Breathe!

Back to coaching R. and "Love Changes Everything". I asked him to add breath to the opening sounds, making the character seem (ironically) more breathless. Using a lot of breath in the sound means you have to breathe more, and any singer worth his salt will then have to work out where to breathe that makes sense with the words. In R.'s language, this made him come "off the voice" - he couldn't use the central core of tone that he normally has, as using breath interferes with the process. The result from that one instruction was surprising, even by my standards. I had tingles listening to him, and all the hair stood up on the back of my neck. Those of you who know me (or have seen my photograph) know that this is no mean feat. As with many singers, if you give R. a clear instruction, he follows it to the letter. He also said it was much easier to sing, and made the climax easier, bigger and more exciting.

Dhafer Youssef soundbites

Incidentally here's an update on Dhafer Youssef (thanks Simone). His own website is http://www.dhaferyoussef.com and has a number of examples of his work (mp3 soundbites). It also has his diary for the year - he's in Amsterdam at the Konzertgebouw on April 9th. Check it out.

Breaking the Line.

When I started coaching R. in Love Changes Everything, he was singing with far too much line and connected sound for the genre - it sounded too operatic.
First I asked him to do something that not all opera singers are used to... putting into the text all the commas, semicolons and full stops. This may be surprising to non-operatic singers, but opera singers are taught to produce a fully-connected, continuous stream of sound.
Adding the punctuation started to break up the line, but the sounds were still too well matched. The problem here is that the listener focuses on the beautiful arching line instead of the song lyrics. In opera the emotion tends to come from the musical and emotional shapes of the phrases. In musical theatre, the emotion tends to come from the song lyrics, with the musical shapes coming second.
In addition, the song is a classic build song, it starts soft and just continues climbing to the big finish. Unless there is variation in the text and meaning, the singer ends up pushing vocally to top what he has started with. I've seen it happen so many times!

Style Conscious

Back to changing style. I recently wrote a piece for The Music Teacher magazine called Style Conscious (it's on the Vocal Process website at the moment). It contains several tips for singers wanting to move into a new genre. I was working with a tenor last week who wanted to sing more show stuff. As an operatic singer R. has a bright, full lyric sound, and is used to singing Cavaradossi or Rodolfo (or even Verdi's Otello). However, he's a bit of a stranger to Musical Theatre, so it was an interesting session getting him to sing "Love Changes Everything" from Aspects of Love.

I love sheet music...

Both male singers are very experienced singers, but neither of them had seen this particular show (Love, Lust and a Damn Good Chardonnay), and the format is quite different from our other shows. This one is much more scripted, with the two girls interacting on stage, and a "relationships" plot running throughout. The baritone had brought a selection of pieces from his vast repertoire, most of them 50-year-old copies. I had a huge pile of sheet music on a stool next to the piano and spent the whole evening swapping books, sheet music and files, hoping I'd got the correct book in front of me. And that it wouldn’t disintegrate in my hand – I’m an enthusiastic page turner. The mezzo always presents the show, and is a past master at improvising and working around problems. The audience was absolutely with us, and in fact were the first audience to spot one particular joke in the Britten cabaret song (it involves snot).

Another opening, another show rewrite

The lurgy was proving a little hard to shift, so on Friday we invited our resident tenor to join the show. The soprano at this point had about 5% volume left, but she has superb cut on her voice so the audience got an incredibly focussed, tiny sound from her, followed by the tenor giving it everything on the high Cs (that would have played havoc with anyone's hearing aid). And on Saturday, a hasty phonecall to our baritone had him driving up from London to Macclesfield for the third version of the show, the mezzo and baritone selection. Small hall, tiny stage, and a fantastic audience who were out for a party from the very beginning. Doing the show that night was like riding a bucking bronco - you never knew quite what was going to happen next.