Roughly translated means: No one must sleep. The final aria of the night with Mr. Bocelli. I use it as my title, because judging by the Facebook entries flying fast and furious from choir members right now. . . . at 12:30 AM on Saturday morning. . . we are taking that message to heart. I will not be sleeping for a while, so I might as well try to get this down now while I sip my wine!
Where to start? This was another Choral Arts phenomenal event. How do you even process the kinds of experiences I have been able to have with this choir? I guess you don't. Not at 12:30 AM after spending 6 1/2 hours at a venue rehearsing and performing.
And "rehearsing" might not be the best word. In the first place, up until tonight we have had several rehearsals as a choir. With a piano. And incomplete scores. And a director that says over and over, "Now we don't really know how this piece is going to work. They may cut some parts. They may add some extra music here." All we could do was learn the notes they gave us, show up, and hope for the best. This was PROFESSIONAL music making. Which means. . . you are paid for knowing what you are supposed to do when you show up. But of course we are not paid. But we are supposed to function as if we are. So here's how that all important final rehearsal with orchestra, conductor and artist really went: Conductor shows up in our gathering room to say the stage has not been set up yet. So they drag an electric keyboard down to the room and he plays while we run through some of the music once. The keyboard is so loud that he can't hear if we're doing what he wants or not. About an hour or more late, we make it to the stage with the orchestra. We practice our opening number. . the one we sing by ourselves. One run-through. Bocelli comes out (more about him later) and we kind of go through parts of some of the things he is doing. Some pieces we don't do at all. The conductor shouts back at the choir: "Choir, is this easy for you and you don't need to do it?" We shout back, "No, we need to do it!" He shouts back, "Great. Then we don't need to do it!" Flying by the seat of our pants. . . . professionals.
Dinner (provided) was NOT a ham sandwich! It was pot roast, roasted chicken, pad Thai, vegetables and salad on real breakable plates with real metal silverware! Wow. . . the big time!
Biggest thrill of the night. . (because really. . most of the thrill is the anticipation of the event. Once you get there, you're so busy working and trying to get everything right that you don't have time to realize that you're thrilled): walking down the back hallways of the Verizon Center. . .being told to line up in a hallway. . . realizing that the EXACT spot where I am in the line is right next to the open door of Andrea Bocelli's dressing room. The door is open. This is before the rehearsal. . .we have not yet laid eyes on HIMSELF. The whispers around me say that they just saw him walk in there. I keep my eyes pealed on the open door. Then, into that space walks AB himself. . wearing the coolest white sweater and jeans. He walks up to the piano that is there and starts to warm up. I'm maybe 10 feet from Andrea Bocelli as he opens his mouth and sends that voice into the atmosphere! I almost pass out! I'm quite sure in those few seconds I was about as far from a professional-acting person that there was. I was a 13 year old girl at a Justin Bieber concert! And I might add that the man is pretty damn cute.
He did come up on stage for the run-throughs, although as I said earlier, we didn't even almost go through 50% of our pieces. Oh well. . . I guess that's why they pay us the big bucks. . . .oh wait. . . . never mind.
So after dinner it's back on to the stage for the performance. The Verizon Center has about 12,500 people in attendance from what I heard afterwards. A wildly enthusiastic crowd. Very receptive to the opera of the first act, but WAY more receptive of ACT 2 which included Ave Maria, Amazing Grace, Adeste Fidelis, and all of his big pieces as encores. We sang in only 9 of the pieces, so we had ample time to sit and watch the concert. Talk about the best seats in the house!
Now an observation. . . .I really began to think hard about what it means for him as a blind man with this wildly successful career. He is a genuine talent. But there were a couple of times when maybe due to his proximity to his microphone, the feedback was such that he could hear his voice coming right back to him a split second later. During a duet he was singing, this seemed to momentarily throw him. Because what he can't do is watch the conductor for the beat. Luckily the lovely woman who was singing with him could, and she was able to ignore the feedback by just staying with the beat. That must be hard for him. And then I got to thinking about this tour he is on. One thing I have learned from my friends who travel for work is that they enjoy seeing all the different cities. I realize that a tour for him is just going into one venue after another and pumping out the songs. For him, Washington, DC is no different from NYC, or Columbus, Ohio for that matter. How profoundly sad to not be able to see and appreciate the differences between all the places you go because you cannot see what their famous landmarks and characteristics are. Heck, just driving home tonight in all the traffic, I enjoyed my slow trip down Constitution Avenue with the Washington Monument on the left, and the White House (the Obamas must have been in bed. . . it was dark) on the right. He can't see any of that. It just made me think.
Such a wonderful time. Walking the bowels of the Verizon Center. . .past the locker room for the Capitols, the Wizards, the Mystics. So much goes on in that building. Watching how this huge show was put together. Being challenged to sing perfectly when you don't exactly know how it is going to go. And hanging and sharing this with my colleagues. Truly truly blessed.
Nessun Dorma.
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