My time on the road this summer is almost at an end, and I have things to tell you!
The inaugural Wagner Institute at the Miami Music Festival was a wild and inspiring ride. Our first group of participants came in at an astonishing level. The work we did together, and the work they did with Christine Goerke and Alan Held, was wonderful. Two weeks of the best parts of singing in German: Long, early, beautiful consonants, real vowels, legato, and poetic specificity. As you can tell from that sentence, the geek level was off the charts. In a word: heaven.
Our final concert blew the doors off the New World Center. Kudos to the student orchestra who played all that Wagner with commitment and beauty. I’ll remember this group of warrior maidens and sword wielders for a long time. Thanks to Christine and Alan, to Michael Rossi and Milton Laufer and Jack Firestone, and to all the students at the festival for an energized and brave atmosphere.
It was also great to catch up with beloved friends and colleagues on faculty there – Jeremy Frank, Grant Loehnig, Tony Manoli, Brad Moore, Stephanie Rhodes, Caren Levine. They are still down there working their magic, with opera performances around the corner of Magic Flute, Crucible, and Turn of the Screw. I’ll be cheering them on from Ann Arbor!