I shouldn’t have been surprised at the power of In the Memory Palace—but I was. The quattro staggioni effect of four song cycles, each of them intense and utterly different from one another, worked even more magic than I had expected. The beauty of not being especially confident is that good experiences still fill me […]
Read MoreMoving to Merkin from our Washington venue was a bit like going from dating Twiggy to dating Gina Lollabrigida. Our Washington space was a Bombay martini; Merkin is graciously reverberant, and it sure LOVES the piano. We spent a pleasant afternoon adjusting to the new (but by now familiar) acoustics—both its challenges and its possibilities. […]
Read MoreIt sounds simple: you leave town to make music in another locale, and then you come home. But touring is seldom a bed of roses, and this bed was unusually thorny. Dramas abounded. When we got to Union Station in Washington on Friday night, our specially pre-ordered cab (with a ramp for my wheelchair) had […]
Read MoreToday is my late father’s 100th birthday. One of the cast members took his photograph down from my windowsill and put it on my coffeetable—the Danish Modern one I inherited from him. It gave my dad a ringside seat for the six-plus hours of rehearsal today, and I think he enjoyed it. I mean, he […]
Read MoreA recent NYFOS tradition: the roadside display of personalized mugs for rehearsals at my place. I spend too much time thinking about who gets assigned which color.
Read MoreAs I get ready to rehearse Granados’s Tonadillas, I’ve been tempted to listen compulsively to other performances of them—I have about six recordings on my iPod. But I realized that rather than torture myself hearing de los Angeles and Gerald Moore for the ninetieth time, I’d do better to spend that time slugging it out […]
Read MoreI had a revelation yesterday afternoon that may surprise you. It certainly surprised me. To be a good citizen, I went up to Caramoor for the afternoon. They were giving a special concert honoring their four mentoring programs, and since I am the artistic director of one of them, the Vocal Rising Stars, I felt […]
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