Campbell Vertesi

For the first time in awhile, I have to go on the job trail. Not the glamorous, operatic auditioning-around-the-country job trail, but the REAL job trail.  I'm trying to take the season off to save money, and that means I gotta get a real job.

 I don't think anyone likes doing this.  Any suggestions of opera-singer compatible work out there?  I have very high level technical skills, but the trick is finding work that pays well, and has a flexible enough schedule that I can take off for gigs without getting fired.  Ideas?

... is actually taking that year off.  I find myself looking at audition postings out of habit.  The company with which I'm singing Aida is doing Don Giovanni and Rigoletto in the spring, for example.  Well crap, those are two shows with great roles for me!  I've been wanting to look at Leporello anyways, and it could -

NO.  Bad bass. That's a very bad, bad bass.  Now you go back to your practice room without supper!  

Sigh.

 So I'm meeting myself halfway (?), and singing for the roles that I know already and which will be good vehicles for solidifying new technique.  I won't sing for Leporello, I'll just sing for Commendatore and Sparafucile.  That way, even if (worst/best case scenario) they cast me for both roles, I'll still have 4 months to myself before the summer season - which I'm planning on taking off, too.  That's plenty of time on technique, and I'd still be singing 4 leads in the spring season, which is enough to keep me happy.

I'm really starting to understand the people who talk about this as an opera "habit".  I think I may need rehab to really make myself take time off!

Pressured by the growing number of my friends and acquaintances who are on Twitter, as well as by my own apparent inability to keep a regular full-length blog, I've finally joined Twitter.  This is an experiment for me - I'm not a big fan of having another web service to update, but I'm hoping that it will prove a reasonable way to prove that I'm still alive in the times when my blog is languishing.

So now there's another little box on the right side of this site,  with my twitter "what am I doing?" for the instant.  Enjoy.  

This would be a good time for fans of Twitter to try and sell me on the idea, cause right now I'm not entirely convinced.  I figure I'm just not in the paradigm yet, or maybe there's some really cool thing I can do with Twitter that I haven't learned about yet.  Help me.  If you know how to use Twitter to burn down a spambastard's house, that would be enough to get me hooked for life.

As of today, I'm testing out the mollom anti-spam program on my site.  The good news: no more CAPTCHA!  The bad news: a separate company is reviewing your comments to check for spam.  If their computers think your comment is spamtacular, you're given a CAPTCHA to solve.  99% of comments get by without needing the extra verification.

Please let me know if you don't like the idea of your comment being scanned by a separate company, if you think the system isn't working, or if you have any other suggestions for me on the subject.  I thought of burning down the spammers' homes, but with gas at such a premium, arson has become a rich man's game. :(  

Other than that, it's back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

I've updated the image gallery with some photos from the Aida I'm singing, as well as some older performance shots.  Have a look!

My site has been attacked again by spambots.  Please forgive the comment spam that's been all over this space for the last few days.  Sadly I'll have to disable comments while I work on a new CAPTCHA (prove-you're-not-a-robot) scheme.

What a pain in the ass.  Almost makes me want to by W@rcraft G0ld or Male 3nhancement from a reputable, legitimate source... just to help drive the spambastards out of business.  Augh. 

So, I know I said I wasn't doing any auditions this season - but that doesn't mean I'm not doing any shows. :)

Last night was opening night for Aida with the San Francisco Lyric Opera.  I sang Ramfis - a big boy Verdi bass role - and you know what? It's actually quite a good fit for me!  Even the F's are working well in my voice now, which cues me that I've made some fantastic progress this year (happy!). Beyond that, it's always scary performing a role for the first time, and I'm glad to be over that hump. 

It's amazing to me that small companies even bother with Aida.  It requires a beast of a mezzo and a monster of a soprano (in a good way!), and it's not easy to find a good Radames, either.  Arguably, you could have the same kind of casting difficulty with any Verdi opera.  But Aida goes above and beyond - three big choruses, a huge orchestra... and then you have the triumphal scene, which is supposed to have elephants and other live animals.  This is an opera that is about spectacle, and that's pretty hard to do on a small budget.  Seriously- why not do something smaller in scale, like Rigoletto or Boccanegra?

So with Utah Festival Opera's Aida (this summer), we had a small chorus divided three ways, and we skipped the elephants.  We all sang extra loud to compete with the orchestration.  Here in San Fran, they managed to get about 70 chorus members (a good start, by Aida standards!), but the orchestra had to be small, and forget about the triumphal spectacle - the cast heads to the back of the stage, and watches a parade go by just out of sight of the audience.  It's a funny sort of conceit, but apparently it works...

Actually, we had it doubly interesting - our Radames has been sick for the last two weeks.  With no cover, as a company you just have to send him on and have him get through it.  To his credit, our Radames managed just fine - he crooned a lot, but the audience liked it... and in the end, that's the whole point.

 I'm constantly amazed by these small companies, and the incredible productions they manage to pull off.  All jokes aside, when it comes to opera companies size really doesn't seem to matter - it's what you do with what you've got.  So this company put on a very good Aida, with some especially great singing from the leads.  It's really worth coming to see.  

A side note - in this trip to San Francisco, I finally got to bring my wife Bryn with me.  She volunteered to sing with the chorus,and it was great to get to spend so much time together.  What's more, we've really fallen in love with this city.  We're now revising our plans for moving next year, figuring out where we really want to be: New York or San Francisco.  There are up and down-sides to each - I'll keep you posted.

I had my first lesson back with my teacher yesterday.  Mostly, I was concerned about the direction I was taking my voice on my own this summer.  It was either a really awesome new direction, or a really terrible one, and I needed to consult as to which one it was.  

See, your voice can react similarly to really new technique and really bad technique.  I was doing something that felt really different, that sounded terrible on the inside, but sounded great on recordings, and I found my voice getting very tired very quickly.  I was even a bit sore after intense sessions.  Sometimes that's because you're doing something new and your muscles are uncomfortable working in this way, and sometimes it's because you're doing something wrong and your muscles aren't supposed to work in that way.  This is why we have voice teachers, to be objective eyes and ears to guid us.

Turns out it was an awesome direction.  My teacher gave me some good things to start thinking about to help me with my highest notes, and a lot of encouragement about the direction I'm moving with everything else.  In all, it was a fantastic lesson, and it accomplished exactly what I wanted it to.

And then my teacher dropped the F-bomb on me.  We were talking about rep I should start learning after my recital this fall, and he suggested I look at Figaro.

Figaro is at once the most exciting and the most frightening thing he could have suggested to me.  On the one hand, the character fits my personality incredibly well, and a natural fit like that means it would be a great role for me to perform.  Lots of real basses have sung the role, and I always hoped I'd get to sing it someday.  On the other hand, it's a herculean task to sing.  

You see, though it's tough to sing things on a grand scale like Wagner or Verdi, in some ways it's much harder to sing something "nice" like Mozart.  Figaro sits in my most uncomfortable range, and he has to have ease and finesse throughout the role.  While you can yell through the tough parts in Verdi (if you have to), you can't get away with anything approximate or "good enough" with Mozart.  Every note has to be precise and beautiful.  Particularly in Nozze di Figaro, the composer expects perfection of his singers.  If anyone slips, the masterpiece doesn't make it.  Ezio Pinza used to say that Figaro was the role he dreaded most, because it was so vocally and musically unforgiving.  Ultimately it became one of his signature roles, but that came with a certain respect.

So I've started looking at the hard parts of Figaro.  I can get through it, which is great, but I have a long way to go to develop the ease I need on some of those Es and Fs.   This will be a long project. 

We're going with plan B, folks.  Turns out the Canadian Permanent Residency will take much too long for us to plausibly move to Vancouver in the winter.  That means we'll be staying in the Midwest with my in-laws, while we save up to move to New York. Personally, I'm just excited about the possibility of saving up more than one paycheck at a time.

Now that we know WHERE we're going to be, Bryn and I are turning our attention to WHAT we'll be doing.  Both of us really want to take a season to work on technique, without performance pressure looming over our heads.  Remember how I talked about that last season?  And then remember how I got work and took the work opportunities instead?  Yeah, it's time to actually do my technical due diligence.

It's actually really HARD to take time off.  I keep seeing advertisements for auditions, or I hear about companies that are looking for basses, and I keep thinking "I should sing for them, I'm sure they'd want to hear me"... and then I kick myself.  I worry that if I keep taking every opportunity that comes my way, I'm going to end up with a good career as a solidly mediocre bass - and that's not what I want.  So I'm writing letters and making calls to my favorite companies, letting them know what I'm doing.  Partly this is to preserve contacts and give people a reason to hear me again next year, but mostly it's because in my experience, administrators really care about their young artists and want to see them develop. They're hard calls to make, though.

I just keep taking deep breaths and telling myself, in a year I'll be back on the scene with a more solid technique than ever, and be in a really strong position to knock 'em dead on the audition circuit. 

One of the hardest things about being a young artist is the itinerant nature of your calendar.  Not only do we traipse around the country for gigs, but we also move every couple of years or so for proximity to school or other training. 

This year marks the end of Bryn and my Masters' programs, so it's moving time again.  We're homeless at present, since our lease came up just in time for us to begin our summer contracts scattered around the globe... so the question is, where will we live?

Option number one is my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. We have excellent training available there, we could live with my parents on the cheap, and it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet.  The down side is that we have to get work visa for Bryn - shouldn't be too hard since we're married, but we don't know how long it will take - and it's quite a ways from the east coast audition circuit.

Option number two is New York. There is (obviously) great training available there, plus it puts us right in the middle of audition-land.  The downside is the cost, of course.  New York apartments are notoriously expensive, and it puts us in that great singer's conundrum: either you're working, so you're making the money to pay for your apartment, but you're not living there; or you're not working, so you don't have the money to pay for the apartment while you're actually using it.

So, that's that.  For the immediate future, Bryn and I have gigs lined up through mid-November. After that... we'll see.