Um, hi. It's been a few....months(!!) since I've written anything here. MONTHS!! What has gotten into me? I'm the world's most delinquent blogger!!! You know how someone calls you, and for various reasons you put off calling them back, but the longer you wait, the harder it is to call? Well....
But I've gotten enough emails and comments from people asking me if I'm still alive, that I felt I needed to write down a few words, just to reassure anybody who may not have given up on me. I haven't written anything for several reasons. First, I haven't been working, and since this blog is all my opera stories, I didn't have a lot to share. I have been off since March, and don't go back to work until August. There's nothing wrong with me, it just worked out that my schedule was really empty for the summer, and I didn't mind one bit, so I didn't hustle to try to fill it. I know that some singers go non-stop for their entire career, but two years of barely being home was enough for me to need a large break, so that's what I've been taking. It's been fabulous, and I've been entertaining myself by learning to sew and cooking and hanging out in NYC, which I haven't done in a relaxed manner in some time. And I guess I could have posted pictures of the food I cooked or the purses I've sewn, but I had a feeling that might not be particularly interesting. Even my facebook friends were starting to get annoyed by my "look what I made today!!!" status updates.
And you know what, YES, having a boyfriend makes me need to blog less often. Even reading that makes me cringe a little bit (I'm not one of those girls who gets a boyfriend and suddenly stops calling all her girlfriends, I swear!!!). But it's not because I'm running around swooning in love, and therefore too mooney-eyed to bother to write a few words. It's just because I started blogging because I was on the road a lot, and I was lonely, and I wanted to have a platform from which to share all the experiences I was having with other human people. The blog was a regular thing in my life that gave me comfort, and all the readers gave me support. And with an actual partner in my life, I don't feel so lonely all the time, and I share all my experiences with him, so the blog kind of fell by the wayside as a result.
But the fact is that I love writing, and I love that people have written to me and told me that the honesty of the blog helped them in some way. I have tried to cut through all the crap and just write an honest account of what it's like to have this particular life. And it really does make me feel all warm and fuzzy when fans, young singing students, and just regular folks email me and tell me they are enjoying reading what I'm writing. So, no, I'm not quitting the blog. I was just taking a rather large hiatus.
During the hiatus, the Pergolesi CD finally officially "dropped" (that's right, one CD and I'm already a master at the lingo). You can buy it on Amazon here. I wish we still had actual CD stores in the U.S. so I could go wander around the store and casually pick up the CD like "oh, what's this? This looks interesting..." but alas, those stores are a thing of the past here. I did have a friend tell me he had seen it and listened to it in a store in Paris, so at least it's sitting on a shelf somewhere!
In other CD news, the Harmonia Mundi Brochure which announces the release of the Agrippina CD also just came out, and they posted a couple clips of arias there. If you click the listen link you will hear one of the soprano arias followed by one of my arias all in one track. In fact it decided to play right now on my computer as I type this. And I can stand to listen to it, which, for me, is great news (I can be a little, let's say critical, of my own singing, as you might have noticed from my previous blog posts). And the orchestra sounds frigging awesome - they are REALLY something else!!
That's about all for now. I leave for Italy in August to go sing another production of the very same Pergolesi from the recording at the Pergolesi Festival in Jesi, Italy - Pergolesi's birthplace. It's not going to suck to go to Italy in late summer/early fall and be right near the Adriatic Sea. I promise I'll go back to reporting then. I hope you are all having a happy, healthy summer!!