Caramoor Vocal Rising Stars, Day Four: Mecca slowing coming into view, on a road strewn with umlauts

Today the singers showed us the staging they did for the encore after Mikey and I left last night. I won’t divulge what piece we’re doing because I want it to be a surprise. But they came up with something devilishly clever and pretty sexy. There is a lot of thrilling singing in our show, and a lot of moving material—Sarah, Julia, Theo, and Toby break my heart (and Mikey’s too) on an hourly basis. But it was great to see them do something playful. I also received a video yesterday evening of Toby singing one of his Sibelius songs solemnly accompanying himself on a vibraphone they found in the basement of their residence, while Sarah (holding the phone-camera) is shrieking with laughter. I think the four of them have become a family, and thank God not one of those depressed, dysfunctional Ingmar Bergman families.

Thinking back on the week, I am remembering a Julia moment on Tuesday, when John Lidal was working with us. She was singing a very famous song by Grieg called “En svane”—she’d asked for the piece and I happily put it on the program to oblige her. It has a poem by Ibsen. Sixteen bars in, she stops singing and goes into “I can’t sing this piece, I don’t understand it, there’s something that doesn’t make sense.” I start in patiently explaining the poem when I suddenly realize that after knowing this song for forty years I don’t quite get it either. It talks about a swan who sings, of course, just before dying, In the middle, though, it has a line about “But at our last meeting, when vows and glances were secret lies…” We look at John. “Um, vows, glances, secret lies. Explain.”

John clears his throat and says, “Well. Who knows if this is true, but legend has it that there was a woman who was in love with Ibsen for years, and she never told him till she was dying. And that’s what the song is really about—a confession of love from a death-bed.” “Not a swan?” “Not a swan.” Silence. I open my mouth to say something but Julia gets there first. “Let’s sing it again.” Of course it was a totally different song. The miracle was twofold: first, Julia looked at that text and saw there was an unexplained mystery, and she did so in the presence of a man (our beloved John Lidal) who could actually unlock the door.