Near Easter each year, Dr Hochs Konservatorium and the German Musician's Association host and sponsor the singing technique seminar "Free the Voice". Cornelius Reid himself gave the masterclass for the first 10 years and handed the reigns over to Carol Baggott-Forte, when, at 92 years of age, he decided it was too much to travel to Europe. I first attended the seminar in 1996 and have been hooked on Funtional Voice Training ever since. I attended every year when Cornelius was still coming, traveled to New York City to have lessons with him and found myself teachers employing his theories here in Germany. The first year Carol took the masterclass over I was only in town for 1 day, so I listened and was impressed. She seems to channel Cornelius in mannerisms, but she has her own style. She is extremely knowledgeable and yet intuitive, combined with a kind of fearlessness she gets amazing results in a short period of time, just like Cornelius did.
It always seemed to be the same situation, that I was traveling when Carol was in Frankfurt and so I had one lesson with her until 2006. By that time I'd moved to London and was gladly informed that she was doing a seminar in Brighton, just a short train ride away. It was amazing. I had had a bad cold, basically losing my voice and 3 weeks later it hadn't really recovered. I was still having trouble with notes in the upper passaggio and above and I was traveling to the US the week after the seminar to sing concerts with Elysium. Ack! Carol worked magic on my voice, took me in a new direction, which has turned out to be the beginning of wonderful changes in my voice and technique and I felt like I'd never sung better! Since then I've attended nearly every class Carol has given in Europe traveling to Lyon and Paris, France and to Frankfurt and also organized for Carol to teach in Hannover in February.
This years seminar was a good experience. I was able to attend for an entire week, listening to lessons for upwards of 6 hours a day and having 3 lessons myself. Unfortunately, I had had a(nother) cold just after the St. John's Passion concert and was still hacking up pflegm from under my larynx just days before going to Frankfurt. I had a lesson on the first day of the seminar and the cords were still swollen. They decided they were done after about 15 minutes. Until then it was a very good lesson. :-) I waited until the end of the week to take the other 2 lessons and they were great.
I wanted to insert the recording of my last lesson that I made on my phone, but for some reason it won't upload. Sigh.
Listening to lessons is a very valuable experience as well and I always try to listen to as many as I can. It's interesting to hear the progression from one lesson to the next as well. Carol's focus is more and more on professional singers and teachers of singing, so the level of the singers attending is quite high. There's not a whole lot of relevance for my own teaching since I teach beginners, young singers and amateurs for the most part, but it's ear-training which is all-important.
And the great news is that it appears Carol is serious about moving to Europe for at least part of the year. Her husband is Italian and she really enjoys doing these seminars here so they are now taking steps to make it a reality. She doesn't know where they'll "settle", but anywhere in Europe would be really helpful and facilitate any classes she gives around Europe. w00t!!!
Friday, May 08, 2009
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Report: St. John's Passion / Johannespassion - Wiesbaden
Man am I behind! I sang the soprano solos in the St. John Passion at the Bergkirche (Hill Church) in Wiesbaden over a month ago! In my defense, you might remember that when I returned I was still in the midst of my enforced (by our ISP) internet-less period. Then, Magnus and I took off for our Easter visit to the In-laws in Italy. I had about 24 hours at home before I left for Frankfurt where Carol Baggott-Forte was teaching for a week. I'll write about that in a subsequent post.
Anyway. Overall, my experience was a good one. I had an easy trip to Wiesbaden, arriving quite early. The other soloists were very nice, which is always a plus and I had a chance to chat with the Alto soloist (who actually lives in Hannover too) and the Bass soloist. I was a little nervous for the rehearsal, which I attribute to wondering so much whether I was prepared enough and concerned that it had been so long since I sang in such a production. My singing wasn't stellar in the rehearsal, but it wasn't horrible either.
I stayed with my good friend and colleague, Bastian Baumann, who played the portative organ for the Passion. That was a stroke of luck because we were able to run through my arias at his house on the day of the concert. Bastian has a lovely way of getting the best out of me, giving clear suggestion as to how to improve things. He does this in such an encouraging way and that helped to calm my nerves.
The church was full to the brim and there were several of my former pupils from Frankfurt as well as my friend Caroline in the audience. We soloists were able to sit with our backs to the audience when we weren't singing, which for me was a God-send. The soprano soloist has but two arias to sing in this oratorio and Bach was so kind as to put one within the first 15 minutes and the 2nd (more difficult one) within the last 15 minutes. If that doesn't sound like a bad thing to you, then picture sitting in a cold church for an hour and a half between arias while your voice and your body falls asleep. Sitting facing the orchestra and choir meant that I could discreetly sing along with the choir and thereby keep my voice alive. It worked beautifully and I was even more satisfied with the 2nd aria (Zerfliesse mein Herze) that I was with the first (Ich folge dir gleichfalls).
Overall, I'd say the quality of this production was extremely high. The choir was, as usual, excellent and Christian Pfeifer (the Music Director and conductor) put together a fantastic baroque orchestra. I can't wait to hear the recording. When I get it I'll post my arias for your listening pleasure either here or at MySpace (providing the link, of course) or both.
The one review that appeared in the local paper after the concert was quite favorable all in all. The critic was slightly less impressed with my performance that with the other soloists, writing "Diane Severson proved to be very discreet and agile, she could, however, gain a bit more aplomb." I actually felt rather calm during the concert and could concentrate well on singing the music and being in the moment, but I guess I can't be surprised or wonder much about the critique.
Anyway. Overall, my experience was a good one. I had an easy trip to Wiesbaden, arriving quite early. The other soloists were very nice, which is always a plus and I had a chance to chat with the Alto soloist (who actually lives in Hannover too) and the Bass soloist. I was a little nervous for the rehearsal, which I attribute to wondering so much whether I was prepared enough and concerned that it had been so long since I sang in such a production. My singing wasn't stellar in the rehearsal, but it wasn't horrible either.
I stayed with my good friend and colleague, Bastian Baumann, who played the portative organ for the Passion. That was a stroke of luck because we were able to run through my arias at his house on the day of the concert. Bastian has a lovely way of getting the best out of me, giving clear suggestion as to how to improve things. He does this in such an encouraging way and that helped to calm my nerves.
The church was full to the brim and there were several of my former pupils from Frankfurt as well as my friend Caroline in the audience. We soloists were able to sit with our backs to the audience when we weren't singing, which for me was a God-send. The soprano soloist has but two arias to sing in this oratorio and Bach was so kind as to put one within the first 15 minutes and the 2nd (more difficult one) within the last 15 minutes. If that doesn't sound like a bad thing to you, then picture sitting in a cold church for an hour and a half between arias while your voice and your body falls asleep. Sitting facing the orchestra and choir meant that I could discreetly sing along with the choir and thereby keep my voice alive. It worked beautifully and I was even more satisfied with the 2nd aria (Zerfliesse mein Herze) that I was with the first (Ich folge dir gleichfalls).
Overall, I'd say the quality of this production was extremely high. The choir was, as usual, excellent and Christian Pfeifer (the Music Director and conductor) put together a fantastic baroque orchestra. I can't wait to hear the recording. When I get it I'll post my arias for your listening pleasure either here or at MySpace (providing the link, of course) or both.
The one review that appeared in the local paper after the concert was quite favorable all in all. The critic was slightly less impressed with my performance that with the other soloists, writing "Diane Severson proved to be very discreet and agile, she could, however, gain a bit more aplomb." I actually felt rather calm during the concert and could concentrate well on singing the music and being in the moment, but I guess I can't be surprised or wonder much about the critique.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Michael Bishop featured on StarShipSofa (I narrated the main fiction)
I narrated Vinegar Peace, a SF story written by Michael Bishop for his son Jamie Bishop who died two years ago at the Virginia Tech shootings.
" "Vinegar Peace" grew from this disaster and from a grief that I can't imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie's loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States' optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote a story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way." - Michael Bishop
StarShipSofa - http://www.starshipsofa.com - is very honoured and humbled to be allowed to bring this story to a wider audience. I know I speak for the SF community when I say our hearts and prayers go out to Mike and Jeri and all the families who have to live with this grief every day.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Narrations on StarShipSofa
Recently, I reported having done a lot of work lately on narrations for the StarShipSofa. Many of those stories haven't aired yet, but these are the ones that have:
Poetry by Ann K. Schwader - In Aural Delights Episodes #69 and #70 toward the beginning of the shows you can hear "Time Trapped" and "If Cold is a War" respectively.
Bruce Boston "People" poems - This is a small collection of 3 poems which are loosely related, entitled, Chess People, Marble People and Gargoyle People. On my suggestion Tony interspersed them throughout the show. I thought, since they have similar structures, listeners might get more out of them if they could hear them in one show. Normally Tony would have only included one per show. Feedback on the Forums was positive!
Aural Delights Episode #71
The good ship StarShipSofa undertook the massive task of publishing in audio all the Nebula Award Nominees in the Short form category. You can hear the one I narrated - "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson in Aural Delights #72 This is a nice story, and not so out there that folks who don't like Science Fiction or Fantasy much might actually enjoy. It's about 30 minutes long, so not a whole lot of investment!
Enjoy!
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Poetry by Ann K. Schwader - In Aural Delights Episodes #69 and #70 toward the beginning of the shows you can hear "Time Trapped" and "If Cold is a War" respectively.
Bruce Boston "People" poems - This is a small collection of 3 poems which are loosely related, entitled, Chess People, Marble People and Gargoyle People. On my suggestion Tony interspersed them throughout the show. I thought, since they have similar structures, listeners might get more out of them if they could hear them in one show. Normally Tony would have only included one per show. Feedback on the Forums was positive!
Aural Delights Episode #71
The good ship StarShipSofa undertook the massive task of publishing in audio all the Nebula Award Nominees in the Short form category. You can hear the one I narrated - "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson in Aural Delights #72 This is a nice story, and not so out there that folks who don't like Science Fiction or Fantasy much might actually enjoy. It's about 30 minutes long, so not a whole lot of investment!
Enjoy!
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Monday, April 06, 2009
Returning soon!
I apologize for the decided lack of communication on all fronts: email, phone, blog, Twitter, facebook and MySpace have all been experiencing Radio Silence. We have broadband at home and 2 weeks ago tomorrow it simply stopped working. No landline or internet! The company we use (1und1) has terrible customer service! Anyway, I'm writing this using my phone so I'll keep it brief. I just wanted to let you know that I should connected up again on Wed. I have a couple of things to report on and then I'll be heading to Italy for 10 days: Easter with the In-laws. After that I'll be attending the 15th annual Free-the-Voice seminar taught by Carol Forte in Frankfurt. So, you won't be hearing much from me till May most likely. Until then have a blessed Easter!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Stumble Audio
I just discovered that my CD "Silence" with lutenist Meinhard Gerlach is on Stumble Audio. This is a fun site, where you hear random tracks from CDs available on CD-Baby. You can give each track you hear a thumbs up or down and choose your favorite genre or listen completely randomly.
Silence can be found in the Contemporary section of the overall Classical genre. Here's a link to the song "Silence":
Title from Silence at Stumble Upon
And yes, we do get paid (granted it's peanuts!) for each play. From stumble audio you can click links to go to CD-Baby or Amazon or other sites to buy the album (or just listen to the whole thing). If you like what you hear, please don't forget to log-in and give it a thumbs up. I'd suggest pausing it or logging in early, because you can't back-track once the song is finished playing. If you end up at Amazon or CD-Baby, please write a review. We'd be eternally grateful!
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Silence can be found in the Contemporary section of the overall Classical genre. Here's a link to the song "Silence":
Title from Silence at Stumble Upon
And yes, we do get paid (granted it's peanuts!) for each play. From stumble audio you can click links to go to CD-Baby or Amazon or other sites to buy the album (or just listen to the whole thing). If you like what you hear, please don't forget to log-in and give it a thumbs up. I'd suggest pausing it or logging in early, because you can't back-track once the song is finished playing. If you end up at Amazon or CD-Baby, please write a review. We'd be eternally grateful!
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Upcoming events
A flurry of activity is marking my days lately. Well, relatively speaking anyway. Aside from teaching and recording for the StarShipSofa (and not much of that actually), I haven't done much the past few months. That has changed to a certain extent (I'm still not what a lot of people would call busy, and stress isn't really a part of my life at the moment, but, you know, it's all relative).
I will be singing for a wedding on March 21st. Weddings are small, low-key affairs for me. I usually sing 2 or 3 songs (in this case it's 2) and they are usually songs that are familiar to me and not too difficult technically. I'll be singing Amazing Grace and Climb Ev'ry Mountain (from Sound of Music) for this one. Had a bit of a hiccup when 2 days ago the organist called and said she is bowing out of playing these songs for the wedding. Huh? She said, the arrangements were not suited for the organ (well, I told her *that*) and she didn't want to play them. I think she thought that I had chosen the music I was to sing. I said to her, I have a hymn accompaniment for Amazing Grace which is certainly more suited to the organ, if that would help, but as for Climb Ev'ry Mountain, there is simply no other arrangement that I could find and I had hoped she would be able to cope. I was wrong. She simply flatly refused (2 weeks before the wedding I might add) and said she'd already spoken to another accompanist, one that had an electric piano that he could use. Fine with me, but is it fine with the Bride, I asked. Well, she hadn't spoken with her yet, but she would. So I called the new accompanist to arrange a rehearsal and discuss things with him. He asked me about his payment. What do I know? That's something he and the Bride and possibly the organist are going to have to work out. He told me the organist said I'd arrange that! Sheesh! She seems to live in la-la-land, this one! So, to make a short story even longer - it's all worked out now and I'm sure I'll prefer working with the pianist more than I would have the organist!
A couple of weeks ago I got a call, out of the blue, from a church musician in Wiesbaden, Germany for whom I've sung before. He wanted to know if I was free on April 4 to sing Bach's St. John Passion? I tried to remain calm, but in my mind I was saying, "Duh! I would be over-joyed, I would kiss your feet for giving me this opportunity, Thank God I'll get to sing a real concert again!" I told him, "Yes, I'm free and I'll be glad to sing for you again." Yippee! It's been about 2 years since I sang solo in an oratorio, and I tell ya, I've missed it.
So now, I've got my work cut out for me. I'll keep you posted.
I've recently finished recording a couple of stories for the StarShipSofa, which will be airing eventually. One was a story I've been working on for months. The Green Calling, by Storm Constantine. It's not that long, about 45 minutes total, but for some reason, I was have a really hard time with this one. I recorded most of it, got distracted and when I came back to it, I realized that it sucked. The accents were horrible and my narration was flat. I realized also that just recording the rest would not cut it either, because there'd be no way I could match the beginning to the end. So, I just re-recorded the whole thing. Then came the editing. Because I'd played with accents on this one (and the still suck, but not as much as before) I had a lot of flubbers to edit out. I can't say how many hours I spent on this one, but it was far and away the most of any story I've done so far.
Another story is Vinegar Peace - or the Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage by Michael Bishop. This is a great story. Mr. Bishop was motivated to write this story as a way of processing the grief over the death of his son in the shooting incident at Virginia Tech a few years ago. This is an event that was actually covered on the news here and I remember it distinctly. I corresponded with Mike a few times to work out some of the details and clear some things with him. He's a very gracious man and I enjoyed our exchanges. I had two songs to sing in this one and it's a powerful story. He also wrote a short commentary, which will follow the story when it airs on StarShipSofa.
Upcoming recordings are: 26 Monkeys by Kij Johnson - a Nebula Nominee! I'm really looking forward to this one; Poetry by Bruce Boston; Daughter of Botu by Eugie Foster - this one will be fun too, it's for PodCastle; Silence in Florence by Ian Creasey; and Project Mastodon a novel by Clifford Simak that I'm doing for SFAudio.
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I will be singing for a wedding on March 21st. Weddings are small, low-key affairs for me. I usually sing 2 or 3 songs (in this case it's 2) and they are usually songs that are familiar to me and not too difficult technically. I'll be singing Amazing Grace and Climb Ev'ry Mountain (from Sound of Music) for this one. Had a bit of a hiccup when 2 days ago the organist called and said she is bowing out of playing these songs for the wedding. Huh? She said, the arrangements were not suited for the organ (well, I told her *that*) and she didn't want to play them. I think she thought that I had chosen the music I was to sing. I said to her, I have a hymn accompaniment for Amazing Grace which is certainly more suited to the organ, if that would help, but as for Climb Ev'ry Mountain, there is simply no other arrangement that I could find and I had hoped she would be able to cope. I was wrong. She simply flatly refused (2 weeks before the wedding I might add) and said she'd already spoken to another accompanist, one that had an electric piano that he could use. Fine with me, but is it fine with the Bride, I asked. Well, she hadn't spoken with her yet, but she would. So I called the new accompanist to arrange a rehearsal and discuss things with him. He asked me about his payment. What do I know? That's something he and the Bride and possibly the organist are going to have to work out. He told me the organist said I'd arrange that! Sheesh! She seems to live in la-la-land, this one! So, to make a short story even longer - it's all worked out now and I'm sure I'll prefer working with the pianist more than I would have the organist!
A couple of weeks ago I got a call, out of the blue, from a church musician in Wiesbaden, Germany for whom I've sung before. He wanted to know if I was free on April 4 to sing Bach's St. John Passion? I tried to remain calm, but in my mind I was saying, "Duh! I would be over-joyed, I would kiss your feet for giving me this opportunity, Thank God I'll get to sing a real concert again!" I told him, "Yes, I'm free and I'll be glad to sing for you again." Yippee! It's been about 2 years since I sang solo in an oratorio, and I tell ya, I've missed it. So now, I've got my work cut out for me. I'll keep you posted.
I've recently finished recording a couple of stories for the StarShipSofa, which will be airing eventually. One was a story I've been working on for months. The Green Calling, by Storm Constantine. It's not that long, about 45 minutes total, but for some reason, I was have a really hard time with this one. I recorded most of it, got distracted and when I came back to it, I realized that it sucked. The accents were horrible and my narration was flat. I realized also that just recording the rest would not cut it either, because there'd be no way I could match the beginning to the end. So, I just re-recorded the whole thing. Then came the editing. Because I'd played with accents on this one (and the still suck, but not as much as before) I had a lot of flubbers to edit out. I can't say how many hours I spent on this one, but it was far and away the most of any story I've done so far.
Another story is Vinegar Peace - or the Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage by Michael Bishop. This is a great story. Mr. Bishop was motivated to write this story as a way of processing the grief over the death of his son in the shooting incident at Virginia Tech a few years ago. This is an event that was actually covered on the news here and I remember it distinctly. I corresponded with Mike a few times to work out some of the details and clear some things with him. He's a very gracious man and I enjoyed our exchanges. I had two songs to sing in this one and it's a powerful story. He also wrote a short commentary, which will follow the story when it airs on StarShipSofa.
Upcoming recordings are: 26 Monkeys by Kij Johnson - a Nebula Nominee! I'm really looking forward to this one; Poetry by Bruce Boston; Daughter of Botu by Eugie Foster - this one will be fun too, it's for PodCastle; Silence in Florence by Ian Creasey; and Project Mastodon a novel by Clifford Simak that I'm doing for SFAudio.
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