A good reason to write a new blog entry

Something is wrong with my permanent forwarding email account (not so permanent now, are we). Not sure what happened, but as of four days ago, any mail sent to eamiller (at) alumni.usc.edu is missing somewhere in the world wide web. So, if you sent me something, please resend if it was important. I'm hoping to get this problem solved, but just in case that doesn't happen, please send me emails at EricaMillerSoprano (at) gmail.com.

Yes, it has been a while since I've written a post. That's mainly because not much has happened. We finished Helena and Elektra, and opened Carmen, which I'm not in until June. So I didn't really have to go to rehearsals since it's a completely different cast in June and we'll have to rehearse then.

I've taken two little trips since I last wrote. I had an audition for an agency in Vienna, and the audition went well. After singing Der Hölle Rache (only one person, a tenor, sang more than one aria out of the 20 or so singers there), the agent told me that he didn't have any auditions he could send me on now, but that he'd call if something came up. Sounded promising. From what I've heard through the grapevine, and from other friends who have done agent auditions in Europe, apparently the agents don't sugar-coat. They'll tell you exactly what they think, so if I had done something not to his liking, I have a feeling he would have told me.

I also took a little vacation to Munich surrounding a Richard Strauss competition. I made it to the finals, but was not one of the winners. I felt like a winner though when I was unexpectedly handed 200 Euros in cash for my travel expenses. Thanks! Munich was beautiful, but there's not a ton to do as a tourist. A few days was definitely enough to see what I wanted to see. Something I was looking forward to and will hopefully avoid at all costs in the future was watching the Glockenspiel at the City Hall (at 11am every day the clock plays a merry tune and dancers spin around to the music, like a big cuckoo clock). Well, the merry tune was so out of tune that I would have sworn it was written by Harry Partch, and the action definitely left something to be desired. It was pretty sad, and maybe half the crowd actually stayed for the whole thing (we're talking 7 or 8 minutes at most). Here's a short segment if you don't believe me, unfortunately it isn't rotated correctly. See if you can name that tune!

My latest project was making a new recording of the two Queen of the Night arias. You can listen to them on my website at http://www.ericamiller.papaphonic.com/recordings/recordings.html. They came out really well, if I do say so myself. I will tell you, recording Der Hölle Rache is so hard! It can only be done in one take because there's no good place to splice, and there's a limited number of times you can sing it before you can't sing it. This was my second take of two. Whew! Now, the reason I needed to update my recordings on my website is because I just sent my materials out to about 80 opera houses in Germany, and about 20 agents in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. My plan is to do as many auditions as possible and maybe even have a job next year! I sent out everything this weekend, and have spent about four hours already today getting email after email back from the info@ email addresses telling me where to send my materials. A lot of houses don't post the important people's email addresses on the website. I've already heard back from a couple houses who are looking for a different soprano type than myself, I have one agent audition scheduled in Düsseldorf and another possible audition for an agent in Munich, and the opera house in Leipzig said they'd set up an audition for me, and that I'd hear from them later. Hopefully some more will bite.

Since I haven't given a sausage update in a while, I should say that the Weißwurst in Munich were delish. Something else I bought that was also delish but not so delish when I still had the taste in my mouth a day later was Döner-flavored potato chips. Döner being those yummy meat-on-a-stick Turkish sandwiches that are on every street in Berlin. I think I'll stick with the ham-flavored chips from now on. The Roast Chicken and Thyme chips were also good, but they just didn't seem to go well as a side dish with anything. Ham's definitely the way to go.

There's not much coming up for me at the moment. My next performance is La Novice in Marie Victoire in April. I'm double-cast so I haven't been rehearsing since the other soprano is singing the premiere. Fine by me, the director has apparently been pretty mean during rehearsals. My entire role pretty much consists of sitting and praying and every five minutes singing some phrase that begins with "J'ai peur." I'm observing a rehearsal tonight, so I'll find out if I actually move in the hour plus that I'm on stage. I hope so! I'm also learning Clorinda in Cenerentola (as a cover), and I think I'm going to start looking at my part for the White Rabbit in Ostendorf's Alice in Wonderland. There's quite a bit of dialogue, so the sooner I start looking at it, the better off I'll be.

Happy almost spring!

Edited to add: Thanks to my sending this blog out announcing that my email isn't working, my email is now working. So email me at whichever address you desire, USC or Gmail.

Helena premiere and a couple of divas

I just sang in the premiere of Helena on January 18, and according to some of the other singers, it was the most well-received premiere here in years. The singers were all incredible. Laura Aikin, the coloratura, was such an inspiration. She's sung everywhere, is the sweetest woman, has two adorable kids, and has a voice that doesn't have any hint of age in it and is just spectacular. The Helena, Riccarda Merbeth, also has a gorgeous instrument, but expects the world to cater to her. Throughout the rehearsal process (6 weeks), she never once acknowledged any other singer's presence, and her favorite pastime was taking off rehearsal costume pieces that she no longer needed, walking by another singer with a smaller role (like me), and dropping them into our arms, as if we were her dressers. All of this while walking forward and not looking in our direction. There was one time when she simply held out her coat in the middle of rehearsal and let it dangle from her fingers for about a minute before finally realizing no one was coming to take it from her. She huffed and laid it on the bed on stage. Needless to say, the show makes absolutely no sense, but it's beautiful to look at, and the audience cheered like crazy.

The costumes were definitely cool, even if they were a little painful. My corset one rehearsal was pulled a little too tight and for the next few days I felt like someone had kicked me repeatedly in the ribs. It's fun looking like a weird 80's rock star though!

Here I am, the pink elf. (We're not really elves, we're ladies of the night.)

The three elves.

Three elves, two maids, and Laura Aikin as Aithra.

Speaking of divas, it's been loads of fun working with Agnes Baltsa, who is singing our Clytemnestra in Elektra. She is the first superstar singer I've gotten to sing next to here (even if she is in her 60's), and she's absolutely hilarious. At the first rehearsal, we were all called at 10am, and we did nothing until 10:30am because Ms. Baltsa was telling the director everything she would NOT do. Which is basically everything. The stage is basically a pit of tiny, dusty, gray pieces of cork that everyone has to stand in at some point or other. It's smelly and gross, but oh well. Well, when Ms. Baltsa saw it, she said no, she would absolutely not walk into the stuff. Now Janice Baird, singing Elektra, has to lie in it and writhe around, and she's doing it! But no, not Agnes. Then she was told she has to carry an axe around with her. What did she say? First, in her 25 performances of this role, she has never had an axe and it's not in the character at all, and second, my personal favorite, if she were to carry an axe, that would leave only one arm left to emote, and Clytemnestra needs two arms at all times. All of her complaints were followed by her opening her mouth wide enough to swallow her head, and laughing. It was pretty funny! For the scene that I'm in as her confidante, we're up a good height above the cork, and she doesn't want to be there because it's too high and too far back. For her entrance, she is supposed to walk left, then right, then down the middle, and finally end up center to sing. No no no, she says, when I come in, I make my entrance and stay, my character would never walk across 3 times. This is not a new production, by the way, so it's not meant to be changed at all. Anyway, she's, how do you say, difficult. But at least she's fun and talks to us and doesn't toss her costume pieces towards us when she doesn't need them.

The set for Elektra, including the cork, was a complete death trap the day of the dress rehearsal. The door where we stand about 20 feet up is like a drawbridge, and the front couple of feet where we actually stand had nothing to either side except a 20 foot drop down! My hands were shaking when I was up there because I thought at any moment Ms. Baltsa would bump into me and I'd drop to my death. For the performances, they thankfully closed in the gap so I felt a lot better! The cork itself has got to be the most unsanitary substance on earth. It's from last year, was packed up in plastic bags for safekeeping until this year, and it's constantly being watered down to keep the dust level low. The bacteria levels must be off the chart!

I was lucky enough to get to sing 10 days of rehearsals of Zerbinetta since Jane Archibald was at another gig. I sang through most of the role with the conductor, and a few staging rehearsals. It was so much fun! I was sad when I had my last rehearsal, but after hearing Jane do the aria, I am so excited to see her in the role. She's incredible. The conductor, Jacques Lacombe, seemed to really like me, and mentioned to one of the staff members that we had a great backup Zerbinetta here, so that made me feel great. Hopefully, if anything goes wrong with Jane, they'll give me a call.

Carmen rehearsals just started, and even though I don't get to sing Frasquita until June, I've gotten to sing all the musical rehearsals with Yves Abel, the conductor, since the March Frasquita is currently sick. Yves is wonderful to work with, and I'm really looking forward to singing the role on stage!

It looks like I'm going to be in another premiere now, which isn't making me too happy. I had a relatively free mid-February through mid-April, and I put in for some vacation time so that I can do auditions and maybe even take a little vacation. The forms were signed, the time off was approved, and two days after I got the forms back, Herr Seuferle popped into one of my rehearsals and told me that even though he signed my forms, he was going to need me to be in the premiere of Respighi's Marie Victoire due to his miscasting a mezzo in a soprano role and only now realizing it. It opens April 9 and will have 6 weeks of rehearsal, and even though it's always nice to get more stage time, I'm a little annoyed. I'm only in one act and I have about 5 lines, and it's a role that's unimportant in an opera that I will never be singing again. At least if it were something useful I'd feel less annoyed about giving up my vacation/audition time. I told him that I really needed to be available for auditions during the time of the rehearsals and performances, so I will be sharing the role with another soprano who can't make all the performances but can be there for the rehearsal period. I did have every right to say no since I already had the forms signed to be gone, but I do appreciate everything he's done for me, and I really want him on my side if potential employers call him to ask about me.

All in all, I've just been super busy since the new year started, and it looks like I'm going to stay that way for the next few months. If I can sneak in and get pictures of the Elektra set and cork, I will, but no promises.

Hope you're enjoying the cold weather more than I am! Brrrr.

Happy Holidays! (And time to get to work!)

To begin with, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! And soon to be, Happy New Year. 

December has been super busy and also a bit frustrating. Good stuff first: the Christmas Markets are fantastic, full of great food and arts and crafts, and I've seen just about all of the ones anyone's heard of. I've eaten all sorts of delicious sausages, crepes, melted cheese, perogies, salamis, soups, quarkballs (basically donuts made with sour cream), chocolates, and other things I can't remember. Yum! Sadly, they're all over now, but they sure make being away from home during Christmas less sad. My sister visited for a week in the beginning December, also a lot of fun, and I got to walk around more of Berlin that I haven't seen, and try out interesting restaurants like a Sri Lankan place I'd like to go back to. I've also managed to memorize Zerbinetta, which is great since Ariadne auf Naxos starts on January 2.

And now the not-so-much-fun stuff. We started rehearsals for Strauss' Die Ägyptische Helena (which I now am calling Hell-ena). The cast is wonderful, and surprisingly, mostly made up of Americans. The Helena is German and expects the world to rotate around her, but she has a fabulous voice so I'm not too bothered by her attitude (many of the other cast members are ready to kill her for being such a diva, but I haven't had any major run-ins yet). Our conductor, Andrew Litton, is lots of fun, American, always buys the wine at dinner, and speaks no German. The director, Marco Marelli, speaks English to the conductor, but not to us. Two of us don't really understand him, and the other girl doesn't seem to care, but I do. It's so frustrating to be told something in German, understand some of it but not all of it, and then after looking confused, have the director say the same exact thing in German again. I also hate having to always ask another cast member to translate, but it's what I have to do. I can't go from not understanding German to understanding it fluently just like that. I do get a lot of what the guy says, but there's only so much I can get at once, and it's not nearly enough.

I had mentioned before that we're in the whole show, even though we only sing in one scene. During a 3-hour rehearsal, we cover about 3-5 minutes of the opera. We do the scene over and over again, and we barely change anything. And if Marelli wants to change something, instead of just going over the one part, we start the whole scene over again. And then the next rehearsal, it ends up changing! It takes so much energy to be there, and he expects more with each repetition. By the time you get to the 20th rep, everyone's making stupid mistakes because we just can't focus anymore. We've been working on the show since the beginning of December, and we basically have seven days of rehearsal left before our first dress rehearsal. We still haven't staged half of Act I, and the elves haven't been put into Act II at all (and I know we're in it!). I don't know how this show is going to come together in time. However, all that being said, if it does come together, I think it will be a beautiful production. The costumes and sets are gorgeous, and I think it will be fun to watch even if the process is tedious. Hopefully we won't get booed like Tannhäuser did!!

I've had three performances of The Cunning Little Vixen. It is the cutest production – everyone's in amazing animal costumes, and there are a number of dancers. I am a grasshopper in the beginning and the end, and I eat leaves and play a violin like it's a guitar, and dance like an idiot. All that while being very green and wearing a grasshopper head that I can't really see in.

In another scene I'm one of two boys (well, more like a big boy since I have a padded stomach on my costume). We torment the vixen and get thrown back inside by our dad.

We had two performances yesterday, one on December 17, and one coming up on January 9. I only have a few lines to sing, but the music is fairly difficult rhythmically, and we have a conductor who doesn't think it's his job to cue singers, so we are always off. The audience would never be able to tell, but it's annoying to never get things right – as soon as one singer is slightly behind or ahead, we all end up singing it wrong. Oh well! I suppose if he cared, he'd cue!

January is going to be super busy. I'm singing the first 10 days of Zerbinetta rehearsals, starting January 2. I'll also be at most of the other rehearsals because of covering Zerbinetta and Najade. Hell-ena opens on the 18th. And then we're starting Elektra and possibly Carmen. The big news about Carmen is that we're no longer doing a new production since the director had to pull out for health reasons, instead we're remounting the old one. This will take substantially less time rehearsing. This is good because I'm already busy enough and will appreciate the extra time, but bad because I'd like to have a chance to really rehearse Frasquita before being thrown on stage. I'm also not performing the role until June, so I don't know if I'll be called to the early rehearsals. No matter what, they can't call me to more than 6 hours a day of rehearsals, so I'll be busy, but not that busy.

Not too much else to report at the moment. Happy New Year everyone!