Creation

Today is the Creation with the Kingston Symphony, and we're all very excited. Rehearsals over the last few days have been a lot of fun, and I've had coaching and encouragement from Peter in Brussels, Don in Toronto and of course Bruce in Kingston. He's sung it many times in Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and in Canada, and knows my voice very well, so he had a lot of good suggestions.

Glen Fast was interviewed in the local paper, and said some wonderful things about the production. It's my first time singing it, and my first time collaborating with Laura Albino, James McLean, and Jennifer Routhier, so it's going to be a lot of fun. I have never had the chance to make animal noises with the symphony before!

Our boys are fine

Just a quick note about the bus crash in Switzerland. The two boys are attending their regular school classes in Brussels, and Maggie's students are not involved. We are horrified to hear of this tragic accident, that affects the families of students from schools in Lommel and Heverlee, in Flanders.

a pause between performances

The Schubert concert in Kingston last weekend was quite a nice artistic success, and it was great to see so many people attend from the Kingston area, including a number of musical friends and colleagues.

Dina and I were both amazed to find that after almost a year on the shelf the work was almost completely at our disposal, even without a full rehearsal... that is fortunate because I needed the vocal rest after a strenuous rehearsal and performance period in February.  There were many things in Müllerin that were much easier for me to sing this year; perhaps because I had just completed such a vocally and dramatically challenging role as Eisenstein so recently...  Certainly we are confident that we will be in good shape for Waterloo this coming weekend, and are eager to discover new things in the text and music each time we perform this beautiful work.

As well I'm taking the time to review the Creation, and will be singing through the duet bits with Laura Albino, the soprano soloist this week here in Toronto.  Then there are a number of new pieces to learn for the "No Tenors Allowed" concert, including some Sondheim selections from Sweeny Todd and Merrily We Roll Along that I'm trying out for the first time, and a great duet "Suoni la Tromba" from Bellini's I Puritani.  Certainly we are running the gamut of styles and periods on this trip!  That's one of the reasons I feel so lucky to be working in the classical repertoire; there are such a wide variety of styles, colours, textures, emotions, texts, ideas and so on to express... it's impossible to ever feel hemmed-in by genre or stylistic convention in such a limitless artistic medium.

La Commedia è finita!

Our last performance of Fledermaus was a success, and now I'm busy forgetting one set of german text to sing another.

The cast had a nice drink after the show, but the snow put an end to our revels, and we made it a relatively early night.

I was particularly tired after the last performance, as I had made the trip down to Kingston the preceeding day to attend the concert given by Bruce and Dina at Chalmers, as part of the Queen's Faculty Recital series. They presented Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and then did a dramatic reading of Ludwig Tieck's fairytale, Die Schöne Magelone, with the interspersion of fifteen Romanzen written by Brahms.

Absolutely brilliant! The large audience quite literally leapt to their feet afterwards, and gave an unusually sustained ovation. Congratulations to both artists for their very moving performance.

Yesterday I came down to Kingston to rehearse my own lieder concert with Dina, the Müllerin thursday evening at St. Mark's. Even though it's been "on the shelf" since last spring, Dina and I have found it immediately familiar yet full with many fresh ideas. Kim Duca has been a wonderful help in setting that up, and we are very much looking forward to it.

Yesterday evening we attended a reception for the mélodie specialist Roy Howat, originally of Glasgow, and now a keyboard research fellow of the Royal Academy in London... He was entertaining and we shared much conversation about Debussy, Fauré and Chabrier, and I'm hoping to attend his masterclass tomorrow. Rather ironically, for someone who moved to francophone Brussels to get exposure to more French opera, most of my singing there has been in German! Perhaps that nesns that I must visit London sometime to work on Debussy?

Creation

We have the second Die Fledermaus tonight, and it will be good to present it again after a break of a few days.  I have a little bit of time now before I leave to carpool up to the theatre with Anthony and Aleksandra, so I thought I'd blog a little.

I had a lovely evening last night with friends Eric and Kareena and their children, with a delicious dinner and lots of great conversation with the whole family, which was wonderful!  I also had a chance to see some of the artwork that Kareena does both herself and with the kids, and frequently describes on her own blog.  I can testify that their work is even lovelier when viewed directly, in person.   Having lived in the same house as Eric and Kareena for our first two years in Toronto, beginning when Malcolm was just a few months old, we've come to think of them as part of our extended family, and are looking forward very much to spend time with them during our stay in Toronto this coming summer.
 
I've been spending a lot of time on the computer recently, mostly because now that the show has opened, my personal time has opened up a little.  Still a lot of that time has been spent doing publicity for the lieder recitals that are upcoming, and of course coaching and listening to the Haydn Creation in english.  It's quite different and in some ways more difficult to sing than the german text, I think because I have the habits and patterns from learning in that way first, but I'm getting the hang of it.  I'll have a chance to do the recits and duets here in Toronto with the other singers in a couple of weeks, and also will practice them with the harpsichordist myself in Kingston next week, so it should be well prepared well in advance of the performances.

Part of the publicity work has been preparing posters and writing and telephoning potentially interested people in Kingston and Waterloo who can help spread the word about the concerts, and it also means contacting the local newspapers.   A couple of weeks ago I spoke with a reporter at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, and she carried out a telephone interview with me, and also unexpectedly followed up with Bruce.  That interview was published in today's edition of the paper, and is quite encouraging.  I suspect that it will go a long way towards publicizing the concert, and appreciate the attention from Valerie Hill, the reporter who interviewed me, and of course also the public encouragement from my mentor.

I have been communicating a little with friends and family in Toronto, trying to find time to chat and catch up, and to also let them know where certain performances are happening.  I've had a tremendous amount of support and encouragement from friends and colleagues as I've been pursuing my artistic career, and frequently those conversations turn towards the idea of doing one's "dream job"...

For example, in one conversation with a friend from my home town, Angela Carter, she explained how much she enjoys her growing enthusiasm for photography.  She has a digital SLR camera and an instagram account, and her work is really quite lovely; you can see it for yourself here.  She said, perhaps half-seriously, that she would love to be able to make enough of a living at it to change careers, because she had no idea until very recently that she was a creative person.

I found this sense that she wasn't a creative person funny, given the beauty of her photos, and said so, and we talked a little about what it meant to be creative.  Afterwards I got to thinking about our conversation, and about the newspaper interview, and other related ideas, and wrote her an email.  I have asked her if I can reproduce it here, and she's fine with that.  I think it sums up what I've been thinking about recently; that small wins accumulate, until suddenly a transformation appears...

May you have a "small win" this week (you'll see what I mean if you read the letter).

--

Dear Angela,

You were talking about having fun being creative, and your fantasizing (tongue-in-cheek or not) about giving up your day job reminded me of this article from the Globe and Mail (see link below) about Michael Phelps, the olympian swimmer.

I have had a lot of people (mostly former colleagues from business) say that it was crazy brave of me to leave my job at bell canada and drag my whole family off to another country to pursue a dream of singing.  The reality is that it wasn't a big risk because there had been a number of small risks that worked out well, over a number of years that let me believe that it would work.

I worked for bell as a tech in summer 1998, hoping to get into the opera school at U of T.  I didn't; that would have been a big win, but in reality I wasn't polished enough as as singer.  I had a lot of smaller wins as a song writer and performer with my blues group, and that built confidence.  I went on to fail to get into U of T the next two years, but Bruce told me to just audition for other singing work instead, and to gradually perform more and more challenging repertoire as time went on.  That's what happened; small wins under conditions of relatively low risk accumulated.

The reality is that it is a number of small changes in life that make the difference in the long term, and allow for a real career to develop.  It's not necessary to take an insane risk!  Sometimes people think that if they really want to pursue their dream of being a chef they need to quit their job, sell the house and open a restaurant on a whim.  In fact, it's probably better to start experimenting, spending an extra hour a week trying out recipes at home, then having some dinner parties, then take some cooking classes, then get a job in a kitchen where you work one day a week and see how it goes...

Anyway, I applaud your photography, it's beautiful, keep shooting.  Here's the article about the power of small wins.  It's not exactly what I mean by small wins, but it did trigger me to think about them in a different way...

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/conditions/brain-health/how-good-habits-can-win-gold-medals/article2349723/?service=mobile

Matthew