The "shout-outs" continue...

After my praises for Passport Canada last post, and my excited review of the Gent Museum the one before that, I don't mean to give the impression that I'm turning this blog into an ongoing testimonial or commercial.  Still, I received an nice present recently...

Most of you have iPods, or some sort of mp3 player.  You might even have several hanging around, of various ages?  Such is certainly true of our family: I received an iPod shuffle as a thank-you present for switching my bank account to another bank, back in summer of 2005.  I liked it, but since I frequently listen to multiple commercial recordings to prepare for roles, and also record rehearsals and coachings, I found the lack of a screen to choose tracks less than ideal; the shuffle was made more for casual entertainment listening than for professional use.  For that reason, later that year I bought a 1st-generation iPod Nano at a promotional points sale at Shoppers Drug Mart; it worked much better for my purposes, and it was coveted by the rest of the household when I wasn't using it.  Over the next little while we acquired more iPods: then Bell Canada CIO Eugene Roman gave me a new Nano as a present at an office function, and I bought Maggie an iPod Classic in 2007, and gave her a iPod Touch that I bought with points in 2008.

However what happened this past December really surprised me.  All of our iPods are still going strong, but a few weeks ago I received an email from Apple, saying that my Nano 1st generation was being recalled.  The letter indicated that they had discovered a problem with the batteries in some 1st-generation iPods; one batch of batteries from one manufacturer appeared to have a risk of overheating.  Since after six years they couldn't identify which models had which batteries, they were recalling all of those old iPod Nanos and replacing them.  I filled in the form with my Brussels address and when the prepaid envelope came, I called UPS to come pick up my old Nano (like the one pictured above) and forgot about it.

A couple of weeks ago, imagine my surprise when this arrived in the mail:

I purchased an inexpensive strap for it, and it can be used as a watch:

Or, with the addition of a little thumbtack microphone I bought online for 8 Euros, it becomes a sound recorder that I can use easily in my rehearsals:

Really, my comment is partly about the coolness factor; I am sure that in another couple of years we'll be wearing smartphones like these on our wrists, and it will be completely "Dick Tracy".  But my real reason for mentioning it is that I am really impressed with the idea of customer service that this implies.  There was nothing wrong with the old device, it had run perfectly for over five years, but it had a capacity of 1gb, and had a resale value of maybe $30.  Unsolicited, they sent me a new one with 8gb of space, more features, and sticker price of $130.  While I can't think of what else they could have done that would have removed the risk of the battery overheating, and their liability, it still impresses me.

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Ok, enough "commercials".  What else is happening?  Lots of rehearsing for Fledermaus, and Creation, and I've had a chance to geek out with my watch-recorder already, so that means I can review those coachings when I'm walking back from taking Duncan to school, or when I'm on the plane back to Canada.  David Miller and I have lots of work still to do on the Fledermaus but he has done the work several times before with baritones, and I'm appreciating his advice about how to approach the more "tenorish" sections.  I also got some good news from the Vlaamsopera, and must prepare for an audition that I've been invited to in Antwerp next week.  I was glad to speak yesterday with the casting director, and I don't have many details as yet, but will write more when I know more.

I scored some new glasses this week for a really good price; there was an estate sale and the seller would not ship, but insisted that pickup be done only in a narrow window of time, two hours either last Sunday morning or Wednesday evening, in person.  I wasn't free on Sunday, but was available Wednesday, and so I put in a bid and received a ridiculously low price on some Val St. Lambert white wine glasses, and some cocktail/martini glasses.  Here they are:

So for those of you getting this note, I'm making a standing offer to make a martini (or a manhattan or cosmo or margarita) in one of these, next time you visit us in Brussels...

Preparations

Welcome to the land of German text!  Die Schöpfung and Die Fledermaus have been taking up a lot of my mental time these days.  Thankfully it's all in the same language so that's does make it a little easier.  Haydn gives the baritone (as the angel Raphael) the prophetic voice, in the same way that Bach gives the tenor soloist the Evangelist recitatives in the Bach passions, so I'm excited about singing something new and different, but it does mean that there is an awful lot of German recitative to learn.  Although I perform it first in English in Kingston in March, I am learning the German first because a) I wanted to coach it with Peter here in Brussels before he left for Lyon, and b) I know I'll be singing it at the general rehearsal in Antwerp for the first time on April 2nd, after an overnight flight from Canada, and I want to have it firmly planted in my memory so that I can deliver a good performance even if jet-lagged.

But today is Fledermaus; I have already looked at most of the musical material with Peter, but he's off to Lyon for Parsifal until mid-April, and so I'm going to review the final trio with David this afternoon.  Eisenstein has a lot of its own challenges; while it's said that the part is now most frequently played by a baritone, the original score was written for a tenor so it does sit rather high... there are "alterations" that are often done but they don't seem to exist in notated form anywhere, but are improvised pretty much on the fly.  I've made a few notes based on the live video performances I've been able to find, but it is time-consuming to figure that out for oneself.  Still the music is great, and the show is going to be an absolute riot to do.   Those performances are at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on February 26th (2pm) and March 1st and 3rd (8pm).

In the meantime the Schubert Die Schöne Müllerin is hovering in the back of my mind... The Kitchener-Waterloo Record will be interviewing me by telephone later this week, and there are still plans to arrange a second performance it in Perth, Ontario around the same time as the Waterloo one.  Having already performed Müllerin quite a few times, I can afford to let it sit on the back burner a bit, and look at it more closely once these other projects are closer to completion, but I have been preparing in other ways, reflecting on how to continue to reshaping its performance technique.  As I may have explained already, I read the texts in English translation just prior to each song, so that the texts blend seamlessly into the music and back out again as the cycle progresses.  The hope is that this allows Dina and I to convey the meaning without printed translations, while continuously setting each other up for the next "vignette" in the series of pieces, and avoids breaking the flow and emotional intensity of the work as a unity.  I have constructed a couple of different versions of my "little black book" to use as a reference in performance, with the German text and my own English translations, but I'm still tweaking that, and I will have to do more than tweaking in May, when Peter and I perform it for the first time in Brussels, this time with French translations instead of English ones.

Okay, back to work.  But before I finish, a compliment to Passport Canada.  Maggie and I both have valid passports but the boys' ones expired in early January.  I assembled the necessary documentation last fall, and Maggie took it into the Embassy here in Brussels.  They did a very thorough job of checking everything: Eric, our local police officer, whom I asked to act as guarantor, told me at Duncan's school last week that he had received a call to verify that the information we had provided was accurate.  He was quite surprised, saying that it was the first time this had ever happened.  I suppose that Canadian passports are highly valued internationally, and it would seem that we have rather strict guidelines for their approval.  Happily both passports arrived in the mail yesterday, so the boys are set for another few years.  Maggie renewed hers a little while ago, and I'll renew mine while in Canada.

Way to go, Canadian Embassy!

Happy New Year

Thanks to everyone for their good wishes for 2012... we reciprocate them whole-heartedly!  Happy New Year to you!  Here we are dressed to go out on NYE...

The second part of the holiday was a good mix of socializing and quiet time.  On the social side, we had a big fondue dinner with the Gardners and Julia's parents on the 27th, with lots of great conversation, AND we managed to squeeze 10 around the table without any trouble, even with the Christmas tree.  Then we had an engaging and entertaining New Year's eve with our friends Jean-Luc and Régine, and made some new friends at their table.  Then the three Kings who had sung Britten's Journey of the Magi reassembled at Leonard and Jill's home for a lovely dinner to mark Epiphany, and we met some new friends there as well.  The rest of the time was spent reading, playing our new Catan board game together, and just relaxing.

Speaking of Epiphany, we had a guest ourselves this year: artist manager Laura Adlers is a friend and colleague from Canada who passed through Brussels earlier in December with musician and composer Peter Togni, enroute to Riga, Latvia for the premiere of one of Peter's newest compositions.  We had a look around Brussels together on the first leg of their journey, and while Peter had to return to Canada shortly after his premiere, Laura had a couple of days stopover on her way back to Toronto, so we spent a little time exploring Brussels, and she joined us for dinner one night for lapin cooked with Mort Subite kriekbier and dried cherries.  Yummy!  This year Duncan found the fève in the galette des rois; it was the Schtroumf boulanger!

Today is brilliantly sunny here in Brussels, with temperatures howering around the freezing mark.  Maggie is nearly halfway through her ski trip to Anzère Switzerland with her class... I am a little envious of her trip, but now that she knows how to ski (as does Malcolm) it might meant that we can all add this destination to our list of possible family vacation choices.  It's crazy, the alps are not far away at all; our friend Matthias said that a flight to Innsbruck in Austria is perhaps one hour, so it's quite strange that I haven't gone yet.

What else?  The twice-yearly retail sales period has come and gone, and Maggie and Malcolm both took advantage of them to get kitted out rather nicely.  Duncan has lots of good quality clothes that are now coming to him from Malcolm, and I did well last year so don't really want for much in my closet, so we didn't bother purchasing anything.  The boys are both back in the swing of things at school.  Malcolm has had a relatively easy time of it, as a couple of his teachers have been absent freqently in the last week.  Duncan is getting to know his new teacher, as Catherine had her 55th birthday over the Christmas break and promptly retired.  I hope that he will get along well with the new one.

I've had quite a bit of musical work to do.  I've finished coaching the Haydn Die Schöpfung in german, so that's ready for April 3 and 4 in Antwerp, and have been looking at the english version for Kingston's March 24th.   However the bulk of my time has been spent preparing Eisenstein.  There sure are lots of words to learn in operetta!  38 index cards' worth so far, not counting the spoken dialogue.  Lots to memorize, but after the french dialogue in Duchesse.  I'm just happy the spoken stuff is in english!

I also accepted a contract to perform Conte Almaviva in a chamber opera reduction of Nozze di Figaro next fall in Flanders, which promises to be a lot of fun.  I did the role in Canada a few years ago, and as I recall I had to learn it very quickly, so I'm happy that I will be able to revisit it, and to spend some time discovering new things to do with it.  In other music planning I've been doing lots of emailing and calling, and I'm getting some good responses, specifically with some contacts in Holland, so that's great.  I've got to do some more auditioning, hopefully before I leave for Canada, and it's a good chance as well to revisit my audition repertoire in advance of the "No Tenors Allowed" concert Bruce and I are performing in Ottawa on the 31st of March.

Last week I took a day trip up to Gent, to pick up some scores that a conductor/composer/singer friend was getting rid of, and I took the opportunity to also visit the Fine Arts Museum there.  Fabulous!  There were two temporary exhibits that caught my interest; the first was a John Constable exhibit on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  Constable was painting in the first part of the 19th century, and he practiced his art largely in the Essex-Suffolk area of England. 

I found it interesting to see his different pictures of Salisbury, and also of the sea at Brighton; while these are executed beautifully it is impossible not to see the differences between them and those landscape paintings of his home, which really "pop" with intensity... I can't quite explain it intellectually, it's just that one can tell that these paintings of his own rolling English countryside are imbued with the love the artist had for his subject, something that I don't feel with his Brighton work, nice as it is.  I don't know, perhaps it's just me?  The exhibition goes next to Princeton University Museum in New Jersey; if you're in the neighborhood you could always have a look and see for yourself...

The Fine Art Museum was recently renovated, and it is really full of fantastic pictures from the late middle ages up to the present day.  I was thrilled to see two Hieronymus Bosch paintings that I'd never seen before; a stunning Van Dyck of Jupiter and Antiope, and a great many other paintings and sculptures.  The museum is recently renovated and everything was remarkably well presented, with descriptive cards available in Flemish, French, German and English.

The second temporary exhibition was more modern; it was entitled "The World of George Minne and Maurice Maeterlinck", and reviews the development of the work of these two Gent natives, and their influence on the Symbolist movement.  Maeterlinck was known to me as the author of the play Pelleas et Melisande which of course formed the basis for Debussy's opera of the same name.  Minne's sculptures during his Brussels period were very important in the Art Nouveau movement, and his work influenced other artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.  It was a great time in Gent but I was very tired from all of the walking, and I feel I could have spent another day in the Gent museum, as there is so much there to see...

My, what started as a quick blog post turned into something far longer, so now I must get going and get some real work done.  Before I go, I should explain that if it's been a long time between blog posts it might be because I've discovered a neat little application called Instagram.  I've got a good quality camera on my phone, and it's revived an enthusiasm of mine for photographic composition.  An old friend from Belleville (Angela Carter) inspired me with her own beautiful photography work that she's been sharing on Instagram, and so I've started posting the odd picture that I think is worth sharing on my own photo feed, as sort of a micro-photo-blog.  A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and the application has some interesting filters and framing choices that allow you to tweak your pictures if you like.  If you have a smartphone you can download the application for free, or if you just want to look at my photos, click here.  As well, I usually post those photos to twitter as well; my twitter id is @matthewzadow.

Again, Happy New Year!