June 6, 2010

Footsore in the morning, from the wearing of bad shoes for the concert, and they were brown shoes with a tuxedo, so things were a disaster, foot-wise, from one end to the other. The second annual “Taste of Opera” was fun, if less well attended than one would have thought for all the hoopla. The opera patrons are even older than the patrons at NC Stage. How did we sound? I have no idea. I was not confident, but neither did I feel I’d made a mistake. The Diana Wortham is very dry and you hear nothing on stage. This does not matter in a stage play, but when singing it can be disorienting. We climbed the balcony to hear the other acts, and they were, by and large–with the exception of the tenor who sang Mozart and later Tony in West Side Story– flat and–with the effort to get the sound in their own ears– a little strident. What impressed me was that the singers were good actors, and gave a sense of the moment in their selection rather than just planting their feet and singing. BF was there, his intimidating beauty softened with time. Actually, I wouldn’t have know him until I heard him sing. He wondered why I had stopped sending him e-mail updates of my life. The answer was because I couldn’t imagine that he’d be interested, though apparently he was. A few of the voices were too big for the room, and sounded distorted, like an amp turned too high. The handsome dark-haired bass sounded like a Tartarean vacuum-cleaner when he began, though I think he heard it and focused his tone so by the end his voice was blue fire. DCS said twice how he’d like to get me back on the opera stage. Did he forget he fired me, or did I somehow misinterpret that event? All in all, the events of last evening were unfamiliar enough to me that I keep turning them over in my mind. I have done opera, ballet, drama, and have found that the kindest and least diva-like people are in the opera, and that the hardest-to-comprehend traditions are in the ballet, and by far the most doubtful training is in the theater. This says nothing about the end products, though, and I find that curious. Often the actor with the least training is the most electrifying on stage. This is never the case with opera or dance. Both opera and dance strive for a perfection that is, by and large, pre-ordained and will be welcomed with a joyful familiarity. Yet only mediocre theater wishes to recreate perfections of the past, while good theater hopes to astonish with some new height or nuance which is the accident of the moment.

Sitting beside Jonathan Ross is a music lesson. He makes me realize how sloppy and inattentive my music-making is. He holds every beat out its full value, observes every marking, divines which note to skip by with a touch and which to bring to full resonant bloom. He makes mistakes, but never the same one twice. I catch myself singing as though the car were double parked or I have something better to be doing. You’d think I’d overcome the imperfections of my voice with more attentive application, but the fact is I’m generally singing with people less accomplished than myself, so half-assed begins to seem like enough.

I must stop buying cheap shoes.

The hydrangeas bloom en masse– that blessed blue, ultramarine and snow, Mary’s mantel blue.

Deleted a book I wrote years ago– Canticle for the End of Christendom. It was meant to be a sort of summa theologica, but it was mostly just angry, punishing, settling scores, embarrassing the idiotic, blasting the hypocrites. I must have been very angry for a very long time.