7
Learn Opera Assisting
As I mentioned before, nobody really explained to me what assisting was the first time I was booked as an assistant on an opera production. There are some books to help you: 'Opera Coaching' by Alan Montgomery is great.
The role is a weird and nebulous one, but the key responsibilities are:
The other big thing worth saying here is that you get yourself a big advantage if you play the piano well. As money in the arts becomes tighter, lots of companies are expecting that their Assistant Conductor will also be able to play piano for production rehearsals and coachings. If you have this advantage, press it.
As I mentioned before, nobody really explained to me what assisting was the first time I was booked as an assistant on an opera production. There are some books to help you: 'Opera Coaching' by Alan Montgomery is great.
The role is a weird and nebulous one, but the key responsibilities are:
- really being on top of the detail of what the singers are doing: not only checking whether things are correct, but also whether the text is clear and whether it could be sung more appropriately / to better effect.
- with this information, you have to be a master strategist about which notes you give directly to the singers in the production rehearsal room, and when you give them, and which things need to be dealt with by calling the singers in for extra coaching. The balancing act is: Have they got the brainspace to take this on now while they're trying to learn the blocking (where they stand and move to onstage)? -vs- If I leave mistake this unchecked until later, is it going to get programmed in through repetition and harder to unpick later?
- Keeping a track of who needs more coaching, and constantly talking to the company manager about when that could be scheduled.
- Watching and remembering (and practicing) exactly how the conductor you're assisting is handling the piece - what tempos s/he is choosing, how much rit they're taking here - how they're beating or organising coming off the end of a pause and going on, etc. This is so on the occasions you need to cover their absence, you're not suddenly disrupting everything by going at a different speed or doing things totally differently.
- Once you get into rehearsals with the singers and orchestra, this is where you really earn your fee. What the conductor hears from the pit bears no relationship to what the audience hears. Sometimes the conductor cannot hear the singers at all, and is relying on seeing their mouths move to accompany them. So the assistant is there to run around the auditorium and balance the whole show in these rehearsals. You identify the moments when the orchestra is too loud, and you immediately come up with solutions for how to fix it. Sometimes the note for the orchestra is EVERYBODY STFU, but if a more nuanced solution is available, like "horns and trombones come down into pianissimo here, and go back to printed dynamics there", or "just the outside string players play from Fig D to Fig E", then those are psychologically much more beneficial than spending two days nagging an orchestra to play quieter.
The other big thing worth saying here is that you get yourself a big advantage if you play the piano well. As money in the arts becomes tighter, lots of companies are expecting that their Assistant Conductor will also be able to play piano for production rehearsals and coachings. If you have this advantage, press it.