Life on the road is exciting, rewarding, and challenging!
We though we would share some of those moments with you in photos.  Enjoy!

We Sing Seattle-ese

Kids say the darndest things. Ya gotta love 'em. The cutest and most humorous answer to any of our questions this season:

Question: Does anyone know the language we just sang?

Answer: Seattle?

Yes, Seattle has it's own opera dialect. I'll need a refresher course for that diction. We also get great answers for other questions. During our Opera Improv intro we will sing a snippit of an aria and ask our audience, usually K-5th graders, "what type of character or mood did I just sing?"

Answers fly at us such as,

"You look like you're a king punishing a peasant"

"You're a princess who just kissed the prince"

"There's a spider in front of you and you're scared"

"You're lost and you can't find your mommy"

Smart kids. Clever kids. Never do they cease to entertain us.

Written by: Bobby Jackson

At the end of our Opera Improvs, sometimes we have the time for a Q and A session. This is always fun, because we get some really fun questions. My favorite though, is when we get a student who wants to sing for everyone like an opera singer. We've had several throughout the tour, girls singing as high as they possibly can and guys typically singing with the baritone claw (hand outstretched), but today at a performance for homeschoolers in Beaverton we heard my favorite. I believe we met a diva in the making! One of the girls that we performed for asked if she could sing for us like an opera singer and preceded to stand up, face the audience and say "Wolf Man, get the piano ready!" She wanted "happy music", so Eric, our pianist, preceded to play some happy music on the piano and away she went. What confidence! I wish I had that when I was her age.

We've been on the road for many weeks now and have been all over Oregon. Many times when we travel out of town for the day or week, we'll load up in the van, sleep and just wake up when we get there, unload and perform the show. Consequently, we don't always know where we are, except the name of the school. I felt so silly when after being interviewed after a show for a newspaper, I asked the girl that was interviewing me, "So, is this for a local paper or the school paper?" I soon found out it was the capital's paper, the Statesman! We were in Salem and I didn't even know it.

Written by Alexis Lundy

For some weeks now I have been very tempted to go out and buy The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross. I was partly deterred by the fact that it is not yet out in paperback and that I would therefore have to pay thirty dollars for it. I kept telling myself that if I were just to pay off my Multnomah County Library fines I could borrow it for nothing. Then I would remember that my fines are somewhat more than thirty bucks and furthermore that having my very own copy would mean that I could keep it by my bed and dip into it at leisure without having to worry about its being overdue (and incurring further fines) and that I could make little marks in the margin should I wish to do so. These factors when combined were pretty persuasive but the clincher was when as a Border's 'preferred customer' I was emailed a 40% off coupon which meant that all I had to do was jump on the MAX and shell out eighteen dollars and instant biblio-gratification could be mine. Done! And let me tell you I am thrilled and that it would have been worth every cent of thirty dollars.

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and taken with Antony Lane who is the movie critic forms the core of my outsourced decision-making process. If Ross says "Listen to this..." I tend to listen and if Lane tells me that a movie is a must-see that's good enough to have me lining up in the rain and paying exorbitant rates for tickets and popcorn. But this book is far more than a series of critiques. The subtitle is 'Listening to the Twentieth Century' and that is a succinct and accurate description of its contents. Of course even in a book of nearly six hundred pages he couldn't hope to do justice to every composer or musical movement and influence of the last hundred years, but I am now about 300 pages into it and have not found myself saying "Yes, but what about.....?"

On Saturday evening I attended the final performance of Rodelinda at the Keller Auditorium. I enjoyed it thoroughly and was gratified that it seemed to me the loudest cheer of the night was reserved for Gerald Thompson - a counter-tenor in the role of Unulfo. Those of you who read my post a couple of weeks ago which was about counter-tenors will understand my pleasure I am sure.

Lately I have been thinking about opera singing. Not opera. And not opera singers. But the actual noise singers of opera produce. More specifically, why do they make the noise they do? Think about it; you are standing in the shower singing your favourite pop song and then the thought occurs to you "Why don't I give that thing Pavarotti sang at the World Cup in Italy a bit of a go?" and the next thing you know you are belting out Nessun Dorma and heading for the climactic "Vincero! Vin-ceeeeeerrr-oooo!" Did the sound you made (and I am not in any way asking you to make a valid assessment of your own vocal abilities here) bear any resemblance to the pop-warbling you had been engaged in just moments before? Noooooooo. My guess is that you tried to sound like Pavarotti or Domingo or your other opera singer of choice. It has only very recently struck me that this is precisely what budding opera singers do too. They are taught how to manipulate their larynx, voice-box, diaphragm and whatever other bits of their anatomy as brought into play in order to produce the sound that we in the Western world associate with the singing of opera. It is a wholly artificial sound produced for the purpose of pleasing audiences who have become used to hearing that type of sound associated with that genre of singing.

As tour manager I get to hear (and remember) the great things kids say and the quick thinking the performers are required to do. I also get to see most things that happen behind and off the set. At this point in the tour a handful of great moments have passed, almost unnoticed.

First, I would like to clarify that this tour requires the cast to be the crew as well. At each performance we unload, set-up and the re-load the set pieces in a moving truck. We have gotten quite good at the process. At the Bay City Arts Center, we were unable to fit all the pieces up the stairs and needed to set a few off to the side. This happens often, depending on the size of the space. What makes this event memorable was the action of a wandering animal. Bay City Arts is graciously (and gently) guarded by a beautiful dog who is not responsible for the following action. A collie I have never met before came to greet us about half way through our set-up. He was quite an excited pup and instantly began looking for something to claim as his. All he found were my set pieces and they, naturally, became his. After shooing him away, the women in the kitchen helped me find some disinfectant so I could sanitize the set pieces before returning them to the truck.

In addition to La Boheme, this tour performs an interactive improvised opera which lets students vote on music and storylines as well as learn a few lines to perform as the chorus. During the musical voting sessions, the kids are asked to think about the mood of the music and respond with their ideas. They also get to vote on the overture. In one of these moments, Eric played a happy tune which got the response “it sounds like an elf bouncing through a happy place.”  Eric responded, slightly under his breath, with “well, it is Mozart, so you’re right.”

A few days ago while browsing the Willie Week, I happened upon an advertisement informing me that the Opera Theater Oregon would be performing Bizet's Carmen beginning on Saturday, February 9th at the Someday Lounge in Chinatown. Normally this would not have stirred much interest within me as I have seen rather a lot of Carmens lately including the excellent Portland Opera production when Hannah Penn had to step into the breach at very short notice (see this blog entry for October 10th for a fuller account of that show). What did seem interesting though was that the music - singers and piano plus sound effects - were to accompany a showing of Cecil B. deMille's 1915 silent movie of Carmen, starring Geraldine Farrar as the vamp. Also, beer and adult beverages could be purchased and consumed during the performance. Well, if you think Met simulcasts excite me in part because you can drink coffee and munch popcorn while watching the show then just imagine how I felt about the prospect of Cecil B. deMille, live singers and beer! I didn't know anything about this particular movie, but I was aware that Ms. Farrar had sung Carmen at the Met with Caruso as Don Jose. A search on Google let me know that Ms. F. had parlayed her Met performances into a thriving movie career and that Carmen was reckoned to be her best.

The title of today's post was the first thing which came to mind when I read this article. Opera singers are delicate creatures at the best of times and seem to cancel engagements for the most unlikely of reasons (see below) but this one takes the biscuit. My Main Tenor Man, Juan Diego Flores was scheduled to sing the role of Count Almaviva in Rosinni's Il Barbiere di Seviglia at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in just a couple of weeks from now but has had to pull out due to a throat infection caused, we are told, by his having swallowed a fish bone. Ummmm...oooookaaayyy. I guess. His doctor has advised him not to sing until he is paid more money fully recovered. I feel for the senior management at Chicago I must say. My own, admittedly jaundiced view is that if he didn't gag on that excuse then nothing sticks in that man's throat.

POGO took a trip to an alternative high school named The Miller Education Center. These were some of the neatest teens and being at this school reminded me of how much I miss my work as a teen counselor. For some of them, it was their first opera. The opera ends with Rodolpho screaming Mimi's name on a high G and then sobbing over her dead body. Pretty emotional huh? Well despite this, I heard that one of the girls cried not during this, but instead during Colline's (the bass) aria where he decides to sell his coat for Mimi's medicine. I guess the tenor can't ALWAYS win.

Today POGO participated in our first teaching class sessions along with our 3rd Bohème for a school consisting of K-5 students. The students turned out to be a bit rowdy during the class teaching segment, but I chalked it up to their enthusiasm for the upcoming show. The Bohème went really well and the students seemed to really enjoy it. I must admit, I did think the subject matter of Bohème might have been too mature this age group. However, they were a really good audience. Afterwards we started loading the set (that's right, we do it all and sing too). As we were doing this, I noticed one of the students standing off to the side watching us. He was dressed like any other stereotypical "cool" young guy in black jeans that barely hung onto his waist and a black sports jacket 2-3 sizes bigger than he was. He looked at me and asked, "You were in that opera right?" "Yep!", I replied to which he responded, "That was really cool. Thanks for coming." Then, he turned and walked away throwing jabs at the air like he was sparring with an imaginary boxing partner. I thought to myself, "Now that's why we're doing what we do."