Birthday singing Tamino
This week we had our first run through Magic flute, it went well but there are lots of details to improve on the staging and I must also work on better phrasing and on the spoken text, it is already there but I must improve still my accent, I feel very comfortable asking my german colleagues whenever I have doubts or I forget in which part to emphize the sentences correctly. Like in Spanish there are many ways to say the same sentence and therefore it is always important to explore the different possiblities, and even though I have been here since few years I still have sometimes my natural clear open vowels from my native language in my spoken german so it is always important to ask in order to correct and improve littel by little. Singing Tamino is really nice and in comparison with Tebaldo from Capuleti there are very clear differences vocally speaking.
Yesterday evening 13th November we had our last performance of Capuleti for this month, next month comes another on the 10th December. It went well and the audience again was really warm and happy with our performance.
On the 12th November I had my Birthday and just turned 36 years old and I cellebrated it with rehearsals of Magic flute. Aki prepared me a lovely Japanese breakfast (grilled salmon, miso soup, rice, some veggies) and it was delicious and for lunch Japanese curry and some little cakes she bought me. At the theater an Italian mezzo colleague of us baked a cake for me and it was also really good and the colleagues sang "Happy Birthday" to me during the rehearsal, so I was happy about it.
Tonight we went to see Monteverdi's Verpers at a church under the baton of Christian Heidecker with whom I already worked but due the pandemic our Verdi Requiem project is posponed to further notice (I really hope it will happen sometime in the near future) here in Wuerzburg. The concert was really good. I sang this piece back in 2008 and really loved this work of art. It brought me a lot of memories back when I sang it in Mexico with dear colleagues and friends. I cannot say enough how much I love the baroque instruments in this piece and specially the wind instruments. There are also very nice solo for the tenors in it which I really enjoyed singing them back then and for sure would love to sing this again and even want to conduct it one day.
Tonight it remained me how I started singing baroque and now fully singing opera. I must admit I never thought back then in 2008 that would sing opera professionally. I thought back then to sing in an ensemble professionally and to travel the world doing baroque music and lots of conteporary music which I did as well. For me it was the thought of singing opera very far away. It was only when I started studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London my Masters Degree that I slowly discovered the world of opera, but even back then I tought more about being a concert singer and giving Lieder recitals more than singing opera. I always tought that singing with a full orchestra was too much for my voice and I was happy to sing chamber music and of course baroque operas but I never ever imagined I would be singing the repertoire that I have sung during the last 6 years... Nevertheless I am really happy and thankful that my teachers guided my and adviced my to sing opera and I am working hard everyday to get better at it. I really enjoy discoverying and studying different repertoire. Approaching a new role is always challenging in many ways and that keeps me wanting to improve and develop my craft.
I do however hope that baroque music will come my way again and I will be able to perform again more often this beautiful musical period that I enjoy very much singing. Until next week. I wish you all a good one.
