Day Three - Cincinnati May Festival

There was only one three-hour rehearsal on Day Three, so there's a little less fodder for blogging than the first two days offered.








It was Miller time again, and we worked through the entire opera. In the first chorus, an entire Italian village is somehow in the tiny house of Luisa and her father, wishing Luisa a happy birthday. We play the village. After we finished the section, Conlon's comment was, "That was charming, lovely and most of it in tune!"

Joining us was Rebekah Camm, a pretty darned good soprano who sings the role of Laura. Here's a very little bit of her voice:

The only other Conlon bon mot worth sharing was in reference to working with soloists and being where you're supposed to be at the right time: "Do not depend on any soloists ever. They are paid the big bucks to not sing in any tempo known to man."















Good choruses hit their marks, tempo-wise, regardless of any screwups on the part of soloists. We had that situation in the Brahms Requiem this past season, when the bass screwed up and finished a measure or so early. His ending was our cue, but we waited to enter until it was the right time -- it would have been so easy to follow him and mess everything up.

The rehearsal was pretty uneventful otherwise. It closed with a 30-minute retelling of the story of the opera, which, in my opinion, is silly beyond measure. Conlon, after all, is an opera conductor and loves the genre, and he manages to extract all sorts of deeper meanings out of the characters and plots. At least he tells the story in an entertaining fashion.

Conlon's daughter, Luisa, was conceived, so the story goes, the night we performed this opera in May of 1988 (the only other time he's conducted it), and is named Luisa. She is apparently as sick of hearing about that as we are.

Since the evening was otherwise uneventful, I'll close with some more photos taken during the evening.