I have always had a complex relationship with the piano. But I have an especially complex relationship with the piano I am playing this week at Poquatuck Hall. Oysterponds Community Activities, the hall’s parent organization, proudly bought the piano several years ago, and it was a major upgrade from the weather-beaten wreck it replaced. But when I first sat down to play it, I had the oddest sensation of déjà-vu. In fact, I felt as if I were seeing a ghost.
Read MoreWednesday is always the last play-day. People are still giggling over their memory slips, I calmly look the other way when I play a wrong note (which means I am looking the other way quite often), and a certain amount of experimentation remains the order of the day. Sunday’s performance seems centuries away. Everything changes tomorrow, when the glass is definitely half-empty. But today we were in the song-sandbox all afternoon, with the glass safely half-full.
Read MoreThe music is pouring out of everyone—heartbreak from Kelsey, brio from Christine, panache from Miles. I feel as if I am driving a very fast chariot à la Ben-Hur, hoping to emerge victorious like Charlton Heston.
Read MoreThat whole song is full of double-entendres, and a lot of them come from old slang expressions. “Neither one knew where the trash is” rhymes with “someone to haul the ashes.” I mentioned it was a phrase you might see in a classic blues song. By this time Christine pulled out her phone to look it up online. “It says: ‘to have sexual intercourse.’ Wait, here’s Urban Dictionary: ‘to have sex, homo or hetero, usually casual, but wild, hot, monkey sex.’” “OK, well, then, you get the picture?” She did.
Read MoreI met Cyndia Sieden outside her voice lesson at Marlena Malas’s studio in 1982. She was a breath of fresh air—guileless and smart, an unbeatable combo. We seemed to fall into one another’s confidence instantly. I was fascinated by her name, which happens to be the same as that of a character in Massenet’s opera “Le roi de Lahore.” Only…it’s the baritone role. I pulled the LPs off Marlena’s shelf to show Cyndia, and the sight of her name attached to a picture of a glowering, mustachioed Sherrill Milnes made us laugh like kids.
Read MoreSasha Cooke walked into my studio at Juilliard twelve years ago, bringing songs from Fauré’s La chanson d’Eve. My life instantly took a turn for the better. From the beginning Sasha had That Sound—I describe her voice as the love child of Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson—rich, intense, somehow fruity and folky at the same time. I knew I wanted to be one of her musical partners for life, also sensing that I would have to share her with a lot of other folks. (Thank God I had learned to be polyamorous as a musician.)
Read MoreWilliam Sharp has been my most enduring song partner. We met at Aspen in 1978, where he was a fellowship student and I was…whatever I was. An apprentice coach or something. The first thing I remember working on with Bill was the Act I duet from Don Pasquale, what’s known as the “Rehearsal Duet” for Norina and Malatesta. My boss Richard Pearlman, always a musical yenta, had given him a big build-up before our first meeting. This, of course, only made me more skeptical.
Read MoreIt is amazing what you can find on the internet. Trawling YouTube for this week’s videos, I nonchalantly typed “Blier Fleming” into its search engine. There were a few clips I already knew about, but also something I had not seen before: a performance of the Rondine aria “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta.” No pianist was listed, but it came from a concert in Barcelona’s Palau de la Música in 1999. Hmm, wasn’t that when I was in Spain with Renée, accompanied by my brother Malcolm and my newish boyfriend (now husband) Jim?
Read MoreSo let’s start with a love story: soprano Corinne Winters, whom I first heard when she auditioned for New York City Opera. A recent graduate of AVA in Philadelphia, she sang Manon’s entrance aria “Je suis encore tout étourdie,” and the third-act Bohème aria. Her voice intrigued and puzzled me. It was dark but very free at the top. While she had the lightness to soar up to an easy high E in the Massenet piece, she also demonstrated the rich timbre of a Verdi singer.
Read MoreOne of the anomalies of my life as an artistic director is that I have to think about Christmas in June. Our annual Goyishe Christmas program at Henry’s is set for December 12, and it would be smart to get a cast assembled sooner than later. It’s been a little easier to turn my mind to GC this year because it has been so cold outside. I seriously thought about wearing a scarf on Wednesday, and now wish I had
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