Bird on a Wire

I was at the bank yesterday because I had to make an international wire transfer. I had ordered several music scores from a Danish publisher, and the invoice they had sent me was in DKK, so it was now up to me to figure out how to pay them. Since the invoice contained wire transfer instructions right there on the page, I figured it must not be such a hard thing to send money to Denmark via wire transfer.

First I went online to the (really crappy) website and clicked on the tab that said “wire transfers.” Apparently I wasn’t signed up for their wire transfer service, and when I tried to submit an application, I got a message saying that a customer service representative would be in touch. That was five days ago…no contact from the bank whatsoever.

So I called the 800 number, and the person on the other end of the line told me I would have to go to the bank in person to initiate a wire transfer.  I asked what I would need when I went to the bank, and she didn’t really have an answer for me.  I figured I had all the info I’d need on this invoice, so I drove to the bank, invoice in hand, ready to learn how to wire money overseas.

The last time I had gone to this bank and tried to pay a bill in foreign currency, they had looked at me blankly and told me to go to Western Union…so I was prepared for a little bit of resistance. But I guess I didn’t count on downright incompetence.  This is how the conversation went:

ME: Hello, I’d like to make an international wire transfer.

JOAN*: Sure, have a seat. Can I have your account number?

ME: Here you go.

JOAN: How much is the transfer going to be for?

ME: I’m not sure.  The invoice I have is in Danish krone, so…

JOAN: Oh, we can’t do anything that’s not in dollars.

ME: Are you sure? I mean, I’m pretty sure your bank does international business.

JOAN: (clicking through some screens on her computer) Oh, I guess we do. What’s the exchange rate?

ME: I don’t know.

JOAN: Well, I can’t do the transfer without the exchange rate. You’ll have to go find that out and come back.

ME: Um…aren’t you a bank? Aren’t you supposed to know that kind of thing?

JOAN: (blank stare)

ME: Exchange rates fluctuate throughout the day. I would imagine banks would know what the current exchange rate is more than a regular person like me.

JOAN: (getting defensive) I’ve never done this before.

ME: Okay…um…

JOAN: (waving over another rep) Hey, Linda!  How do I do this? I’ve never done this before.

LINDA: (coming over and pointing at the computer screen) Just hit “wire transfer.” Okay, now hit “international.” What’s the currency she’s trying to use?

JOAN: (growing increasingly more nervous) I’ve never done this before!

ME: Danish krone.

JOAN: (picks up the phone and dials what must be the help desk line) Hello? I’m trying to get help finding an exchange rate. You what? My store number? (to Linda) What’s our store number?

LINDA: (gives store number)

JOAN: (repeats number) I just…that’s not the number? But that’s the only number I have. RS Code? What’s an RS Code?

LINDA: (turning to me as Joan continues to fuss on the phone) you want to pay in the foreign currency, right?

ME: Yes.

LINDA: That’ll be an extra $35 for international wires.

ME: Fine.

LINDA: (hitting a few keys on the computer) The exchange rate is 5.114.

ME: Okay.

LINDA: So here’s what the entire amount will be that we’ll deduct from your account.

ME: Sounds good.

JOAN: Oh, that’s what an RS code is?  Okay, thanks.  Well, we found out what the exchange rate is without your help, but thanks anyway. (hangs up the phone)

*All the names have been changed to protect the stupid.

The rest of the meeting was fairly normal; she asked for all the information that was on the invoice, and I had to keep pointing out where the information was on the invoice that was right in front of her.  She was incredibly nervous about the whole thing, which amused me more than anything (I think if I hadn’t been amused, I would have been angry, which wouldn’t have helped anyone). And I think I calmed her down by telling her I had never done this before either, so we would both be learning as we go.

I told Ray this story last night, and he said that this bank is infamous for not paying enough, so nobody who is at all good at banking will ever work for this company.

And the sad thing is, I almost went through this whole post without revealing which bank it was, but I think I owe it to you all to reveal which bank has that kind of level of consistent incompetence:  TD Bank (formerly known as Commerce).

Reviews and Rehearsals

I’ve been very busy running from rehearsal to rehearsal to concert; learning music for 5 different concerts in 2 months is exhausting, not to mention confusing. Recently I’ve had to quite literally be in two places at once, and I still haven’t invented gotten my hands on a Time Turner, and as a result, I’ve had to make compromises in my schedule and try to anger all of my conductors equally (you know, so I can be fair about it).

Amazingly though, I am managing to learn all my music and (knock on wood) keep healthy, so I can’t complain too much.

The Crossing is now two-thirds of the way through its Month of Moderns; we gave a performance of the second concert on Friday night to a sparse, but enthusiastic, crowd (we didn’t promote this concert as much as the last one, and it was at the beginning of Memorial Day weekend to boot).

We got a pretty good review from David Patrick Stearns for the first concert of the Month of Moderns, but although we saw him at Friday night’s concert, he came out with a completely different story in this Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. He didn’t mention the concert at all, but he did review the CD of Kile Smith’s Vespers, which is just fine in my book. The more positive reviews and press we get for the CD, the better, and Kile deserves all the attention he gets.

Speaking of Kile Smith, he has been writing in his blog about the piece he has been writing for us, a part of The Celan Project (commissioned works based on the poetry of Paul Celan).  The work is called Where flames a word, and it uses three different texts by Celan, all incredibly powerful.  We just started rehearsing his piece yesterday, and I’m already in love with it. It is such a joy when a composer really understands the ensemble he is writing for, and this piece fits The Crossing like a glove. I nearly cried in rehearsal for the beauty of it.

Kile’s piece will be performed in the third concert of The Crossing’s Month of Moderns.

Friday, June 5, 2009 8pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA
Click here for tickets

I’m also very excited for the Chorus America conference coming up in just a few weeks. The Bruckner Mass in E Minor is an ingenious blend of romanticism and piety.  We’re also performing a piece by Martino called Seven Pious Pieces; those rehearsals have been difficult, just because it’s 12-tone music and very hard to understand intellectually.

But I think we’re finally starting to get it, and once we’re really comfortable with the music, we will be able to perform it with grace.

This program is the Centerpiece Concert of the National Chorus America Conference hosted by The Philadelphia Singers.

Thursday, June 11 at 8:00pm
Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia

For tickets: 215-751-9494 and be sure to mention my name (Maren Montalbano) for a 10% discount.

Bruckner’s Mass in E Minor

My next concert with the Philadelphia Singers will be at Verizon Hall, for the keynote concert of the Chorus America Conference 2009.  No solos for me, unfortunately, but since I used up all my solo karma for the Copland, I can hardly complain about that.

So, here’s all the pertinent info. I hope to see you there!

The glorious 150-voice Philadelphia Singers Chorale joined by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia will perform Anton Bruckner’s exquisite masterpiece, Mass in E Minor. A beautiful combination of intricate Italian Renaissance polyphony and lush Romantic harmonies, it is among the most powerful in all Romantic choral music. 50 voices from The Philadelphia Singers fully professional ensemble will perform Donald Martino’s a cappella Seven Pious Pieces and Charles Martin Loeffler’s By The Rivers of Babylon featuring organist Michael Stairs on the Kimmel Center’s Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ. This program is the Centerpiece Concert of the National Chorus America Conference hosted by The Philadelphia Singers.

Thursday, June 11 at 8:00pm
Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia

For tickets: 215-751-9494 and be sure to mention my name (Maren Montalbano) for a 10% discount.

Blogging for a song

Yesterday, my friend Amy Armstrong sent her readers over to my blog, so now I get to return the favor.

OperaMouth is a blog about being a working singer. Amy has some excellent advice on audition dos and don’ts, as well as some really thoughtful insight into what she herself is doing to make her way in the professional music world.  If you are a professional singer or if you have thought about becoming one, I would definitely recommend her blog.

Amy is participating in a 31-day blog challenge, in which she is trying to improve her blog (something I should probably do, instead of posting whatever random thoughts come out of my head), so head on over to her site and leave her some feedback.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to come up with some posts for you to enjoy. I’ve got a lot going on here in the Land of Supermaren, so I don’t think I’ll be lacking in stories to tell. My only worry is that I won’t have time enought to tell them!

A Month of Moderns

So, Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles isn’t the only concert I’m doing with The Crossing this spring.  We are performing a “Month of Moderns” this spring: three discrete concerts in five weeks.

The first concert is only one piece: Talbot’s Path of Miracles.

The second concert will have a song by our featured composer of the year, Bo Holten, as well as a new piece by Kirsten Broberg (a part of our Celan Project, in which we commissioned works based on the poetry of Paul Celan).

The third concert will feature Bo Holten again, who will be traveling to the U.S. to see the concert! Our final Celan Project performance will be of a work by Kile Smith, who wrote Vespers that I keep gushing on and on about.

So, here are the concert dates and times, just so you can put them in your calendars:

Month of Moderns I: Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles
Saturday, May 16, 2009 8pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA
Click here for tickets

Month of Moderns II
Friday, May 22, 2009 8pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA
Click here for tickets

Month of Moderns III
Friday, June 5, 2009 8pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA
Click here for tickets

Kile Smith’s Vespers

You remember that recording that I did last summer? Well, it’s finally been released!

As of today, Vespers by Kile Smith hits virtual shelves all over the place, from Amazon to Piffaro’s website to Navona Records.

However, just from a purely selfish perspective, I’m going to encourage you to purchase the CD from The Crossing, because that way The Crossing can make money to pay their singers (i.e., yours truly).

But however you acquire this recording, I would encourage you to get your hands on a copy, because I think Vespers is an amazing piece, and I had so much fun working on it.

Oh, and I have some solos on it, so if you’re in my fan club, you should DEFINITELY give it a listen.

Talbot’s Path of Miracles

While I’m in the mood for shameless plugs, my next performance after L’Enfant is a performance of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles with The Crossing.  I do have a solo at the beginning of the piece, although the ensemble is so small that very often everybody has a part to sing by themselves.

Path of Miracles is a piece about the pilgrimage along the Camino Francés in Spain. It’s written in several overlapping languages (from Ancient Greek to Basque), and utilizes some very interesting vocal effects, which will be admittedly difficult to rehearse.

This concert is the first in a series of concerts called the Month of Moderns (3 concerts in 5 weeks), which promises to be exciting.  Here are the details:

Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles
Saturday, May 16, 2009 8pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA
Click here for tickets

At the Opera

For the last few month, since I’ve returned from Hawaii, I’ve been rehearsing for L’Enfant et les sortilèges at the Opera Company of Philadelphia.  I’ve got a tiny little solo at the end (the same solo I had when I sang it with NY Choral Artists and NY Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel’s baton in February), and it’s been a real treat being able to perform this opera twice in one year.

Ravel’s masterpiece (with libretto by Colette) is about a naughty boy who doesn’t want to do his homework or pay attention to his mother. She leaves him alone in his room with only stale bread and tea, and he throws a temper tantrum, destroying everything in his room. But when he falls down exhausted in his chair, he is surprised to find that the chair has come to life! All the things that he has destroyed come back to haunt him in a strange, comical, and nightmarish way until he realizes the error of his ways.

L’Enfant is one of my favorite operas of all time, not only because of its fairy tale qualities, but also because the music is so beautiful, moving, and simple all at the same time.  If you get a chance, come see it (and me!) at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

Friday, April 24, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 2:30 p.m.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, May 1, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, May 3, 2009 at 2:30 p.m.

For tickets, go to the Opera Philadelphia website or call 215-732-8400.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Tuesday, March 24

And then began the long flight home.

As I was drafting this post, I considered writing another long diatribe about the airplane business and the state of flying these days. But I decided it would be redundant, since my description of the flight to Hawaii covered most of what I wanted to say.

We were packed in overbooked flight, and once again, got very little sleep — Ray less so than I, since he was feeling sick the entire flight back. We had a layover in Phoenix, where there were so many people waiting for their overbooked flights that we had to sit on the floor.

A group of college girls were seated on the floor next to us, talking to some classmates of theirs who had been on our plane. They had gone to Vegas for Spring Break and now were having a hard time getting home because of overbooked flights. They had been stuck in Phoenix for a day and a half and had even been sent onto a plane going back to Vegas.  I breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t in their shoes, and I started wondering about the fact that we turned down the airline’s offer to give us free tickets to give up our seats on the plane.

They announced on the P.A. system that they were looking for passengers to give up their tickets back to Philadelphia in exchange for a free roundtrip domestic ticket (within the contiguous states, of course). Well, we’d already given up our free Hawaiian tickets…why take a domestic ticket?

Sigh. We got on the plane and returned to Philadelphia as scheduled, just in time for me to go to my Philadelphia Singers rehearsal.

And thus ends my tale of Hawaiian adventures. I probably won’t be posting nearly as often, now that I’m done with this particular story.

But I do intend on being a bit more regular with my postings, since I do have plenty of performances coming up, and I’m all for using this blog for a little bit of shameless promotion. <grin>

Seahorses

Monday, March 23

At last, it was our last day on the Big Island. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 10:59 PM that night, though, so we still had a full day ahead of us. Unfortunately, we needed to check out of the hut in the morning, since there was another group of people coming in to stay there, so we packed up the car and headed out to explore the island some more.

We didn’t have much of a plan of action.  We considered driving all the way around the island one more time (after all, we did have the time to do that), but I wasn’t really in the mood to sit in the car for 8 hours.  I did express some interest in seeing a waterfall on the east side of the island, and we were told we had to go to to Tex Drive-In for their famous malasadas, which was in that direction, so we drove east for some breakfast.

We had gotten a fairly early start, so by the time we had driven through Waimea to Honokaa on the northeastern shore, it was only 10:00 or so.  The Drive-In did have a drive-thru window, but we wanted to sit down and eat, so we parked and went in the front door. The guy behind the counter had an uncanny resemblance to Judge Rheinhold’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, both in his mannerisms and a little bit in looks.

The malasadas were good, but they were not spectacular. I suppose it was one of those experiences one “must” have while in Hawaii, much like having a beignet in at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans: they are both fried concoctions made of sugar and flour, little more than donuts without the hole, but if you don’t do it, you somehow are missing out on the local experience.

After breakfast, Ray started to not feel so well.  We decided a long drive halfway around the island would not be so good, so we nixed the waterfall idea and made our way through the middle of the island (for once, we were not driving along the coast!) to Kailua-Kona.

We ended up at the only Seahorse Farm in the U.S., and signed up for a tour that would start at 1:00. The “farm” was located in an industrial park called NELHA (National Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority). We were interested in touring the energy labs, too (I had heard about some interesting alternative energy systems they were developing there), but apparently there was only one tour per day, and that had been at 10:30 in the  morning.

The tour of the seahorse farm had all the makings of a Busch Gardens/Seaworld presentation, complete with wireless microphones and portable amps. All that was missing was a bunch of 20-somethings singing and dancing on a stage (I would have offered my services, only I’m not 20-something anymore and I was on vacation).

Although the tour itself was ostensibly to raise awareness about reef conservation and environmental stewardship, the money from these tours were being used to raise funds for research on these bizarre little creatures. It was a good cause, so I didn’t feel so bad about the overpriced tickets; I just chafed a little bit at the sterile show/presentation.

Oh, and there were children there. Lots of hot, cranky, pushy children. And I love kids, but their parents were just as hot and cranky, and they didn’t really police the kids when they pushed to the front of the line or knocked people out of the way.

Even so, I did enjoy myself. Seahorses are fascinating creatures, and this was the closest I had ever been to one, not to mention thousands! At the end of the tour, they let people hold the seahorses…okay, actually, they have you put your hands in the water, and then they get a seahorse to wrap its tail around your finger.

I was stuck behind a horde of whiny kids, so by the time it came for my turn, the seahorse in question would have none of me. Unfazed, the biologist plucked up another seahorse and coaxed it around my finger.

I barely felt anything at all: it was very light and smooth, and the seahorse delicately held onto my finger until the biologist decided it was time for the next person to go. He gently coaxed it off my finger onto his, and I went to dry my hands.

After the seahorse farm, we wandered back to the main part of Kailua-Kona, for one last trip to Kona Bay Books. I traded all my books (which I had finished in the previous day and a half) for enough books to last me the plane trip and then some. It turned out to be an even trade, and I didn’t have to spend any money, which was a bonus.

Apparently, there was an “international market” somewhere close to the book store, so we wandered over to where it was marked on the  map. We expected something more akin to what we had experienced in Waikiki on Oahu on previous trips: dozens of small stalls selling t-shirts and tikis and silly Hawaiian collectibles for bargain prices (most of which were negotiable). This marketplace was more of an outdoor mall. They still sold kitsch, but not for bargain prices, and it didn’t really seem like anything was negotiable.

We ate dinner at the Kona Brewing Company again, and we got there right before the dinner rush. Ray still wasn’t feeling very well, and although he had napped a little bit in the car while we were at the marketplace, he ate dinner listlessly. I was hoping that whatever he had would pass before we got on the plane. The skies started to threaten rain (which would have been very bad for us, since we were eating outside), but luckily, the clouds passed by without comment.

Finally, it was time to return the rental car and check in to our flight at the airport. But as we got up to the check-in counter, the woman told us that our flight was overbooked, and would we like to stay here in Hawaii a few days longer?  They would put us up in a hotel and give us a free flight back to Hawaii. The only catch: they couldn’t get us on another flight until Thursday.

I looked at Ray. We were both exhausted, and not thinking right. I had rehearsal on Tuesday evening and another one on Thursday, and Ray had to go back to work on Thursday. Could we really afford to stay longer? Probably not. I told her thanks but no thanks.

Stupidest thing I’d done the whole trip.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Next: Leaving on a Jet Plane