I'm back!

Just when you thought you'd never hear from me again....

Well, it's been a little over a year since my last post, but I guess I was a little busy. You know, getting married, buying a house, going on my honeymoon to St. Lucia, rushing off to spend the summer again in Sante Fe with my new husband, coming back home and sprucing up the house, thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner...that kinda stuff.

I'll give you the singing news first before I bore you with personal details. If you'll recall, I was slated to sing Lucia at Opera in the Heights in Houston, Texas in September 2011. Well, the conductor/artistic director who hired me just retired from the company, so I was a little scared that my contract (which I never had in hand) would be given away. Fortunately, everything worked out and the contract is being honored. The new news is that shortly after receiving the actual signed contract, I was notified that the opera was going to be changed because Houston Grand Opera is doing Lucia also, and they don't want to compete for an audience. All's well that ends well, though, and instead of Lucia, I'm going to be singing Marie in Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment, which is probably up there in my top five roles I want to sing. More than Lucia, even. I am so excited!! The role is double-cast, and I'll have four performances between September 22 and October 2.

In other opera news, I ran into a conductor I've worked with a couple of times in the past in the hallway at a recent audition, and he told me to call him about a possible job he thought I might be interested in. This spring, he'll be conducting one of Mozart's rarely done early operas,Mitridate, at the Little Opera Theatre of New York. I auditioned for him and the director a few days later, and was offered the leading role of Aspasia. The role consists of 4 great arias, one duet with a countertenor (that'll be a first for me), and more pages of recitative than I can count. It's going to be a lot of work, but it will be so wonderful to have the opportunity to sing a leading role in NY, where my family and friends can come hear me sing.

I sang for my agent in NY before the audition season started, and she's really happy with how I'm sounding. I've had a few auditions since then, which I think have gone well (my agent says they're the best auditions I've done since signing with her). I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

In personal news, I got married in May, two weeks after closing on a house. I don't recommend doing those two things at the same time, it was a little stressful. One mental breakdown later, the wedding went off without a hitch, and I am a very happy wife!

Here we are!

We went on our honeymoon to St. Lucia, which was just beautiful and very relaxing. I gained a good 5 pounds and have yet to lose them. After we got back, Hal left for Santa Fe, and I joined him about a month later for the last two months of his gig. Since we've been home, it's been all about fixing up our house and really moving in. I've learned a bunch of new music for auditions, and have had some fun creative non-singing moments. I decorated a cake for Hal's birthday, my first attempt at cake decorating, I carved a mean pumpkin for Halloween, and I made a turkey cake for Thanksgiving.

That's all for now! I'm sure I'll have lots of stories once Mitridate starts in April. I'll be sure to send an update if I hear anything from my auditions. I've added a couple of videos to my website from a raunchy production I did 2006 of Powder Her Face, feel free to check them out if you don't mind seeing me in compromising positions. The first one is G rated, the second one is not. My NEW web address is: www.EricaMillerSoprano.com. Hope everyone's well, and have a great holiday season!

Better late than never: singing the Queen in Spain, some future gigs, and the best engagement of my life

It's been three months since my last confession...I mean blog. Guess I've been busy, lazy, forgetful, or all of the above. I kept meaning to write about my experiences in Spain singing Queen of the Night at the Festival Internacional de Música de Almansa, and somehow, I never got around to it. Until now.

So here we go, assuming I can remember a majority of the details. Almansa is a tiny little town full of very friendly people who don't speak a lick of English. They all know each other, and they all love Martín, the trumpet player at Deutsche Oper who is from Almansa originally and started this music festival. They have a theater but there has never been an opera performed in it before. The whole town basically raised the money for us to come, and while we didn't get paid much, we were staying in a fantastic hotel, got free use of the olympic-sized swimming pool in the center of town, were given discounts and freebies at restaurants, and were thrown a number of parties at wineries just outside of town with all the jamón and manchego and other Spanish tapas we could eat (and that's a lot!).

Now, due to a tremendous lack of funding, we had one makeup/wig girl and one dresser. This was not a high budget production. It was like being back in undergrad again, where we just figured out how to do things ourselves. This didn't bother me so much, but a lot of the Germans who are used to the special treatment weren't too happy. Thanks to having only one makeup girl, our call times started about 3.5 hours before the show, which is pretty unheard of in the real world. We did each other's pin curls and wig-caps to make things go faster (things that were always done for us at Deutsche Oper). By the time my wig was on and makeup was finished, I had about 2 hours before curtain. After I finished the book I was reading early in the week, I started offering to help, and ended up doing the whole wig process for the three spirits, played by three adorable little girls with terrific voices. I might be the first Queen of the Night ever to double as a wig girl. Pretty crazy, thinking back on it. Guess it proves I'm not a diva!

The performances were great and the audiences just ate it all up. I've never felt more like a celebrity. I received so many cheers and bravos, it was incredible. The majority of the audience members had never heard anything like my two arias before, and they just went wild after both of them, especially Der Hölle Rache. I had people coming up to me afterwards saying they had tears streaming down their faces when I was singing all those high notes, and the head of the festival told me that I was definitely the crowd favorite and that they couldn't stop talking about me after at the end of each show. It was an amazing way to end an amazing season!

Here are some pictures of the show and my costumes.

Here I am with Pamina, she looked very 80's. This was my first costume.

Same costume with two of the spirits that I wigged.

This was costume #2, that I wore with a cape on top for my first aria. Hello Vegas.

Costume #3, that I wore for Der Hölle Rache, the better known aria of the role.

Here I am holding my favorite Spanish snack food between acts: Ham flavored potato chips.

Action shot from Act I.

And another.

After Spain, I flew back to Berlin for a day, repacked, and took off for NJ. Then I left for Santa Fe two days later to spend a month and a half with Hal, who was singing a couple of roles there this summer. The Monday after I got there, I got some bad news. Opera in the Heights messed up, and I'm no longer singing the heroines of Hoffmann there next September. It's a long story that I don't need to get into, and I am really disappointed. However, I am definitely on the schedule in a couple of years for my first Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), my first Gilda (Rigoletto), and my first Blondchen (Abduction from the Seraglio). They're not coming up for a little while, so I'm back to doing auditions and trying to find singing jobs. My first priority right now career-wise is finding an agent. I should have a couple of auditions for agents this fall, and hopefully someone will want to represent me and get me into the bigger auditions.

The same day I got the news about Hoffmann, another engagement came about that evening, the best one yet. Hal proposed! We had gone out to a good Mexican place for dinner, and on the way home, he took a detour. We ended up at 10,000 Waves, a fancy spa, and Hal had rented a private bath for us, which was basically a really large outside hot tub with a cold plunge and a private sauna. After a little while of soaking, we got really warm and stepped out of the tub to cool down. We were sitting on a bench on the side and all of a sudden Hal started making a speech and got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him! And then as an afterthought, he said "And I got you a ring, too." And it is absolutely perfect! It's an antique ring from 1920, completely hand made, and the diamond is over 100 years old. It's been a couple of months, and I still can't stop staring at it. :-) The big day will be in May, and I can't wait to be Mrs. Harold Wilson!

Here we are overlooking a sunset in Santa Fe.

And here's the ring!

That's life for now. Having no jobs at the moment leaves me plenty of time for wedding planning, which is pretty nice. I'll be sure to update you when I have more singing news, and hopefully that won't be too far away. Hope your summers were also wonderful!

I posted some new recordings on my website. You can check them out at www.ericamiller.papaphonic.com. I also redid the look of the site, it's a little different and in blue instead of red. Matches my favorite Queen costume that I have on the home page.

Last blog from Berlin (well, at least for a while)!

My time here at the Deutsche Oper is rapidly coming to a close. My last performance is this Friday, I'm singing Frasquita in Carmen for a third time. I also have two Turandots, singing what is clearly marked in the score as Altra sola. As opposed to Una sola, which is the girl I'm singing with offstage for 20 seconds. Bad news is, I have to actually show up for this, good news is, one of the two shows is technically after my contract is up, so I'm getting paid extra.

Let me start with the exciting news: I'm going to Spain to sing Queen of the Night! I leave on Sunday. Originally, I was going to go home to the US of A on Sunday, but the Spanish Queen (well, not the Queen of Spain, that's different) pulled out of the show on Friday, and I got a call in the early evening. I'm singing at the first annual Festival Internacional de Música de Almansa. The music director is a trumpet player in our orchestra here and has heard me sing Queen numerous times, so he thought of me right away when the other Queen canceled. I am very excited to have another Queen on my résumé, and especially in another country! It'll look great on the bio! There are four performances, and then I come back to Berlin on the 13th, fly home to NJ on the 14th, and fly out to Santa Fe to spend the rest of the summer with my boyfriend who is singing at Santa Fe Opera. Needless to say, there's going to be a LOT of jet lag.

So, on to things I've already done. I sang Cugina in Madama Butterfly three times, and Frasquita in Carmen twice. I'll start with the Butterfly. If you're not familiar with it, Cugina is a teeny tiny role. One solo line consisting of six words, and a couple other small parts sung with other singers. I had one rehearsal, and one rehearsal with orchestra. At the first rehearsal, I felt like an idiot. I missed my solo line twice, and couldn't figure out where to come in for one of the parts with chorus. Now, the chorus was not at this rehearsal, which made entrances a little more difficult. After much confusion, I finally figured out that there was a huge cut in the score and half my lines didn't exist anymore. No one in the cast could actually tell me where the cut was (apparently nobody was told!), but I finally figured it out by the 2nd performance. While my kimono was gorgeous, I have to admit that I do better Japanese makeup on myself (see pictures below).

Real kimono at Deutsche Oper

Less-than-Japanese makeup, but great wig at Deutsche Oper

Looking more Japanese in the face, but with funny-looking wig and bathrobe kimono

On to Carmen. Carmen I actually did get rehearsals on, although never with the same cast. The quintet (Frasquita, Mercedes, Carmen, Dancaïro, Remendado) is constantly changing, which just keeps you on your feet on stage. The production itself is very traditional, almost too traditional, but the singers are fantastic and with Yves Abel in the pit, the music couldn't be any better. My first performance was June 5. Having never rehearsed on stage with the set, or with the chorus, there were definitely some interesting moments. The craziest was my entrance at the beginning of Act II, which is the big dance scene for the three girls. We had rehearsed the dance and felt very comfortable with it, but I had no idea that the chorus men on stage would be grabbing at us from left and right. There were so many times when I was supposed to travel from one side of the stage to the other, and either a chorus guy had his arms around my waist, or was picking me up and spinning me, or just holding on in some other way. I had no idea, so a lot got improvised, and it certainly didn't look planned to the audience, which it's not supposed to. The second performance, the dance was a complete mess, the Carmen hopped up on the table and never got off it (she's usually only up there for some of the 2nd verse), the chorus guys were extra crazy, but the music continued and eventually it was over! Due to the traditional nature of the staging, most of my singing required very little movement, so after the dance I was home free. I'm definitely looking forward to giving it a shot one more time this Friday. Here are a couple of pictures:

Me!

First costume – it was too short so they added some random material at the bottom

Second costume just for the end – there are gigantic black wings attached, but they take them off as soon as I get offstage so I couldn't get a picture with them. We're angels of death just in case you're wondering why I'd have wings.

In other news, I went to Toulouse, France to visit my boyfriend who was singing in Salome. I ate tasty foie gras pretty much every day, and had a great vacation away from Berlin. Right after I came back, my parents came to visit for just under two weeks, and got to see me once in Butterfly and twice in Carmen. Then my dad went home and my mom and I went to Madrid for a little vacation. Best parts of the trip were amazing melt-in-your-mouth octopus, some French-fried eggplant with honey, my first real paella, some nice hot and dry weather (we seem to be stuck in March here in Berlin), and a bullfight (not sure if I need to go again, but once was exciting).

Next blog will be about the upcoming Spain trip and my final thoughts on living and singing in Berlin for the last 10 months. This has been one amazing year!