[Galadriel55]

Going out of order here, but this needs to be said first - Ballad is so good. I keep saying it, and I keep not really expecting it to get even better, and every step keeps raising the song to new heights. I was blown by the visuals. It's seriously good.

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

Re: song order - it occurs to me that putting Dream after Captivity actually brings it closer to the books!

'Nay, Lúthien my child, I fear
he lives indeed in bondage drear.
The Lord of Wolves hath prisons dark,
chains and enchantments cruel and stark,
there trapped and bound and languishing
now Beren dreams that thou dost sing.'

(Lay of Leithian, Canto VI, which I've only just noticed is a total sequence-break, because we haven't even seen Beren reach Nargothrond yet!)

Dream timing is weird. Because ^that. But Luthien's part sounds like she is leaving Doriath (love is leading me to you...), which must place it before she meets CelnCur. But Beren's part is very much a nod to Farewell Sweet Earth, which is not even in the same timezone. So... go figure?

Originally Posted by Hui

Wait, what? Sauron is Seraphim? :O Cripes, that's a genre jump!

Yup, about sums up my reaction!

Originally Posted by Hui

They have an audio file from Maxim Rakovsky singing Finrod at - sigh - "Glastonberry" back in March, so he's probably the one on the videos; I feel like I slightly recognise the name? But I'm not sure of that.

Yes, I believe it's him in the videos, and the name sounds vaguely familiar to me too, but I can't place it without digging back through all the links. The other Finrod name I recall is Pavel SomethingIForget, who I think is the really tall guy in some of the outdoors concerts... I'm not good at names.

Originally Posted by Hui

It's weird to me that almost every performance of the play drops one or more of the female roles. There's already fewer of them than the male roles; is there just a major shortage of women in Russian musical theatre?

You know, that's a great question. I feel like generally in "theatre", or at least "Russian Tolkien theatre", there are more females - there is a tendency to have more female "extras", and in other stuff too females often take over male parts (e.g. the Remmirath performers are mostly female, and even the films in the first post of this thread - a good chunk of LOTR characters are female actors). I do wonder at the logistics that keep out female solo singers out of the Zong.

Originally Posted by Hui

This, I need to revisit when I have my microphone handy.

It's been brewing for a while, when I had the thought that surely there must be other Silm scenes out there that would lend themselves well to this genre, and the Maedhros rescue scene was one of the first examples I came up with. But it only got spat out in words this past week, and then it was stuck in my head at work so I had to make the music for it to get it out of my system. I'm at the Eagle part now, so most of the wah through, but this bit actually requires effort and creativity and inspiration to make a believable eagle. But still, won't be too long. And then back to Zonging.

Originally Posted by Hui

I actually really loved the simplicity of Finrod here - he basically just sits there in full colour the entire song. It let me focus on the rest of the scene more than I would otherwise. I also appreciated the structure of the song - every set of four lines is exactly the same length! I could move things around with no trouble at all to get it all sorted.

And it came out absolutely beautifully! Seriously though, after this piece, I think that simple repetitive songs are underappreciated.

Originally Posted by Hui

So now we have a run of nine. ^_^ I was going to put up the spliced-together video - it comes to 42 minutes! - but, like, you've already sketched most of Dream; at this point I might as well wait and do the whole of Act I!

42 minutes! Yikes! That is quite a bit longer than tbe previous performances. O.o V1 is just over an hour in total. V2 is about 1.5h, so 42 minutes would be just around the right timing if it was the whole of Act 1. So the first half would actually be more like an hour. Geez. How did we get it so long? It cannot be the intros, because as long as I make them, they are actually still shorter than the real performances. Do we just tend to slow the songs down more? Probably. Actually, yeah. We do tend to sing slower on average, I think. But - 42 minutes. Whoa.

Originally Posted by Hui

On which note: while I would love to do a duet with Celebestel, there's no evidence that the "Heart Duet" has ever existed; it's probably sensible just to make it a solo at this point. If they ever sing it as a duet we can revisit.

I feel like I am of two minds about this. On one hand, as I told you before, I anticipate this will be a challenging piece musically, and it would probably be easier to write for solo than for a duet. However, I would also love to see you guys duet, and the lack of previous attempts is not in my mind an absolute contraindication for attempts on our side. Maybe we can start by aiming at the simpler goal of solo, and see if it works as a duet afterwards? Anyway, as a friend of mine says, let's burn that bridge when we get to it.