vol. 34: that which is nurtured slowly, grows well
Reflections on my eighth Messiah as a soloist.
Greetings from ViaRail Train 62 from Toronto to Montreal. It’s starting to feel like I’m always in transit, which is only going to intensify this month as I head to Augsburg, Munich, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Qualicum Beach, & then back to Toronto over the next few weeks. I spent this past weekend singing Messiah with the Masterworks of Oakville, a group I’ve sung with before and with whom I really enjoy working.
This weekend marked my eighth Messiah as a soloist (maybe ten performances total?). My first was almost ten years ago when I sang with the Dayton Philharmonic following my stint as their soprano artist-in-residence. In 2019, I covered the solos with Vienna’s Concentus Musicus conducted by Daniel Harding, a world-famous conductor who works obsessively to find all the drama and specificity in any given piece of music. My mentor/teacher Michael Schade was tenor soloist, and he spent months preparing me to make sure my singing was as stylistic, accurate, and interesting as possible. I’ll never forget how thrilling it was to sit in on those rehearsals, and I was spoiled by the way the German-speaking Arnold Schoenberg Choir would de-emphasize unimportant syllables such as “FOR unto us a child is born” (they sang the “For” softly, building to “unto US”). I’ve never heard that since… (it’s often referred to as the golf chorus, with a giant “FORE!”).
A little sneaky vid I took of the Hallelujah chorus back in Melk, Austria in 2019 with Daniel Harding. I’m obsessed with how they started it softly, conveying quiet awe before building to a forte when the timpani comes in…
Listen to Michael’s thrilling variety and specificity in this aria.
As I drove to Oakville yesterday, CBC Music was profiling Raffi Armenian, an Armenian-born conductor who studied in Vienna before receiving his first conducting posts in Halifax and eventually Kitchener-Waterloo. Armenian is largely responsible for shaping the KW Symphony into one of Canada’s finest orchestras, as well as helping to build the Centre in the Square theatre - a world-class acoustic and home for classical music.
When Armenian described his career trajectory on CBC, he mentioned that he considered himself lucky to have built his experience gradually and in smaller places. Musicians are often frustrated or envious of their colleagues, wanting to perform in giant halls with major ensembles right away and never feeling that their gigs are as fancy as they could be. Hearing Armenian, a European who trained in Vienna, describe the advantages of building his career and experience gradually was exactly what I needed to hear as I drove to my performances in Oakville.
The Canadian soprano and voice teacher Mary Morrison once remarked that because I’ve performed Messiah so many times, my interpretation must deepen and grow with every performance. The tenor soloist I sang with this weekend admitted that Messiah is one of the only pieces he performs where he’s able to get out of his head technically and connect spiritually, simply because of how many times he’s done it.
Every time I sing Messiah, I connect differently to it. I try out different ways of story-telling, different dynamics, articulations, phrasings. It’s never perfect; there’s always some coloratura passage that could’ve gone better or ornament that could’ve been more legato. I also understand the piece differently every time I sing it. It took a long time for me to understand all the text in “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” where I now enjoy being the smartest girl in the room as Michael Schade used to tell me in coachings (“I know that my Redeemer liveth”) and putting the baby to sleep in a nice pianissimo final phrase.
There’s a Haruki Murakami quotation I like, which is that “What is nurtured slowly, grows well.” I think that’s an important one for many of us to remember in our fast-paced, results-driven world in which many things like pandemics or life often render career trajectories differently than we may have imagined.
Here’s to building experience slowly and shirking whatever path we thought we were supposed to take.
