The Internet Makes The World So Much Smaller

Just to show you never know when someone you know will pop up somewhere... this morning I started reading this article:

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MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Two sentences inscribed above the refurbished entrance hall of Moscow's Kurskaya metro station are causing great agitation for survivors of Russian labor camps.Yuri Fidelgoldsh, who had five ribs removed after imprisonment six decades ago, is one of the offended survivors.

"Stalin reared us on loyalty to the people," says the inscription above the pristine marble floors of the metro station. "He inspired us to labor and to heroism."
Fidelgoldsh, now 82, doesn't use the metro station much, but he has been there to see the restoration. When he invokes the name "Stalin," he gets angry. "For people who were imprisoned, punished and whose parents were killed, this is still in their hearts," Fidelgoldsh says.
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Well, I think it's perfectly dreadful and disgusting, but that's only part of what caught my eye. I read the following paragraphs:

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"This metro station was built by prisoners of gulags who were in there for no reason, just because. They were the ones building this station. I think all of this is simply wrong," says Valeri M. Shevchenko, a musician, whose father suffered at the hands of Stalin's regime.

"They came in the morning, Stalin's police, took everyone outside and shot my grandfather in front of his family. My grandmother and her eight children, including my father who was 8 at the time, were sent to work camps. Only three children survived."

As Shevchenko looks around the metro station today, he shakes his head.

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Valeri M. Shevchenko. I blinked twice and I asked myself "could it be?"

Of course. The middle initial and his profession said it all.

Valeri M. Shevchenko was my flute teacher at the conservatory where I studied during my teenage years!  Eventually he left to go back to Russia and I never heard from him again.

At least, until this very moment.

Becoming Myself, Part II or, How I got where I am.

I must preface the second part of my life story (which will be shorter, I promise!) by saying that I do not resent my father in the least for saying what he said to me. No matter how squelching it may have been, I understand that he said it out of genuine concern, not as a desire to put me down.


I knew I had to find a way out, and I knew that remaining in my country as not an option for me for several different reasons, chief among them the fact that I simply wouldn't be able to get the education I wanted for my voice. Financially, I couldn't afford any of the prestigious universities in the united states, and although Europe was a wellspring of culture I felt pulled towards the United States.  Eventually, through the help of a good friend, I managed to secure a scholarship for a small private liberal arts college in North Carolina. It wasn't the North Carolina School of the arts, which had been where I wanted to go in the first place, but unfortunately we aliens don't qualify for scholarships in public universities.  Despite the protestations of my mother (who was firmly opposed to anything related to the US), I went to North Carolina and spent  four years at a college in the swannanoa valley. There I essentially had to make my own music major, as the school only had a music minor, but since I already had had six years of conservatory back home, I had to cover only a minimal surface.

Unfortunately my voice instruction was not the best. I felt my teacher there didn't understand my voice (or was very knowledgeable at all) and for four years I was very frustrated, as I was not allowed to switch to another voice teacher, and dropping out would have meant being sent back to a country I in which I did not want to be. Transferring was a little difficult, too, because of the scholarship issue I mentioned earlier.  So I stuck through it, determined that after college I would find the right voice teacher. I have many pleasant memories from my time in Asheville, including being helped in many ways by a wonderful person called Lenora Thom, a one-woman dynamo who is the conductor of the Asheville Choral Society, among many other things (and I mean many others, she has boundless energy), and of course my friend Pete to whom I owe my being able to come to this country. I loved Asheville, and someday I would like to go back there and sing for them... a sort of "look, it's me!" thing, I guess, and a bit of a homecoming.

After I graduated I went to Colorado where I had a rather negative experience with one of the voice teachers from one of the universities. This person was simply vicious with me, and after a month of studying with them I felt so depressed about the whole thing that I stopped singing altogether for four months, firmly entrenched in the idea that I simply wouldn't be able to sing correctly at all. This is perhaps the only abusive voice teacher I've ever had, and I never thought someone in that position could have the power to crush you so utterly--- but the kind of personality they had was one where every dart was disguised under a mask of affability and good intentions. You wouldn't really feel the poison until after it had taken effect.

Once more, as you can see, I let someone else's voice affect me in ways I shouldn't have. Then it came to pass that I met a wonderful woman with a very warm heart. Her specialty was musical theater, not opera, but nevertheless she took me on and worked on slowly building back my confidence. After two years with her,  I went on to another teacher at her behest (she said she didn't really know how to teach a tenor) and spent two years with the other teacher.

 During this time I finally had my first main role in a production - previously I had done only chorus work. At the end of the two years (and two more productions) I realized that there were still deficits in my voice, many,  and that I had to find a way to address them. Also, it seemed to be that everybody had been wrong about what kind of voice I was: Up until now everybody thought I was a tenore leggiero,whereas in fact I was a lyric tenor...

I stumbled into this revelation when I attended the Colorado Vocal Arts Symposium where a few lessons with James Allbritten changed my entire perspective and, indeed, my entire life from that moment on.  I had been singing leggiero repertoire for all of my life, and imitating the leggiero sound as best I could. Finding out you're a lyric tenor after that is akin to realizing you have a whole mansion to live in, and that you've only been living in a corner of the kitchen.  Eventually after singing in a production, my teacher and I came to a friendly parting of the ways and we remain on good terms to this day.

Since then, I have been incredibly fortunate to be studying with Martile Rowland,  a woman with enormous experience, incredible ears and an amazing knowledge of technique. I've been studying three months with her (plus another Vocal Arts Symposium) and there are many changes going on in my voice. A lot of frustration, too, because I must overcome many many habits that are ingrained into my muscular memory. It is in this strange stage of change that I find myself in right now.

Where will it lead? Will I be able to become the tenor I know I can be? Well, stick around and we'll find that out together.

If you are puzzled  as to the name of the blog, I named the blog after Alphonse Nourrit. Nourrit was an unfortunate tenor known for good musical taste, the first to sing songs by Schubert in France. He was unfortunate because he happened to live during a time of transition in the tenor voice, where the old method of singing the upper register in falsetto was being phased out for the full-voiced upper register, including the popular tenor high C, which was popularized by Duprez in France.  So frustrated not to be able to hit that high C was poor Alphonse, that he threw himself out of a window and died. One might say poor Alphonse (who was greatly lamented) died of high tessitura. It's a reminder to me that being a tenor is an incredibly frustrating, at times exasperating thing, but that getting too exasperated or too frustrated might end up in you losing your head if you're not careful.

Becoming Myself, Part I

I guess this is where I introduce myself, isn't it? Well, let's get acquainted:

Since we're going to need something by which you can talk to me (or yell at me, for that matter), whoever you are, you can call me 'P'- how interesting is that? I'm a letter!


I'm a 'youngish' tenor -by that I mean I just have turned the magical number of 30, which means I am no longer a 'young artist' but still considered to be somewhere along the baby scale, I guess.

For as long as I can remember, singing has been the one thing I have wanted to do in my life. Although clearly passionate about it, I admit to have been the victim of my own foolishness during a period of my life in which I allowed some erroneous criteria to interfere with my pursuit of this passion.  Among the voices I allowed myself to affect me were the well-intentioned warnings of my father who, concerned for his son's future and well-being, advised him that it was not a wise decision to follow a path in music as he did not think his son had the exceptional voice required for an operatic career. Since this disclosure came during a trip we were both taking to Italy, a trip where I was surrounded with musical glories, I felt it hit me particularly hard.

I felt as if the world we were seeing, a world which I had always loved, would be forever barred from me because I wasn't good enough for it. I was a teenager during this period and I had a lot of things to be uncertain about - many were very personal, and many of them touching upon the idea of self-worth. Eventually, as more and more things started going wrong for me I became discouraged, ultimately convinced of my own inadequacy and I 'quit' music altogether.

Up until this point there had never been a moment in my life in which I wasn't involved in one or another way of music-making: guitar classes, choir, the baroque recorder, theory, solfeggio, etcetera. The year of 1998, which is now 11 years ago, was a very long one for me due to the absence of music. However, I was convinced that I should be practical, that I should instead seek a career in which I could be realistically successful and perhaps keep music as a hobby.

So, having just graduated from high school, I enrolled myself in the local University as a Psychology student to pursue a career.

It didn't quite happen like that, though. Having given up professional music, at least in my mind, caused me to become extremely depressed.  I spent several hours in front of the television every day without much will to do anything - even read, which has always been one of my passions. Whenever I don't feel like reading, it is an indication that I am seriously depressed. My mother and a friend grew concerned at this during the summer, specially since I said I had no plans whatsoever, and suggested I try something at the university. Not caring very much one way or the other what happened, I gave it a try.  (One good thing of this, though, was that I found a very dear friend, Sasha.)

Little did I realize at the time, but I was following the same path of life my father had followed in the past: The advice he had given me was exactly the same advice my own grandfather had given to him when my father wanted to become an opera singer (runs in the family?), and that is why he became an Electrical Engineer-- a career he absolutely hated, which is why he never actually exercised it but rather ended up following his own unorthodox but extraordinary career path.

I was, I must say, completely miserable during certain periods of my training as a psychologist. I found many things absolutely fascinating, as I have always been an intellectually active person, so I took an interest to neurobiology but dreaded, for example, sitting through lectures about Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud -- it may seem strange to you, reader, but where I come from the predominant school of psychology is Freudian. I found Skinner's behaviorism appalling and completely anti-intellectual, with so many errors that it was astonishing anyone had ever considered using it, and as for Jung... the less said, the better.

I realized that this couldn't possibly be my life. The idea of spending hours in an office every day whilst listening to people's psychological enigmas did not seem attractive to me in the least. Eventually I would come to resent that life, and the thought of living a life I hated was not an option for me. So I  decided to take drastic measures...

Stay tuned for the next installment, where you get to find out the rest!