Ah yes, spending a day singing Sullivan's gratifying music with about 70 like-minded individuals - what could be better? Well, if TW were similarly inclined, and therefore willing to go with me, that would have been better. As it was, he stayed home and puttered - house cleaning, second-coating the front door, etc. It also would have been better if I'd had more time to go over the choruses; I found far too many places I didn't remember. Ah well, I still got to sing myself silly, which is why I went.
We were gathered in an empty office space. The low acoustic ceiling and commercial carpet weren't great for the acoustics, but there was plenty of room for all of us, our semi-circle of chairs, tables at one end for food and drink, and a space in the semi-circle for the keyboard and soloists, who were occasionally rather numerous (as many as 7 or 8).
"And how did the singing go?" I'm glad you asked! (Relax: I won't attempt a full review because this entry would be three times as long as it already is and, more importantly, I'd be sure to overlook someone.) We opened with 2 choruses from The Mikado: "If you want to know who we are" and "Comes a train of little ladies". Having just done Mikado, these were very easy and a great way to dive into the day's vast, inviting pool of G&S.
We then went on to the double chorus "In a doleful train" from Patience. "What's a double chorus?" That's when Gilbert has the men's and women's choruses singing different things - in this case, the women mooning about over a romantic poet and the men upset at being neglected by their onetime ladyfriends - and Sullivan sets the texts to different melodies and - here's what makes these so difficult and rewarding to sing - at different tempos or meters (in this case, the women are singing solemn half notes while the men are expostulating in outraged eighth notes). You know you're in a room of folks experienced in G&S when you can run through such a number without rehearsal and the group as a whole manages to finish together without a train wreck or even a near miss.
Perhaps in tribute to Savoynet's August 9th production of Iolanthe at the International G&S festival, our gracious hostess then let us all sing the March of the Peers (women could sing along if we behaved ourselves and sang in the men's register; easy for the altos & mezzos, not really an option for the sopranos, poor things). I've always loved that one - another exhilarating Sullivan chorus! (The man really wrote some of the most gratifying-to-the-singer choruses it's ever been my pleasure to sing.)
Next up: the first full (musically - no dialogue) work of the day - The Pirates of Penzance. This one has long been one of my favorites, and my friend D (she & her husband were my traveling companions for the weekend) was singing Kate. She was nervous, not having attended these things before nor sung the role before, but she did just fine. Being familiar with the show, she was also able to do a bit of acting. D and I became friends while singing together in the alto section of many a chorus, so I'm just a bit biased, but I thought she did a fine job. Also in Pirates, I got to hear W's lovely, lyric mezzo as Ruth. I knew her only from Savoynet, so I was glad of the chance to hear her in person, as well as to see her in action. E was a delightfully over-the-top Mabel, mugging fit to beat the band and popping out shamelessly high cadenzas with wild abandon. Her interplay with the tenor playing Frederic was great fun to watch, and they were both obviously having a great deal of fun. Yet they were completely capable of being serious; their "Ah, leave me not to pine" was probably the most moving piece of the day, all the more remarkable for the fact that they'd never laid eyes on each other before that morning. The Sergeant of Police was a true bass, with wonderfully rumbly low notes; the first time he hit one, Mabel abandoned Fred and fluttered at the Sergeant! :) My only problem w/ Pirates was that, in my eagerness, I had foolishly oversung and my throat was already feeling the strain. Not at all good, given that Princess Ida, up next after the lunch break, was the one with "my" music in it, and of course there was still plenty and plenty of singing to follow that!
Apparently the lunch break was sufficiently restful, as I wasn't noticing any vocal problems when we resumed. My first, very brief solo line as Melissa ("Pray, what authors should she read who in classics would succeed?" - that's the whole thing) may have been a bit shaky from nerves, and the fact that the personwho was supposed to sing Psyche, who was supposed to answer my sung question, wasn't there. F jumped in to cover Psyche, which helped immensely thereafter, as Psyche has a lot of music to sing. F either knows Ida well or is an excellent sightreader, as this seemed to give her no trouble. My next set involved a quintet and a duet back to back. The quintet, which A had warned me about because it was so easy to accelerate during the refrain, went well. A told me later that the 3 of us originally scheduled to be singing it did a good job of "anchoring" it for F and one of the men, who were last-minute substitutions and therefore hadn't had time to prepare. At any rate, while I had my nose in my score far more than I would have liked, I was able to interact with the men on either side of me when I wasn't singing, which was fun. I had taken my hair out of its ponytail for Ida (long hair just seemed to suit Melissa) and J, who was singing Melissa's mother, Lady Blanche, decided to let down her own, which is about as long, to heighten the "family" resemblance. The funny thing about that is that "my mother" is only a year older than I am. The duet, which I'd had fun singing w/ K in my voice lessons, went well, though both of us agreed later that we wished we'd had time to practice a bit together. The one piece I was worried about was "Death to the invader". The chorus sings, then Melissa has a verse (with chorus response), then the chorus finishes. Melissa's verse is written with both a high and a low option. I wanted to take the high road, so to speak, but having oversung by lunchtime, I was not exactly optimistic. However. By the time we got to that song, I was re-warmed up after lunch, and by the end of the verse I had enough of a running start that I decided to go for it. Never underestimate the power of adrenaline! :) It felt good, not screechy or strained, and I'm told it sounded "great"! This was the one number I knew well enough to do without my score (I'd sung it in the chorus several times), so I was able to "perform" it, not just sing it. At the end of my last voice lesson, K had dug thru her props collection and come up with a squishy plastic battleaxe, which I used to (I hope) good effect. If nothing else, it helped me with the switch when Melissa shifts from "Death to the invader!" to "Please you, do not hurt us!" Along with F singing Psyche on the fly, special kudos to R, barely off the plane from the Int'l G&S festival in England, where she'd sung Phyllis in Savoynet's Iolanthe less than 48 hours before, who sang the eponymous Princess Ida, and did it beautifully - wonderful voice, excellent emotion, not a trace of jetlag!
And K's battleaxe saw more action than I'd expected. I almost didn't pack it, thinking it silly to pack it for one number, but I'm glad I put it back in the suitcase. When Ruth and the Pirate King were trying to threaten Frederic empty-handed, I handed the weapon to Ruth. In Ida, one of Ida's three brothers used it for one or two of their songs, and of course I used it for "Death to the invader". Thanks, K!
To be continued...
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