What's next?
What will my next adventure be??
After eight straight days of coaching - sometimes with multiple coachings in the same day - all my Carmen coaching is at an end (for now). I don’t know about the rest of you, but I always feel a little blue when I finish up a big project like this. After going 1,000 miles a minute for several weeks, it’s HARD to slow down! I’m left with my brain whirring and asking myself “What’s next?”
It’s not like I won’t be looking at Carmen at all in the near future (I’m planning to incorporate the Habanera into my regular audition set). There is still PLENTY to be done with that role, but after several weeks of thinking about it nonstop, I’m feeling the need to look at something else for a while so I can digest all the information I’ve recently consumed around that role.
I got all of my Jensen recordings done last week. The are all edited, posted to YouTube, and my application for the competition has been submitted. I won’t hear anything from them until mid-April, so I’m setting that out of my brain for now as well!
So what’s next? I have a couple of hard deadlines:
April 2 is when I have to have my cello piece ready to go.
April 29 will be my first live audition in over a year. Huzzah!
Obviously anything with a deadline takes precedence, so I’ll be working on my cello chops for the next few weeks, and also keeping my audition rep ready to go. Problem is, neither of these take much time. I’ll be maintaining (and making slight improvements to) my audition rep, but there’s no new music to learn for that. As far as cello, my hands don’t have the endurance to play for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time right now. I’ll be working to increase that over the coming weeks, but that still leaves me miserably short of my 3 hours per day.
Never fear! I have some ideas:
Actually finish reading Audition Success. I know…I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. It’s time to move it off the docket!
I got to sing for a manager in Spain (!!!) as part of the Carmen workshop. He had some really positive things to say, and he recommended I work on some bel canto rep. Outside of Rossini, my knowledge of mezzo rep in this category is sorely lacking, so I’ll be doing some research and asking around for ideas on this.
I’m going to spend some time watching some interviews and workshops online.
I could finish learning Donna Elvira!
I’ll be brainstorming other rep to learn as well.
In the not-so-fun category this week, I need to get all of my tax documents and records together to send to my accountant. Real talk: doing your taxes as a musician is not fun at all. I’m really anal about keeping good records, and have a good general idea of what I can and cannot do, but my taxes are complicated. I don’t have time to read the tax code every year, so I’m HAPPY to spend some dollars to have a professional do them RIGHT.