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Well, I certainly didn't wake up for the 7-9am breakfast. However, the buses left at 9:15 for the Sala Nezauhacoyotl so we could rehearse from 10-1:30. With everybody. It's so nice that this trip we had just about a run-through per day, rather than 8-hour rehearsals every other day or so, like last time. The runthrough each day with notes and small bits of repetition keeps the sequence in our heads better and is not tiring at all. Especially if one is in the chorus; we get to watch the soloists.
Nabucco is sweet, especially after being struck by lightning. The singer's name is Walter Donati, and he's German (raised in Italy). He's quite the showman, but has a tendency to flatness after too long a rehearsal, as do we all, I'm sure. He's very silly during rehearsal, and I think he annoyed Abigaille offstage at some point.
Abigaille gets first bill for some reason; Nabucco is the title role, but Abigaille is such a terrible diva. Janice Baird is the singer's name, and apparently she was born in America, but she had a nasty extended argument in German with Spierer and Nabucco about something relating to his standing up during her solo. One of the clarinets meowed at her, she was so hissy. And she is always late. We had to wait to start the second act because she wasn't there.
The two other sopranos, Fenena and Anna, are vocally and personality-wise unremarkable. Fenena is Italian, and her name is actually Anna. Anna is Mexican, and her name is actually Ana. Yeah.
Another minor person is Abdallo, whose name I can't even remember. He has quite a nice tenor sound, from the... what... twelve measures I heard?
Slightly less minor is the Gran Sacerdote. He looks like a Jewish priest, rather than a priest of Baal, but he has the whole balding-nearEastern thing going on. Although apparently he's Mexican. His bio lists almost no solo repertoire, and you can tell he just started his solo career; he's an ensemble singer. By himself he usually goes horribly flat.
The baritone who plays Zaccaria is quite the stage hog. His voice has this dark, covered quality I don't agree with, but hey, he's Russian. He makes all his low F's sound like wway too much work, but they seem nice enough other than that. He gets to banish and curse and generally rabinnify all over poor Ismaele.
Oh, Ismaele. Sigh. I saw him backstage in the hall after rehearsal. I gave him a huge grin and a thumbs-up, and he replied with the nicest, most modest, most self-effacing "gracias" I've ever heard. Aww. I want to import him to be the tenor soloist for everything HSC does. Except he deserves a better gig than that.
Post-rehearsal: Ooh.
There was a group set up to take a bus to the Palacio Bellas Artes to see Ballet Folklorico. Having never been, I decided it would be a good idea, since the year before I went to Mexico they performed there and never got to see the stained glass curtain.
Great Prophet Zarquon, was it a good idea. First of all, I was floored when we walked into the building. Even the lobby is stunning, with jasper and onyx and marble walls, ceiling and floors respectively. The stairs go up into the auditorium, which is composed of a different kind of reddish stone, with shiny green-to-brown-almost-iridescent marble in places that seemed like it should clash but didn't. The ceiling in there, let me tell you. Augh. There was a stained glass oval representation of the nine Muses (with wings!), each with her name in her own frame, and Apollo in the middle with the sun, and there was a light behind it! It was a stained-glass light! The arch above the theater was lined with glass or stone mosaic with all kinds of cool Roman-looking figures and inscriptions in Latin and Spanish about the superiority of the Arts. I desperately with I had brought a camera, but I hadn't thought it would be allowed. Well, it was. During the dancing, too.
The dancing. The first thing I thought, when the lights went drastically out and the huge beat started and the curtain opened and this long line of brilliantly costumed strange dancers came stamping out, was that Reggie would adore it. The first dance was "Los Matachines," from the north side of Mexico City, and the Spaniards brought it for the Christian God. The costumes were unbelievably bright green with sparkly dangly things off the backs of their tunics (which were quite long), and underneath they wore neon pink tights that made the ensemble both wonderfully, unbelievably, marvelously tacky and somehow very dignified. It was a stamping dance, and I was relieved to find that just because white people don't have rhythm (I hate that thought) doesn't mean that the majority of people elsewhere do. You'd expect Latinos to have a perfect beat, but there were mistakes. Yes.
Anyhow, there were ten dances, and they got even more wonderfully tacky with these huge caricature heads in the Fiesta de Tlacotalpan, and then more terribly and primitively dignified with the Deer Dance of the aboriginal Yaqui tribe (one man, leaping about with a deer head on his head, imitating the movements of a deer as two men shoot at him with bows and arrows). There were Soldadera tributes, sugar harvest dances, traditional austere Spanish court dances, very strange stlyized women-carry-a-plate-of-flags and men-bellyflop-gracefully-on-the-ground-in-front-of-them dances, rattle dances, huge-white-dress-twirling dances, jungle shadowpuppet dances with five guys on one marimba accompanying... They ended with the stereotypical Mariachi dances, the one where they tie the bow with their feet and the Mexican Hat Dance. Their band was surprisingly good and in tune, and it seemed like they could read the dancers' minds, because nobody ever missed something terrible and they always started at the same time.
So, wow. The dancing. And the bus took us back to the hotel. I could have stood to eat.
Nabucco is sweet, especially after being struck by lightning. The singer's name is Walter Donati, and he's German (raised in Italy). He's quite the showman, but has a tendency to flatness after too long a rehearsal, as do we all, I'm sure. He's very silly during rehearsal, and I think he annoyed Abigaille offstage at some point.
Abigaille gets first bill for some reason; Nabucco is the title role, but Abigaille is such a terrible diva. Janice Baird is the singer's name, and apparently she was born in America, but she had a nasty extended argument in German with Spierer and Nabucco about something relating to his standing up during her solo. One of the clarinets meowed at her, she was so hissy. And she is always late. We had to wait to start the second act because she wasn't there.
The two other sopranos, Fenena and Anna, are vocally and personality-wise unremarkable. Fenena is Italian, and her name is actually Anna. Anna is Mexican, and her name is actually Ana. Yeah.
Another minor person is Abdallo, whose name I can't even remember. He has quite a nice tenor sound, from the... what... twelve measures I heard?
Slightly less minor is the Gran Sacerdote. He looks like a Jewish priest, rather than a priest of Baal, but he has the whole balding-nearEastern thing going on. Although apparently he's Mexican. His bio lists almost no solo repertoire, and you can tell he just started his solo career; he's an ensemble singer. By himself he usually goes horribly flat.
The baritone who plays Zaccaria is quite the stage hog. His voice has this dark, covered quality I don't agree with, but hey, he's Russian. He makes all his low F's sound like wway too much work, but they seem nice enough other than that. He gets to banish and curse and generally rabinnify all over poor Ismaele.
Oh, Ismaele. Sigh. I saw him backstage in the hall after rehearsal. I gave him a huge grin and a thumbs-up, and he replied with the nicest, most modest, most self-effacing "gracias" I've ever heard. Aww. I want to import him to be the tenor soloist for everything HSC does. Except he deserves a better gig than that.
Post-rehearsal: Ooh.
There was a group set up to take a bus to the Palacio Bellas Artes to see Ballet Folklorico. Having never been, I decided it would be a good idea, since the year before I went to Mexico they performed there and never got to see the stained glass curtain.
Great Prophet Zarquon, was it a good idea. First of all, I was floored when we walked into the building. Even the lobby is stunning, with jasper and onyx and marble walls, ceiling and floors respectively. The stairs go up into the auditorium, which is composed of a different kind of reddish stone, with shiny green-to-brown-almost-iridescent marble in places that seemed like it should clash but didn't. The ceiling in there, let me tell you. Augh. There was a stained glass oval representation of the nine Muses (with wings!), each with her name in her own frame, and Apollo in the middle with the sun, and there was a light behind it! It was a stained-glass light! The arch above the theater was lined with glass or stone mosaic with all kinds of cool Roman-looking figures and inscriptions in Latin and Spanish about the superiority of the Arts. I desperately with I had brought a camera, but I hadn't thought it would be allowed. Well, it was. During the dancing, too.
The dancing. The first thing I thought, when the lights went drastically out and the huge beat started and the curtain opened and this long line of brilliantly costumed strange dancers came stamping out, was that Reggie would adore it. The first dance was "Los Matachines," from the north side of Mexico City, and the Spaniards brought it for the Christian God. The costumes were unbelievably bright green with sparkly dangly things off the backs of their tunics (which were quite long), and underneath they wore neon pink tights that made the ensemble both wonderfully, unbelievably, marvelously tacky and somehow very dignified. It was a stamping dance, and I was relieved to find that just because white people don't have rhythm (I hate that thought) doesn't mean that the majority of people elsewhere do. You'd expect Latinos to have a perfect beat, but there were mistakes. Yes.
Anyhow, there were ten dances, and they got even more wonderfully tacky with these huge caricature heads in the Fiesta de Tlacotalpan, and then more terribly and primitively dignified with the Deer Dance of the aboriginal Yaqui tribe (one man, leaping about with a deer head on his head, imitating the movements of a deer as two men shoot at him with bows and arrows). There were Soldadera tributes, sugar harvest dances, traditional austere Spanish court dances, very strange stlyized women-carry-a-plate-of-flags and men-bellyflop-gracefully-on-the-ground-in-front-of-them dances, rattle dances, huge-white-dress-twirling dances, jungle shadowpuppet dances with five guys on one marimba accompanying... They ended with the stereotypical Mariachi dances, the one where they tie the bow with their feet and the Mexican Hat Dance. Their band was surprisingly good and in tune, and it seemed like they could read the dancers' minds, because nobody ever missed something terrible and they always started at the same time.
So, wow. The dancing. And the bus took us back to the hotel. I could have stood to eat.