12:34 pm: Artist Transpo
A quiet moment waiting at the Hilton,
catching up on email on the now-indispensable iPhone

1:43pm with Hannah Montana and Bob the Builder in Instant Opera preview
Hannah & Tiffany shopped for shoes in Pisa, and Bob & Pongo played ice hockey until Harry Potter’s spell mistakenly melted the rink.

3:04pm: Places, Ladies & Gentlemen!
Peering around the corner while backstage left with Amanda,
a most excellent place to be

3:08pm with CameraMan in the balcony booth,
protecting the music from the click of our shutters

3:10-5:20 Invitation to the Dance
In a future life, I want to be able to sing, play, and dance like these folks.
A terrific concert, topped off by an encore dedicated to yours truly on the occasion of my 25th summer with Wolf Trap Opera.
(Have I really not had a summer vacation since 1984?)

5:38 pm in the English Barn with this wonderful cast.
(Minus Danny, ever the working drummer, packing up his kit.)

6:25pm.  The house and lobby are clear.
(Except for RT & JB, loitering at the box office)
Time to send the cast and company off to Chef Geoff’s for a party, then head home to visit my brother, who is visiting from Colorado for just one day!

FUSION (noun):  a merging of diverse, distinct, or separate elements into a unified whole
Etymology: from fusus, pp. of fundere “pour, melt”

Thursday was all about melding music and visual art.  Melting the colors in the art until they became harmonies, words, and melodies.  Pouring the music back into the paintings until they became wholly new.

A midday concert at Wolf Trap was followed by an evening of music and art at The Phillips Collection in downtown D.C.  Four singers and two pianists presented a concert of songs inspired by paintings in the collection, and the audience was able to view a projection of each painting during the performance of its paired song.

I have a seriously underdeveloped visual sense, and it is my ongoing challenge in the opera business (the most multi-media of all genres) to amp up my ability to see.  For that reason, these Vocal Colors recitals have a strong, peculiar attraction for me.   Sadly, I missed both of Thursday’s events, as my job description for the day kept me at the Filene Center for Joshua Bell’s performance with the NSO.  But I was there in spirit, and I’m looking forward to the chance to see the video recording of the evening concert.  Bravi to Eve, Kenneth, Ashlyn, Ryan, Michael & Jeremy, and to the other Ryan for making it all happen, with appreciation to The Phillips Collection for this wonderful partnership.

Photos by Eric Melear
Of course

Learn the role inside-out, annotate and memorize.  Then show up for rehearsal.  Add blocking, props, costumes, sets, orchestra.  Amplify and enhance until the glorious whole is bigger than the sum of its many complicated parts.

Present to an audience primed for being transported out and away from themselves into another place and time.

The process of preparing one of Steve Blier’s concerts is somewhat surprisingly and curiously reductive.

It’s not that inhabiting these songs doesn’t require an accumulation of knowledge – for there’s an important preparatory gathering of language, subtext, context, style and musical elements.  But the recipe for the intensive week of rehearsal that immediately precedes these events is more about uncovering than it is about augmenting.

Take one singularly dedicated, inspiring, and seasoned musician and a handful of singers curious to know more about themselves, the music, and the world.

Throw away old habits.  Dismiss all preconceptions.  Banish timidity.  Fend off bias and easy categorization.  Deflect those judgmental voices in your head. Strip away anything but the raw anger/love/glee/sex/whimsy/yearning in the songs.

Jettison fear.

Sweep it all away until all that’s left is your heart, your voice, the words and the music.

Present it to people who want to travel inside themselves.

Walk taller and stronger on the other side of it, and accept the appreciation of those of us who went along.

Thank you.

[Latin Days, American Nights photos by Eric Melear]

Vocal Colors – A Vibrant Fusion of Arts Onstage

Click to download release here.

Participating blogs are listed below – links will become active throughout the day on February 9.

Where and How We Do What We Do

• The Barns at Wolf Trap via Clef Notes
• Arts Management in Reverse at Adaptistration

Focus on Repertoire

• Zaide at Roger Evans Online 
• Turk at Musical Perceptions 
• Dream at Dramma per musica 

Marketing and Fundraising

• Why Wolf Trap Needs Members at Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog 
• Zaide Production Choice Becomes Marketing Hook at Butts in the Seats 

Our Young Artists and their Careers

• The YAP View via Houston Grand Opera
• Overview of 2010 FYA Roster at Miss Music Nerd
• The Career Pyramid at The Omniscient Mussel 

Interview Fun

• Operagasm (Instant Opera, Artist Profiles, Audition Advice and More) 
• The Mind of the Airstream Diva (Books, Music, Daily Life)
• Does The Fat Lady Still Sing? at The Next Hundred Pounds 

WTOC Colleagues

• Whack-a-Mole at Rahree
• Studio Artist Photo Gallery at the Melear-o-sphere 

It’s like the crazy Christmas season years ago when my husband and I decided we didn’t have time to put the requisite tens of thousands of lights on the house. A worried stranger knocked on the door and asked if we were all OK – thought that because we hadn’t decorated the house, someone must be sick.

We are all fine here at WTOC, but this last week was a struggle. No surprise – we saw it coming. Ulysses performances, Instant Opera week at Theatre-in-the-Woods, Steve Blier’s residency and Pursuit of Love recital, and the approach of Boheme tech week. It was all marvelous, but it consumed all available waking hours, with no time to tell about it!

This is our day away from the theatre, ceding the stage to Pat Benatar and Blondie. We reoccupy tonight at 12midnight, and it’s nonstop from there till Saturday. I offer in these few quiet minutes a catch-up posting.

SpongeBob, Princesses, Scooby-Doo, Captain Hook, and Harry Potter…

If our singers ever doubt that they’ve come to work in a National Park, those thoughts are erased by their first trip out to the Children’s Theatre-in-the-Woods. They hiked along the stream every morning last week, and presented 5 world premiere operas written by the children of the Theatre-in-the-Woods and brought to life by the Wolf Trap Opera Studio. These amazing singers were armed for improv battle by Your Friend and Mine Jim Doyle, joined by Pianists Grant and Jeremy, supported by Super Judy and Super Amra, and cheered on by coach Eric.

Pursuit

Steve worked his magic (and no, that’s not a euphemism) last week, and brought a slightly atypical program to The Barns. The Pursuit of Love wasn’t structured like most of Steve’s recitals – rather, it gave each of its four singers a chance to sing a complete set/cycle of songs (by Villa Lobos, Grieg, Granados, and Gabriel Kanahane), and then featured all of the singers in quartets. In the midst of an intense rehearsal week he also found time to chat with our donors and lead a master class with some of the Studio Artists. And, of course, the journey home (a needlessly epic 12-hour trip from Vienna to New York) yielded the annual brainstorming document with ideas for next year’s recitals. Six of them. (Six ideas, not six recitals. Even though I tried:))

Joining the Bohemians

We are now exclusively on the Boheme train. A few shots from the last room rehearsal and this link to the promo will have to do for now! More tomorrow. I promise.

Why the chairs? Well, we’ve been terribly fortunate to have an audience that loves its preshow lectures. We’ve been holding the preshow talks in our small 99-seat space, but lately we’ve been turning away dozens of patrons due to the capacity of the hall. So I decided to give today’s talk in the Boheme rehearsal space, and setup was required!

2:00 pm Inside the Opera Preshow Talk
Being in the rehearsal hall meant that I was without my fancy-pants powerpoint presentation, but it was a good call. We had 151 patrons in attendance, and we were pleased to not have to turn anyone away.

3:00 pm Ulysses Performance #2
Packed to the gills, no house seats, no givebacks. Yikes. Nice to have a hot ticket! Fabulous performance. YouTube moments to come, I promise. As soon as I have the time.

6:10 pm Steve!
Mr. Blier himself is in the house, rehearsal with the cast for this Saturday’s Pursuit of Love. Grieg, Villa Lobos, Granados, Sondheim, Kahane, and Robinson (Smokey, that is).

7:30 pm Instant Opera Dress Rehearsal
Darth Vader and Kermit steal prom dresses from Hannah Montana. To the strains of Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti and others. The real deal begins Tuesday at 11:15am!

9:30 pm At the Desk
Catching up on email, writing Boheme supertitles, and checking my RSS feed. Which is where I found that according to the blog metrics flavor of the day, we rank surprisingly high

Tomorrow I will sit in awe of two of our performing artists (mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and pianist Jeremy Frank) as they revel in a challenge to respond to paintings by Cézanne, Chagall, Daumier, Bonnard, Monet, Lawrence and Degas. They’ve chosen songs by Libby Larsen, Henri Duparc, Fiona Apple, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, and Elton John; and they’ll perform the music in front of projections of the artwork (courtesy of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.)

If you’re a fan of ours in the Vienna, VA area, and you’re interested in coming to this mini-recital at 1:00 pm tomorrow (Thursday, June 11), drop us an email at wtoc@wolftrap.org, and we’ll reserve you a seat! (Reservations required)

(A fly-by visit to my office a few minutes ago reported that the Mark Chagall / Fiona Apple pairing is a marvelous thing:)

The paradox of blogging is that the stories that defy description are the very ones that demand to be told. Tweets and posts don’t feel like strong enough vessels to contain an evening filled with such beauty, humor, talent, and generosity of spirit.

The full house at The Barns was treated to twenty-two songs ranging from the batty (At the Mardi Gras)…

…to the heartbreaking (Haunted Heart)…

… the witty (A Summer in Ohio)…

… the jazzy (Sugar in the Cane)…

… and the… well… uh… indescribable (courtesy of Arizona Lady).

And of course, none of it would be thinkable without Steve Blier at the helm. Bravi, amici.