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So Long, Farewell......

4/9/2013

No more wonderful way to top off my experience in Salzburg than with the Salzburg Festival!

Salzburg is a thoroughly different place in the summer time: like some kind of Austrian Nice. Rashes of flower pots and pop-up bars appear as if from nowhere, and suddenly the streets are filled with people speaking every language imaginable. The sky soars, the river glitters, and the churches bake white in the heat while we sip Aperol Spritz in the square and watch world-class performances for nix on a massive screen, over which the Festung Hohensalzburg (the iconic fortress) towers.

The foyer of the Felsenreitschule (Festspielhaus)

Even greater fortune, through Mozarteum friends who are working as chorus or repetiteurs (and in the Young Singers Project), I had the opportunity to sit in on various rehearsals, see the inside of the main theatre, and catch some of the performances themselves – tickets I literally couldn’t buy due to cost and availability. PRETTY AMAZING!

It has been such an important year which I’ll never forget, and I have so much to be thankful for. To Barbara and my coach Gaiva, in particular, I cannot extend enough thanks for their patience and generosity.

Salzburg, ich vergesse dich nicht.

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Under the Mountain Untersberg

9/4/2013

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So, just over halfway through my year in Austria, and what an extraordinary place it is. How impossible it seems to encapsulate life in words though, sometimes, so I’ll put up lots of photos! It can be very tough being away from your loved ones, and that is so often part and parcel of being a (fledgling) musician. But there are certainly lots of things to keep one entertained/bewildered in the meantime!

I’m loving really getting stuck in to a lot of technique and repertoire, working really hard both with Barbara and my amazing coach, Gaiva (who has accompanied the International Mozart Competition for the last 3 years and is fabulously feisty with her musical opinions….which, due to our lack of a common language, are conveyed through a hilarious mixture of pigeon German, pigeon English, and hand gestures. We’re both improving though! Ha!). I’ve had the chance to travel up to Vienna and work with one of the fantastic coaches at the Vienna State Opera, and go for coachings in the Opera House (always very exciting, star spotting in the corridors). I’ve had the chance to travel to Graz to sing with my lovely friend Ella, and work with her wonderful teacher, Mr Julius Drake. The most exciting aspect, though, would have to be the proximity to truly great performances: there is just music EVERYWHERE. Everywhere in Salzburg, and then 4 Euro standing-room tickets at the Vienna State Opera……I’ve certainly been enjoying that when I can make it up there! It’s quite amazing to be in that paradigm of music being central to life and accorded so much respect. Should I feel a little sorry for the nation’s sportsmen….? ;)

There’s so much to learn, on so many levels. It’s confronting. It’s confusing. It’s lonely. As with the majority of worthwhile undertakings, it’s difficult. I await the Spring with baited breath.

In the meantime, I find myself increasingly fascinated by Untersberg, the mountain peak which towers over Salzburg and which greets me so many times a day: peeking over the tall trees at the edge of the Mirabell Gardens when I walk home from Uni, and whenever I travel to and from Salzburg by train or plane. One of the legends has it that Charlemagne sleeps under the mountain, and that when Europe needs him again he will wake up and march down with his armies. Whenever I catch sight of it, I can never work out whether I feel watched, or simply watched over, but I find it unsettling, as though Untersberg somehow embodies all my challenges here, and I am somehow fighting something very ancient.

Still, if your sense of myth is not stirred by living in a place like Salzburg, so steeped in both fairytale and horror, then how can you purport to be a storyteller?

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Karen?

1/8/2012

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I have spent many years trying to work that one out, along with honing my cloud-pinning and wave-whispering skills, and am unfortunately no closer to coming up with an answer.

However, never one to let such disturbing gaps in my self-knowledge hold me back from an adventure, from mid-September I am off to spend a year studying as a postgraduate at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria! [Cue all manner of Sound-of-Music-related, groan-inducing humour]. I’ll be studying under Barbara Bonney, who has been an idol of mine since I was a teenager, and whom I cannot yet be in the same room with without being intensely uncool in my attempts to be cool about the fact that she is, in fact, Barbara Bonney. (After my first meeting with her, slightly overwhelmed, I managed to lose my way out of her building. Which probably would have been fine had I not then unfortunately met her heading for her front door, five minutes after I’d left her studio. I was emerging from her basement and in response to her quizzical look could only muster “Um. Yeah. I lost the front door.” Nice work, Fitz-Gibbon. Smooth.)

I’m really very excited, and of course rather nervous. (This is called “understatement”.) This will be a fantastic opportunity for me to eat as much strudel as humanly possible (which I think deep down is a goal for most people) and perhaps create some unforgettable tableaux using the excellent Wolfgang Mozart Action Figures I saw in a shop when I visited (which I may post for you at the right moment). But it goes without saying that I consider myself a very, very lucky girl. Somewhere in my youth, or childhood……I must have done something good?

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So Long, Farewell......

Under the Mountain Untersberg

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Karen?

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