My first New York City experience (last Thursday) began with a trip to the Metropolitan Opera House for a trumpet lesson with David Krauss. It was fascinating waiting inside the stage door by the security desk as parents were dropping off their kids who were performing in the Saturday night performance of Tosca. It was their dress rehearsal. Talk about a lot of interesting personalities!
Unfortunately, I had a very short amount of time to work with David, but we made the most of the time we had together. One of the things that I do with my instructor in Tempe is to swap lines of Rochut trombone etudes so that I can dovetail in and out of his sound and really soak in what I’m hearing. I asked David to read through #13 with me, and I was so pleased that I played my best (a long travel day the day before and some minimal practice mute playing in the hotel didn’t seem to effect me at all).
It was great to hear his sound up close again (the Denver ITG is just a faint echo at this point). He commented that my sound production looked great, and we moved on to other topics. His quickly identified the same thing that I hear from my instructor, and that was to maintain the sound throughout phrases (I tend to taper the end of phrases and it comes across as “letting up” instead of rounding off).
He suggested that we experiment with a different type of breath. I remember this vividly from his talk in Denver, but I hadn’t implemented it as fully as I should to glean all the benefits. While I take a full relaxed breath every time I breathe, he suggested that I need to breathe more slowly, through my nose, and really set up a pressurized feel with some resistance in my chest (
please read my notes about his class to get the idea of this concept). He mentioned that he is cautious to offer this advice to students because the last thing that he wants is to introduce the wrong kind of pressure or harmful tension, which could harm sound production. I think that he could tell I would benefit greatly from this subtle variation on what I already do well.
He said, when this is done right, it’s like watching a well made paper airplane fly. What he heard in my sound was more like a paper airplane that is thrown, goes nose down, and then crashes right into the ground (it’s not riding on the air). He said, when you’ve made a good paper airplane, it will go up, take a dip, and then catch itself (floating on the air), and do this several times before it lands. What a great illustration he chose to illustrate this concept to me! Only a Dad with elementary school aged kids would come up with this one!
I took this slow intake (with my chest in a prominent position) and kept breathing in until I really felt pressurized (literally with some resistance in my chest), and then just released the air and played the beginning of the Rochut. WOW! The sound just came out. The connection was right there and my sound had no chance of “letting up”. It was simply riding on top of this more energized, faster air (just like the paper airplane). Literally! When you fill up this much and let go, there is just more pressurized energy behind the sound. It certainly showed in my sound and David seemed to shake his head as if to say, “Yep! This stuff works!”
With a little over 20 minutes for the entire lesson, and wanting to pack in as much as possible, I quickly pulled up the big solo from Don Pasquale. While I have been listening to Italian songs and arias for months in preparation for this lesson, I have never heard a recording of the complete Don Pasquale solo (just several 60 second clips from Amazon.com). I played a very clean version (holding close to what was printed).
When I finished, David said, “That was very nice, but this is Italian music. It needs to be greasier! It needs to be played with Schmaltz!” Then he said, “You know what schmaltz is, right?” I shook my head, thinking to myself that I needed to take more liberties with the music. He said, “No, really. Do you know what schmaltz is?” I just shook my head and said, “I guess I don’t”.
He shared a story about one of the first times that he went out to dinner with his colleagues in the Met. They took him downtown (I think he said Little Italy). He said, “You’ve been to an IHOP restaurant before, right? With all of the bottles of syrup on the table?” Of course (with 3 boys, Funny Face Pancakes are something that we do at least every couple of months)! “Well”, he said, “this restaurant in Little Italy had bottles like that on the table, and when they brought out the meal the waiter took a bottle in each hand, poured it over the food and said, ‘Those are your vitamins’”. Of course, it wasn’t syrup in the bottles.
The “vitamins” were literally called “Schmaltz” or chicken fat! And he said, “If you eat too much of this stuff it will kill you, but it tastes so good you can hardly believe it!”
So, with that, he launched into Don Pasquale with schmaltz! WOW! Talk about greasy and tasty! He took my bland reading of the notes and transformed it into something worth listening to. Sixteenth notes in Italian are short…take your time here…take a breath at the cadenza feel before the fermata. He said, “You’re essentially playing this big trumpet solo by yourself in the middle of the opera, and you have to really tell a story. It has to have schmaltz!”
I finished the lesson with the first two pages of the Marcello vocal solo that I have been modeling after the Cecelia Bartoli recording.
And then our time was up!
We were packing up and talking so that he could make it to his 11 AM rehearsal and when he opened our practice room door, someone had pushed this giant storage crate in front of the door! I’m glad he opened the door. He put he stuff down, pushed the crate out of the way and said, “I hate it when they do that!” He showed me back to the security area and invited me and my Wife back for a backstage tour of the Met after the first intermission of the Saturday show.
I have more stories about meeting Wilmer Wise and Jim Ross, hearing Peter Bond, Guy Piddington, Matthew Muckey, Thomas Smith, John Chudoba, and all of the spectacular shows that my Wife and I saw on our trip. I wanted to really capture this lesson on paper so that I can remember it for a long time, so I started with it first. I’ll post more recollections of my trip soon.