different opera and art song scores for up to two weeks at a time. Pretty good, eh? I did manage to get a copy of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (or Songs of a Travelling Journeyman) in middle voice, and a Handel aria, Ombra mai fu, from the opera Xerxes. I want to try some of the arias from Giulio Cesare but that was out, as was a collection of Massenet songs. Interestingly this library also has a great many manuscript and autograph scores, written in the composers' hand. Sometime when I have a little more time I'll go and take a look at a few of those.


I picked up Duncan from school, and we sat down to a nice dinner of Irish stew (leftover from St. Paddy's Day), chicken and peas and potatoes (left over from our Thursday dinner with Louise and David) and some fresh bread and brie. During dinner it started to snow very heavily again, and after the boys caught a glimpse of how it was accumulating, they wasted no time in getting suited and booted up... Malcolm quickly determined that it was snowman-ready snow, and exclaimed, "Halleluia, my prayers have been answered!"


I won't say who started the snowball fight, but let's just say that our Belgian neighbors had even more reasons to shake their heads at the crazy Canucks... swimming in February, barbequeing outside in the middle of winter, and now running around in freezing weather throwing freezing slush at each other and laughing our heads off, when sensible people would be inside keeping warm.


Malcolm was right, it was perfect snowman snow, and so we got straight to work, and as you can see our snowman was a good one. We had used all the carrots in the chicken stock, so had to make do with a banana for a nose (Duncan said he looks like Gonzo the Great from the Muppets) and used a Blue Jays cap in place of a top hat. Old Frosty is still standing out there this morning, but I doubt he'll last much longer as it's warmed up already.


This morning the kids are reading on the bed and Maggie is gleefully trying out her new machine, as you can see. We're trying to eat up what's left in the fridge, and are packing up today so that we can leave promptly tomorrow, early, as we need to take a bus to the Charleroi airport, about 40 km south of Brussels.

Happy Easter, everyone!

On the right track

We're doing a lot of planning for next year at the moment. Maggie has, I think, settled in very well, as you can tell by her last blog entry, and I wrote last time about the boys' and their progress.

We've found a family to rent our house in Toronto, and are almost finished preparing the contract and signing it on the dotted line for another 24 months, starting in July 2008. As well, I've been looking at houses and apartments here in the neighborhood, and I'm confident - especially given the accelerated proliferation of "a louer" signs - that we'll find something attractive in our price range.

As well, I was thinking about the amazing support and encouragement that I've had since beginning this adventure, from many different people, and wanted to share a little bit of what just a few of them have said.

• "You have a fabulous voice... you have to follow your passion." - Eugene Roman, MBA, CMA, Group President, Bell Canada Systems and Technology
  
• "I like the colour of your voice very much... you are on the true path, continue!" - Pierre Fleta, tenor, stage director, l’Opéra Royal de Wallonie, professor of voice, Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège, Belgium
• "I am so impressed by your presence amongst these directors and (other) singers and how you are persuing your dream with diligent patience." - Peter Hejny, painter and teacher
• "Cool - you go for your dream!" - Sue McCoy, Associate Director, Bell Aliant
  
• "...you should enjoy this opportunity to experience Brussels and your growing boys to the fullest. It's not a time you can retrieve." - Marianne Czerny, poet and teacher
• "...that's amazing what you're doing... good for you... follow your dreams..." - Chris MacDonald, Associate Director, PMO, Information Systems and Technology, Bell West
• "I think you have been doing an incredible job... I think you are very cool and very brave to take this on, and absolutely agree that you must be patient. You have already done a huge amount of work with this whole project." - Dina Namer, B.Mus. M.Mus., Manhattan School of Music, pianist and professor, Queen's University
  
• "...I want to encourage you!" -Kinza Tyrrell, PhD, conductor, pianist, coach
  

It's great to have people cheering for me, and confirming what I believe, that this was the right thing to do.

I've been thinking about singing some auditions for Canadian opera companies this spring, and have just found out that I'll be coming back to Canada for a couple of weeks at the end of May/early June, to sing at the Queen's University's spring convocations. It will be a very full schedule, because the usual place for convocations (the Jock Harty Arena) has been demolished to make way for a new complex on the same site. This necessitates a greater number of convocation ceremonies for audiences of a substantially smaller size.

It is an very great honour to participate as an alumnus of Queens in this kind of thing... I guess I have to get measured for a robe and gown! It's been a while since I wore them, ten years in fact, as you can see by this picture of Maggie, Don McLean and I taken on the day of my convocation in May of 1998.


The thing to do now is to make arrangements for scheduling auditions around these singing commitments. Why, you may ask, would I audition in Canada if I'm living in Brussels? The answer is simple: it's important to maintain the career momentum generated by eight years of working hard in Canada. With affordable direct flights available from Brussels to Toronto, there's no reason I can't continue to sing on both sides of the Atlantic. We will be coming back eventually, and I'd hate to have to start again in Canada from square one, especially given that I've had some great opportunities to perform there.

On this side of the pond, I've got a couple of auditions coming up in the south of France next month, and I'm trying for more daily, while planning a trip to try and visit Pierre Fleta, my teacher's teacher, who lives near Montpellier with his wife Claude. The other thing I've been doing is following up with the people I have auditioned for already, to try and stay on their radar.

Lastly, there's our Easter holiday to plan. We're having our neighbors David and Louise and their two kids in tonight for a Maundy Thursday dinner before the week ends, and then we're flying to Scotland on Sunday, to spend a few days visiting Rob and Vicki Freeland at their house in Edinburgh. This will be our first time in Scotland, so we're very excited; we haven't seen them since their visit to Canada several years ago. Duncan and Malcolm have even been watching Robbie the Reindeer to try to tune their ears to the Scottish accent, and I'm ready to do a little roamin' in the gloamin' wi' ma lassie by ma side. Who knows? There might be a little Scotch tasting in the works, in moderation o' course.

We're back mid-week, and then I'm off to Liège on Friday the 28th to see the opening of Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The family is thinking of spending some time in Glons, and then we are heading off, most likely by car, to Hamburg, to visit with Max and Séverine for a few days. So things are shaping up to be very busy for the next little while! I'm sure we'll have lots of new to report, and some photographs to share...

Quiet week for reflection

So my cold is pretty much gone, (knock wood) and I'm feeling better vocally at last; I sang for the first time yesterday in almost two weeks, and the voice, as always, feels good after a rest, but the endurance isn't there right away, it's harder work. Today my stamina was back, which is also what usually happens on the second or third day of singing after a rest. No new auditions yet, except for the one in Lyon at the end of April. I've been meaning to follow up with the twelve or so opera houses located in the south of France that I contacted by email a few weeks ago, but when one has a sore throat and a head cold, it's particularly hard to talk on the phone in a newish language.

Likewise I've got to follow up with a number of the Belgian, Dutch and Parisian contacts that I've made already. Without at least some intermittent successes, and a sense that progress is being made, it's difficult to keep my energy and confidence level up.

I think one reason that I'm a little pensive today is that the demands on my energy are shifting slightly now that the boys are solidly established in school. Duncan likes going to school, and his outgoing, affectionate nature has made him lots of friends there, and Malcolm is getting good marks. He no longer protests at the necessity of homework activity, since he does most of his work correctly at school now, and actually likes the time we spend together practicing. In the absence of these family stresses, I think I have more time to think (and sometimes worry) about my career.

It's a matter of how one chooses to view things, really. I have to keep telling myself that I've had success in finding quite a few auditions, and have sung some particularly good ones. As well, this is an entirely new country, and I'm making a career here from square one, in a field where - assuming that you have the appropriate skill and ability - your public profile and reputation are the main tools for finding work, and I came here as a totally unknown quantity.

Another thing I need to remember is that I have only been a "pro" singer for a little more than six months. Before that I worked for nine years at my other job while working at developing my singing as, by necessity, a part-time, secondary career. It gives me some perspective when I look at my performing colleagues and realize how long they've been digging away at just one thing (music) and I relax a bit, and realize that I need to keep going, and give it more time to progress, to keep digging... Dig, you groundhog, dig!

I've had support from friends who've emailed, or called; those words of encouragement have been very much appreciated, and I'm saying "thank you" for their (your) efforts to stay in contact, your encouragement does bolster my conviction to continue. I'm also finding support in unexpected places; I recently had the honour of being interviewed in December for the Queen's Alumni association podcast, which was just published in late February.

There is one family task that is occupying me now, and that is finding a house for next year... I've already looked at a couple, and more and more signs are appearing on the streets around us, for houses, and for apartments. If we can find an apartment with two bedrooms, and a large enough living area, and some sort of garden access, that will suffice for our needs and have enough room that we can welcome guests. There is a cute house directly across from the boys' school with two apartments in it that might be just the thing for us, and I'm looking at it tomorrow. I'm also seeing a house around the corner from the school tomorrow morning. It is still a little early to find a place, everybody says wait until the beginning of June, but since we will be in Canada for July and August, I'm a little anxious about finding something that is affordable and still appropriate for us in the little more than three weeks I've got free in June.

The cherry trees have just peaked and are starting to decline; they've been in blossom for almost a month now, as the weather has been cooler, but I noticed this afternoon that the hedges are green with new growth and soon it will be time to cut them. Tomorrow is expected to be a high of 15 degrees, which will coincide perfectly with the plan to turn out the streetlights tomorrow. Apparently it's an annual thing that they do to allow people to see the stars; Belgium as seen from space is very brightly lit, as unlike the surrounding countries, they light everything, even their rural highways, and so that has an effect on the visibility of the night sky.



I remember suggesting the "lights out" idea to Maggie a few days after the North American blackout of 2003, when the skies were clear and open in Toronto, and we had an improptu street party and jam session on our street, huddled around the kerosene lamp and the barbeque. The experience should become an official observance, to remind the millions of people who live in Toronto what the night sky actually looks like. It seems as if the Belgians, or the Bruxellois at least do this sort of thing every year, and there are other "special" days, too. Soon after we arrived, for example, it was the "day without cars", where everyone took part in physical activity out-of-doors, and the use of bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, etc. were greatly encouraged.

Anyway, I do hope the weather is nice; we're having dinner guests from down the street, and cooking a big Thai meal; it might be a great night for a cigar on the patio after dinner, and I've turned on the pool heater, just in case it's really nice out and we want to have a swim.

Time to go help Maggie get dinner ready. We alternate the cooking during the week, but collaborate on the weekends. It's leftover night anyway!

A night at the opera

I'm sure you've heard the expression, "You really had to be there"... well I went to see an opera last night that this figure of speech certainly applies to: Wozzeck by Alban Berg, which premiered in 1925.

The reason that I suggest that description falls short of the experience is that the plot sounds incredibly dark and hopeless. There's an excellent detailed synopsis online here, but to be brief, poor Wozzeck is a truly modern man, alone, tormented, poor and powerless; he has had a child with his mistress, Marie, but she is likewise poor and anchorless. The bulk of the other characters, almost exclusively male, are more powerful than Wozzeck, and taunt, abuse and exploit him, eventually unhinging his mind: the Captain with his lectures, the Doctor with his experiments and lust for scientific immortality (hoping to name Wozzeck's illness as a new psychosis) and finally the Drum Major who seduces Marie, and then beats and publicly mocks Wozzeck. Wozzeck evenutally comes completely unglued, murders Marie, then drowns himself. Only their little orphaned child is left, playing with his toys, unaware and uncomprehending of what has happened.

Not a great "first date" opera, no.

Probably not a good one to take the kids to either, unless one has a fund set aside for psychological debriefing after the fact...

Why something like this is interesting to watch is tricky to explain, but it has a gripping intensity that commands attention: certainly this audience (quite young, with most under 30 by my estimate) was completely absorbed in the story. Think about thriller or suspense films, like Christopher Nolan's Memento, the Tarantino pictures, or even better, Joel and Ethan Coen's films like Fargo or the recent Oscar-winner No Country For Old Men and you'll realize that these stories are eerily powerful and horrifyingly compelling.

But there's nothing new about that; we've been drawn to this kind of thing for hundreds of years, in old tales and folksongs... there are connections with murder ballads such as Knoxville Girl, even down to such elements as the murderer and victim taking a walk by the river prior to the murder. This story is also significant because it's largely true, and was one of the first times that the "insanity" defence was attempted in a legal trial. I say "attempted", because it didn't work: Johann Christian Woyzeck, the historical figure on which the play and then this opera was based, was found guilty and executed for the murder in 1824 in Leipzig.

Ultimately I think opera, because of its stylized nature, and resultant capacity for amplification of reality, works incredibly well at telling this kind of story. Berg's music is eerie, beautiful and frightening, perfect for illustrating the exploitation of the poor by twisted and corrupt authority, and one can fully understand the impact his music has had on audiences and other artists when you hear his score today, eighty years later. The influence on cinema music is most obvious, and because of that I think that a modern audience is much more open to dissonant and frightening music than they might have been in 1925, when one reviewer famously thundered that the opera wouldn't last beyond the decade of its premiere.

The German baritone Dietrich Henschel played Wozzeck; I have several of his lieder recordings and was very interested in seeing and hearing him live. (The chance to hop on a bus for 30 minutes, and get to see first-rank European singers for a reasonable price is one of the great benefits of living here.) Henschel has a beautiful, lyric voice, and his characterization of Wozzeck was consistent, believable and sad. He played him as a rawboned, melancholic soldier with a kind of unconscious awkwardness that put everybody else slightly ill at ease. His voice was assured and evenly coloured, expressive, and the most compelling and attractive thing about the character. The other singers I didn't know, but they were all very effective in difficult parts, their individual vocal colours standing out well, even against the sometimes heavy orchestrations.

Surprisingly, my favorite voice of the evening was actually one of the smallest parts: it was the drunken sermon by the First Apprentice, sung by bass Kurt Gysen that stood out for its clarity, authority and vocal power. It just goes to show you that a role doesn't have to be big to be impressive! The orchestra was superb, and was conducted not by the scheduled conductor, but by his assistant, Peter Tomek. (There's another lesson there: everybody gets sick once in a while. Most of my breaks in the past were because someone got sick, or backed out of a contract, and it's like that for everyone.)

The set was minimalist: the stage was simply covered with brown dirt... this sounds odd but it really worked wonderfully for the different scenes. On one side was a slight depression that looked like a bomb crater; on the other was a white rectangle, initially covered with dirt that Marie ineffectually tried to sweep clear, that powerfully evoked the carving out of a pitiful room where she and her child lived, where Wozzeck visited her and where she eventually betrayed Wozzeck with the Drum Major. What I didn't notice at the time but realize now is that the dirt made the stage seem alive, in an organic way... strangely it was more like a real place than any other set I've ever seen. For the tavern scenes the cast moved in enough furniture to effectively help them represent a bawdy, drunken party, complete (as in the last opera I saw there) with onstage musicians, adding further to the sense of reality. Scene changes were quick, carried out in near-blackout, and frankly necessary for the audience to have time to process what they had just seen, especially as the dramatic pace accellerates as the plot moves to its climax.

The depression/crater to stage right suddenly filled with muddy water, just prior to the murder scene in act III, and the technical triumph of the evening happened when Wozzeck was made to drown in what we knew was only a few inches of water, disappearing completely under the surface of the "river"... how they did this I don't know - maybe something with a trapdoor that let him through, but retained the water - but it was incredible.

I realize that I've just written over a thousand words about an opera that I said at the beginning you really had to be there to "get". Oh well!

I bought a copy last night of Henschel's lieder and art song disc, Invitation au voyage, with songs by Mahler (Songs of a Wayfarer), Vaughan Williams' (Songs of Travel) and various songs by Duparc. I've done Travel before, and want to look at Wayfarer but don't have a copy. However, Bruce sent me a book of French chansons including Duparc's l'invitation au voyage, so I think I'll take a listen and try that one out myself before Malcolm comes home for lunch.

All the news that fits...

Is the first week of March gone already? Wow, that was fast. Spring is springing out all over the place here, although it has turned suddenly cold again. It's strange to see a much longer, slower transition from winter into spring that is customary in our part of Canada. The flowering trees for example have had their blossoms out for weeks now, and they show no signs of stopping. The weather continues to be very mild, with a few snow flurries this week, but no accumulation of snow.

It's been a while since the last posting. We had a good time in Liège last weekend, leaving Friday evening and arriving in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, with rain and very high winds. Our night in the loft was a noisy one because of the winds, and it wasn't until Monday when we read the newspapers that we realized that hurricane Emma was responsible.

We had a great time with the Cloes, and checked out Jean-Remy's new house, which is really taking shape. I put on coveralls on Saturday morning and helped him muck out a lot of old building waste material and went with him to the dump to get rid of it. We had lunch with Mami and then helped JR install a satellite dish for a friend. That evening we returned to a delicious raclette dinner at Nathalie and Tschi-tschi's, where the boys showed off their growing proficiency in french; Maggie and I are both noticing our progress also. We were so happy to see our adoptive Walloon family, and they were equally enthusiastic about our visit. It's seems crazy that we don't see them more often, as they are only one hour's drive away, but in Belgium, that's a long way.

Sunday morning we were up fairly early, and met Michel, dropping off his two kids for an extended holiday with their grandparents. There was little time to chat, as Nathalie drove us in to the Liège-Guillemains train station where we checked our bags and headed out by bus to Le Batte, the Liège open market held every sunday.

It was immense, stretching along the side of the river Meuse as far as we could see in either direction. Malcolm was quick to find a vendor selling live birds, and he managed to discreetly winkle out eight large goose quills, each over a foot long, perfect for making quill pens. Duncan loved spending time with the bunnies, on sale at only 4 Euros each. We didn't have the heart to tell him that they probably weren't being raised as pets, although I suppose they would have served just as well in a hutch in the backyard as they would in a pot with some kriek beer...

Then we headed towards the Theatre of the Opéra Royale de Wallonie, where "uncle Bruce" sang for many years while he lived in Liège. We had a nice leisurely lunch at a café on the corner next to the opera house, of croque monsieur (grilled ham and cheese) and boulettes liègois (Liège-style meatballs) for the boys, and some delicious salads for us. After lunch we walked to the theatre to attend an opera for kids, called Max et les Maximonstres, after Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are. It was fabulous, and the boys were thrilled, as were Maggie and I. The staging was great, and incorporated all sorts of techniques, including ballet, circus arts, fantastic costumes, blue light puppetry, and of course some great singing from the cast. This was Duncan's first opera, and Maggie's first time to the opera since she came to Belgium; for Malcolm and I it was a big step up in visibility, after our poor seats in Antwerp for Le Nozze di Figaro.

After the opera we headed back to the train station and picked up our luggage. The next inter-city train wasn't for almost 45 minutes, but the Thalys high-speed train was leaving in fifteen minutes, so for an additional 2.50 Euro for each of the boys, and 6 Euros each for us, we took the highspeed train home, and were in Brussels almost before we knew it.

On the way home on the tram we were a little delayed by an accident; an elderly woman fell while climbing into the tram, landing very heavily and splitting her shin open quite badly. A Spanish man and I leapt to her aid, and I sacrificed two of my handkerchiefs, one of his, and one of hers before we realized that it wasn't going to stop. I reassured the lady, and sent one of the bystanders up to tell the driver and we waited for the ambulance. Strangely enough the whole thing happened in French, and I didn't give it a second thought... I guess that's a sign that the language is feeling more and more comfortable for me. We ended up getting home at a reasonable time, and had the kids in bed as per our usual routine.

This week saw a traumatic but amusing experience for the cat, Cafouillon, who lives in the house, and whom we have been taking care of during the owners' absence. He is a long-haired persian who spends most of his time outside, and so gets horribly matted with burrs no matter how diligently one might brush him.

Apparently one of the sure indicators that spring is coming in this part of the world is a confirmed sighting of the "golden house-goat". As you can see he looks a bit odd, but apparently shaving off his fur is a twice-yearly event. We've tried hard not to laugh at him.

Malcolm has been playing quite a bit in the garden, as I've mentioned in earlier posts, and using the Dangerous Book For Boys, he's made a serviceable bow and many arrows. I got a little tired of him asking to borrow my swiss army knife, and noticed that he had taken to heart my admonition to use my knife responsibly and safely, so I made a stop at a coutellerie and bought him a little present. This opinel is his first pocket-knife, and a well made one, of high-carbon steel for carving, with a locking ring that will prevent it from opening, or keep it from closing on your hand if you are carving with force. He was very pleased and has so far been very good about its care and use.

Well, the boys are doing art right now at the dining room table as I type this, and the pizza dough is rising in the kitchen. Friday night party time!