Thomas Meglioranza, baritone

Kansas City

In Kansas City, I sang five songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra, using the arrangement for chamber orchestra by Philip West, who made them for his wife Jan DeGaetani's final recording.  This beautiful and moving CD was one of the factors that got me interested in going to the Eastman School of Music for grad school, and although I arrived too late to have ever met Ms. DeGaetani, her name still inspires a hushed reverence from those who knew her.  I've lost count of the number of people who've come up to me in recent months to simply say "I was there when she made that recording".

I also had some excellent ribs at Oklahoma Joe's, which is attached to a gas station.

Though the brisket was a little dry.

Another unexpected highlight of the trip was visiting the National World War One Museum. I'm actually in the middle of preparing a recital program of songs from the WWI era and have been reading history books up the wazoo lately, and didn't even know that this existed until I arrived in Kansas City.  It's an astoundingly good museum, which had me at its entrance where you walk across a glass bridge over a field of poppies. You're immediately ushered into a small theater to view a ten minute film which deftly explains the circumstances leading to the outbreak of war while in the background a distant drumbeat gets closer and closer, creating an awful sense of rising menace.  You're taken right to the brink of August 1914 when the movie suddenly ends, the lights come up, and your desperate need to find out what happens next propels you into the museum proper, which is a marvel not only of historical artifacts and scholarship, but of beautiful, riveting storytelling.  I spent four hours there and would have returned the next day if I could.

strawberry shortcake

An unusually sweet and fragrant batch of Tristar strawberries from the greenmarket inspired to me finally try the technique of adding hard-boiled egg yolks to biscuit dough.  It's supposedly old James Beard trick, passed on to chef Larry Forgione, tinkered with by Russ Parsons in a recent LA Times article, and further tinkered with over at the beautiful Smitten Kitchen blog. 

I made mine pretty much as SK did hers, except 375 seemed like a better temperature for my oven, and I used less sugar on the strawberries since they were already so sweet.  Also, I think I could have easily used twice as much strawberries for the amount of biscuit I ended up with (though I didn't complain as I ate leftover biscuits for breakfast the next morning with jam and yogurt). 

These were the most delicious things I've made in months.  If you're tempted to make this, don't worry (as I did) if the unbaked biscuit dough has an unappetizing eggy sulfurous odor--it somehow vanishes during baking.

Longy

I'm very happy and honored to announce that I've been appointed Visiting Artist in Voice at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge starting this fall.  Here's the announcement on Longy's website.

my special island

Houston

I took an unexpected trip last week to the land of fajitas, pho, and alfajores to sing Roberto Sierra's Missa Latina (for soprano and baritone soloists, SATB chorus and orchestra).  It's such an extraordinarily beautiful and uplifting piece that I was inspired to update my concert-wear:

The Lovely Sandwich

In Philly briefly, where I sang a concert performance of a new opera, The Loathly Lady, I ate this delicious pork and broccoli-rabe sandwich (combining my favorite meat with my favorite vegetable!) at the Reading Station Market.

Ode to Ode

Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte brought me to Baltimore, Ann Arbor (whose lovely, semi-circular concert hall is seen below), and DC. 

In addition to the joy of performing this crazy piece with fun colleagues, there was some cellist-drama between the first two performances, a motel near the Detroit airport that had bullet-proof glass at the check-in desk among other qualities, refreshing my driving skills behind the wheel of a minivan on the NJ Turnpike, walking around the DC mall on an incredibly beautiful spring day

Lake Ontario

Altoona

I went to Altoona to sing Falla's Siete Canciones Populares Españolas and Vaughn Williams' Five Mystical Songs with the Altoona Symphony and a chorus of area high school students (who displayed more maturity than I would have had at that age when I reached the immortal line in the fourth song: "You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat").

I love beautiful old buildings, and Altoona's Mishler Theater is one.

Goodbye, winter.

Braised pork ribs and black eyed peas over polenta, collard greens--probably the last wintery meal of the season for me.  I used to not bother with polenta because all the recipes that seemed worth making (i.e. those that used non-instant polenta) involved endless stirring.  But I'm now a devotee of Paula Wolfert's "oven-baked" polenta, which I make by mixing 2 cups of polenta, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 9 cups of cool water in a greased (butter or olive oil) heavy pot, and baking it, uncovered in a 350F oven for 80 minutes, then stirring it and baking it an additional 10 minutes.  I either use the whole grain, coarsely ground cornmeal that's sold at the Union Square Greenmarket on Saturdays, or Bob's Red Mill coarse grind cornmeal, which is in a lot of supermarkets these days.