Q: Handel’s Messiah is the bread and butter for many musicians each December holiday season. We think we know the answer, but do you ever tire of it? What are your favorite moments in the score (other than your own spectacular arias)?
A: My absolute favorite moment to watch, as well as hear, is the coda at the end of 'Glory to God in the highest', the chorus from Part One. Not only is the instrumentation cheekily sparse for such a laudatory moment, but the disjointed nature of the final progression often lends itself to a unique little dance from whoever is on the podium.
Q: It must be great fun to collaborate with a trumpeter in “The Trumpet Shall Sound.” But it comes very near the end of a long(-ish) evening. How do you keep yourself warmed up, especially in a cold cathedral?
A: It IS always a pleasure to have a moment of one-on-one collaboration, in the middle of such a grand scale work. To stay warm, I use the easiest method I know: singing! It's very common for us singers to lightly hum or vocalize along with the music being played or sung by our colleagues, ideally so lightly that nobody else hears it. Though I'm sure some ABS players could tell stories of some of us singers unknowingly being a tad less than subtle …
Q: You’ve been spending a lot of time in recent years performing throughout Europe. What were some of your most memorable experiences there?
A: I've been really lucky to have had a wide variety of experiences on the road in the past few seasons. Some are memorable for purely musical reasons, as I'm very often in awe of the absolutely top notch musicians alongside whom I'm lucky enough to sing. Others stick with me for completely non-musical reasons. I recently performed Monteverdi's L'Orfeo as a member of a twenty person ensemble of singers and dancers, all dressed in skin-colored body suits and mushed together in an amoeba-like clump for the duration of the piece, while an enormous, three dimensional matrix of fishing line, controlled by eight software-driven motors, danced in the air above us. Yeah, that one was pretty memorable!
We're tremendously excited to bring Alex to San Francisco for all of our December programming.
All seats including General Admission are now on sale.
Get tickets today!
