Opera Singing in Germany and other adventures....

This past Saturday night (November 12th) I attended an interesting festival that is an historically important Catholic tradition, based on the life's work of St. Martin (Martin of Tours), and one particular event in his life, specifically. This festival takes place to commemorate St. Martin (a knight in the Middle Ages, and then later on a monk) who met a beggar on his travels who was on the verge of freezing to death on a particularly cold night.  The back story to the beggar is that he had been robbed shortly before he meets up with St. Martin, and that he was previously a middle-class citizen who was on the way home to his family when the night grew colder and he decided he'd never make it with his heavy cart full of his master's goods to sell the next day at market, all the way home on dark roads with the potential danger of getting lost or getting robbed.  Therefore, the man decides to camp outside the city gates of where he came from, and then gets accosted by two b...

This particular entry is meant to provide an insight into my first two weeks here in Bad Orb thus far while working on the role of Rosina in Rossini's opera, The Barber of Seville , or in German "Der Barbier von Sevilla". The photos below are included to be a sort of progressive explanation of my experiences during these two weeks, almost like a photo journal. Our first day of staging, and part of our scenery! During this day, we went through the First Act musically, and then began right away to become acquainted with the acting out of the First Act Finale, and putting it on the stage as it would look in the final product. Different angle, same scenery :) Though, the set has changed even further from what it looks like here, and it is currently really much more developed than what you can now see.  A side note: the tables on the stage are where the Stage Director (Carlos Krause, a Kammersaenger from the Oper Frankfurt, and this year has been working in Opera for...

My favorite practice room in Henderson Hall, # 308B (and me in the mirror-lol!) Since I didn't get a chance to post these photos on here while I was actually in Blacksburg, VA at IVAI, I will post them on here now, so that you guys can see after the fact what things were like there.  I honestly should and would have taken more photos of more people and places in VA while I was there, but you know, as you can see from my photos here- the majority of my time was spent in this lovely little practice room (which amounted to something like 3 hours a day) and then the rest of my time was spent in lessons (something like 4-5 hours a day) and then the rest of my time was spent sleeping, eating, or some other uneventful but necessary thing like that.  However, I do resolve to take more photos when I am in Bad Orb (and have done so already - yahoo!) because I do realize that I am sorely in need of photos with people in them from my time at IVAI. More of my favorite practice r...