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We had visitors today, two people I was especially looking forward to meeting. César Parreño’s parents flew in from Ecuador to visit their son and hear next Wednesday’s concert. I am always excited to meet my students’ families, but this was something special. You...
One picture, worth 1000 words: Santiago Pizarro showing Leonardo Granados some cool Peruvian rhythms. First on drums, then at the piano, grooving to a sexy, exotic beat. It was a side of Santiago I had never seen, though I suspected it was there. The two of them had...
I don’t know how Adam Cates and Mary Birnbaum do it. They are able to sustain positive energy hour after hour as we slam this show together. Today we had an ambitious agenda, and when I heard them say “We’ll stage the four operetta numbers in two hours,” I raised an...
We had our first day of rehearsal today for this year’s NYFOS@Juilliard show, Cubans in Paris. It’s a tricky process: more than half of my cast is also rehearsing The Mother of Us All by Virgil Thomson, scheduled for performances at the Metropolitan Museum in early...
I seem to have spent the week writing about bel canto singing without posting a single aria from the bel canto era. Let’s rectify that with this beauty I found online: the young Renata Scotto singing the Mad Scene from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” It was filmed in Tokyo...
I’ve been ruminating about bel canto all week—not just the sometimes thrilling, sometimes mediocre Donizetti operas the term usually implies, but the larger meaning of “beautiful singing.” Maria Callas and Ella Fitzgerald are bel canto singers in their very different...