Week One

Buongiorno ragazzi!

This post will be much easier on the mind (eyes?) than my last one. It has been a fantastic few days. The program where I am studying is unbelievable. The combination of fantastic teachers, coaches, and singers has really made the past week and a half some of the most exciting time as a student of singing.

But first a little bit about Arezzo:

The greater metro area hosts about 100,000 people, but within the city walls (yep, Arezzo's that cool) it is mostly shops, restaurants, bars, cafes, and pizza places. However, we live about a two-minute walk away from the main square, Piazza Grande, so we are right in the heart of everything. In true Italian fashion, I live in an apartment with nine other guys. We cook our food, wash our clothes, and solve the world's problems (which may or may not involve wine) in our community kitchen. Perhaps my favorite part about living in this city is its effervescent vitality. There is always something going on. There are about six long streets in the city that are only for walking with shops, bars, cafes, etc. lining the walk. We live next to the Corso Italia, which is the biggest and busiest of them all. No matter if you are walking there during the midmorning or 22:00, people are everywhere. Saturday nights are the craziest. Italian tweens all congregate in their gendered groups and stare at the opposite gender's groups across the street. It's really quite quaint.

It's exciting because I'm able to pick up on more of what people are saying now. This can be both good and bad. Last night I was walking with a group of fellow singers (and pianists). I overheard a group of Italian guys look in our direction and say "Americana." I was about to correct their incorrect gender grammar to say "Americani", but then I realized he had probably not made a mistake... We are pretty popular here whether we like it or not.

This whole week has been a wild ride of coachings, lessons, rehearsals, and concerts. I’ve been working with some of the best coaches in the nation—professors from Manhattan School of Music, Academy of Vocal Arts, Curtis, Julliard, and of course Oberlin. I’ve finally begun to understand the difference between a voice teacher and a vocal coach. Voice teachers focus on bigger things; vocal coaches focus on language, diction, rhythm, and affect. But mostly they nitpick . . . and nitpick . . . and nitpick some more. However, this is such a good thing because by the time you’ve had three different coachings on the same song, you come out with a very polished product. (The alternative ending to that story is that you have three credible people saying contradictory things and YOU, the un-credible one, have to decide whom to believe…Gah!) One of the more difficult things to procure here in Italy is a space to practice. There are nine rooms that have pianos in the university where we work, and during the majority of the day they are used by lessons, coachings, and rehearsals. So, the remaining two hours are divvied up into thirty-minute slots, which leaves each person here (about 70 singers and 4 pianists) less than one thirty-minute practice session every day. Luckily, some people are less motivated than me, so I’ve been able to do pretty well with practice time. My pianist friends are less lucky, as they are used to practicing about 4-6 hours a day and can only get about 2 hours here.

The group I’m in is called the Concert Group, so we are the ambassadors—singing around Arezzo and in neighboring towns throughout the duration of the program. In total we perform about ten times over the six weeks. It’s actually probably the perfect fit for me, because everyone in the other two groups (the operas, and the opera scenes) only learn their respective opera music over the course of their time here, whereas we get to sing new music pretty much every week. I would much rather leave here knowing about 6 arias and a couple scenes instead of an opera role. It’s more practical in my station.

Glad you made it through the “Boring Singer Part” of the blog post? Yeah, me too. So let’s move on. We’ve already had three performances with three entirely different sets of music. On Wednesday, we went to the mayor’s office and sang the chorus “Va Pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, which is practically the Italian national anthem (so those stray “s” sounds and word slips were really embarrassing…). The mayor’s office was at the top of the hill and it afforded one of the best views in town where we could peer out over the town and the surrounding countryside.

On Thursday we had our first “real” concert (with real Italians in the audience!). In addition to two chorus numbers (“Libiamo” and “Va Pensiero”), each singer sang two arias. I sang Figaro’s first aria from Le Nozze di Figaro (“Se Vuol Ballare”) and a beautifully sad lament from Bellini’s I Puritani (“Or dove fuggio mai . . . Ah per sempre”). I will say that it was a very real experience to sing Italian songs for Italian people—you realize exactly why all your coaches were nitpicking your Italian diction. They understand it, they want to be entertained, and they love it. Consequently, when they don’t understand it, they’re not entertained, and they don’t love it. Also, for those fledgling singers out there, you need to know your translations . . .. If you don’t you can’t act your part properly. I was struck by the vibrancy of the entire night—opera is certainly not a dying art form in Italy. The concert was in the Museo Ivan Bruschi, who among other things owned a lot of weapons presumably. Our improvised green room was right next to his arsenal, so if that’s not an inspiration to go sing about love and loss, I don’t know what is.

On Friday, we had our “American Night” concert. This is an outdoor concert where American singers (mostly) sing American songs to the delight and merriment of the Italian bourgeois. However, we had a few hitches that hindered our performance. Our directions were to be at the Piazza San Francesco at 16:00 for a sound check, but we showed up and there was no piano and no microphone. Okay, we thought, why don’t we just reconvene at 20:00, an hour before the show, and we will sound check then. We returned to find our beautiful grand piano waiting out there, but there wasn’t a microphone in sight. So, everyone started panicking because, to be honest, we wouldn't have been heard by people who were five feet in front of the singer. The combination of people laughing, babies crying, marching bands playing (Yep. You read that correctly. Arezzo has a yearly joust where the four quarters of the city select knights who represent their part of town. The actual joust is next weekend, but each knight was paraded around the city with drums and trumpets and horses and full costumes, etc.) would be too much for our measly little voices. By the time we were supposed to start singing, a pretty sizable crowd had gathered, but still there were no mikes. Ten minutes passed, twenty, half an hour, forty-five minutes, and finally a full hour after we were supposed to start, the microphones and speakers showed up (in other news, Italian roadies look the exact same as their American counterparts). In true Italian fashion, they were only about six hours late. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, for during the entirety of our mike-strike, our crowd had been sampling the local wines and beers, so they were plenty excited to hear us by the time we started performing. The concert went well though. Some of the highlights: the Italians cheering every time we sang a Frank Sinatra song and hearing the Russian memberof our group, Alexandra Maximinoff,  sing American songs—I can't really replicate a Russian accent via text, but just imagine the strong glottal pops and rich eastern-bloc timbre singing "Someone to Watch Over Me." It was fantastic.

Everything else has been fantastic. We have a day off today and are planning to visit the local countryside. I already can tell that it's going to be a sad day when we have to leave. I'm getting really close to my two roommates, Jonathan and James, who are both pianists. (Consequently, I have also now heard about every single work by Chopin at some point in this trip. I'm not complaining.) We are having an awesome time living with the rest of the group in our apartment. Currently, there's a conversation about Billie Holiday going on in the kitchen (the walls are thin). The church bells have been ringing since about 6:30 this morning. 

I'm living in Italy, with all its Romantic charm, and I'm loving it. Enjoy these pictures of our room!

More later.