Tech Week Recipe: Adding Flavor

6 days till opening. Orchestra arrives. Two days in the rehearsal hall, then it’ll be time to fit this:

… into this:

We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.

This music is as beautiful as I imagined. Granted, I’m pretty familiar with it by this time, but it’s still exciting to be surprised by these orchestral colors, up close and personal. The historical recordings of this piece are useful in many ways, but because of their technological limitations, they don’t give you much of an idea of the true flavor of Wolf-Ferrari. For an idea of what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube excerpt from Wolf-Ferrari’s other chamber opera, I quatro rusteghi.

I’m sitting in the orchestra reading behind my friend Ken, enjoying the annotations on the final page of his timpani part. Looks like this piece of music hasn’t been handled for a while.