Monday: looking forward ....

Monday is always an optimistic day for me in the opera. Whatever happens, we know we will be further on at the end of this week than we were at the end of the last week. We have to be - a premiere date is not put on hold. New hopes, new goals to be met and some of the frustrations of the previous week offset by a whole weekend free. Few is the number of whole weekends the chorus has free. Few, too, is the number of occasions where a chorus member gets 2 consecutive days free. I, then, was lucky this weekend - I was totally free and went to my first schoolfriend's wedding back in England. We were 4 years old when we met and curiously he has ended up as a pathologist and I working in an art form where there is usually at least one corpse on stage at the end of the evening!

Today is relatively light. I start with a meeting with a candidate who sang at last week's auditions and who wants feedback about his performance. On to a klaverprøve with Giancarlo Andretta (our conductor for Lucia, about which more anon) to tighten the chorus' musical imprint and to ensure that we are all pulling in the same direction. We start with the Gentlemen's Chorus as they have the most to sing in the piece and the Ladies join us later. Afterwards, a meeting with the Chorus representatives and some members of the administration to discuss the upcoming vacancy of Chorus Master. My colleague, Kaare Hansen, is leaving after 17 years in the position.

*Click for more photos!

I know, too, that the Chorus has a very important General Meeting this afternoon where they will discuss a quite revolutionary type of rehearsal plan that I, the Chorus Administrator and the Chorus representatives have been working on since the beginning of the season. Any change in working conditions has to be approved of by the chorus and this new plan is to meet both the increased workload occasioned by the expansion of the opera in the last two years and the Chorus' own desire to improve the manner in which it works. Although I am not directly involved in this General Meeting I am eager to hear the result of the debate as it will alter quite radically our modus operandi next year.

The rest of the week could be hairy. Lucia rehearsals move into a new phase - out of the rehearsal room and on to the stage within the real set: new environment and with it, new problems (usually). For conductor and chorusmaster alike it is usually a week of torment as both chorus and singers have to acclimatize themselves to the new space and the quality of the musical offerings temporarily slides. Towards the end of the week, costumes and make-up are tried out for the first time and we will start running the whole show from the beginning to end. It is really only here that the director's vision crystallizes for those who have been striving to enact it for the past 3 weeks or so. Spændende!

Philip White