London: Round One

the hyde park christmas MONSTER!

My first trip to London this year was early in the month of December, when it was just beginning to get chilly, and got dark around 4 pm.
(Europe in the winter never ceases to surprise me -- for example, the idea of temperatures so high as to allow rain all winter is such a novelty. 4 pm darkness would be something I was accustomed to if I were from Edmonton, but I'm not.)

A guy butted in front of me in the boarding pass line, I think without knowing he was doing it; his belated "so sorry, sorry" immediately tipped me off as to his provenance. When I spotted his passport I asked where he was from exactly; turns out we are from the same province, same city, same PART of same city.. and.. SAME HIGH SCHOOL. It is a truly small world.

Aside from a minor broken-boot incident that resulted in a day and a half of sopping foot in incessant downpours, the trip was really lovely. I stayed with an old singer friend and saw another few friends from school and my travels here; I was refreshed by the sight of familiar faces even in unfamiliar locales. London isn't that unfamiliar to me, as I spent three weeks exploring it in 2007 when a good friend was living there. So that probably helped too.

I finally ticked Brick Lane off my London bucket list with a soul-searing curry and a good friend from university. My soul was revived by a rambunctious and truly uplifting production of La Cage aux Folles. Who doesn't need a little drag in their life?

While I haven't been offered admission to the Royal Academy, I was placed on the waitlist for the final round of auditions for the Aix-en-Provence summer residency for lied and contemporary repertoire. A small success, but a pertinent one: the audition was a true learning experience. I went in to that audition about as cold as I could have gone into any audition; they were running early and I was running late, having got lost in the maze that surrounds Waterloo station. It was cold and I had walked for half a hour. I went in and the first sounds I made were.. well.. honks. But I am convinced that there is nothing I do better than contemporary repertoire and art song, especially if it's Hymnen an die Nacht, and I swear to you, there is nothing more valuable than your strongest warhorse on a bad day. That piece has pulled me through I don't know how many auditions. It's not just that though; we all have to enumerate our strengths and play on them, and one of mine is being myself on stage. (It's when you ask me to be a character that I freeze up.) And who better to be singing something as outré as Hymnen an die Nacht or as intimate as, say, An den Mond?

Lessons learned...