(Bloomberg) -- At Bloomberg Pursuits, we love to travel. And we always want to make sure we’re doing it right. So we’re talking to globe-trotters in all of our luxury fields—food, wine, sports, cars, culture and real estate—to learn about their high-end hacks, tips and off-the-wall experiences. These are the Distinguished Travel Hackers.
The French opera singer Benjamin Bernheim has been busy. Shortly after performing at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, the tenor, who’s based in Zurich, released an album with Deutsche Grammophon titled Douce France. Now audiences can see him starring in the titular role in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera in New York through Oct. 18, after which he’ll be back on the road again. The more successful he becomes, Bernheim says, the more he travels. This summer “I was in Salzburg, and before that I was in Milan,” he explains, “but during that period I might have to go to Paris for a meeting.” Sometimes he might only be on a plane once or twice a month; other times it might be “eight or nine times,” he says.
But whereas other business travelers merely need to function in conference rooms and hotel lobbies, Bernheim needs to keep himself fit enough to perform for 2,000-person audiences night after night. That, he says, “is the most technical aspect of what it is to be an opera singer today.” Here are his travel tips.
Bring flexible workout equipmentI work out every day, but I never really know a few months in advance if I’m going to be in New York renting an apartment with a gym, or if I’m going to be in an apartment where there is no gym at all. I was in Salzburg for nearly two months—it’s not that there was no gym in the city, it’s just that I didn’t have time to go to one. There were too many rehearsals, so taking the car, going to the gym, then coming back was wasting so much of my time that I decided to begin to jump rope. Now I take a jump rope everywhere. I also have a TRX, which is a great thing that you can just fix to a door, and then you can work out with your body weight. You can do resistance exercises and many other things.
One small appliance can make a big differenceI bought a humidifier from Vicks in New York two years ago, and now I do not travel without it. It’s been a very good travel companion to have for my performances. Sometimes there is a lot of pollution in one city, or sometimes the pollen in a place can be extremely aggressive. Especially for artists and opera singers that have long careers, it can take a lifetime to know yourself and to know what you need. Little things like the humidifier are what I’ve learned to use over time. It’s helpful when dealing with the dry airplane air, changes of environment and jet lag. I always use it before a performance to help keep my vocal cords hydrated.
There’s a simple way to recover from work travel (while you’re traveling for work)A singer can do 30 to 60 performances a year. But when you have a performance, it means you have a general rehearsal that doesn’t count as a performance. So you can actually double it. Years ago, singers that had the career that I have now would tell me: Be careful, because if you say yes to everything you are going to burn yourself out. And now I’m in the place where I see what they meant. I was able to recover very fast when I was in my 20s. Now that I’m getting closer to being 40, recovering is extremely important. To relax, I go for walks with absolutely no direction, no meetings, no nothing, whether it’s in Paris, in New York, in Vienna. That way I can also surprise myself with seeing a gallery, getting a coffee, anything. But I have to force myself to do it.
It’s better to accommodate jet lag than try to avoid itI don’t beat jet lag; jet lag beats me. I have to survive it. I’m not a good sleeper, and I don’t sleep on planes. So I have to be very patient with myself. It’s all about arriving maybe a few days earlier than necessary to really calibrate my sleep and calibrate my rest.
Business class isn’t that importantBecause I’m singing at the Met and in other major opera houses, it maybe would surprise people that I don’t often fly business class. It’s very simple and it’s not about really saving money, it’s just about the practicality of it: All I care about is finding the right airlines and flights that allow me to arrive not too early and not too late, and all of those low-cost airlines in Europe are very practical, like EasyJet and Ryanair—a lot of the time within Europe you don’t have a choice.
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