What they don't teach you at college 1

I'm back at the RSAMD next week to work with the new intake of BA students. And it started me thinking about the practical things that I wasn't taught at music college. One topic came up last night in our Hatstand Opera "Bite At The Opera" performance at the Tenby Festival:

How to rehearse in a new space.

Many students coming out of music college assume that how they sing is how they sing, and that's all there is to it. But they are completely missing the point of live performance, and also the focus of the onsite rehearsal. For me the point of an onsite rehearsal isn't to practise the things you should already know and don't. It's to begin working together as a group that day towards a common goal, to tweak anything that needs tweaking, and to find the good and bad points about the space you are working in. In fact, every time you move to a different location, you have a different set of acoustical problems to deal with.

Hatstand Opera is known as the "go anywhere" opera company, and since we don't normally work with a sound system, we carry our own acoustics with us. We have to deal with different spaces and acoustics almost every performance.

Last night, the stunning St Brides Spa Hotel in Saundersfoot, South Wales was our venue, in a beautiful though tricky space - a long, fairly narrow room with a lowish ceiling and an entire wall of glass looking over the harbour.

And the room was packed with 100 people dining (they'd sold out).

Our particular lineup that evening had been working as a team for more than 13 years now. So we know each other's quirks and foibles, and we know the repertoire backwards (one day I'll learn it the right way round, but I always was different to other people).

So, much of our rehearsal time is spent working out the staging and the acoustics of the room. We will sing bits of the pieces, usually working from the end of the show backwards to prime the voices for the beginning. And we'll be checking for dynamic levels, sweet spots and dead areas, and delays.

As well as the low ceiling and long room, for this performance the singers were literally in the middle of the audience and were going to have to do what we call a "Lighthouse gig" - revolve as they sing to include every member of the audience.

Also, our performing spaces were dotted around the room and were mostly made up of corridors between the tables, dodging around 4 pillars, and squeezing between the chairs to reach the next spot. Oh yes, and an exit through the fire doors during O Soave Fanciulla to sing the final high Cs on the balcony overlooking the harbour (and scaring the neighbours). We also discovered a slight delay in the acoustics - the moment the singers went further than 8 feet from the piano, they were starting to sing behind the beat.

In addition, there was no way they were going to be able unleash the full power of their voices due to the size of the room and proximity of the audience. I still think people are quite thrilled and amazed at the power of an unamplified operatic voice - and most of the time our singers aren't going full out!

So the order of the evening was:

• keep moving while you sing
  
• turn as much as possible to include everyone in the room
  
• rework the choreography while you're singing to make sure you don't hit anyone
  
• no "racking up" until the money notes
  
• be careful about singing towards the windows as the sound will bounce back
  
• sing ahead of the beat if you're more than 8 feet from the piano
  
• and of course, remember the words

While all this sounds very complicated, we're used to doing it, and we had a great night. The audience loved what we did, and I got to wear the blond wig again. In fact they liked it so much that they were standing at the reception afterwards trying to book seats for the next year's performance (and we hadn't even been booked!).

Next year I'm going to arrive early and spend some downtime in the hotel's sumptuous spa. I wonder what the acoustics are like in the swimming pool?

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