Characterisation

Let's regard this rehearsal as an actual performance. It is true that you rise in artistic level and awareness during actual performance. If you treat this rehearsal as a performance, you will also rise to the occasion and come away feeling much better about your roles. Then you will rise again, over and above that level, during the next two concerts.

Except when I was having my first run-through of a new work with a musical director, I always looked upon rehearsal as performance. This enabled me to constantly hone and revise my work so that during the actual true performances, I was several levels ahead of my colleagues. I was never competing with my colleagues. In fact I would take extraordinary time to work with them to develop their characters and the interplay between their and my characters. I was, however, always competing with myself because I knew that I had to convince my audience that I was a real person at a certain time and place. I persuaded myself that the audience must not think of me as an actor on stage but feel for me as the person I was portraying. That constant act of performing both in rehearsal and in performance allowed me to get closer and closer to my audiences and share the experiences of the characters I was portraying. It was often said that I was a man of many voices. That is absolutely untrue. The voice was my one and only voice - there were plenty of better voices - but it was a voice that followed the character and thus was a voice of many shades and nuances. You all have wonderful voices. It is the art of communicating that we want you to develop and these concerts are a good way of helping you to do this. After the next two concerts, and before we plunge into the concert of June 29, we will take a little time out to develop the art of bringing character into the body, voice and mind. Believe me, once you develop the art of moving into the skin of the character, you will never want to sing any other way and you will discover a voice which you never before realized that you possessed. Guys, forget the artists of recent times. We must step back to the golden age. Marcel Journet, Chaliapin, Caruso, Tettrazini, Rosa Ponselle, Magda Oliviera, Laurence Tibbett - just to name a few, all available on disk- sounded different in each role they portrayed. They sang with a freedom that flowed from being in-character and that's why they were outstanding artists that the world clamored to hear.