Day 37 - Review of Sat/Sun and first day of Wolf Lieder Course

Montag

9:00 - 11:15 - Wolf Coachings

11:35-12:35 - Nap

12:50-1:00 - Buy and consume lunch

1:15-1:35 - Diction coaching with Nick Kopta

1:50-2:20 - Practice/Rehearse with Sarah

2:30-5:30 - Wolf Coachings

5:45 - Dinner

6:35 - Take the rest of the night off

Sorry for neglecting the blog recently. The past few days have been eventful.

On Saturday, we had our third performance of the Beggar's Opera in Doebeln. We performed under somewhat unfavorable circumstances including a fairly small audience and a stage exposed to the outside street noises. The nice thing was that (a few) more people showed up by the end. Upon finishing the performance, however, we all came to the consensus that it was our worst execution of the show, so we agreed to do a better job for our last show on Sunday. Fortunately, the performance easily and quickly became an afterthought because we were able to enjoy the carnival taking place that day. For such a small town, Doebeln certainly contained tons of people everywhere and consisted of a pretty elaborate carnival set-up with food stands, sweets, carnival rides, stages, and tables for miscellaneous unclassified paraphernalia...such as intricate candles. It was overwhelmingly wonderful. I purchased some intensely tasty donut-like fried dough balls, called krapfen. Though delicious, I think they turned out to be more heart-burn inducing because they were super fatty and greasy. After that, I grabbed a burger with Thorsten at a nearby restaurant.

The cast--left to right, Thorsten, me, Sarah, Ian, Corinne, Elise, Abby, Brian

The next day, we ventured to Bieberstein Castle where we had our last final performance, which went much better than the previous day's performance. It was a beautiful setting and surrounding, and unfortunately I did not take many pictures. I think collectively we found it difficult to get into the proper mindset for this performance. Having done it three times and no longer finding this opera to be the stressful priority it was the week before, I think much of the cast felt ready to discard their roles and to be past this performance. Understandably so. After this performance, we headed back where many of us had a late Italian dinner at Amici's at the bottom of the hotel. Though I was pretty exhausted by the time we finished, I ended up chatting with Thorsten in my room about youtube links, recordings, artists, voices, and other miscellaneous music topics before we exchanged good-byes since he's now done with the program.

Auf wiedersehn! Until we meet again

Today was the start of the Wolf Lieder course. Given that I had been up later than usual over the past couple nights--which was made worse from their being somewhat long energy draining ones, too--I was somewhat dead to the world for much of the day, which made it hard to focus during my coachings. In spite of that, I found them to be helpful and indicative of what I need to work on, and as a result, I have a lot of work ahead of me. In spite of that, I decided to take the night off because I didn't get much of a break over the weekend. Two church sermon recordings, and a wimpy nap, and hours of youtube videos later I'm now looking at the end of my evening.

A subject that has been floating around in my mind recently is the nature of gifts and talents and why God endows people with specific gift packages. I find that God blessed me with an interesting combination of gifts, and I'm not quite sure how to make use of them. Obviously my disposition towards piano and fondness of language have made themselves manifest and have found a place in my life. I am still uncertain of what to make of my quasi-athleticism, which I had nurtured and entertained through wushu in previous years. I can see the role that has played for me in the past and how it relates to me today, but it seems like something is latent, waiting to stem into something else. I always felt rhythmically unsatisfied from wushu and craved more musicality of movements. Perhaps I fall victim to overanalyzing, but it makes me wonder if I am to ever associate with the world of dance. I've always admired musical movements and think it would be neat if I could join classical music with physical movement.

Clearly, it's easy for me to get distracted with prospects of the future. My goal for the next two weeks is to focus on being a lieder pianist, so I will be quite a test for me that I'm ready to face. Here I come legato fingerings and finger substitutions!