A young(ish) opera singer's random thoughts and observations.

Thursday 23 January 2014

Making the most of your 5 minutes - ENO Opera Works

I recently wrote up my thoughts on the last Opera Works weekend for the official course blog and you can read them here. I decided not to repaste that text here and trust that you won't hate me for making you click a few extra times. As promised in that text, I'd like to expand on what feedback we got from Christian Curnyn on Sunday, with some of the quotes also coming from Martin Constantine (course leader). I'm afraid I didn't write down who said what, and some of it is me paraphrasing what was said anyway, but hopefully it conveys the underlying sense of what they were both trying to say.

I'll start from the end, when Christian stayed behind after the session was over to take a few questions from us, and these were geared more towards professional advice than performance technique. Here is the advice he gave us in response to our questions:
On the rehearsal process:
Be meticulously prepared, but be prepared for changes, esp in translations / new productions.
Come in with ideas, but no preconceptions.
Check with baroque rep if the conductor wants you to come up with your own ornaments or not.
On auditions:
Keep still and relaxed, but have intent behind it. Have a theatre in your head.
If you think about the noise you're making, you never sing your best.
On performing Rameau:
Recitative is not free at all! It's metronomic, you can put a beat to it. That's why the time signature changes all the time, he didn't do the Mozart/Händel thing of writing it out in 4/4 and filling bars in with rests that you can (and should) leave out when performing. There should be a pulse, it's not a cat and mouse game where the continuo section follow the singers.

And now the meat of the session, remarks made on our attempts at performing our scenes. I say attempts, because we weren't trying to actually put on a final performing version of any of them, but rather trying out different ways and approaches (as I wrote on the ENO blog). To better ilustrate how 'out there' these attempts were trying to be, I've added a video below that gives you an idea of the kind of physical theatre we were trying to incorporate. I do think a lot of the things Christian said apply as general rules for good performance and I hope they will inspire the performers among you to maybe think about whether you achieve them in your own craft. As for 'audience' reading this, next time you're at the opera or theatre, check if the professionals are actually doing a good job ;)

Differentiate thoughts, don't sing the music, say the words. Especially in translation in recit, go with the text, not the musical rhythms and stresses.
Don't suspend the thought before you start to sing.
In recit - don't lock your memory to notes, lock it to words.
Ornaments are meant to move the line forward, not to stop it. Don't flag them up.
Keep the singing active by keeping the thoughts active.
Find the reason you go into song, not recit.
Keep phrases going to the end, don't weaken endings.
When using actions (Stanislavsky), don't let them become stage directions.
When appealing to gods, you have to have belief that they are in the room listening (or deliberately ignoring you). Otherwise it turns self-indulgent.
Don't slow your body down to the music. It can be a good choice in a production, but as a habit it is unhelpful.
There's nothing more artificial than opera. You have to either go against that as much as you can and find the natural, or embrace it whole-heartedly. Don't just sort of go with it.
In Handel - realise that it's already seasoned, you don't need to add anything. The emotion is in the music already, the moment you add any sentimentality to that it becomes too much. All it needs is action and thought, not more emotion.
If a gesture comes naturally to your body, don't stop it mid-flow, think what your body is trying to do and go with it without second-guessing.
Don't fall into a pattern of thought-stop-sing-think-breathe-stop-sing-slow down for ornament-stop-thought. Keep the flow.
Don't play the status - don't play king and princess, play real people. (People all feel the same way and are driven by the same things, status is a physicality)
When you talk to people, they are rarely actually listening, they are always responding by thinking ’what? so? why?'. Playing a scene is reacting to other people's reactions, it's not acting.
There needs to be direction!!!
Some arias are not in real time, they are a frozen moment. You don't have to 'stage' them.
Pointing to yourself on 'I' must be a decision, not a habit.
You have to think about how to make life difficult for your character, otherwise you'll find yourself with nothing to play.
You can be economic in movement without being economic with text and meaning (a teacher explaining).
When you're thinking of something your face is naturally quite masklike. Don't let acting face affect the singing and cut the audience off (closed eyes, scrunched face).
It's difficult in opera (esp early) not to fall into the trap of word-painting, which kills it (over-seasoning).
Slow walking is very unnatural. We don't walk slowly in real life.
Don't put on a mezzo sound. Use your voice. (Fach determines what repertoire you sing, not how you sing it).
Signposting and overtelling aren't truthful and don't travel well. Face-acting - few people pull faces in real life situations, but singers do it all the time, because of our need to tell every aspect of the story.
If you try to tell  the audience a complex story, it becomes vague. Try telling one aspect of it and trusting them to intuit the rest.

And now have a look at this and try to imagine opera singers doing it in a handelian aria:





Thursday 9 January 2014

Whatever you do, don't mention the fees!

While I am still ill, I will try and make this post more coherent than the last. I was inspired today by Christopher Gillett's blog post about singers' fees, and how it made me think of various times I found out that I or one of my colleagues was paid less than everyone else (sometimes despite singing a bigger part!), or that a fixer/organiser took a huge cut for themselves without telling the performer.

As Mr Gillett points out, these things happen for various reasons, not always nefarious by nature. No one would argue with the notion that experience and reputation should influence the money a performer is paid, as should the size of the part undertaken. The lack of rehearsal pay is a baffling phenomenon that I guess I'll just have to get over and live with, but the variation in fees that sometimes has nothing to do with the valid reasons listed above (and it does happen, in opera as well as in oratorio) seems to me to be facilitated by the performers themselves.

As a student I was never sat down and told what the financial realities of the job were, and I felt awkward asking. Nowadays when I talk to my agent I get an idea of what the reasonable rates can be, and having recently become a member of Equity I have access to what they consider the minimum rates to be. As I mentioned a while ago, money is not the only consideration when accepting/declining work, but let's face it, sooner or later the 'I guess that a guy gotta eat' mentality does kick in. 

I mentioned that we ourselves as performers facilitate the sometimes unfair phenomenon of varying fees. Mr Gillett's blog refers to the unspoken agreement that one doesn't talk about fees... Funny that no one ever told us students how much we can expect to be paid, but I was told 'whatever you do, don't ask others how much they're getting'. It's part of the culture. The intention may well be to keep money out of art, not spoil the rehearsal room atmosphere with the rude matter of pay. Maybe back in the day when everyone was making a decent living from it (was there ever such a time?) this made sense, but now that funding cuts abound and companies are forced to search for savings wherever they can have we not given them the perfect smokescreen to cut a few corners without fear of causing upset? After all, the young singer who has no agent will indeed be grateful for the opportunity, and will have their peers jealous of the fact they're working at all... Why would the singer in question risk rocking the boat and asking whether what they're getting paid matches up to what their college year-mate (who happens to have an agent and is singing a considerably smaller part) is getting?  

I'm not saying it happens everywhere all the time, but it does happen. We don't know how common or rare it is, because we ourselves don't talk about it. Are we doing ourselves a favour? Would changing the culture and being more open about fees only sour the atmosphere without really changing anything? I do think more and more young singers are getting frustrated by the lack of information, and some change in attitudes may be on the cards. Personally I've always found that any pressure to not talk about something gives the impression of something fishy going on...

Well, not always ;)


Monday 6 January 2014

I'm ill, therefore I post

Unfortunately I start 2014 with a cold, which prevents me from doing anything too productive due to concentration issues, and also offers an abundance of sleepless free time in which to ponder things. So be warned: I am about to loosely ponder the phenomenon of opera. It's not constructive, or revelatory, but it might inspire you to do something, like maybe go to the opera and take a friend.

The past month has seen my first ever trip to that most hallowed theatre: The Royal Opera House. I went to see Parsifal, but I'm not going to write about the show itself, but rather about the thoughts that were going through my head in the show's two long intervals as well as the long bus ride home. You see, I'd gone to the opera alone, which was a first for me, and being alone I had no one to talk to, but a lot of people around me to observe.

In my sight-seeing walks around the theatre I got to see opera in a slightly new light. Even from the booking process of my day ticket I knew this was going to be weird, when the incredibly well-spoken box office salesperson on the phone offered me tickets ranging from £10 for a standing place with restricted view (not ideal for 5.5 hours of Wagner) to a whopping  £260... I settled for a seat in the gods, over 100m from the stage I'd guess, and invested in a pair of binoculars to help me follow the action. I'm glad I did, because from that distance, all I could get from the acting singers on stage was the singing and a sense of stage presence (or lack thereof)... No acting subtelty travels that far unfortunately.

People do go however! They sit miles away from the action for a fraction of the money the fortunate gentry downstairs pay. They eat sandwiches in stairwells or sitting on the floor in the maze of corridors. A gentleman behind me said it was his third outing to see Parsifal (once in the stalls to see it, and in the Gods thereafter, because it sounds better up there).

In what other art form will you get an audience as diverse? From the people in top-price seats sipping champagne at the bar in the interval, or tucking into a fancy meal in the restaurant, to those who came prepared to stand for 5 hours and only see half the stage, bringing their own food. I should add that the night I saw the performance it was going out live to cinemas worldwide, so to our various types of audience we must add those who chose to see it that way (and pay only slightly more than those standing in the theatre).

There is obviously an audience for opera out there, and there are cheap ways of getting to see it. I appreciate it's difficult, because opera is such an expensive beast. Going to see an opera, you watch 60-100 highly-trained musicians performing (orchestra, chorus, soloists), backed up by a backstage army of stage managers, costumiers, admin staff, music staff, technicians, etc. Add to that the huge sets, costumes, rehearsal time and space, running costs of the theater... Yes, tickets costing over £100 sell very well and yet all companies need additional funding or else run at a loss. It's a huge machine, bigger than most people imagine. The people you see and hear in performance are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of people who work incredibly hard to bring you the show you're watching.

I was glad to see a healthier mix of ages among the audience than I was expecting. I am painfully aware that in my own generation, apart from those who work in 'the business', hardly any of my friends ever go to operas. Despite me trying to convince them it's worth at least going once. It is the only spectacle of its kind, powered primarily by human talent rather than technical gimmicks, with that theatrical power of touching each and every person in the audience with its stories, and yet existing in such a grand scale... Ok, so do musicals, but opera is much more human in so many ways (more people performing live and unamplified for one thing).

Yes, opera sometimes difficult (musically, plot-wise, language-wise, etc), but then again not as difficult as most people think, and even when it's challenging it can still be enjoyable. Some things will elude us, but at the same time some will touch or intrigue us. And despite training for years to be an opera singer, when I'm in the audience it's the same for me.

I find it worrying that people my age almost never consider going to the opera. I often wonder if I'll have an audience in 20 years time. I am at times frustrated that opera companies don't seem to have any good ideas to bring new audiences in (not that I do... It's obviously not just about cheaper tickets, it's a matter of brand identity). Sometimes I hate how exclusive an opera audience can feel even to me.

But then I see the people in the stairwells eating their sandwiches before going to stand through another 2 hours of Parsifal because they love it, I hear about fantastic outreach projects in schools, I hear about the successes of community operas and pieces written for children, I hear that despite being unfairly expensive (a ticket to a Met broadcast in a cinema in London costs only slightly more than a normal film, whereas in Krakow it is 4x more) the cinema relays from ROH and the Met sell out in my home town.

I just hope there is enough of the good stuff happening to get people interested. If you're an opera lover and you read this, why not make a New Year's resolution to find someone who's never been to the opera before and convince them to try? I've done it before and it stuck quite well! Just don't take them to a bad show...