Fellow Bryan

Greetings from Connecticut!  I'm currently a Fellow at Yale University's Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.  This is one of the oldest music festivals in North America and certainly one of the most renown.  Today, I'll give you a quick run-around and in the coming days I will have photos and stories from my short stay.

Norfolk Chamber Music Festival 2012

Back in March, I applied to Yale to be a part of this.  I was extremely fortunate to be invited and to be awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship which covers all the expenses during my stay.  I reckon that most who read this do not know what this program is so...

The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival hosts 30 concerts during the summer and invites some of the world's most prolific composers with amazing musicians to share music among friends.  I am currently staying on the estate of Ellen Battell Stoeckell who was one of the wealthiest persons in the world in the late 19th century.  It is hard to explain her wealth, except to say that her estate has many cottages (one of which is my home for the week) and houses, greenhouses, barns, etc.  It is absolutely gorgeous!  It isn't a castle, but what appears to be quaint on the outside is horribly luxurious on the inside.  The White House (main mansion) of the estate looks simple on the outside, but the music room inside is covered with gold leaf walls, Tiffany windows, and contains one of the world's greatest art collections.  The dining room, filled with ancient European furniture, has an elephant skin ceiling.

Ellen Battell Stoeckel White House

Then there is the little music shed out back.  The Music Shed may sound like a nice barn, but before the Panama Canal was built, Ellen Battell Stoeckel had Redwood Trees in California logged, shipped from California around the southern tip of South America and up to New York City, then carried by horse-team a short ways before giving up because the massive size of the logs were nearly impossible to move around the bends of the mountain trails and roads leading into Connecticut.  So, instead of milling the logs into boards and then transporting the boards, she did what any multi-millionairess would do.  She built an entire railroad to her estate just to transport the logs, and she made a quaint little music shed out of the Redwood.

Ellen Battell Stoeckel Music Shed

Music Shed at the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate

With stupendous accoustics, the Music Shed is an amazing place and what's more amazing is with whom I'm humbled to share the honor.  When I arrived here, I received a little card saying "Welcome to the Yale School of Music - Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.  This summer, you will be following in the footsteps of musicians like Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Granger..."  Oh, my!  Yes, they all have been a part of this experience - Vaughan Williams premiered his Pastoral Symphony here by the way.

Inside the Music Shed

Inside the Music Shed

As to who is here this year, I am one of 14 singers performing all sorts of chamber music from really old to brand new; from no accompaniment to full orchestra.  There are 10 conductors (including Simon Carrington) and 80 instrumental performers who received fellowships and are artists at the festival including the Tokyo String Quartet (universally recognized as one of the greatest string quartets - after 30 years, they will perform their last concert EVER at this festival next year), several Grammy winners, and the composers James Wood (studied with Nadia Boulanger!), Martin Bresnick (2 time Oscar nominee for music), Aaron Kernis (1998 Pulitzer), David Lang (2008 Pulitzer), and Christopher Theofanidis!  Needless to say, I'm in academic musician heaven!  I have already found many friends - many of them are around my age and have received way too many college degrees than necessary, so I feel right at home in many ways.  But, I am one of only 13 from a public University so I am very proud to represent the University of Missouri Kansas City and for that matter, I'm proud to represent all the "average Johanns" out there making their way into music with the tireless help and heart of many selfless public school teachers.  Musicians were invited from every continent (all the warm ones that is) and from many of the most prestigious music schools in the world.  It truly is an amazing place.

But that's all for now...tomorrow, I will let you in on some of what I have been working on!

Back to Normal Life?

Wow, I cannot believe the response I have had with all of the ceremonial videos and my Olympic Ceremony Database www.olympicceremony.org.  These last couple months, I have left my typical Monday routine and posted videos and information about all of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.  I intend to put all the Winter Olympic ones up in the future, but it is certainly a labor of love as one blogger wrote.  In the meantime, I've had up to 100,000 readers every day - causing my blog to crash momentarily.  Amazingly, this blog has been featured on public television and radio in the Netherlands for my coverage of the 1928 games in Amsterdam!

So, what have I been doing in the meantime.  Well, I have been relaxing for one, but I am the kind of personality that doesn't do well with time off - mentally, I must keep active and these Olympic posts have been doing that.  After I returned from my opera in Pennsylvania, I honestly was completely drained.  I had a packed school schedule last year and the most rigorous performance schedule of my life - I needed a break. So, I did what any opera singer would do.  I helped to start two off-shoot companies of my own Kansas City Vocal Institute - www.kcvocalinstitute.com.  Last month, the Philadelphia Vocal Institute - www.philadelphiavocalinstitute.com - got off the ground running and this month we will be launching the Boston Vocal Institute.  These other companies were started by several good friends of mine who are great musicians with super intelligence and big hearts, trying to give folks in these communities affordable opportunities in music education.

Surely that wasn't enough work, so I have also been exercising.  Now, I am completely self-conscious about my image and HATE taking my shirt off.  So maybe this will help me not be so afraid in the future.  In my professional opinion, opera singers don't necessarily exercise enough, and I surely fall into that category.  I have known about different workout programs and it just so happens that a friend of mine started p90x and I have had other friends and musicians who were currently doing p90x.  They look to be in great shape.  If you don't know, p90x is an extreme workout program that is only 90 days long, but it takes a lot of drive, mental strength, and loud operatic screams to get through it.  So, I started, but I couldn't keep up the routine during two of my week-long gigs and I likely won't be able to next week, but I'll get to that in a second.  So instead of 90 days of extreme workouts, I had to push that a little longer and I'll have the pictures to prove it when I'm done at the beginning of September.  Already, I feel great and wanted to push myself further, so I decided to start running again...and not just any kind of running but long distance timed runs.  Last month I ran about 150 miles and this month I should be around 200 miles!  It's been a lot of fun and I've never felt better.

Next week, I'm off to Yale!  If you don't remember, I was awarded a fellowship from Yale back in April to sing at their Norfolk Music Festival.  I am super excited and have been studying the music - it should be a great experience.

I also have several exciting announcements about my upcoming gigs.  I am singing the National Anthem on TV nation-wide on GolTV for the US Open Cup Final (soccer's national championship) featuring Sporting KC and Seattle Sounders FC.  It's likely that few reading this purchased the extra fourth-tier sports channel package from their cable provider, and if that's the case I suppose you'll just have to imagine a loud packed stadium with lots of fireworks, while I try not to forget the words.  Last week, I was able to sing the National Anthem at a Sporting KC vs. Stoke City (from the UK) and sang both the Star-Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen.  I don't get "jittery" nervous that often, but for some reason, I was completely off my game with the UK's anthem - I sang it just fine, but was extremely nervous about it for whatever reason.

I am also scheduled to be a soloist in Beethoven's Mass in C with the Village Symphony and Choir on October 28.  I also have several great professional choir gigs as well.  I am planning to sing with the Conservatory Singers again and be the Evangelist in a Bach Passion next April (which makes me super excited) and I will be singing with Te Deum and be the tenor soloist in Bach's B Minor Mass at the Kauffman Center on my birthday (April 28).

In addition to all of that, I am finally scheduled to take my Doctoral Comprehensive Exams this Semester - for that I am terrified and horribly anxious.  And, I will be performing in a solo recital likely at the end of the semester.

Believe it or not, I have much more to talk about in the coming weeks and there are some other gigs still up in the air, but I will let you know as soon as I get the go-ahead.  Until then, enjoy the Olympics and my next update will be from beautiful New Haven, Connecticut on the campus of Yale University.