It's OOOOOOOOOOVER!!!!!!!

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

Just enough time before leaving for Frankfurt airport this morning to blog one last time “on tour”… last night’s concert turned out to be in a monastery about half an hour outside of Wiesbaden; a beautiful venue, but with unfortunate acoustics, at least for coloratura!!!!! It took a while to get used to the sounds bouncing off walls and ceilings and coming at you from every direction. Even though I was standing directly in front of the orchestra I had a difficult time separating the real sound from the echoes. Anyway, by the second half I had gotten more accustomed to the sound patterns and had an easier time of it, but I have to say it was quite a contrast from the Concertgebouw. Mo. Labadie was joking that for those people who missed the concert yesterday, they could go today and probably still catch the second half bouncing around in there!

For all you movie buffs, the monastery turned out to be where they filmed “The Name of the Rose” with Sean Connery! All the orchestra members were getting their pictures taken in front of this little wooden door which was apparently the “secret door” in the movie. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, being a fair Sean Connery fan, that I’ve never seen the movie. Have to put that on the list for my trip home to Alaska next month!

So, I’m most pleased with this past week’s experience, and happy to have been able to share some of it with you!

"Italia! Italia! Italia!"

SUCCESS at the Concertgebouw...

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

I didn't fall down the stairs!!!!!!!

Seriously, singing at the Concertgebouw is *so* wonderful, it has the best acoustic anywhere, so I guess they just had to invent something to keep the performance experience fresh and challenging. Or maybe they decided that you'd be so happy about making it to the stage without killing yourself that you'd figure the most difficult part of the evening was over and you could now just have a good time performing. That was the case with me last evening, at least! (For those of you who have never had the good fortune of seeing the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the soloist enters above the stage and makes a grand descent down a long staircase, finally arriving at the stage after much trepidation.... especially if the soloist is wearing stiletto heels... anybody we know???)

We didn't have a full house, but did have a good crowd of great people, even giving us a standing ovation by the end of the program. It was a lot of fun for all of us, and we really appreciated the warm reception.

Today was another travel day, but somewhat different and a bit easier as we had a bus hired to bring us to Wiesbaden. We left around 10, meaning I got a good night's sleep, and arrived at 5PM having made a stop along the way for lunch. It was nice, and I got some good study in for next week's rehearsals in Jerez of Scarlatti's "L'Ottavia restituita al trono". In other happy news, there is room service in our hotel here, so hunting for vittles won't be an issue!

Tomorrow is our last concert, and I've really enjoyed touring with Les Violons- besides being a thoroughly dedicated group of musicians, they're a *lot* of fun to work with.

Schedule from here is:
Sunday- fly back to Venice
Monday- lesson with Ms. Pinza, repack, do last-minute errands (when I get back to Italy the next time it will be August and almost everything will be closed!!!)
Tuesday- another 5AM wake-up call to get back to the airport for the trip to Jerez!

Travel day...

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

Yesterday in Santiago was a "sit-in-the-hotel-room-and-wait-for-the-concert" day, so there wasn't much to write about. We did have kind of a dress-rehearsal in the morning from 10-12:30 where I basically just marked (yes, jb, I "sang verrrrrry quietly"...) then went back to the hotel and played the waiting game. Usually on performance days I take a nap in the afternoon to give myself a fresh start, eat about two hours before concert time, then head to the theater to warm up. Yesterday was no different, but tomorrow and Saturday I'm going to have to improvise a bit... I'm a creature of room service, and unfortunately the hotel I'm in today in Amsterdam has neither room service nor a mini-bar fridge. Saturday we'll be leaving from our hotel for the performance venue about 3 hours before the concert, so I'm going to have to work that out as well... I think finding food at the right times can be the hardest part of being a singer!

Anyway, the concert last night in Santiago went well, finishing up around 11:30PM. Mo. Labadie and I were then invited out for dinner by the festival's organizer, and had the most *amazing* steak- even better than a "fiorentina", but I then begged off dessert because it was already half-past midnight and the bus was taking us all to the airport at 8AM. These are the true sacrifices of being a singer! No wine for dinner, and no panna-cotta for dessert! If that's as bad as it ever gets, I guess I'll survive.

Got back to the hotel a little after 1AM, packed up my suitcase and got to bed around 2. At 6:45 up again to get ready and check out, and by 8AM we were all loaded on the bus and off to the airport. The organization so far has been really wonderful, and check-in went super smoothly. I remember being on tour with Akademie für Alte Musik when we did the Farinelli album and there were all sorts of problems for the poor cello players because they have to bring their instruments with them on board, they can't be checked in, and as cellos neither fit in the overhead compartment nor under the seat in front of you, the orchestra has to pay an extra ticket for each cell0. Somehow the airline staff didn't understand this concept and, having overbooked the flight, insisted that the cellos needed to be checked luggage even though they had paid tickets. This was eventually resolved (cellists and instruments all got seated and comfy), but we then found ourselves sitting on the plane at the gate for about 45 minutes. Finally, it became clear this was due to the fact that the stewardess hadn't understood why her head-count wasn't agreeing with the ticketed passenger list, and she made an announcement apologizing for the delay, saying that she now understood that "cellos were people too". Anyhow, that's the sort of thing you have to expect on tour with an orchestra!

So, here I sit in my hotel room again- I found a supermarket and got something to eat in my room as I really don't feel like going out to a restaurant. I think for tomorrow the hotel clerk has worked out a way of getting some chinese food delivered about 4:30, so I should be ok! We shall see...

On tour with Les Violons du Roy!

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

Hi all!

Haven't blogged lately because I've mostly been studying the past two weeks (what a luxury *that* is, especially after such a busy year) and didn't want to bore everyone with, "Got up, had 2 and a half hour lesson, took nap, studied, ate dinner, slept" for days on end. When I study I generally can't do much else, no puttering around the house, no gardening, so there's nothing to blog about! I did take Sundays off (except for a short trip to Köln/Bad Ems for a concert with Concerto Köln which was really fun- they're such a fabulous group to work with! Plus, it was my first concert without a conductor; when they work with a soloist they are led by their concertmaster, and it was a great experience)

Saturday involved a dress-fitting appointment with Fausto Sari at 9AM, lesson with Ms. Pinza from 9:30 to 11, then a coaching with Gianni from 11-12:30 on some new Handel rep possibilities. By that time I was pretty much worn out, went home and had a *humongous* piece of watermelon (I'm theoretically allergic, but once in a while I splurge anyway!) followed by a great lunch prepared by Hubby. Then a good nap before getting to work on my suitcase. I think I'm getting better at packing for short trips; this is the first season that I have a lot of concerts, meaning you're traveling anywhere from 3 days to a week. Normally I'm on the road for 3 months or so at a time, so packing attempts for my first concerts this year were really hilarious! For the trip to London and Madrid, two concerts in 5 days, I had an enormous suitcase with two carry-ons... *no* idea what I was hauling around, but obviously way too much!

So, now I'm in Santiago de Compostela (with one suitcase and one carry-on!) where it's pretty much raining (surprise, surprise... the last time I was here for a recital with Craig Rutenberg it was raining for 5 minutes, sort of vaguely sunny for 3 and then back to rain again) I arrived Sunday and spent most of the afternoon resting (having been up at 5AM to get to the Venice airport for my flight and arriving in Santiago around 2:3oPM), studying, and catching up with computer maintenance (my old notebook computer keeps shutting down because the battery overheats constantly- better that it shuts down rather than bursting into flames, but it was becoming impossible to work with, so I ended up buying another one and have been transferring files and installing programs whenever I get the chance) My big coup yesterday was figuring out that the instructions they give you on how to set up your computer to synch wirelessly with your cellphone are incorrect and how to work around that. By the end of the day I managed to get them to talk to one another!

Actually, my second coup was in researching mp3 players with line-in and record-volume controls, finding out there is nothing out there except for the iRiver H340 (which I have but was thinking of replacing because *that* battery is shot, too) finding out that the H340 is now discontinued, but that you can actually replace the battery in the unit! (there's even a tutorial video that shows you how to do it: http://www.viewdo.com/now_viewing.php?id=198
Too cool! That will *definitely* be a blog entry when I get my new battery- I should make my own do-it-yourself video!)
Anyway, I love my H340 because you can record rehearsals/lessons in mp3 format directly onto the hard-drive, using a microphone plugged into the line-in jack. The big difference with the H340, however, is that you have a record-level volume control, which is *really* useful when you're recording opera singers/orchestras in a smaller-sized rehearsal space and want to record something other than just distortion! I'm sad the unit has been discontinued, and wish someone would put something comparable on the market, but at least I can now repair mine.

So, enough technical talk (and parenthesis) I guess! Monday I have rehearsal with Les Violons du Roy, afternoon and evening, preparing for Tuesday's concert and the rest of the tour (Amsterdam and Wiesbaden). We have travel one day, concert the next, then travel again, so this is the longest I'll be in one place this week.

More later!

Today I finally had a breakthrough!!!! I found a replacement toilet-paper holder for the bathroom!!!!!!!!


Now, for those of you gentle readers who may find this perplexing, I must explain that in general, shops in Italy are very specific as to product inventory. This is great if you're looking for bread, meat, computer supplies, pet supplies, furniture (though you have to go to about 20 different stores to find what you're looking for). However, when it comes to something as seemingly trivial as a toilet-paper holder, what kind of store do you go to??? I tried a hardware store and they carried one *very* ugly model that glued on to the wall. Sharing the bathroom with two boys, I don't know how long a plastic box tacked on to the wall with double-sided tape is liable to survive, so I passed. Next came three different stores specializing in shower stalls, bathtubs, sinks, etc (this because I was looking for a replacement part for one of the showers, and ended up having to buy a whole new shower kit because according to the "specialist": Replacement parts are not available anywhere, just whole sets. More on this later.) Here again, they had a limited selection, better than what I had seen in the hardware store, but still nothing worthwhile.

I feel obliged to explain at this point that the main problem with our *original* toilet-paper holder was that there are two sizes of toilet-paper rolls here in Italy: small and jumbo. The small size consists of approximately 4 feet of tissue paper, while the jumbo model is about 1000 times that. In general, seeing as how I seem to be the only person in the house who actually changes the roll when it's empty, we go for the jumbo roll. Here enters the problem: our holder only accepts the small size roll, so we never have any idea where to put the jumbo sized one until it's worked itself down to about 4 feet of tissue, at which point it survives all of about 25 minutes in the toilet-paper holder before it's ready to be changed out again! You can see where the frustration kicks in.

Now, it seems that most of the toilet-paper holders I had seen up to this point (except for the plastic box that glued onto the wall) accepted only the smaller sized rolls, so they were of course automatically out. My question to the "specialist" was: if they *sell* jumbo size rolls of toilet-paper in Italy, why doesn't someone manufacture a toilet-paper holder that *holds* a jumbo size roll of toilet-paper in Italy????? It seems like an obvious supply/demand issue to me.

Anyway, long story long, I finally found the italian equivalent of Home-Depot today, about 40 minutes from our house, and it was like the moment in "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy opens the door and steps from her grey, storm-swept house into the land of Technicolor. Not only did they have toilet-paper holders, they had about 20 different types of toilet-paper holders! They had gardening supplies (got more irrigator heads for my veggie garden irrigation project *and* a new hedge/border trimmer!), I found a battery-powered screwdriver (only 9.95!), silicone to *FINALLY* fix all the baseboard trimming in the house that keeps coming loose and is impossible to nail in place (humidity and plaster.... not the greatest combination, and yet Italy seems to live on in the hopes that one day the two will finally evolve into compatible elements).... AND THEY HAD THE REPLACEMENT PART I'D BEEN LOOKING FOR FOR THE SHOWER!!!!!
(Italian Lesson #1`: Never believe the "specialist".)

I was in heaven!


So, while I know it it highly unorthodox for this to appear on an opera-singer's website, I hope you will humor my great pride in my latest italian conquest:











Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

Home for two weeks!

Unbelievable, but I'm home for two weeks after being on the road for 3 months! I've really been looking forward to the opportunity of preparing for the next 2 months of performances, but unfortunately I've been fighting some kind of ear-infection/sinus-infection/now-seems-like-a-cold-but-at-3:30AM-goes-back-to-feeling-like-a-sinus-infection-again.... very, very annoying. I don't have a voice doctor here in Italy since I'm not here that often, and finally decided to start taking my emergency antibiotics today after three weeks of hoping things would eventually work themselves out. Hopefully the antibiotics will get me back in shape in the next few days so I can get back to work!

In the meantime, the weather has been just beautiful, so I'm hoping to get out and do some gardening over the weekend! It's time to trim shrubs (my job) and plant the garden (Hubby's job), and we just bought a new lawnmower today- the manual kind that has rotating blades and doesn't use electricity or fuel... I feel so virtuous! I hope that feeling holds up as I'm shoving the thing around cutting grass tomorrow!

I just finished a 10-day stint in Firenze recording an opera of Vivaldi, and though we were working a lot I did get a bit of time to wander around. The season has been unusually warm, and it was lovely to have the chance to walk and sightsee a bit. I had been there many years ago, but I always appreciate things more the third or fourth time around... a slow learner, I guess! The recording was very intense, and took a lot of concentration; I hadn't sung Vivaldi recitative for a while, and it's amazing how different it is from Handel (which I've been singing a lot of lately). It was nice to have the change, but I have to say I'm happy to get back to Handel recits again... probably just because my ear has become more attuned to the harmonic progressions he uses. Vivaldi had some very interesting and sometimes unexpected (to my ear, at least!) jumps harmonically speaking, that were hard to get used to and took some extra focus.

Must run because Hubby is taking me out for gelato (poor me....)
Happy Spring to everyone!




Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

My New Year's resolution was to blog more often, and obviously that's been working out just swell! Not only have I managed to glide by the Jan. 1 deadline (with almost no guilt pangs associated, I must say), I have also outdone myself and ignored what could have been the redeeming loophole of Chinese New Year on February 18. I feel that this displays my ever stronger ties with italian culture (when we were trying to get work done in the house, one contractor offered to come up with a cost estimate by Easter... unfortunately he didn't divulge exactly *which* year's Easter he was aiming for, and we have yet to hear from him. I aspire to this level of professionalism.)
So, the news is that we had opening night of a new production of Handel's Ariodante at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and it went quite well.
The *big* news is that I am well on the way towards cataloguing the best "chocolat viennois" in Paris, and have another foray planned this afternoon. It's been a challenging venture, as not every place I've tried actually *has* chocolat viennois (a dense hot chocolate served with thick whipped cream on the top), so I've had to develop a B-plan which involves trying different kinds of cake. In some cases I've been lucky enough to have been able to combine plan A with plan B in the same location, and though the sugar rush is a bit intense, I know it's for a good cause.

So, my recommendations thus far for chocolat viennois in Paris:
#1. Le Café Marly, located in a wing of the Louvre museum. The thickness of the chocolate was just right, and the whipped cream fabulous!!!
#2. Angelica, on rue de Rivoli between the Tuilleries and Concorde stops on the metro line 1. The chocolate is *incredibly* thick (almost overwhelmingly so) and kind of spicy, and they serve the whipped cream on a separate plate so you can add as much as you like.

Plan B awards go to:
#1. Angelica: you *must* try the Mont-Blanc, a major glob of whipped cream on a meringue base, covered with spaghetti-like strands of chestnut paste... has to be experienced to be believed. I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that any dish involving a high quantity of whipped cream can automatically be classed as "diet" (it's mostly air), and chestnuts are a great source of protein, as is the meringue, so this could easily become one of my staple foods.
#2. Gérard Mulot (76 Rue de Seine, in the 6th arrondissement): I had already tried several of their cakes before going to the store, as this is one of the most popular and chic dessert makers in Paris. They only have a very small seating area in the corner, but they do a great business in "take out". Most of the dinner parties I've been to this trip have included Gérard Mulot cakes for dessert... oh, the suffering. So, here I've tried a chocolate fudge cake that was so intense I couldn't finish even one piece (that's a compliment in itself), a prune tart that was *almost* as good as the ones I remember from Basel, Switzerland when I was a kid, an Opèra (a chocolate cake with a mocha creme filling... just *super*), and the crowning glory thus far: a lemon-curd tart that was out of this world!!! They do have coffee as well, but no decaf... sigh.

So, be sure to catch these places on your next trip to Paree!!!!


Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

It's been a busy week, and so much to report that I'm actually going to use smaller print... nope, too small... ok, back to large print, and I'll do two, two, *two* blogs instead!

Blog The First:

For the past two weeks I've been between performances of "Semele" at New York City Opera and rehearsals of "L'Assedio di Corinto" with the Baltimore Opera. It's the first time I sing two operas (comprising three roles and two genders! I play two women, Ino and Juno in "Semele", and a man, Neocle, in "L'Assedio") so I hadn't wanted to blog about it before seeing if it were really possible to do! I've seen a lot of singers who don't think twice about accepting to rehearse something on the West Coast while still in performances somewhere on the East Coast, but I've never done it and was a bit reticent about actually giving it a try. Both shows are new for me, and it does take some concentration to switch between one and the other, but I think the fact that they are so different from one another has probably made things easier. If I were switching off between two Rossini operas, for example, I'd probably be in trouble! Rossini's mezzo arias very often start off with the same two chord introduction, so I can see myself standing blankly center-stage thinking, "Ummmm... which aria was this, again?"

I'm also glad I'm able to travel by train between the two cities. If I'd had to fly it definitely would have been more challenging, given the added time one needs to add for security screening at airports these days. Besides that, I find it always takes me a day to recover from the dry air on board, so my singing voice fresh off a plane is not something I want to subject any audience to! The train has been extremely comfortable, and I couldn't believe they actually had porters at Penn Station to help with luggage! I've basically given up on trains in Europe because in traveling for 3 months at a time like I do, it has proven impossible to bring less than two large (overpacked) suitcases of stuff, and getting all of that on an off a train by one's self is just not an option. I love trains, so it's been fun to be able to use them again.

I now have one last show at City Opera, which I will miss very much, and then it's off to Baltimore to become ensconced in "L'Assedio"!

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

Blog The Second:

Having thus far managed to jump the performing trans-city/trans-composer/trans-gender hurdle I decided to treat myself to a day as a spectator here in NYC yesterday. I saw two shows, beginning with "The Screams of Kitty Genovese", presented by the New York Musical Theatre Festival. It was performed in a small theater inside a church, and involved 12 principal singers accompanied by a small ensemble of instrumentalists. The musical, based on a real incident in 1964, tells the story of a woman who, coming home one evening, was followed and stabbed in the streets of NY right outside her apartment building. It was later discovered that, although almost 40 neighbors had heard her screaming for help over a period of about 30 minutes, no one called the police or went out to help her. Her attacker came *back* after that half hour and killed her; if anyone had responded to her earlier calls for help she could have been saved. Obviously, the topic is very intense. I am always interested, as an opera singer, to see different performance genres, and this one was fascinating for me because I could watch a whole different technique of stage presentation. Each performer had a small platform on which to work (each platform representing a different apartment), and the singing was projected with microphones. It was fascinating for me, being used to performing on huge stages, often feeling like I need to cover a lot of space physically to reach every part of the audience, to see an actor/singer perform for 80 minutes continuously on one small square of stage. It helped that the venue was so small and you could really see the details of each individual performance, but the focus that each actor had really carried. I was also interested from a vocal perspective; in opera one really needs to face out over the audience to be heard, whereas when using a microphone one doesn't have the job of projecting vocally so facing an audience becomes almost another color that one can use in one's characterization. It becomes a really strong position that in opera, because of the sound issues, can lose some of its strength because it is employed almost constantly. I learned a lot!

My second spectator-sport of the day was "Spamalot" at the Shubert Theater. Quite a dichotomy between the two shows, but I had a couple of hours between one and the other to switch gears. "Spamalot" was a hoot, and the whole audience had a great time singing along and applauding some of the more memorable Monty Python lines ("Bring us a SHRUBBERY!") I was really amazed to see how many of the cast members of both shows were products of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I was based in Pittsburgh for many years to study with my teacher, and do remember having seen an amazing performance of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" at CMU years ago, but never realized just how many of their students went on to have careers in musical theater. It's really remarkable! Also, some of the cast members had also performed musical theater at NYCO which I thought was fabulous. American musical theater is as close to opera as we have in our culture here in the States, and was the only bridge *I* had between myself and opera, so I think it's great when an opera company, especially one like City Opera, can provide a venue.
OK, folks, I'm in my last two functional days here in NY so I'd better get everything tied up and ready to move out!
Next stop: Baltimore!

Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com

I'm pleased to report that the opening night of New York City Opera's new production of Handel's Semele went very well last night! This in spite of the fact that immediately upon making my first entrance at the very beginning of the opera I began thinking to myself, "So, you think you *memorized* this opera, do you? How did you do that? Do you *really* think you have it memorized? I bet you can't even remember the next recit, can you? Can you?.... Oh no, what *is* the next recit???????", and on and on like that. Notwithstanding all of this invaluable "self-help" I got through pretty well, I think, and I felt good about it both vocally and in staging... no major prop-karma issues! And all my nine costume changes went without a hitch thanks to my wonderful dressers backstage!
We now have 6 more shows, and I'm looking forward to the relative normality of a run, rather than the discombobulated emotions of opening night.


Click here to return to VivicaGenaux.com