Più docile io sono

Well, one survives that, no matter how… If it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

— James Baldwin, The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity

I was hiking with my family recently, and my mom said affectionately that she was glad I’d learned to hike while looking at the ground.

As a kid, I evidently walked through forests looking up, forward, or sideways, but never down: unaware of the parameters of my own body, either absorbed in an inner world of my own making or projecting my imagination outward, far beyond my little self. Today, a kid like me would probably be recognized as neurodivergent, but in the vocabulary of the 90s I was bright, forgetful, spacy, shy—and clumsy.READ MORE

A Story of 2024 in Twelve Things I Made (That Weren’t Music)

JANUARY :: roasted tomato salsa.

At this time last year, I went to Mexico for a much-needed break and a visit with my sister after a prolonged period of intense stress and overwork. It was an amazing trip. It was also the last time I could pretend to myself that my increasing anxiety was just a temporary byproduct of pushing a bit too hard, and that a holiday would solve it all.

Luckily, you don’t have to be in a perfect mental state to enjoy a vacation—or a cooking class. That green mole, look at it! The tamales! We snacked the whole time we learned how to make these gorgeous dishes, then we sat down and ate a full meal of what we’d made (plus plenty that had been prepared beforehand), then we sampled the funkiest mezcals ever. A day of total indulgence, tasting as we went. This picture was taken by my friend Steve, the best travel companion, as we crushed on the enthusiastic and crazily knowledgeable teacher/chef Emilio who ran the class.

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in praise of feeling less

Hi from my couch (mustard-yellow). No soprano glamor here: I’m wearing an oversized cabled sweater (the color of late summer sunlight) I knitted years ago, candy-cane-patterned socks a friend gave me as a joke, and slippers (caramel) I bought on a blustery day in December between rehearsals. I’m leaning against a woven wool pillow (white, black, turmeric) I got in Oaxaca in January. I’m drinking my third coffee of the day out of a favorite mug (stormy blue) handmade in North Carolina, and I’ve just set down another knitting project (purple, spring green, white) that matches the crocuses popping up all over Rotterdam. My pet rabbit is snoring; the kids in the schoolyard behind my house are shrieking, as usual.

I’m grounding my body in sensory experience—color, taste, tactile fabrics—as a bulwark against the waves of feeling that come as I reflect on the last year or so, since I finally feel able to write about some of it. No doubt I should be pointing to the lovely concerts I got to sing, name-dropping orchestras and colleagues, or teasing future work, but instead, all I want to do is write about this year’s particular mix of music and vulnerability.

The most notable event, professionally, was making the album Forget This Night. It was so close—to us, its makers, Sam and Frerik and me especially, plus many more who contributed in vital ways—that it was hard to keep perspective on it, and even harder to let go when the time came.READ MORE

Kenneth

Stunned that Kenneth Montgomery died yesterday.

Many knew him much longer and better than I did—but I feel so lucky to have known him for a few years, to have worked and learned and sung in his circle of light for a short while; and I feel heartbroken that I didn’t have more time, that we all didn’t, that a light like his has to go out.

It won’t, of course, not really. We’ll all be carrying it on, consciously or unconsciously. I thought of him often today. I was singing Brahms, Herzogenberg, Schumann and Korngold, and I tried to sing it with the rapture, focus, rigor, and zest that he would have brought to music of such extraordinary beauty. I tried to sing it with the gentleness toward myself and those around me that he would have shown. I tried to sing it with a soft sparkle in the eye, like his.

I will never forget singing Mozart with him—starting with my audition for Don Giovanni with the Orchestra of the 18th Century, one sunny May afternoon in his living room. I had been traveling since six in the morning and arrived late after a massive train delay, breathless and frantic that I’d blown my chance. But Kenneth smiled, sat at his Broadwood, beckoned me into its crook, and began to play. My breath slowed into the humanity I heard in each phrase he played, the compassion for every emotional shift. My love for and indignation on behalf of Donna Anna found a friend and champion in him before we’d exchanged a word about her character or her story: I could hear it in his music, see it in his face. And we kept going. We read arias together for as long as it gave him pleasure.

The picture above by Jan Hoordijk is from the Schauspieldirektor/Magic Flute mashup we did in the fall of 2021. I was singing the goofy role of Madame Herz, a caricature of a prima donna. What strikes me about the photo is that I look so much like myself under his amused smile, despite the exaggeration of the character.

I have all kinds of identity questions about myself to this day. Opera singer? Concert singer? Good girl or femme fatale? Nerd or diva? Singing with him allowed me to be all things at once—a fully realized version of myself as a musician and human, whatever the proportions. I think everyone who loved him felt that way. He was so extraordinarily, boundlessly generous of spirit. For him, all good music was good music; every singer or player was a delightful mix of music-making, soul, and sense of humor; and all stories were good stories, and weren’t we just so lucky to get to tell them?

Kenneth, it was an honor to know you.

child’s pose

Hi from a Rotterdam kitchen table strewn with empty coffee cups, scores of Polish songs I’m learning, and a laptop open to an article about airborne missiles (Russian? Ukrainian? deliberate? accidental?) killing Polish civilians.

Life has felt kind of high-stakes lately. Just me? I don’t think it’s just me. 2022 has been so heavy, in fact, that I ran out of things to say here for a while. It was hard enough to stay present in my work and in my relationships, and no kind of music chit-chat came easily. Music was dwarfed by the enormity of everything else: the pandemic; a breathtakingly destructive European land war; climate inaction and denial; borderline-fascist power grabs; the erosion of individual rights, safety, and autonomy in many places.

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wells of love, lasagnas of protection

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water,
That “love” is literally something of yourself,
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

There are different wells within us.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far, far too deep
For that.

—Hafez

In late March 2021, after all the accumulations of the past year—

after mourning the people who died—

after commiserating with friends who lost loved ones—

after adjusting to the loss of most of my income—

after feeling almost unbearable gratitude for the work I managed to do in spite of everything, and the friends who supported that work—

after watching momentous political upheavals across the world on small screens—

after endless vulnerable conversations about how everything, everything, had been changed by Covid—

after making and re-making plans over and over and seeing most of them cancelled anyway—

after laboring for so long to keep my professional mask from slipping, because I knew that everyone in the performance industry was suffering more or less equally, and no one had any answers—

in late March 2021, after all this, I cried harder than I had in the entire pandemic.READ MORE

the things I am still, a year in, trying to tell myself

Someday, you will recognize how brave you were.

Someday, you will recognize that your grief was reasonable, whether it was connected to a specific loss or not.

Someday, you will (possibly) forgive yourself for your unearned privileges—a home, a few close people, tolerance of solitude, money and food enough, health care—that others suffered and died without.

Someday, you will (possibly) forgive the politicians who dismissed the importance of your life’s work during a crisis that stripped you and most of your friends of their livelihoods even as those politicians continued to ease their lockdown boredom with stuff made by artists.

Someday, you will look back in disbelief at having been able to devote months to a single project, a single album, and you will fully know the generosity of everyone who helped make it happen, everyone who listened and shared and wrote to you to tell you what it meant to them.

Someday, you will know that what you actually spent time on this year—making that album, listening to what others were making at the same time, movies and shows and books and podcasts and radio and streamed concerts, cooking and cleaning and sleeping and bathing and walking and resting and laundry, knitting, keeping a pet rabbit and some plants alive, yoga, learning about houses in general and yours in particular, taking things apart and putting them back together mindfully, clearing away old objects and anxieties, opening your home to two friends for months, opening your heart to many friends’ fear and grief, finding ways of sharing your own fear and grief and also bearing them on your own, huddling for long cold afternoons under a crocheted blanket that was a handmade gift—mattered more than what you didn’t spend time on and felt guilty about.READ MORE

Ruth Falcon, 1942-2020

I was shaken to learn last night that soprano and legendary teacher Ruth Falcon has died.

I was lucky to study with Ruth at Mannes for three years. She was an exacting technician, a force of nature, someone who could be both boundlessly generous and terribly difficult. Although we haven’t been close in many years, it’s hard to believe she’s gone.

I remember our first lesson. I had been accepted to Mannes and was trying to decide on a teacher. Ruth worked me hard for an hour; I felt things unlock that had never been free. The feeling was physical and thrilling, and the resulting sound was one I had never heard come from my own body before, unstable, full of color. After I breathlessly thanked her at the end of the lesson, she told me with satisfaction that she had heard something teachable in my high C during my Mannes audition. Nothing else was good yet, she hastened to add, but we could build down from that pitch. It was my first squirming encounter with her notorious directness, but the thing was, we DID build down from there. In the next year or two especially, she gave me technical tools I am still using.READ MORE

Reinbert de Leeuw, 1938-2020

The world is a less vibrant place today.

The last time I saw Reinbert was nearly a year ago, spring, a jump-in—Berg and Zemlinsky songs in gorgeous chamber arrangements he had made. I had enough notice that I could go to his house in Amsterdam on a sunny April day to go through the music. I had been cramming at home and was quaking in my boots when I arrived, because I was barely past the sight-reading stage with some of the songs, and how could I hope to please him, who knew so much more than I did?

I should have known better, but then I only worked with him a few times. He welcomed me in, made me a coffee, sat in his favorite chair in the sun, and then we didn’t rehearse at all—he talked about the music and the texts for an hour or two with such love, such depth of understanding, and such wonder and humor. He played me recordings and hummed and conducted along, his eyes sparkling at particularly beautiful harmonic shifts. He told me stories. He could not have been more generous. It wasn’t only generosity—this was also of course the most useful preparation together, because everything started from his fierce, uncompromising, entirely romantic commitment to the material, and this was what he cared that I absorb in our short time together, more than musical details, which I could manage on my own. I won’t ever forget that concert, or his spirit, although so many knew him much more deeply and longer than I did.

Rest well, Maestro.