Let’s not bury the lede: the hall was full (I feared that we’d have a sparse crowd), and the reception was rapturous. For once, that descriptor is not hyperbole. The hall in Orient is not large, and there is the palpable sense of a community coming together for a shared experience, an annual gift. People come up to us and thank us personally for bringing our music to them, and I always have the sense that each individual audience member is absorbing something essential during the afternoon. They are not there to judge or evaluate, but simply to revel in good songs and beautiful, young talent. 

I certainly was able to supply them with those crucial elements. This is the fourth time I have done an operetta program, and it was the best of them, more concise, more surprising, more varied. Philip told me last night that as a performer the range of performance styles in his material felt like being in six different plays during the course of two hours: comedy of manners, farce, political drama, romance, vaudeville, pastorale. And I had moment after moment where I felt the electricity of the singer-to-listener connection: Scott seducing the crowd like an experienced roué with his aria from Lehár’s “Paganini,” Philip’s inspired, be-turbaned lunacy as a horny, highfalutin’ Maharajah. But perhaps my peak moment came when Adriana sang the climactic phrases in the aria from La rondine, which we’d worked on all week: a divine high C held for just the right length, an un-rushed pause, and then a pianissimo high B-flat timed to perfection. Gorgeous. I am a voice-guy, and it meant everything to me to watch her take control of the music—and of the crowd—like an assured professional. (A lot of those professionals, by the way, would kill to have her instrument.) It was so beautiful that I instantly got choked up and almost cried.