Rain, Singing

It’s Monday morning. It rained heavily in the night and I woke to its comforting sound on the roof, another kind of music. This afternoon I will work with Alice in the studio again; she may even sing a little. In the last few days in the theatre she worked – really worked – but silently; with either Fiona Murphy (who sings Mercedes) or Murray Hipkin (Senior Repetiteur) singing her part from the wings; a strange ventriloquism – perhaps a reverse quote from “Singing in the Rain.”

We finally worked through the last duet, not in the studio but on stage. It was the only remaining scene to explore before Alice got sick. In the chaos of the theatre, work going on all around us, people wandering in and out of the stalls, I tried to create an atmosphere of absolute focus through my own uninterrupted gaze and energised attention. It worked.

The combination of Julian Gavin’s now searing and extraordinarily moving embodiment of Don Jose, an evolution I have watched day by day, and Alice’s seamless entry into the emotional zone, voiceless though she was, proved the integrity and power of her performance. Even without her sound she was riveting. By the end all three of us were in tears, yet again – but then this opera is a tragedy.

The long duet in Act 2 which is the axis of the story for Carmen and Don Jose, together with the final duet in Act 4, are really the most crucial in the entire opera. If those sequences are not right then it is an opera without a heart- an empty vehicle, a decorative spectacle. Of all the work in these last weeks it is the subtlety and depth we have managed to reach together in these scenes that makes me most proud. My hand in it will remain invisible and rightly so, but in rehearsal I hovered close to Julian and Alice and gave them all I could, all I know.

On the first night I will be out there in the auditorium still beaming at them but they will carry it alone.