Glass Armonica in ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ at the Kennedy Center

I’m playing the glass armonica part in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor for the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center (Nov 10-19, 2011)—eight performances in all.

In the opera, Lucia is in love with Edgardo but her family wants her to marry Arturo—because Edgardo is broke but Arturo has money. Edgardo goes away on business, so Lucia’s brother forges letters and generally convinces her that Edgardo has been faithless.  So she reluctantly marries Arturo after all, but of course Edgardo returns from his trip just in time for the conclusion of the wedding—too late. Despondent, Lucia stabs & kills Arturo on their wedding night, goes mad and dies. Then Lucia’s brother kills Edgardo (it takes him an entire aria to die, of course) and the opera ends.

They have a faux glass armonica which they use in the ‘mad scene’  — a fun prop (the glasses are actually plastic bowls):

The glasses turn — powered by batteries. During the ‘mad scene’ it sits on the side of the stage, the glasses turning & the foot treadle going up and down by itself, adding marvelously to the general spookiness.

Meanwhile, I’m down in the pit: I’m actually under the stage, all the way in the back:

Whew, that darn Lucia gets her bloody paw prints on everything:

All in all it was an extraordinary experience, as you might well imagine. Aaron Doty, the operations & personnel manager (he manages the musicians — think ‘herding cats’) deserves a special shout out for elegantly handling my logistics and shepherding me through the whole process.

Here are excerpts from reviews in which the glass armonica and/or yours truly were mentioned:

Washington Times

Nov 11, 2011

(Entire article)

Enhancing this haunting performance was the musical master-stroke of the evening, as the orchestra added a “glass armonica”** to its accompaniment. Actually scored by Donizetti himself for the opera’s initial performances, its spooky, shimmering echoes underscore the pure madness of Lucia and her hopeless situation. It’s a shame that most performances of the opera today neglect to employ it.

——

** Although the “glass armonica” for this production actually appears on stage, the performing instrument in the orchestra pit and is being played by soloist William Zeitler for these performances.

ConcertoNet.com

S. Coburn, S. Pirgu (photo by Scott Suchman)

Nov 11, 2011

(Entire article)

Maestro Auguin worked from the critical edition and made very few cuts. He employed the glass harmonica in the Mad Scene, which gave Ms. Coburn the opportunity to do wonderfully imaginative touches. Most notable was the cadenza of the Mad Scene, in which the eerie sounding glass harmonica replaced the traditional flute. Whoever wrote her cadenza did something really brilliant. It was completely outside the 19th century bel canto style of music. It was like a young Arnold Schoenberg had composed it. It was lush and explored new possibilities in the tonality as she searched for that final Bb. To say the very least, her performance of the Mad Scene completely brought down the house.

DC Theater Scene

Nov 12, 2011

(Entire article)

Conductor Philippe Auguin makes wonderful music, and the orchestra, once warmed up, did well. I very much liked how Auguin let Coburn shape her mad aria. I was especially delighted that the production returned to the original score, restoring the glass armonica as accompaniment in Lucia’s mad scene.  (Its unworldly sound was thought to induce hysteria.) It suitably evoked the voices echoing in Lucia’s head.

Baltimore Sun

November 16, 2011

(Entire article)

 In this visual and theatrical context, the use of an armonica for the mad scene, as Donizetti intended, is the crowning touch. (It is quite rare to hear this instrument in a “Lucia” performance, live or on recording.)

This Benjamin Franklin-perfected instrument of musical glasses produces a sound so eerie and ethereal that it can’t help but reflect Lucia’s fragile mental state. Heck, people used to think the instrument itself could trigger nervous disorders. (William Zeitler is the accomplished armonica player here.)

Globalization, Film Scores, and Yours Truly

I was recently contacted by Sören Hyldgaard, a film composer in Denmark. He wanted glass armonica in his score for a film called Red, but flying me to Denmark to record them just wasn’t in the cards. So instead he sent me the cues (each musical ‘chunk’ of film score is called a ‘cue’) and I recorded the glass armonica parts in my own studio and sent them (by ftp) back to Denmark. Sören and his engineers then dropped my glass armonica recordings into that of the rest of the orchestra. Sören wrote:

Thanks to your precision AND the advent of digital editing, we spent a mere 45 mins adjusting and sync’ing your glass cues to my score – - and the blend is magnificent, no less! Your GA adds a haunting facet and makes an integral part of the score’s and thereby the film’s ‘sound’. The Prague studio is direly pressed for time, so we did not make the final 5 channel mix of the score. My engineer will do this tomorrow or Saturday at the latest. So we’re are all eagerly awaiting the final score, mixed and sweetened and ready to adhere to the pic. FYI, final mix commences 2 January and the film will open on Sundance around 19 January.

We’ve never even talked on the phone–the whole project took place entirely over the internet. The world is indeed a-changing!

Life on the sound stage at Warner Bros.

I got a call to play glass armonica on a film score for a feature called Terra. (A ‘feature’ is a film that is distributed to movie theaters (first), not for TV—at least initially). Here’s how recording film scores work:

‘Post Production’ at Warner Bros.

When making a film, they have ‘pre-production’, which is when they do all the planning for the film, ‘production’ when they actually shoot the film, and ‘post-production’ when they put all the pieces together into the finished product. Although the film composer will already be working out the themes and can start writing the music for the film during pre-production and production, the composer really needs the final edited version to time all the music right. So the film score is largely a ‘post-production’ task, and they never really want to give the composer much time because by this point they’re very anxious to get the thing done. Then once the score is done there’s generally a bit of a mad rush to record it all—for the same reason. (By the way, it’s surprising how many films are completed and are put on the shelf.)

Assuming that the film score is using an orchestra, orchestral musicians are used to playing with other orchestral musicians, and they can get a lot more music recorded in the same amount of time if they record the whole orchestra all at once. One thing they typically do, though, is have a separate microphone for every ‘desk’ (two musicians playing the same instruments—e.g. two violinist—sitting next to each other reading off of the same music). This can require 24 track recording or more, but later as they’re doing the final mix, they can decide “we want a little more French horn in this spot”.

The sound stage

But there are instruments that are problematic to record in this context. Percussion is a good example—it can be so loud that it’s hard to balance it with the rest of the orchestra in the orchestra recording session. And then there are quiet instruments—like me!—that can too easily be drowned out by the orchestra. So a frequent plan is to record the orchestra, and then record the percussion and instruments like glass armonica, one at a time, later. Which is what they did this time.

In the control booth they have the edited film, and the orchestra recorded to it; they give me the music, I’m the only musician in the studio at this point, and I can hear the orchestra in headphones. I also hear a ‘click track’ that clicks out the beat, and I have my own display of the film that also shows the measure/beat number in the upper corner. So they start the recorder—I’ll be track 42, say, along with the rest of the orchestra—I know I come in on beat 3 of bar 92, I watch the measure/beat counter and listen to the track and play when I’m supposed to.

Later they’ll do the final mix down of all the musicians into the final product that you hear in the theater.