Det er saft og kraft, der kendetegner Det Kongelige Operakor, når de 60 sangere åbner for de musikalske sluser aften efter aften på de skrå brædder. Men en korsangers hverdag er meget mere end at stå på scenen – kig med her og se hvad der foregår bag kulisserne i Det Kongelige Operakors hverdag.Looking ahead ....
Let me give you some figures.
In 2002/03 the chorus had 67 performances. In 03/04 a little more ...... 90. In 04/05 a bit more again - 114 (that's when we moved into the New House). The 2005/06 season saw a slight drop, back to 98. Last year, however, there were 119 opportunities to catch the chorus on stage (almost twice as many as in the 2002/03 season).
And this year we are almost unavoidable; to quote from Leonard Bernstein's opera, Candide, we will be doing our best to "glitter and be gay" almost every other day. Shared between Holmen and Gamle Scene, the chorus will be singing in 156 performances. It is quite a rise in a very few years. And that takes some planning.
Rehearsals for this season's opening premiere, Hoffmann's Eventyr, were well underway already in May. It opened on the 8th September. Now a revival of Don Giovanni has been playing for a week. It's our smallest piece - a group of 24 singers, and the ladies only get to sing in 1 number (though, for the record, they have an even shorter part in Ragnarok: where despite almost 5 hours of music, Wagner has only allotted them 15 notes. In contrast to that, music scores are brushed down and opened up once again next week to relearn Verdi's choral blockbuster, Don Carlos, and, with 71 singers, it is our largest piece this season In the meantime, Den Glade Enke started music rehearsals last week and La Bohème hits the boards next week. The chorus appears only in the 2nd and 3rd Acts, and Act II of La Bohème is one of the shortest acts the repertoire - coming in at around 20 minutes - about the same length as the orchestral prelude to Parsifal! It is not short, however, on the number of characters the chorus are required to play - in this production there are 18 different characters who have a specific task to fulfil allied to the role they are singing - and all of these have to be covered in case of illness.
In all that's 5 different pieces in 8 weeks. We will be getting our tongue tied around 4 different languages: French, Italian, Danish and Czech. The linguistic competence that is required by a chorister is worth a blog in itself, but just as a taster, let's consider Czech.
Czech is the language of Dvorak's opera Rusalka which will get it's Danish premiere in February 2008, despite having had its world premiere 107 years previously!! The idea of singing in Czech generally fills a singer with dread, at first. Why? Because of all European languages it has the greatest number of words with no vowels. One can be expressive singing "A", try being expressive on a "K" or a "P".
I am sure I do not need to tell you there is a lot of death in opera -in Czech opera, there is a lot of "smrt". "Morta, morta" cries the Italian, "smrt! smrt!" buzzes the Czch, thereby covering the last row of the orchestra in a fine dusting of saliva. "Ice" is "zmrzl" and a "fool" is a "blb". But my favourite has to be this:
"Strc prst skrz krk"
That's the longest sentence without any vowels. Try singing that and projecting it to the back of the auditorium. It is unlikely we will ever need to. Rather appropriately, perhaps, it means "stick your finger through your throat". Who knows - it might help. But we won't need to find out for some weeks yet.
This week we will be concentrating on pulling Bohème together for repremiere on October 1st. It also marks the arrival of our new chorus master, Jeremy Bines, the biennial Chorus Seminar, with opera chief, Kasper Bech Holten with whom we also embark on a 7-week journey which will culminate in the premiere of Don Carlos on the 18th November.
With 9 performances already past as I write, you only have 147 opportunities to catch us.
See you there!
Philip White
In 2002/03 the chorus had 67 performances. In 03/04 a little more ...... 90. In 04/05 a bit more again - 114 (that's when we moved into the New House). The 2005/06 season saw a slight drop, back to 98. Last year, however, there were 119 opportunities to catch the chorus on stage (almost twice as many as in the 2002/03 season).
And this year we are almost unavoidable; to quote from Leonard Bernstein's opera, Candide, we will be doing our best to "glitter and be gay" almost every other day. Shared between Holmen and Gamle Scene, the chorus will be singing in 156 performances. It is quite a rise in a very few years. And that takes some planning.
Rehearsals for this season's opening premiere, Hoffmann's Eventyr, were well underway already in May. It opened on the 8th September. Now a revival of Don Giovanni has been playing for a week. It's our smallest piece - a group of 24 singers, and the ladies only get to sing in 1 number (though, for the record, they have an even shorter part in Ragnarok: where despite almost 5 hours of music, Wagner has only allotted them 15 notes. In contrast to that, music scores are brushed down and opened up once again next week to relearn Verdi's choral blockbuster, Don Carlos, and, with 71 singers, it is our largest piece this season In the meantime, Den Glade Enke started music rehearsals last week and La Bohème hits the boards next week. The chorus appears only in the 2nd and 3rd Acts, and Act II of La Bohème is one of the shortest acts the repertoire - coming in at around 20 minutes - about the same length as the orchestral prelude to Parsifal! It is not short, however, on the number of characters the chorus are required to play - in this production there are 18 different characters who have a specific task to fulfil allied to the role they are singing - and all of these have to be covered in case of illness.
In all that's 5 different pieces in 8 weeks. We will be getting our tongue tied around 4 different languages: French, Italian, Danish and Czech. The linguistic competence that is required by a chorister is worth a blog in itself, but just as a taster, let's consider Czech.
Czech is the language of Dvorak's opera Rusalka which will get it's Danish premiere in February 2008, despite having had its world premiere 107 years previously!! The idea of singing in Czech generally fills a singer with dread, at first. Why? Because of all European languages it has the greatest number of words with no vowels. One can be expressive singing "A", try being expressive on a "K" or a "P".
I am sure I do not need to tell you there is a lot of death in opera -in Czech opera, there is a lot of "smrt". "Morta, morta" cries the Italian, "smrt! smrt!" buzzes the Czch, thereby covering the last row of the orchestra in a fine dusting of saliva. "Ice" is "zmrzl" and a "fool" is a "blb". But my favourite has to be this:
"Strc prst skrz krk"
That's the longest sentence without any vowels. Try singing that and projecting it to the back of the auditorium. It is unlikely we will ever need to. Rather appropriately, perhaps, it means "stick your finger through your throat". Who knows - it might help. But we won't need to find out for some weeks yet.
This week we will be concentrating on pulling Bohème together for repremiere on October 1st. It also marks the arrival of our new chorus master, Jeremy Bines, the biennial Chorus Seminar, with opera chief, Kasper Bech Holten with whom we also embark on a 7-week journey which will culminate in the premiere of Don Carlos on the 18th November.
With 9 performances already past as I write, you only have 147 opportunities to catch us.
See you there!
Philip White
posted by Det Kongelige Operakor at 11:42
2 comments
