London to New York

I have come into New York City for several days, mainly to hear Yevgeny Kutik in his Alice Tully Hall debut this evening with the Riverside Symphony.

Last night I saw Noel Coward's Private Lives  at the Music Box Theatre. Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross played the two main roles, Amanda and Elyot, very well indeed. I have seen many productions of this play, including one where, for some reason, the locale was changed to South America and everyone spoke with a Spanish accent. That made no sense whatsoever since all the humor is a British as Paddy's pig. 

Last night's production also featured Anna Madeley and Simon Paisley Day as Sybil and Victor and Caroline Lena Olsson as Louise, the maid.

Act one is definitely the best part of the play when Amanda and Elyot, having been divorced, find themselves in adjoining suites on their honeymoons with their new spouses. Acts two and three get a bit langweilich  with the repeated fighting and making up. But the dialogue, as always with Coward, is brisk and funny.

Returning to New York after ten days in London is an interesting experiece. In comparing the two cities, the whole tempo of life is different. The British are more laid back in their activities around town. In New York, the fact that Broadway, from 47th street to Times Square, is now a pedestrian mall, has made that area even more frantic than ever. Groups of tourists simply stand in one place, making it next to impossible to walk in a straight line.  And of course several bus routes have had to change. My old faithful, the 104, now goes down Seventh Avenue from 59th street south instead of Broadway.

Now to Yevgeny Kutik, whose new album, Sounds of Defiance, is available at http://www.marquisclassics.com/

Tonight Yevgeny outdid himself, playing the recently discovered Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in D minor.Yehudi Menuhin was responsible for having rescued it from obscurity. Mendelssohn was thirteen years old at the time. This is the work of a very young genius. And it was performed by a very young genius. I have been following Yevgeny's career ever since he was the first winner of the Ferris Burtis Music Foundation Scholarship eight years ago. He blew us away then and he continues to do so now, especially tonight. His very special combination of technique, musicianship, and passion, make him the violinist to watch in this decade. I have heard them all, from Heifitz on, and he is a major talent. Bravo, Maestro!

The program opened with Antiphonies by Donald Crockett, a New York City premiere. After a frantic first movement it settled down into a decent piece. It is written in concerto grosso style, with small groups alternating with full orchestra.

The concert ended with Haydn's lively Symphony #83 in G minor. The Riverside Symphony is a fine ensemble and the conductor, George Rothman, is splendid.

London Again!

I have just returned from ten days in Merrie Olde England, mostly in London at the Park Lane Hotel. London is getting trimmed within an inch of its life in Christmas holly and everything else imaginable. It's a great time to be there.

I had some interesting musical and theatrical experiences while I was there.

First was a master class in voice led by Roderick Williams held at the Royal College of Music. He is a lyric baritone who has sung at the English National Opera, Covent Garden and on the continent. He taught a spirited class of singers, mainly working with interpretation, stage presence and the like. Not much was said about vocal technique.

 The first to sing was a young Asian tenor who performed 'Ah, mes amies' from La Fille du Regiment of Donizetti. He certainly had the high 'C,s' in abundance needed for this aria but they were a little hard on the ears. Williams tried to get him to ease up a bit through what he was doing physically in interpretation. It didn't help a great deal. The voice was still overly bright and pushed. In fact all of the singers had this quality, what the British call singing with 'Blade'. Blade is right! It cuts right through your ears!

I was attending the class with my friend and former student, Nigel Brookes, who is a graduate of the College. I asked him if it was the accoustic of the room or simply the way they were singing that made the sound so edgy. We decided it was the singers themselves.

Then a young Irish soprano with a really lovely voice sang 'Ch'il bel sogno' from Puccini's La Rondine. She is a very good singer, but again pushes the top where she really doesn't need to.

Then a tenor, who was the singer I liked best, sang 'Fatto inferno e il mio petto' from Rodelinda of Handel. His voice had more color and freedom than any of the other singers.

Then followed a soprano, another tenor, and a mezzo, none of whom was impressive. The mezzo in particular had vocal problems that suggested tension and a lack of freedom. She was developing a wobble, which at any age, but especially in a young woman, is not a good thing.

Mr. Miller bounded on and off the stage with an ease that I envy and congratulated all of the singers on how well they sang. I can't bound anymore, and I had a very different take.

I attended a performance of The Lion in Winter by James Goldman at the Theatre Royal Haymarket starring Robert Lindsay as Henry II and Joanna Lumley as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both excellent actors in a well staged production. It was interesting to compare it to the film with Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole.



Then, a night at the Opera! The ENO, or English National Opera, for their production of Eugene Onegin. It was sung in English as are all their productions but it might as well have been sung in the original Russian for all the words you could catch. Fortunately, there were super titles! It was an odd production which has not had wonderful reviews. The first act takes place in a barn for some reason instead of Tatyana's home. Tatyana was sung by Amanda Achailaz, who sang with lots of 'BLADE'! A review refered to her voice as steely, which it was, and is totally wrong for the role. The Onegin of Audun Iversen was very well sung and acted. The star, to my way of thinking, was Toby Spence, who looks like a young Robert Redford and sings like a young Jussi Björling. What a great young singer-actor. The score is to die for; Tchaikowski at his most romantic.

Toby Spence         

 Audun Iversen

One more musical evening found me at Crazy for You!, a Gershwin musical that never really was. I think someone has taken a lot of Gershwin's songs and put them together into this flimsy pastiche of a story. But who cares? S'wonderful! Sean Palmer is  the perfect leading man, dark, handsome, and he can really sing and dance, Claire Foster plays the hometown girl he falls in love with way out west. Guess what? She has an abandoned theatre so they put on a show.  And what a show it is. It was a very gay final evening in London.         

E Books

Thanks to my technical mentor Ryan Salame, my two most recent books are now available as E Books from Amazon.

Case Studies in Vocal Pedagogy deals with the voice teacher as psychologist. As an E Book it is $9.99. If you would like to order a soft cover copy, it is $20.00.

Take Two Deep Breaths and Call Me in the Morning, is a singer's guide to deep breathing.
It is also $9.99 as an E Book and $20.00 as a soft cover copy. I have dedicated this book to my dear friend, Phyllis Curtin, on the occasion of her 90th Birthday. Happy Birthday, Phyllis!


To order on line  http://www.amazon.com/  Select 'Kindle Books' and type in my name. They will download automatically.


To order a soft copy of either book by mail, send a check made out to Herbert Burtis, to 53 Rood Hill Road, Sandisfield, MA 01255.

My previous books are all available in soft cover only.

Sing On! Sing On!  is $15.00
Vocalizing from the Ground Up!  is $35.00
How to Make your Arm into a Wet Noodle is $40.00.

Lorraine at BAM 1994

 In the recent issue of Opera News Philip Kennicott has written a wonderful article about repeatedly seeing Lorraine Hunt as Médée at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994. I remember these performances well. On one occasion, I met several of my vocal students in Brooklyn for dinner and we went to a performance afterwards. It was mesmerizing. Kennicott speaks of the emotional impact her performance had on him, as it did on the entire audience. We all went backstage afterwards to give her hugs and kisses.

Always, within a voice lesson, Lorraine never held back or 'marked'. She poured her heart and soul into every note she sang. We would sometimes work for three hours at a clip. We were always equal partners, rather than teacher and student. We both had the same aim in view. Musical, vocal, and emotional perfection. As emotionally involved as she was in every lesson, each time I would later witness her performance on stage I was blown away by the power it contained. She would turn a performance into a living breathing moment of joy, sadness, anger, whatever. She left you spent, having merely been in the audience.

She sang for Les Arts Florissants  for several seasons in Paris as well as several times at BAM. William Christie, the director of the group, had studied conducting with John at Harvard years before.

John and I, along with my brother and sister-in-law, went to Paris a year or so later, for her début at the Salle Garnier in Hyppolite et Aricie, again with Les Arts Florissants. It was an evening I will always cherish.

It makes me both sad and happy when something like this article brings her back into my life. Sad that she is gone, and happy that her great art has stirred the emotions of so many people.

She was unique.

I hope that you will read the article.

Caballe at 79

Tonight on Connecticut Public Broadcasting featured Nicolay Baskov, tenor with guest artists Monserrat Caballe and her daughter Montserrat Marti.
 

Baskov is a handsome young tenor with an Italianate voice. In the 'Libiamo'  from La Traviata both he and Monti take superb high 'c's' at the end of the duet. Otherwise he seems to favor Italian popular songs. But the man can sing. He is a cross between Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Andrea Bocelli. He has the looks and white hair of Dmitri and a much better voice than Bocelli. Apparently in real life he is a blond.

The program seemed to be a mish-mash of operatic arias and duets,  Italian songs, and Broadway hits. Marti, at the end of one duet from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, wound up screaming the final high notes.




Caballe appeared with him in a silly sort of duet called 'Kalinka' and proved that at age 79 she can still sing. She laid out a high 'A' at the end that many of today's sopranos half her age might envy. Nikolay apparently studied with her. Not a bad teacher to have!

I would love to hear him minus the big Radio City production and without a microphone. This was what killed Bocelli when he appeared in Detroit un-miked in an opera and no one could hear him. Nikolay has performed at the Bolshoi in Yevegny Onegin, Prince Igor, Traviata, and other legitimate operatic roles so I presume that the voice is the real thing. I look forward to hearing him in a live situation.

It's quite a voice!

Anna as Anna

Having read several mixed reviews of Donizetti's Anna Bolena, the recent Met production which starred Anna Netrebko, I was looking forward to seeing it in HD at Monmouth University in Long Branch, NJ this weekend. I attended the screening with several friends whom I was visiting while in the Garden State.

The production is hampered by a bleak, rather ugly set that appears to be a series of gray walls. In the days of Henry VII I have a feeling that royal palaces, at very least, had some furniture. More than the bright red bed which, while appropriate to Henry's reputation, left a lot to be desired scenically. When singers were required to sit, they had to plop down on ledges that projected from the gray walls.

This is the first time I have heard Netrebko in person. It is an amazing instrument, but I am not a fan of the kind of 'covering' she employs. While this worked in mid-range sections of the role, she changed position when she had to sing a high note. At this point, she visibly adjusted, physically and vocally, to get rid of the weight that is caused by covering. While the voice has a creamy sound, it is almost as if someone else is doing the singing behind her somewhere. I would love to hear what she would sound like with a more forward projection throughout the range.



At the end, she goes through a door in the wall, pulls her hair to one side, and prepares to have her head cut off. High above her appears the executioner with an axe in his hands. I believe that, as with all royal executions, for Anne Boleyn, a French executioner was used who wielded a sword instead of an axe.

The role of Jane Seymour, Anne's lady in waiting and Henry's wife-to-be was sung by Ekaterina Gubanova, a Russian mezzo-soprano, who sings much more in the tradition of many Russian singers of the past. Her brilliant voice is really fine and she sang with great energy and passion.
Unlike some of her predecessors she does not 'Take the paint off the wall' with her brilliant voice. It would be nice to find a nice mutation of her voice with Netrebko's. You'd have the heavy cream plus the brilliance. When we can clone singers, that might actually happen.

In the scene where Henry is trying to get Jane into bed, he seems to be kneading bread as he wrestles with her, ignoring her pleas to wait until they are married. I wondered if she were black and blue at the end of the performance.

Oldar Abdrazakov, as Henry, has a very good and powerful voice. He is an imposing personage on stage, looking very kingly. He tends to push his very low notes, making them thin out a bit, and overworks his jaw to excess. He also pulls his tongue back into his throat a lot of the time.This tenses the instrument and thickens the sound.


 


For a voice teacher, the advantage of the close-ups the camera provides, which I would never be able to see in the house, allow a voice teacher the opportunity to look right down the singers' throats, just as I often do in a lesson. It is important for the teacher, and especially for the singer, to know what's going on in there. Voice teachers, especially I, should probably not be allowed to go to opera productions like this one since we can't stop teaching in our heads as we see fine singers doing energy-wasting, vocally unpleasant things. And we can't say 'Wait a minute, let's fix that!'

Lord Richard Percy was sung by Stephen Costello, a  good tenor, who started out a bit roughly vocally, but who got better as the opera went along and began singing rather well later on.

Tamara Mumford, mezzo, sang the pants role of Mark Smeaton. She has a good voice, if a little uneven at times, and certainly looked the part.

The roles of Lord Rochford and Sir Hervey were sung by Keith Miller and Eduardo Valdes.

Overall I was disappointed in the production. A more exciting set would have provided a better mood for the action to take place in. I wish that I had heard Beverly Sills or Joan Sutherland sing the role.

Alas, it's too late for that to happen.

Chapter Three

I am being propelled into making this into a book. I had an email from a friend saying 'When are you going to talk about using your air to sing?'

I guess now is as good a time as any.

Once we have taken this free, low breath, what do we do with it? 

We sing!

As I said in the previous chapter, the inhalation-to-sound rhythm is like the bounce of a tennis ball. Inhale as the ball strikes the floor and sing as you catch it. Ka-boom. If you hold the breath, even for an instant, you shut down the vocal apparatus. It also gives you time to 'manage' the breath-to-sound instant. In this case, managment is a bad thing. Olga Averino always spoke about singing from 'Impulse'. That is a very good thought. You should basically inhale the phrase you plan to sing. Your inhalation should be lively; not a gasp, but lively. Lively in-lively out. A slow drawn-out inhalation prepares you to yawn; that's about all.

Everything we do in life requires energy. In singing, our air is our energy. We stymie this by slowing down the breath-to-sound process.

An instant release of sound from the deep, open-throated, relaxed larynx inhalation should be a free, beautiful sound. I just witnessed this happen, yet again, in a student who began studying with me recently. I worked with her on the breathing exercises I have already mentioned, did some work on focus as detailed in my books on singing, and she instantly produced a free, wonderful sound. She was amazed at how quickly and easily this happened. It was an example of free energy at work.

There are several focus exercises I use; humming, duck call, and so on, when the voice is out of focus. But in general, when the air works this way, the voice finds its focus without outside help. A free release of sound automatically locates the resonators, and vibrates, finding the overtones in the sound, and sounding great.

I also do a 'Slow Release of Air Exercise' that I stole from Monserrat Caballe who was being interviewed by the flutist Ransom Williams in Opera News  some years ago. She suggested taking a deep breath and then letting it escape. No pushing of the air. You won't even hear the air escaping. When your mouth is full of air, a little place in your lips will open and a tiny stream of air will escape. It's like sticking a pin in a tire. You produce a slow leak. You then time how many seconds of release you can achieve. I have had students go over a minute with this exercise.

Obviously, this is a lot less air than we use at the time of singing, but it gives us a very good idea of how much air our lungs can hold.

Turning air into sound should be an instant simple event. Too many singers complicate it in various ways that make it difficult. Sing from the impulse of the deep breath hitting your pelvic bone and bouncing right back up into sound, like the tennis ball.

This friend also mentioned that ballet dancers and Pilates practitioners advocate high breathing. Frankly, I don't see the point of this. To my way of thinking, high breathing involves tension, holding, in the lower abdomen. Tension is the enemy of good singing. In Yoga the deep breath is paramount. In singing, it is as well.

This friend also pointed out that good posture is not a part of everyone's body. Stand against the wall so that your back and buttocks touch. The back of your head may or may not be touching, depending upon how you are built. This should give you an idea of good posture.

Lie on the floor. Place a small pillow under your head so your head is not pulling back to touch the floor. Again, you should get a good idea of a straight line for your body.

Good posture should be a comfortable sensation. A military stance is not required. Tension should play no part in the alignment of your body.

Look into a mirror a see what you look like when standing in comfortable posture. Have your teacher or coach help you to achieve this way of standing.

Our entire body is our instrument as singers. Getting it into a good posture is like putting your clarinet together. Unless you assemble it correctly, it won't play!

Once this is all in order, the act of singing is mostly a mental and emotional operation. Again, quoting Olga, 'If you think what it is you want to happen, it may just do that'.