Vacation over, I’m cooling my heals at Rome airport. Looking back at Montisi, that little hill town in the photo, reminds me how much I needed to clear my head and charge my batteries. Now I’m ready to do more in Sibiu.
Nice to have my computer so I can seek confirmation from Garcia’s text. His text and my proximity to my latest teaching activity get the old brain cells working.
Garcia keeps cheering me on as I read and remember the Rome Master class sessions. I spent gobs of time pushing singers to express the emotions and character traits of the person the singer was to impersonate. I was fortunate to have students with the technical preparation sufficient to the task and ready to accept the advice. The results were striking. For bright shining moments there were artists in front of me, not just technically proficient vocalists delivering the notes written by the composer and distinctly pronouncing the words of the librettist so that we could understand them. I saw and heard those distinctly proficient artists rip the dead words and music out of the printed score and put their own lives into them. According to my perception, the singers disappeared and the Opera Characters emerged.
In Part 2 on pages 138 -175, Garcia reminded me of how much more he wants me to teach these young people. The tenor is willing but time is short. Those 38 pages are so full I can’t begin to write about them in this blog, but I can stuff everything into Garcia’s Toolbox.
The new drawer is labeled: Expression.