I guess it was inevitable. Wednesday was come-to-Jesus time, and on Thursday we welcomed Mary. Not the Sainted Mother, but stage director Mary Birnbaum, our Guest Artist this week. We’d all wanted some help staging the two group numbers and the two boys’ duets. I also nurtured a hidden desire that Mary might do a […]
Read MoreThe fourth day of rehearsal is always the come-to-Jesus moment; it’s the last day you can really work in depth, get to the fundamentals, take on the big issues. There is something I want each cast member to focus on as we head towards Sunday’s performance, but by tomorrow they’ll be very focused on memory, […]
Read MoreToday was notable for two things. One: Meredith managed to charm Frank, the owner of the best ice cream store in Greenport—it’s called D’Latte—and showed up at rehearsal with two pints of world-class sorbet and a bag of gluten-free biscotti. The mint-lemon sorbet almost derailed rehearsal, when I had a momentary delusion that I would […]
Read MoreThe weather outside was on the cool and cloudy side. Inside, though, it was pretty sunny—a lovely day of making music. Not that there weren’t some obstacles. It seems that today was the only time the repairman could come to fix a broken door at Poquatuck Hall, so the first three-plus hours of our rehearsal […]
Read MoreWe just had the first day of NYFOS@North Fork, our newest Emerging Artist Program. I’ve nurtured this dream for a number of years and—as if in preparation—I’d done a few concerts out here in Orient, Long Island, in past years. Orient is the easternmost point on the North Fork, and has a serenity unlike anyplace […]
Read MoreIt’s funny—the minute a concert is over, life washes in like a tidal wave, and all the things that I’ve put on hold scream for immediate attention. Therefore: a belated log-in about Tuesday’s show. I worried that we might not have much of a house because my former student Naomi O’Connell was having her official […]
Read MoreVocal Rising Stars at Caramoor, fifth season, days seven and eight: out-of-town debut, in-town dress. Two halls, two pianos. It’s the night before the New York show and I do not want to jinx things. Suffice it to say that we had a beautiful performance yesterday, and that the audience at Caramoor who came to […]
Read MoreVocal Rising Stars at Caramoor, fifth season, day six: reassuring dress rehearsal. Final Lock and Load, tray tables up. We had an amazingly good dress rehearsal today, and I couldn’t be happier with the program or the singers. I even had one of my first above-average days at the piano, which was a huge relief. […]
Read MoreCaramoor Vocal Rising Stars, Day Five: Resilience and Breakthroughs. A faux-blizzard only makes it all the more Scandinavian. It was the third day Michael and I couldn’t get to Caramoor for our morning session, this time because of a very wet snowstorm that made driving conditions somewhere between irritating and dangerous. We waited till 11:45 […]
Read MoreCaramoor Vocal Rising Stars, Day Four: Mecca slowing coming into view, on a road strewn with umlauts Today the singers showed us the staging they did for the encore after Mikey and I left last night. I won’t divulge what piece we’re doing because I want it to be a surprise. But they came up with […]
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