When I have friends over for a meal, and the dinner plates are readied for consumption, I am often the recipient of looks of disbelief from my guests.  “This looks amazing”, “My god David, this looks delicious”, “Oh my god, I can’t wait to start eating”…these are just of few of the predictable gasps that […]

The passage of time is so sneaky, we hardly note the ‘tick-tick-tock’ of life’s clock.  Then one day we awake and realize that we have grown old(er) {see: Old in San Diego, from the August 2011 blog archive}.  Sometimes it is sad, as when we realized that our childhoods were really over; and sometimes it […]

When one tallies the affect and effect of 100 years’ time, we can clearly say “Wow; how things have changed!” as much as we can say “Wow; some things never change!”  My grandmother turns 100 this year.  She lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, enjoyed radio–but also saw the advent of television; she […]

With each breath and step we take, a sliver of history is created: Micro-history, I like to call it.  Macro-history, however, is created via demonstrable over-arches that bend the arc of narrative…at least, and until–in the case of records–they are replaced. Such will be the case later this week when the Dallas Opera steals most […]

As an undergraduate music student at Baldwin-Wallace College (now Baldwin-Wallace University) in Northeast Ohio, we were force-fed an unrelenting amount of music by, arguably, the greatest composer to have ever lived, Johann Sebastian Bach (just don’t tell Mozart or Beethoven…and for goodness’ sake, don’t breathe a word to Wagner!).  The B-W Conservatory of Music was […]

As some of you know, in addition to my operatic performance career, I have spent the last five years establishing (by invitation) a small but growing vocal institute in Montgomery, Alabama; a city with which I have had a decades-long association.  As the Artistic Director of the Vann Vocal Institute (named after deceased philanthropist and […]

This past weekend, a friend and I attended the other current offering at Canadian Opera Company; Kaija Saariaho’s Love from Afar, based on the 12th century poetic text La Vida breve by Jaufre Rudel, with modern libretto by Amin Maalouf, and stage direction by Daniele Finzi Pasca.  As the “Hollywood-ization”–or in this case the “Cirque […]

If one ever wonders what happens when a bunch of opera singers meet well dressed donors under a themed evening of glamor, drinks, dinner/dancing, and a cabaret performance where anything BUT opera is performed; they need go no further than the Lyric Opera of Chicago to find out.  Once a year, Chicago’s finest and ‘fun-est’ […]

On this cold, foggy, but rainy Toronto Tuesday, in the midst of a winter that won’t make up its mind; the Greater Toronto Area (“The GTA” to us regulars…ha, ha…not really a regular…but I just couldn’t resist) had the opportunity to shed a few pounds over their lunch hour.  That is to say, instead of […]