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!

NY Trip and Operatic Beach

I never got to explain the actual name of the blog, hun? Well, believe it or not, it’s the name I’ve always used, ever since I was a teenager blogging for the sake of layouts. It’s from an Andrew Llyod Webber musical called Song and Dance, never saw it, but I like the song. And now more than ever the name makes sense, this whole thing was completely unexpected.

Since I am not talking about anything specific in this post I’ll talk about my crazy decision to go to New York City alone. It was I think September of this year and I was bursting with the need to watch first rate live opera. And then the craziest idea dawned on me, ‘cause me and my family are going to spend something like 3 weeks in Orlando. So I could easily go to New York for a couple of days and then come back, and that’s exactly what I told my dad, and he agreed. It was odd, ‘cause normally, he doesn’t, so I bought the ticket from Orlando to New York, 3 tickets for the Met Opera, and booked 3 nights at a Hostel in Manhatan.

I had chosen the date that coincided with certain performances of certain super cool opera starts (just a reminder that I didn’t know Joyce at the time, if I had the dates would have been completely different). So I’m arriving on the 8^th of February and watching Rigoletto with Diana Damrau (hell yeah baby!) and Piotr Beczala both which I LOVE! Then the next day I’ll be watching L’Elisir D’Amore, one of my favorite bel canto pieces, with Anna Netrebko (my heart will stop when I see her), Erwin Schrott (then I’ll have a convulsion when I see him) and the increasingly handsome Mariusz Kwiecien (marry me!). Then in the evening I’ll watch Carmen, because Carmen never gets old, and this production is really very beautiful.

And I’ll be at the stage door alone, God help me. But my friend told me it was very easy to make friends at the stage door, we all have an objective in common! I remember it was very easy making friends at the stage door of broadway musicals, I suppose it’s gonna be like that.

 So yesterday I made a list with everything I intend to buy when I go to New York. And yeah, I’m gonna be so broke I might as well stop eating now so I can afford these things. Here is a glimpse of the list I made looking only at the Met Opera Store and at the Julliard Store. There are some titles in the sheet music department that don’t have prices ‘cause I didn’t find an edition that can fit my pocket yet, they are all in French, and my favorites.

Most importantly I found the Cendrillon dvd, they sell it at the Met Store, and it’s $40! The things we do for love, like buying Opera Cooks, I love to cook and this is the ultimate book to have if you love opera and cooking! I also decided to buy the critic edition of Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflüte because these are the ones I’ll be using for real you know. I already have a critic edition (Bärenreither) of Le Nozze di Figaro and it’s just wonderful! I could be spending much less, but my teacher warned me against buying from certain publishers that to my utter delight were the cheapest!

And I also selected quite a few cds, I mean come on! I feel so bad already downloading these things, the least I could do is buy the cd when I have the chance! Of course I’m buying the 4 Joyce DiDonato cds they have, but that’s just because she’s my idol!

I also finished my “The Mark of Athena” book the day before yesterday, sad, I didn’t want it to end. But immediately started another one called Contos de Opera e Cantos by Sergio Casoy, who is a brilliant Opera History professor here in Brasil. This book is rather delicious to read, in it he shares little stories about things that happened during the productions of the operas. Like that for instance, the Othello project of Verdi was actually called the Chocolate Project because Verdi didn’t want to compromise in the beginning and took a good two years to write the piece. While Donizetti wrote L’Elisir D’Amore in less than a month! Really very entertaining, I’m still in the Italian operas part, he talks about all sorts of opera which is rather cool.

Also yesterday I did something quite soothing! I got my opera book, a towel and my purse and headed off to the beach. It was the end of the afternoon, so it wasn’t packed with people, but I had to walk a while to find a good spot to read. It was quite nice, and a beautiful sunset!