Monday’s theme was, “Oh, how lovely, what a talented, harmonious cast, and look how much work they did on their music!” And it was true: this year’s ensemble is a gifted group with high-class sets of pipes and excellent training. The sky would seem to be the limit.

Some of that glow is still there on Tuesday, but it is inevitably the day when Bénédicte Jourdois and I take stock of what remains to be done in order fulfill all that latent promise. Since everyone has been to the best schools, we aren’t starting at zero.

They’ve had good vocal training, lots of diction classes, dance, and acting. We’re just…reminding them, sometimes gently and sometimes with force, of things they have been taught (often by us). You haven’t lived until you’ve watched Bénédicte speed through a Victor Hugo love poem at 85 mph, cramming an entire semester’s worth of French diction into three intense minutes. “Fleur—it is a two-syllable word, fuh-leur, immense needs more ‘m,’ immmmense, stronger ‘d’ on ddddddouble…” For Chea Kang, who had been Béné’s student at Juilliard, it was familiar territory—a bracing reminder that the French language needs to be alive, not sleepy, and that she was working with not just one but two French speakers who would squawk at her in stereo if the lyrics didn’t make it to the back row. 

It always surprises me what comes easily to the current generation, and what seems antiquated—slightly out of reach—to them. For example, I had worried that a quartet of opera singers might sound improbably stiff in a song by Bob Dylan, but they relax into that piece with the greatest of ease. Sure, they sing the melody with more accuracy and more tunefulness than a dyed-in-the-wool Dylan fan might expect, but they breathe “Forever Young” into life with refreshing naturalness. All the contemporary American pieces, in fact, though not easy to master rhythmically, were excellent stylistically from the first reading.

On the other hand, the classical art songs, which I would have assumed to be squarely in their wheelhouse, are requiring a lot of painstaking, phrase by phrase work and more language coaching than I would have anticipated. I have a technique for working on a song that seems to be stuck in a rut: I make up a new accompaniment for the piece, loading my improv with all the emotional nuances and shifts of color I want to hear, while maintaining the basic harmonies and rhythms of the original. It’s so easy for an art song—really, for any piece of music—to turn into an exercise, a physical challenge that needs to be met and subdued. You repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, and finally it’s like a piece of chicken you left in the pan for too long: tough, rubbery, dry, and flavorless. So if the written accompaniment is isn’t eliciting the flexible, personal rendition of the song I am looking for, I simply play something else that does. My improvs are spontaneous and I don’t know where they come from. But they do three things: they leave the singer more space to sing their phrases (I don’t rush them), they interpret and musicalize the subtext of the poem, and more than anything they break the carpal tunnel syndrome of rote repetition. We’ve had one success this week and I daresay we’ll have a few more.