Here I am at Coffee Inn drinking an "Icy Spicy" drink! I'm going to be coming here more often - it is much cozier than Double Coffee, and I really like the drinks. Check out how cool my layered coffee looks!
Well last night I had an incredible evening - I had my first lesson with Ms. Sigutė Stonytė . [Here] is a biography of her in English. My lesson was wonderful, she is a great teacher and I'm really looking forward to working with her more over the summer. She is really nice - not in sugar coating her teaching or in her comments - but she made me feel so comfortable to be singing and trying strange exercises. She loves my voice and she wants to specifically work on bel canto style with me.
This paragraph is for the music friends: I know I've been wondering, and some of you have been, too - she "diagnosed" me as a soprano, who may be a soprano for the rest of her life and could attempt to be a mezzo later, but she tested my range during exercises and said I was singing high Ds with no problem (!!!), and that my clarity at the top is characteristic of a soprano. That's news to me! Usually singing high is a disaster for me, so that was pretty much magic. (Tension from schoolwork is gone? Maybe it is my new yoga regimen? Maybe that $3 Belgian beer I had two days ago?) She is obsessed with air, and that really helps with sound. Singing my recital music with her seemed so easy - I guess I've grown a lot in the last month. She said I should focus on Baroque/Mozart music now, and she would be disappointed if in my 40s I wasn't singing Wagner. For now, she wants to "lighten up" my vibrato and get me to finally stop pushing. Yesterday she was able to get me to sound so much lighter and younger, and fast movement with my voice was not a problem.
Her daughter came to translate our lesson, and so I've made another friend over here! She also went to the opera last night, where I met her father, an accomplished pianist. We did a lot of exercises and sang through some of my recital music - it seemed like the hour flew by! Her voice is absolutely beautiful - she is older and yet sounds so impeccably young.
My lessons will be at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy - [ here ] is their website. This is just another example of my theory that if you put yourself out there, people are willing to help passionate people. I had emailed the dean's and international relations offices at LMTA with information about myself and my research project, explaining that I am an aspiring singer and that I would like to try to work with a student who could tell me about studying music here. They put me right in contact with their best opera teacher! I feel so incredibly lucky to be working with her here.
So I went to the opera last night - at the Rusu theater in Vilnius. I've never seen a production like this! There were life size puppets for both of the productions - this is very hard to explain, but let me try. The stage itself was blacked out, with strategic lighting on the puppets, and the singers and orchestra were in a "pit" above the stage, looking down on the action. In the first operetta (about a battle) - there were two sets of armor, each piece held by a different puppeteer. The illusion was them running to each other to the music, in the battle, arms, limbs and swords flew everywhere in this beautiful sync with the music. It was funny, too - at one point, arms and limbs were mixed up to create a spider-looking creature across the stage. In the second operetta, cute little clouds floated across the stage as the gods sang from above. You see, puppeteers were inside of these puppets, so cute dancing human feet pranced about underneath the clouds that crossed the stage. The gods were teaching humans a lesson (what else do they do?) and so the "people" were larger-than-life elderly women. They had no torsos - just 3' x 2' disfigured faces, elaborate victorian-style hair, human pupetter arms, and huge skirts attached to their necks. They whimpered and cackled over the music, and they jump-roped, picked at each other's lice, and danced while the gods sang to them. Cute little demon puppets came out to play when that characteristic droning of Montiverdi's was played by an organ. It was just so spectacular. The whole audience burst out laughing when the flirtatious god puppets batted their big sparkly eyelashes at each other. It was so fun! Oh - everything was sang in really clear Italian, and the subtitles were in Lithuanian. So I picked up a few new phrases from this, too.
What was so remarkable was that the majority of opera-goers were young people. In my row alone were two girls with Mohawks, five young twenty-somethings, and several pairs of friends who were less than thirty, I'd estimate. Going to the opera is really a cool thing to do here! Ah, I love Vilnius. Hmm, I'll have to post about the dreaded / pink haired Vilnius Hippie culture another time...
Tonight I'm going to go to the movies with my cousin Justa and some of her friends.
Speaking of friends - I've been watching some Lithuanian TV as I fall asleep, and one thing that has been on late at night is Friends in Lithuanian. I've picked up a lot just listening and watching. During the opening credits, they say the names of the actors and actresses, adding the appropriate endings to the names to denote gender (Mattas LeBlancas, for example). It is pretty funny to watch. They also have their own version of Friends here - the main characters are a slim brunette and a honey-blonde with a "Rachel" haircut :) Their apartment walls are purple and green, too.
Well, I don't really have enough pictures to post from my camera yet, so I'll do that tomorrow.
Ate, emily
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