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Happy summer! Today is the summer solstice and here in the northern hemisphere we will see the most daylight hours we’ll have all year. I remember being enchanted by Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and marveling at how special the light seemed in the...
When I was in college I had my first encounter of actual “contemporary” music that was written for a singer. A graduate student was performing Joseph Schwantner’s Two Poems of Agueda Pizarro and I was mesmerized. Up to that point I had only heard the usual “classical”...
I used to practice yoga regularly but I’ve fallen out of it in recent years. I guess this is a gentle reminder to myself that I want to get back into it. I reaped multiple benefits from practicing yoga: physical, mental, and spiritual. The word “yoga” literally means...
Today is the first day of rehearsals for the revival of the upcoming Manning the Canon concerts. Several years have passed since our last performances and I am excited to come back to it; it's always an enlightening experience revisiting a program after some time. It...
Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a Francophile and that French is my favorite foreign language to sing. I have visited and performed in France almost yearly since the 1990s. On my first trip to Paris, Tobé Malawista, my beloved friend and colleague in The...