2025 Schwab Vocal Rising Stars: Day 5 Blog | From Artistic Director Steven Blier

Friday can be a somewhat tense day in a rehearsal period this brief. We’ll have our dress rehearsal tomorrow, and in some years the end of the week brings panic in the streets, mostly about memorization or a piece that a still a little unsettled vocally. That’s why today was so unusual. We were all relatively calm.

Bénédicte and I had planned to start the day with some time alone at the piano. Alas, when you rehearse all week with no time to warm up, lots of little spots start to get sloppy—the normal wear and tear of this process. But since we begin each day with an hour’s car drive in the morning, and we get home in the early evening when Béné has kids to tend to and I have a blog to write…well, goodbye to practice time at home.

Unfortunately, we left the city on the late side this morning and had to relinquish the 30 precious minutes we’d carved out for ourselves. Arriving fashionably late at noon, we felt we should get right to our final work-through with the cast. I’ll wrestle as many of my piano tangles as I can back into place tomorrow, when we’ve rescheduled a noon practice hour, come hell or high water. Till then, I am taking deep breaths and bribing my rabbi to have a word with the Almighty on my behalf. 

I had never been through a day quite like this at Caramoor. From noon to six we worked through the show, with a lunch break that stretched out longer than I thought prudent. The discussion was a little too juicy to abandon, and no one seemed to be in a rush.

We finally went back in and I said, “Well, maybe we should skip tea-time today,” and someone—could it have been our stage manager Hallie Eichholz? Or Bénédicte?—said, “Oh no, we have to have tea!” Well, if we must, we must…

We continued to plow through the show, tweaking details, aligning a slightly overblown high note here, coordinating a piano-voice dynamic there, correcting a blatty vowel or two (why does no one want to sing a closed e?), doing some light work on staging and positioning. It was a relaxed but highly concentrated  session, and there was a deep sense of trust in the room—trust in one another, and in the music itself. Béné and I conducted a series of targeted laser strikes on the songs, disturbing only what needed to be disturbed and allowing the rest of the show to continue its quiet process of incubation.

I always tell my students, “First you work on the song, then you have to let the song work on you.” Béné and I coach with great detail and, we hope, depth, but for all of us musicians there is a moment to “let go, let God,” and that moment is rapidly approaching. 

At four it was tea-time, and—obviously outvoted—I headed to the glassed-in patio for our usual break. When I arrived, I understood why we would not be breaking with tradition today: Hallie (and, I think, our beloved Tim Coffey) had laid out an elaborate spread with ornate tea-pots, very fancy china from the formal dining room, and on a pair of three-tiered display servers, pastry from one of the best bakeries in the county, LMNOP, located in Katonah. I avoid gluten, so Hallie had made sure there was something there for me. Full disclosure: I’d had dessert at lunch because the caterer has been buying me GF cookies that I normally would not let near my presence—my powers of resistance are zero. But how was I to say no to such a sweet gift? This is why I, who have dessert at most twice a month and count my calories like a miser, had dessert twice in one afternoon. Do I feel guilty? No.