... is a pain in the ass.
Tu sul labbro is a great piece for me, and I'm learning a lot from it just by working it into my voice. At it's best, the piece shows off all my new technique: some nice softness in the top, a richer sound throughout, and a good high E natural. But this is what singers mean when they talk about "singing it into the voice". It means you work on a piece until that "best" comes out every time, just by habit, without requiring every iota of focus (cause it's nice to act sometimes, too). Until then, that "best" doesn't happen all the time.
And with this piece, when things don't line up all the way through, I can really crash and burn. Not terribly, but that high E natural can sound pretty bad when it's at it's worst.
Still, a part of getting comfortable with a piece is using it in high pressure situations like auditions. So I opened with Tu sul labbro at my recent Cincinnati Opera audition. It wasn't bad, but it really showed me how far I have to go in the piece before it can be a "wake up and sing" kind of thing.
What a life.
Thu, 2007-11-15 23:40
With the lieder post in mind, have you looked at Brahms's Four Sacred Songs? It's probably nothing to look into at our age, but Oh! what a treasure for a bass voice!
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»Wed, 2007-11-21 14:39
No, unless you mean the Vier ernste Gesänge? That's actually "four LAST songs", but the texts are all sacred. Those are absolutely phenomenal - but they get put into the "I'm not worthy" pile (along with Don Carlo and Boris Goudinov) for another 20 years. :)
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»Mon, 2008-06-23 00:07
It's actually Four Serious Songs, and I don't think you necessarily have to wait 20 years to start exploring them. There's an often-repeated criticism that says the fourth ("for now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love") is somehow inconsistent with the first three, which are mostly about death. Personally--and I'm two years older than Brahms was when he composed them--I think that so-called inconsistency is the point: we live every minute with the knowledge of mortality, our own and that of those we care about, and the only thing that makes this knowledge bearable--just bearable--is that we have the possibility of love. I think it's the greatest song cycle in music, and I say that with "Winterreise" and "Lieder eines fahrendes Gesellen" et al. firmly in mind. Rudolf Serkin first performed Beethoven Op. 106 as a young man, put it aside for 15 or so years, went back to it, put it aside, went back in his 60's; he said only then did he really feel he understood the piece, but I suspect the decades leading up to it were an essential part of the process.
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