Dress rehearsal days tend to be pretty quiet - kind of calm before the storm syndrome. And today has been pretty well just that. But I had an early start after a late night as it happened - breakfast with a dear friend from London, Julia Maynard, who runs a first class stable of singers at the excellent London firm Intermusica. Our Sesto, Renata Pokupic, is managed by her. And she is off this afternoon to New York where another of her young people, Iain Paterson, COT's Don Giovanni of last year. is making his Metropolitan Opera debut on Saturday. So it has not been much more than a glimpse of Julia though we did stay up somewhat late after last night's performance.
Otherwise a feature of the day has been a master class by Julie Gunn, concentrating on one of my "hobby horses", the study of the song repertoire which I consider to be of great importance in the development of opera singers. Here she is left with Ashleigh Semkiw who is brave enough to tackle Richard Strauss' Amor from the Brentano Lieder.
And finally Andrew Patner's La Tragedie de Carmen lecture was at lunchtime. And he had a good turn out of intrepid opera lovers braving the truly awful weather today.


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