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!