Miscellany, Jan 21

* From an email I wrote this morning: “This year has presented a whole new facet of my career - music being given or offered to me [unsolicited] to perform and/or premiere - and I really don't know yet how to navigate it. I'm learning slowly, and at the same time, am totally overwhelmed with all the opera and "traditional" old-school standard stuff that is coming my way. It's a wonderful problem to have, I assure you, but it still take some figuring out.” Le sigh.

* Re: the March 2nd Sing for Hope concert: A couple of you have commented on how I can put this thing together organizationally with all the other stuff I have going on. That’s the beautiful thing! The goal of Sing For Hope (one of the goals, anyway) is to facilitate these concerts in such a way that the only thing “we artists” have to worry about is our performance. They, together with the folks at the benefitting charity (Children’s Aid Society in this case), take care of press and advertising, ticketing, programs and publicity materials, all of that. It’s an incredible gift. If you would like to help SFH in this mission, they have a donation page, too! The concert will be at 3pm, fyi, if you’d like to save the date.

* This week I have to get my taxes done. I like to have them done by my birthday every year, but February and March are so busy now that I know I’d better do them now or I’ll be scrambling come April. The incentive: last year I had only W2 employment, as opposed to 1099, which means… tax refund!!

* I made new friend at a recital this weekend, giving my extra ticket to someone I ran into at the box office. Turns out he is a musicology PhD and music critic from Europe, and we spent some lovely hours talking about what’s shakin’ in “classical music” these days. He’s here to do some research into a major 20th C composer, and I just happen to be sort of “connected” with that scene here in NYC; my roommate’s good friend is a major scholar on the composer he’s studying. I’m excited to introduce him to folks, because I think his ideas about music and music writing and “the scene” in general will be a welcome addition. It was a fantastically serendipitous meeting!

* Related: there are some great comments in the Shake Up post; go read them. I’d love to say I’ll get a response posted, but keep reading and you’ll see that is unlikely… Read TM’s great riff instead.

* I can’t remember who first linked to this beautiful interview with Dawn Upshaw, but thank you. “Joy and beauty are my goals.” Amen! (I couldn’t help clicking on the included sound files, fearing (hoping??) that the listed “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a Lionel Richie cover…teehee)

* Music this week: Susanna, including a couple of hours with other GR cast members to run recits and ensembles; Rosina, although she’s still in the text-only stage; Evan Chambers’ new oratorio The Old Burying Ground, which I’ll be recording and touring between Figaro and the SFH concert (I was so excited to learn that a friend will be with me on this project!); and just for fun, some Strauss songs with a pianist/conductor friend. We discovered that we both performed the same set (Madchenblumen; can anybody tell me how to get umlauts with Pages?!) on our Masters’ recitals, so we’re going to get together and make some music. I’m looking forward to it all, but it is a lot, so I apologize in advance for a light blogging week… (Get off my back, Marc.)