Big Opera Wins

Although we are still going through a lot of manifestations all over Brazil I think I should take a break on the subject here. Anyways I’m not up to speed to what’s actually going on right now because I had a pretty busy weekend, only that on Wednesday they did lower the prices on public transportation here in São Paulo and at Rio but the protests didn’t stop.

ReJoyce

First I’d just like to announce that the picture me and ma sista took for Joyce and Me was selected as a finalist! YES! Oh Gods and here comes how I found out. I was on my way to my singing lesson and my teacher’s 14 year old cat had died just the day before so I bought her some flowers. And as I boarded the subway my opera bff called me FREAKING OUT and I just knew it, I just knew that it had happened, that she had chosen my picture. I was so happy and he was also hysterical over the phone and I started crying out of sheer happiness and the people on the subway stared, A LOT. It was quite a sight to see, me holding flowers in one hand and the phone on another with my sunglasses but it was perceptible that I was crying and making the strangest sounds, well that’s me in a nutshell!

Well I was also very happy because Joyce selected pictures from many a number of my twitter friends, so we’ll all be in REJOYCE togetha! Awesome! And as I promised a couple of weeks ago, here is the picture me and Dani took for Joyce. We were going for the Cenerentola/Cendrillon thing.

But now I don’t know what’s going to happen, I mean there are 45 finalists and I’m guessing not all can be in the CD. And Joyce doesn’t say anything, it’s been a week already and I don’t know and I’m nervous!

DON’T LEAVE YOUR CREDICT CARD WITH ME

I had a sort of spending spree madness this week. Everything just looked so cheap to me and I had to buy it. I spend about R$200,00 which would be like a little less than $100,00. But I bought TWO dictionaries, TWO books and THREE cds.

Well, turns out, that some major CD/DVD/Book stores here in Brazil are just like Macy’s after all! If you look superficially everything seems expensive, but when you dig a little deeper, and that might take a few hours, you find a mine of gold. That’s what happened last Sunday to me, I actually went to this Mega Store to buy the sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada” book, “Revenge Wears Prada” and was very disappointed to learn that the book wasn’t in any of their stores yet.

Then I went to the music books section with my expectations hitting the layers of the earth and at first I wasn’t surprised that their so called “music books” consisted mainly of rock stars biographies. But to find the good stuff you have to quite literally get to your knees, and that’s what I did and ended up finding The Eyewitness Opera Guide, which I already have. But then I found a series of books by a Brazilian author called Lauro Machado Coelho (who I just learned is a very good friend of my singing teacher) and each book tacked one type of opera by country, sometimes composer, sometimes period in history! So before I knew it I had Italian Romantic Opera and Italian Baroque Opera in my grasp, but then I found The Operas by Richard Strauss on sale and let everything go.

Then I went to the CDs floor, the so called “Classics” section was filled with Andrea Bocceli, Sarah Brightman, Katherine Jenkins, Il Volo and all that sort of “classical music”, but again I diged and found DIVA DIVO! YAY! For R$30,00 (that would be like $15, Amazon price, hello?) And since I already have it I got it for my best friend as a birthday gift. I also found Anna Netrebko’s Live at the Metropolitan Opera cd for R$9,99! (that’s like $5!) plus her Pergolesi Stabat Mater with Marianna Pizzolato and Tony Pappano!

 

AND I convinced my good friend Caio (he went with me to watch the Live in HD of Rigoletto) to buy The Art of Renée Fleming. And I went to his place for dinner just last night and he told me he absolutely loved it and we listened to it all night long!

I was very happy with my purchases, apart from the fact that I didn’t get what I went there for in the first place. So today I went to another book store, even bigger, HUGE bookstore, I love this book store. It’s called Livraria Cultura and they have the most impressive books in English department. It’s really big and they have all sorts of books all in English, they didn’t have “The Devil Wears Prada” though, but they did have “Revenge Wears Prada”. But then again, you gotta dig in there to find affordable prices; most of the things I wanted were abusively expensive.

Well then I made a big mistake, I let myself be led to the music department and there I found just what I was looking for: Offenbach’s La Belle Helene the Zurich production with Vesselina Kasarova and Handel’s Alcina the Vienna production with Anja Harteros and Vesselina Kasarova, they were so ridiculously expensive that I don’t even have the courage to post the prices here, but I was very disappointed. But then the language department was having a sale and what do we opera singers wannabes need more than anything in the world? DICTIONARIES! I already have a fantastic dictionary for German but lacked my Italian and French, problem solved, got two from Oxford that I trust is an excellent publisher.  

Lighting Management

On other news, I’m performing much these past couple of weeks but I’ve been in the theatre a LOT. I’m helping my friends in my hometown theatre group by operating the lightings for their fantastic new and completely original play called “The Box”. It’s your typical ridiculous comedy but with very smart humor, I mean by that that we have Harry Potter jokes. It’s a lot of fun, I’m actually quite happy to be working not on stage because if I was on stage I would probably crack up all the time because they keep on making up dialogues and they just get funnier and funnier.

Ah well, I guess that’s it! I’ve been watching a lot of Poirot lately too, you gotta love Agatha Christie. Cheers everyone!