Perception, Truth, & Returning Joy
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A February 2026 Newsletter
The turn of the year usually feels like a symbolic gesture, one in which we make promises to ourselves that we won't keep, resolving to be better, to be different, to make change. Rather than set myself up for disappointment, over the years I've resolved to avoid making resolutions and trained myself to treat the crossing of the annual threshold as simply another day—focusing on simply writing the correct year in my morning pages and trying to recover from whatever holiday madness has ensued. With a birthday on January 3rd and an anniversary to celebrate with my partner, Noah, a few days later, sometimes it's difficult to get the party bus to stop rolling so that I can shut down for just enough time before the rigmarole grinds into gear yet again.
This year has felt different, however. As we passed the first year-threshold without my parents, it feels as though a page has turned within me, opening to some sort of a new chapter. Perhaps it's simply a wave of grief passing, but for the first time in many years, things feel slightly clearer. I feel shifts happening within that are helping me reconnect to a sense of renewed energy, especially around music, writing, and the other creative projects I've been working on. Music, especially, feels slightly different. Rather than a refuge and a rock in the midst of a storm, it's begun to feel like a genuine source of joy again. The reconnection to that joy is all the more rich and deep with the layers of respite and strength it has lent me over the past few years, but it's nice for it to also feel fun in new ways.
performing with oboist, Philippe Tondre, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
This past month took me to Raleigh and Philadelphia for concerts that could not be more varied in terms of repertoire. My first concerts of the year were performances of Carmina Burana in Raleigh with the North Carolina Symphony. The piece was an ideal way to return to singing after the holiday break, because its difficulty and challenges require you to be in fighting vocal shape, while not being too extensive in terms of the amount of singing required. One has to practice and warm up twenty times more than one performs in the piece in order to execute the extreme high-wire act Orff composed for the tenor. Not only that, but to begin the year with a piece that meditates on the cycle of life and fortune could not be more fitting.
Following the Carmina performances in North Carolina, I returned to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society for vocal chamber works by Louise Talma and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Both pieces at first glance are incredibly esoteric works: Talma's a setting of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and Vaughan Williams' a cycle of William Blake settings, carefully chosen from his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Learning and performing these works against the backdrop of the varied, politicized accounts of these horrific incidents juxtaposed with the all-too-available video footage, they could not have felt more relevant. Especially Talma's musical treatment of Stevens' poem, which is about the ways perspectives attempt to shape the truth…and how no matter what all of those perspectives may argue, reality is what reality is, and the nature of truth is ultimately immutable. And yet: our perceptions of that truth matter.
San Francisco City Hall this past Friday night
Contemplating the seemingly non-stop supply of horrifying and tragic news, I am looking forward to the Carnegie Hall Well-Being concert program I am performing later this month at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Drawn from the BACH 52 project, the program is a collection of arias by J. S. Bach and Dietrich Buxtehude. Immersing myself in that repertoire feels like a prayer for the world, and for the soul of humanity.
Otherwise this month, I am looking forward to some precious time at home in San Francisco, enjoying the time to immerse myself in some joyful practice, coaching the Adler Fellows at the San Francisco Opera as they prepare for their upcoming recital, as well as soaking up as much of the temperate weather as possible before venturing back into the winter of the East.
As always, I hope to see you at some point: either online or in person.
In the meantime, wishing you a good February ahead. I hope you can savor every moment of this, the shortest month.