Thursday, August 18, 2005
Words for the day:
Wandelprobe: German word meaning literally "wander-rehearse". This is the rehearsal before the final dress.
Sitzprobe: This one means "sit-rehearse" and is the first rehearsal with orchestra and singers in which the singers remain seated.
This to say, I am singing with the Augusta Opera chorus in Jacques Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffman. I called up the office on Monday to ask about auditioning and she asked me to come 45 minutes prior to the rehearsal that evening in order to sing for the chorus director. I ended up picking Gute Nacht to sing for him and only had to sing the first stanza.
It's fun to be around trained musicians again and not just lay-musicians. Most of the people in the chorus have studied or are studying voice it seems. However, it would have been nice if the first opera I came in on was in English, German, or Italian...
French is a language I never sang in college. Somehow Dr. Winters was able to ignore that whole having to sing French thing by assigning me one French song my senior year and working on it only once. At the time I enjoyed that because I had this hatred of the French language and a great love of the German language.
I have since learned to appreciate French a lot more but I have not learned to pronounce French at all. I now regret Dr. Winters' shared dislike of the language and his failure to force me to actually work on a song or two in that language as it means that a) if I study voice when I'm doing graduate work I'll have to make up for lost time, b) I'll need to work hard on it if I ever decide to do any French music as a choral director, an c) it means I actually have to work pretty hard to learn this opera music (and the Pavane by Gabriel Fauré that the ACS is doing in the fall).
If this opera were in one of the other three languages I could practically sight read it -- I'm that profecient in singing German and Italian. I would also have a much, much easier time memorizing the music.
I wrote all the dates for the rehearsals into my calender today. With the exception of the three weeks prior to the performances it'll be a pretty easy schedule with just Monday night rehearsals.
Three weeks before there are three evening staging rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights as well as a two part all-day staging rehearsal on Saturday. That means I'll miss ACS that week, and probably church on the Wednesday night for work.
Two weeks before is basically the same except instead of a Saturday rehearsal there is a piano tech rehearsal at the college PAC in the evening. Of course I'm going to have to skip out on the ACS council meeting that night since it'll run from 6-7 and I'd have to bust my tail to make it downtown by 7 without missing half the meeting.
The week of we have the piano dress on Monday night and the wendleprobe on Tuesday. Final dress is on Wednesday night and then we sing Friday and Saturday nights.
If any of you fine readers of my blog will be in the Augusta area on the 23rd or 24th of September you should come see us! I promise it'll be a wonderful production if it comes close to the other two operas I've seen them do. Wonderful set design and wonderful music. Seriously, if you want to and can please come.
In other news, there is no other news. :) Work goes on, ACS goes on, church choir goes on as usual.
Well, well, well... In getting links for this post I visited my alma mater's website and have found that they have finaly gotten some good design work done on it and this includes an updated site for the music department that fits in with the rest of the site design. Good job, you did the right thing William Carey College.
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)