Riding the Breath

Had an extra-long voice lesson tonight. I wasn't happy with my voice at all. But I plundered through and worked on some of that dastardly French pronunciation for the Tipsy Song. Or Waltz. Whatever it's called. The pronunciation is causing me to lose my legato. Seriously, I think it's the first thing to go when I need to work on some other aspect of a song.

Then I wanted to go back to Vedrai Carino. Like with Una Donna, I can definitely hear a difference after putting it on the back burner for a while. But then there's that damn legato. Where does it go? I wish I knew. So we did it without consonants and then stuck them back in, which helped. Then we talked about riding the breath. Turns out I was doing something that my teacher said is a common mistake- I'd have a few measures to prepare but would take this one big deep breath just moments before I had to sing, then it would come out with a sort of jarring blast. So I practiced taking that big prep breath sooner than I thought I should, and I began to let some out before starting to sing, so that the breath was on its way when I jumped on with my voice. Hence, riding the breath. I could hear an instant improvement when I did that. We worked on a couple of trouble spots and will probably work on it some more next week.

Tomorrow: Fledermaus.