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Rebecca Jo Loeb Shares her Experience with Caramoor's Vocal Rising Stars |
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Home > What's New > Caramoor Blog > Rebecca Jo Loeb Shares her Experience with Caramoor's Vocal Rising Stars
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April 14, 2010
Most people would describe me (hopefully along with a plethora of more attractive adjectives) as blunt. So I will not be embarrassed to say that one word comes to mind when looking back at the week spent on the gorgeous, spacious, and peaceful grounds of Caramoor: exhaustion. I’m not going to lie - I was tired for most of that week. And I don’t think I was alone. For example, after the first full day of rehearsal our entire quartet went to bed at around 8PM. And this is quite a feat for a group of people who have spent a good amount of their young adult life in the city that never sleeps. But sleep we did.
And, looking back, it makes sense. We were working HARD. We were singing or attending rehearsals for 4-6 hours each day. When we weren’t in those official rehearsals were still rehearsing at home. And when we weren’t rehearsing at home, we were rehearsing in our heads: memorizing, making sense of the music, continually finding insights into the text. Even at meals, we were still enveloped in this incredible focused energy.
That, however, was not the reason we were so tired. I think we were tired because the work we were doing was going very deep. We weren’t just memorizing and getting everything into our bodies (although that was a big part of the process) - we were personalizing the music. Making it our own. And we had to do it fast.
Sometimes music seeps into your soul in a slow, lazy fashion. You don’t even notice that you’ve memorized the words, and you barely notice that the words are now truly yours. To be honest, this is my favorite way of learning music. Letting it live with your for weeks or months, and letting it infiltrate your life. But in this business that rarely gets to happen. And in this case, at Caramoor, we had to expedite that process which was sometimes a bit difficult.
In the end, though, I was very proud of how I and my colleagues were able to personalize each song in such a short amount of time. I saw many examples of the French spirit enveloping each of us. This developed even further when Jean Paul (the elf to my Berthe) came and breathed new life into our focused, but slightly weary, sextet of musicians.
His expertise was helpful on many fronts. Simply hearing him speak the language itself would have been enough. We heard how the words rolled off his tongue with abandon but sparkling specificity. We heard how the vowels were bright and full, yet somehow shaded with a mysterious french darkness. He never gave us a diction lesson - he was the diction lesson. More importantly, he taught us how to be expressive in French music - which was rather difficult considering how different the art of expression and emphasis is in English.
So after a week of invigorating, moving, exasperating, and extremely careful work we were ready to show what we had put together. And amid torrential rains and thunder, we made music. If I do say so myself, we did it beautifully. We even managed to reboot all we had learned on the grounds of Caramoor in the big city at Merkin Hall. This concert was even better because the audience, so responsive and educated (as is always the case at NYFOS concerts), gave us new energy and buoyancy that lifted our songs to new heights. Afterwards, I was so proud of my fellow singers (my new friends) and also of myself. But boy was I tired!
Rebecca Jo Loeb, mezzo-soprano
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