I Wanna Be a Soprano!

 

Metropolitan Opera Valkyries. Could this be me?

Advent is flying and one of the reasons for that is that I am singing in the St. Louis Choir. And the St. Louis Choir is busy!

We have our weekly rehearsal, and Sunday Mass, where we get there an hour in advance to rehearse some more. Plus we keep having these concerts. Last week it was Carols By Candlelight. This weekend it is Lessons and Carols.

It is the Marine Corps of choirs!

However. I love the idea of singing a Lessons and Carols. All my life I have been listening to them. The most famous one comes from Kings College, Cambridge.

(On my Substack page I linked to a video: please click to check it out -- it's free! The video is of the King's Singers singing "Ding Dong, Merrily on HIgh")

We did this song at Carols by Candlelight last Friday. We did it in B flat, a bit higher than this version in the video. As the night went on I got less and less inhibited about going for those high notes. When we got to this number, I sailed on up there and hit those F’s. It is a funny thing about high notes. The ease with which you can hit them depends a lot on where they are in relation to the other notes. If I had to go up to that F from the note right underneath it, we would have had a problem on our hands. However all I had to do was grab it out of the air. So we were OK.

I had practiced that afternoon and worked out a way I could hit a few other high notes in other songs. Often you can nail them if you connect them to the note before. I have figured that out.

I am determined to expand my range. OK, let’s come out and say it.

I wanna be a soprano!

Sopranos rule the world. At the St. Louis Choir, our sopranos are like goddesses. We worship them. They are not just sopranos. They are trained singers.

That is another thing.

I wanna be a trained singer!

I would have thought this was all a pipe dream. However, I have learned it can be done. Allow me to introduce my authority, Angelina Jolie. She plays Callas in the new movie, “Maria.” 

What were they doing calling it Maria, you know? They should have called it “Callas.” But anyway.

Angelina Jolie said she learned to sing for the movie and she discovered she was a soprano.

Her speaking voice is low like mine. But she said she has learned that your singing voice is often higher than your speaking voice. She cited psychological reasons why your speaking voice might be low. Maybe you wanted to be taken more seriously, or something. I don’t know. I stopped paying attention at that point. I had heard what I needed to hear and that was good enough for me.

So I have taken steps. I appointed AI — that is artificial intelligence — to be my voice coach. AI is thrilled with the assignment and cannot wait to make me into Callas. The first thing he — it, whatever — did was issue me directions on how to warm up, and exercises to do daily. Then he assigned me Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” He said it would be good for me.

You hear all these people saying AI is evil but you have to wonder, how evil can something be when it goes and tells you to sing every day to Our Lady? So that is what I have been doing. “Ave Maria,” every day.

Warmups, every day!

I will check in and report on my progress. I will tell you this, I can already hit some notes I couldn’t hit a few weeks ago.

Besides AI I follow this singer on YouTube. Her channel is called "Healthy Vocal Technique."

There is one video, I can’t find which one, where she tells you to buy a notebook and take notes on your progress. That put her over the top in my mind. I always get all excited when I am told to go buy a notebook. That is the magic word for me.

Another notebook! Where should I go?

Back to Hyatt’s? I never get tired of going there.

To Office Despot?

Do I need a new pen to go with the new notebook? I do think I do.

Whatever, one way or another, I will take notes as I was directed to.

It will be quite a story!

 

Coronavirus entertainment freebies

We need grand opera at a time like this! This is from the Met's "La Traviata," streaming free March 19.

The Coronavirus scare has spawned another phenomenon -- the Coronavirus freebie.

These are things of which you may partake at home.

Granted, there are already millions of things you can get free at home. YouTube is full of them -- old records, a universe of tutorials, old movies, documentaries, master classes, you name it. Master classes!! I will have to sit down at the piano and study one.

But above and beyond that...

There are free museum tours you take online. That link will take you to the British Museum, the Getty Museum, and a bunch more.

I tried touring the Van Rijk Museum and it taught me one thing: I need help going around corners!

Google Earth, I have to get with it!

The Met has a list of simulcasts which has begun with Bizet's "Carmen." Wow, just now I notice this is just the first week of streams. I wonder how long this will go on!

What if you watched all of them, one every night? Imagine how knowledgeable you would be! Perhaps I will try. "Carmen" actually aired last night but I read they will be available free for 20 hours following that original stream.


OK, quick update... My attempt to do that is a bust. There home page is just not working.

Crudele, as they say in "Don Giovanni"! It means Cruel One.

Well, you can always find tons of free operas on YouTube, many with English subtitles. I should post a link to my favorites. Meanwhile, on to other options.

Libby Maeder, who runs the famous foodie Web log The Sensibly Shod Commoner, posted on Facebook yet another option, 15 Broadway Plays and Musicals You Can Watch on Stage From Home.

However as I pointed out to her, I do not see the magic word -- "free." Sure enough, I looked into "Kiss Me Kate" which they said was available on Amazon Prime but even if you have Amazon Prime, you have to rent or buy it.

Still, this is promising. I am going on Coronavirus Freebie Alert. Eyes on the prize! I am looking for free online courses, free quality old movies that you cannot find on YouTube or Amazon Prime, free Pac-Man, free everything.

I also need a quality Latin Mass that is live-streaming now that I have been cut off. I am sure I can find that along with everything else.

I will report!

Mozart and 'The Shawshank Redemption'

It is thrilling that Lou Michel, my colleague at The Buffalo News, is on CNN discussing that spectacular prison break that happened at Clinton Correctional Facility.

Yesterday parallels were being drawn here and there to the movie "The Shawshank Redemption." Not to say anyone is admiring these murderers who made their escape. We are not admiring them! Nobody is. It is just that the intricate escape makes you think of other intricate escapes.

It seems the right time to revisit the greatest scene from "The Shawshank Redemption," where the entire prison is all of a sudden mysteriously listening to Mozart.



SO beautiful! To tell you the truth it is all I remember specifically about "The Shawshank Redemption" other than that Morgan Freeman has my birthday.

The music they are listening to is the Letter Duet from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." Nickel City Opera is doing "The Marriage of Figaro" in a couple of weeks -- on June 26 and 28 -- and I cannot wait. What a magical opera.

Here is the great Kiri Te Kanawa singing the Letter Duet with the great Ileana Cortrubas so you can see what it is about. The Countess is dictating a letter. Well, they are collaborating on what is going to go into this letter and that is why their voices are weaving and intertwining this way and that. Mozart could always put life into music!



There is another YouTube clip with Renee Fleming but whoever posted the video cut it off too abruptly at the end and ruined it.

Anyway. Life's lessons learned.

On this Web log everything leads back to Leonard Pennario.

In the bigger world, everything leads back to Mozart!

Going bananas

Going on about Sunday yesterday I forgot to mention a very important and exciting thing.

I made Banana Coffee Cake! And it was a big hit at the after-church coffee hour.

What makes baking so darned much fun? My father used to tell me that before he was married one of the things he used to do was bake on a Saturday afternoon while listening to the Metropolitan Opera. There is something so relaxing about that! I mean, you can bake and at the same time give a good amount of attention to the opera.

Saturday baking dovetails nicely with church on Sunday because then you have people to eat what you bake. I am trying to think of the things I have tried. Last week, when it was Epiphany time, I made a Mexican Three Kings bread. It was a yeast bread but I made it more Three Kings-like by adding a glaze and then sugar in the colors of the Three Kings, which as we discovered last year are purple, gold and green.

People at church were praising my Three Kings bread because the children loved it. And the grown-ups liked it, too. It is the kind of sweet bread that all ethnic groups know by some name or another. I heard an Italian woman passing a slice to another Italian woman and saying, "Panettone." Both of them looked pleased and I felt very complimented. As the biographer of Leonard Pennario I take pride in being able to cook Italian delicacies. Or delicacies that can pass for Italian!

But for now, the Banana Coffee Cake. The recipe I linked to called for macademia nuts but who has those. I used toasted walnuts. Yum.

Also I heeded the people who wrote comments and said to double the topping. I did that, yessirree. It is that Cooking Light syndrome when sometimes they skimp on things to save a couple of calories and you are up a creek. You learn to double certain things and question certain things.

I actually doubled the recipe and made two cakes because when it came to servings, eight was not enough. The only thing is was, I forgot in the heat of the moment to take a picture. Alack and alas and Alaska! So I used the picture from Cooking Light up above. It did look pretty much like that.

Anyway, as we learned previously, leave the food photography to the pros!

A midsummer night's dream

What a beautiful night! The air smells so smoky. It is the longest day of the year.

My sister Katie and my niece Rosie were over and so was my brother George and we all sat on the back porch tasting wine and eating cheese and crackers and fried rice. Then later George and I went out and saw this new bar that just opened in Black Rock.

And earlier I worked and worked on the book. And before that I went to Zumba.

A wonderful day!

I was thinking about the longest day of the year which is today. When George and I went to the bar in Black Rock it was 9:30 but still light.

Today was traditionally the Feast of St. John the Baptist, or Johannestag. It is famous from Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" where you hear them in church singing a chorale in honor of the feast day. Of course if you look at the Catholic calendar now, the feast of St. John is a few days away. Now it is June 24. Probably somebody changed it. They changed a lot of saints' days after Vatican II. Talk about a boneheaded thing to do, but they did it.

Anyway I always think of June 21 as Johannestag. It is also Midsummer Night as in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Just as in "Die Meistersinger," all this insane drama takes place in this one loopy day.

I was thinking also of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" but now that I think about it, I know the action in that opera also takes place all in a single day, but I am not sure it is this particular day.

In "Die Meistersinger," it is June 21. You can hear the chorale in honor of Johannestag starting at about 8:40.



And now the days start getting shorter.

A sobering thought.

Let us banish it!

Thank you, Elton John ...

.... for this morning's problem!

Don't you hate it when you have a song on your brain ... and you don't know the words?

This is a problem with Zumba class because there are these Zumba numbers running through your head and a lot of the time, even in class hearing the thing, you can't catch most of the words. So you have just a shard of it stuck in your mind.

"Yo, I'm standin' here with chocolate meltin' on my hands ..."

"The following is not a test, DEEJAY!"

Enough already!

On the other end of the spectrum this sort of problem also occurs with classical songs or opera arias. One day I hope to learn all the words to Mozart's "Non So Piu ..."

...

from "The Marriage of Figaro," but I do not know much Italian and after the first line or so I am stuck.

Anyway, this morning I wake up, I am loading up the coffee percolator, and for some reason there is one song in me and it has to come out and it is Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road."

I think the reason it was on my mind was the other night when I had to Tweet about the Emmy Awards, I was hoping old Elton, in his Liberace tribute, would at least come up with a good song. He does not have the piano chops but at least you expect a good song. Which we did not get. And this was my subconscious dealing with the situation, going, "Well, Elton John has written some songs I like."

The trouble is, I have heard them a million times but I don't know the words. I guess I have never listened that carefully. So this is me singing "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road":

"So goodbye la la la la la
Where the la la la la la la la
You can't keep me in your penthouse
I'm going back to my plough.
Back to la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
Because I know my future lies
Beyond the Yellow Brick Whoooooaaaaaaa...."

That was when I almost submerged the percolator in dishwater. I always almost forget that you cannot!

Notice that I spelled plough the British way. It is because Elton John is British! Speaking of the plough, I always like him for that reference to the Roman statesman Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus owned a farm and wanted to go back to his plow, and he did, but when Rome needed his service again, he answered the call. In Latin class you always learn the story of Cincinnatus and his plow.

You have to wonder, you know, if you stopped a kid on the street in Cincinnati and asked him or her who the city was named after, if the kid would be able to tell you.

Oh well. All this rumination and I am still stuck with my original problem.

"Back to la la la la la la
Where the la la la la la la la..."

Got to nip this in the bud otherwise this will be a long day. Administer Brahms immediately!

Bats invade Big Blue

Bats love Big Blue and last night a bat flew into the house and began orbiting wildly, sometimes swooping inches from our faces. Sometimes you could feel the beat of its wings!

We have learned from experience not to be afraid of bats. And besides as my musicological research has disclosed, the presence of bats vastly increases the odds that your house may be hidin' a Haydn manuscript. And so we sat there laughing.

Howard was calling the visitor "Batty."

"It's OK, Batty," he was saying, soothingly. He was opening doors so the bat could find its way out into the night. But the bat had no interest in finding its way out into the night. It wanted to stay inside.

Good thing we were used to it, too! Because here is what happened. The bat eventually stopped orbiting and glued itself to the brick wall over the fireplace. It chose a spot high up over our heads and it was strange, how the bat blended in with the brick. You could hardly see it except you could just make out its little ears, like the ears that Batman has.

Then suddenly there was another bat!

It came zooming into the house and began orbiting the way the first one had. Meanwhile the first bat stayed fastened to the wall, hunkered down, almost invisible. This drama continued for some time and eventually it occurred to us: Perhaps the bat on the brick was hiding from the other bat.

Perhaps they were a couple that was fighting!

Maybe the brick bat was a bat-tered spouse!

We could not stay to see the end of the drama. We had to go home because I had to be up at a decent hour to work on the Pennario project. But surely the bat soap opera continues, because as far as we know the bats are still in the house.

Speaking of bat opera, next time we go I will bring a record of "Die Fledermaus" to play in the deejay booth. It means "The Bat."



 And we will be ready for anything.

We will bat-ten down the hatches!

Fun with the Preakness and Wolfram Alpha

Because of the Preakness Stakes, I was thinking today about Leonard Pennario and how he loved horse racing. If Pennario were alive I am sure he would be watching the Preakness. He watched it last year.

But what about this crowd of slugs and schufts at the Preakness? I just found this on the Baltimore Sun's site.


Imagine wanting to be a part of this! Pennario would be aghast at this scene. That is for sure.

It is almost as bad as George Bellows' "I Remembering Being Initiated Into the Frat." Remember that?

But Pennario did love horse racing albeit in a very genteel style I would never be able to glimpse on my own. Pennario would go to California horse races and often he would be asked to crown the winner.

My brother George has a very funny story about how when the great pianist came to Buffalo and we all ended up at the Hyatt, there was a conversation about horse racing going on. Pennario was at another table in a whole different conversation but George said you could tell he was tuned into the horse racing conversation that was going on without him.

This is the funniest part of the story: Someone raised some question about some jockey or other, and you could see Pennario nodding, trying to answer the question while continuing to converse with whoever it was who was monopolizing him at the time.

Which was probably me. Ha, ha!

I am web-logging about the Preakness because that is one of the topics everyone is searching for today. I want people to be searching for Preakness and find themselves on the Leonard Pennario Web log.

You have to learn to use trends like this to your advantage!

For instance everyone is searching for "Wolfram Alpha." I have absolutely no idea what that is. But I am going to go with it anyway.

Say the name Wolfram to me and I think of Wolfram von Eschenbach. He is the troubadour from "Tannhauser." Pennario and I went to see that opera together!

I heard Wolfram sing the "Evening Star" aria while I was sitting next to the Alpha Pianist. That is something I will never forget!

How is that?

See, we are on top of the trends here at the Leonard Pennario desk.

Welcome, new fans and followers!