Alessandro by Handel meets The Countess from Figaro

Alexander the Great - in perfect health!

Another fantastic day today - the sun has been glorious and with just a slight breeze, for me, it is truly perfect weather. The heat got me thinking about many years ago when I played the Countess in my first Marriage of Figaro as part of the Chichester Festival.

Festivals are rather like exam time, they always happen in the hottest, most uncomfortable time of the year ! Indeed, when it seems that the rest of the world is enjoying life or bathing in a blue sea, and generally having a lovely time, we performers are roasting in costumes as heavy as Pavarotti after a pasta fest, and stuck under lighting sets which feel like a particularly hot day in the Sahara desert at noon!

The weather was boiling and wearing the heavy costumes of 18th Century Europe was increasingly unbearable. The Countess does not appear until Act 2, so I was able to stave off the moment when I had to don the tights, cotton bodice with loose petticoat, the tied on large white underskirt and finally the dress made of heavy green and gold soft furnishing material. Added to that a decolletage scarf for the first act and buttoned boots...................I must have weighed 15lbs more with all the layers.


The Dress on top


The Layers underneath

Once on the stage the lights add to the tropical temperature and the sweat begins to roll gently down the arms and finally off the tips of the fingers into neat pools on the stage ! After each exit I made my way to the dressing room where a dresser was handy to unlace the layers one by one, open the back of the dress and towel me dry......................ugh! I lie not ! It was like walking out of the shower each time I finished a scene, or aria. The combined sweat count on the stage during the great 20 minute finale of Act 2 was enough to fell a charging elephant !

Another such occasion was during a baroque opera called Alessandro by Handel. I was playing the title role and had to wear the inevitable Ancient Greek army outfit. I had the toga type dress, the gold helmet, sword, leather leg laces and sandals. To top this off the company had a bespoke breastplate made for me which did not appear until the dress rehearsal.

It was, once again late July and very very hot. At the 'dress' I was uniformed up and we set out on the 3 hour journey of a largely uncut Handel opera. All was fine for the first Act, and half of the second Act, but I then began to feel a little dizzy and a touch nauseous, which grew at an alarming rate until I gently fainted and slumped to the floor quietly and with all the dignity of a magnificent Greek general!

The performance stopped abruptly and someone ( I know not who!) rushed on the stage, undid all my layers and I came too, in a relatively short time. Rather embarrassed I rose to my feet feeling quite fine, and we began once more, all assuming that the heat and lights had caused my little interruption.

I was fine for another 10 minutes and then the whole procedure began again - this time I recognised the symptoms and informed the cast and producer I could not carry on. There was much consternation now, and much advice from the other singers, and a great deal of worry on the part of the director/conductor/stage manager etc. Where would they find another Alessandro at 12 hours notice, as clearly I was coming down with something akin to yellow fever!

Investigations were made, questions asked, a thorough medical given, which came back a cracking 100% fit.....what could it be?!

Finally the costume department came up with the answer. With razor sharp Miss Marple investigation they found out that the breastplate, so lovingly made to measure for me, was constructed of a type of moulded fibre glass. It turned out that as I sang and my body heat rose, the said breastplate heated up and gave off chemical fumes which caused my fainting fits !

In great haste a lining was added to the front section which kept the fumes more under control! One wonders that nobody thought to find out if the substance was fit for 'human consumption' so to speak ? A prop maker cheerfully, and with smiley confidence, told me that 'so long as I took it off when I was not singing I would probably be fine' !!!!

Great days! What we suffer for art !

Breathe.............Breathe...................Breathe..............

The running/swimming/jumping season is back with us, and as I type I am watching the Swimming World Championships. As a teenager I swam 50 yards front crawl for my county, so swimming has always been very close to my heart. Sadly by the time I was 16 it was decision time, and I had to make a choice between singing and swimming - actually there was no real choice, singing was always the gold medal winner in my head, but giving up so much swimming was hard.

People say to me that being a swimmer must have helped my 'breathing' for competitive swimming, but apart from the general fitness element, the breathing technique for singing is much harder, much more disciplined and yet much more relaxed.


Low and Slow for singing !

At the time I gave up all swimming competitions it was becoming increasingly obvious that the muscle work involved in front crawl was much to 'tough' for singing.

We need strong abdominal muscles to breath low and slow for voice technique, but above all we need flexibility, and not a hard 'six pack' - actually I have never in my life been any closer than a metaphorical 3,248 miles from a 'six pack', so no worries there then !

Looking at the screen I can see very well developed torsos, much muscle and enormous strength. Oh that a few male singers had such a perfect physique - but maybe these Adonis swimmers are tone deaf !

Well, it's only fair !

'We're Soldiers of the Queen' best chorus in Patience

As soon as I begin to think about the next show my musical memory starts to float to the surface and I gradually remember the melodies of the choruses and solos. They drift into the old grey matter a few bars at a time until the filing cabinet which is 'that' particular show opens it's drawer like a music box.

Today I played through some of the main themes of next year's Gilbert and Sullivan which will be Patience. A very funny and rather unusual show based around the Aesthetic movement of the late Victorian era, with Oscar Wilde as it's figurehead.

The ladies chorus are a melange of lovesick maidens ! All shamming a lifestyle of self inflicted misery and floating diaphanous garments............until they see the light and miraculously metamorphose into Victorian 'girls about town' !


Some lovely highlights from the Houston G&S Company !

The men's chorus are Dragoon Guards resplendent in red and gold and about as intelligent as a troop of half baked goldfish - but perhaps that is somewhat derogatory to the said 'goldfish' ! They decide, in their wisdom that if they are to win the ladies they too must all become effete poets who dance delicate little dances and quote chunks of drivelish poetry, not to mention wearing a variety of pink and purple cravats with hero shirts !

Our Patience will be just perfect, she is the pint sized L, dancer and singer, and who will also choreograph. She has a great aria in the beginning whereby she tries in vain to understand why all these eminently stupid lovesick maidens seem to spend most of the day gently wiping tears from their eyes, in an effort to please the cheeky little Oscar Wilde figure - Reginald Bunthorne.

Our chorus director and tenor C will play the said Reginald, and as he can move his feet rather well, and L will be his Patience, I am hoping for some truly splendiferous foot stomping !

I love the men's opening martial chorus, so jolly and so rhythmical, with marvelously spoof 'army' lyrics!

In my early days of school teaching in a girls boarding school, one year we produced Patience and I have a wonderfully warm memory of that chorus. The line of female dragoon gaurds entered by marching around the hall and the audience. At the top of the line were 6th formers and then the order went down in height to the smallest first formers. At that time in that school we had a girl who was suffered from dwarfism, and she was the last in the snake of soldiers, tiny and totally determined. The roar which went up in the audience every performance brought tears to my eyes as I watched her march for all she was worth, head held as high as the clouds.

Those pictures stay for a lifetime.

Roll on July 2012.......................



Crisp and vigorous singing here!

Ave Maria + Bach + Gounod + Youth = Gorgeous

The words


The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria is certainly the most well known of all sacred 'pot boilers' - now there has to be a reason why it withstands time and all the ravages of bad singing, average singing, lovely singing and truly brilliant singing, and my theory is that the underlying Bach Prelude which acts as the accompaniment to a melody composed by Gounod is like the most steadfast rock upon which nothing can falter.



The Master Bach

The keys it moves through and the wonderfully satisfying resolutions have left listeners through the ages with a sense of complete satisfaction and the feeling of 'coming home'.



The arranger Gounod

Last night my young 14 year old soprano R performed it for my Austrian guests, and once more it's magic wove a ribbon of musical delight around the room. The Latin text of the Ave Maria is timeless and cherished by all, Catholics and Protestants alike, and the Bach piano accompaniment is so perfect that the singer can simply ride over the top of it like a surfer on a large and unstoppable wave.

Sometimes we just forget how beautiful these popular pieces are, and how we must treat them with the same respect as supposedly more intellectual music. After all, music is just music, and a shining young voice singing this lovely melody is a delight. At the RAM prize in May, as some of you may recall, I heard a very young tenor sing the self same aria, full of heart and like young R, full of joy as well as all the endearing imperfections which make it so vulnerable and fragile.



The Performer (in the middle, the others are my grandchildren!)

My friends were both delighted and astonished that such a sound came from such a small body - ah well, you see, it is all in the production not the pounds and ounces !

Well done young R, you did me proud.

The Dream of Gerontius and past dreams and memories

The next leg of the journey.......................


I have some very old friends from Austria staying with me for the next week, at the moment, and we have spent so much time reminiscing, their daughter M who also came for a few days must be bored rigid with stories of when we girls were 13 and spent summers together in glorious North Yorkshire, and in an around the Vienna Woods!

We became known to each other because my father joined the Anglo Austrian Society shortly after the end of WW11, when both countries were trying to encourage friendly relations between the two countries. My father spent a good deal of the end of the war as a Signals 'man' in Graz, Austria and grew to love the people and the country.

So S and I were thrown together by parents with similar beliefs and who had strong feelings of the need for reconciliation, and we have been close ever since, and been through the various stages of life together.



S was the person who quietly and efficiently arranged for concert tours in Vienna for my Convent School Ensemble over 25 years ago, and for the two enjoyable tours made to Vienna by Paradise's own Inner Sound in 2006 and 2008.

We visited the beautiful village of Plockton today. When S and M were last here in 2002 we had a few short hours on the mainland and at Plockton, so she was so keen to return and show her husband this gem of a location. Well, we did the Plockton Shores Restaurant for a quick lunch, and had the inevitable and unspeakably divine Cullen Skink soup, over which I have verbally drooled in past posts so will leave it at that. Suffice to say - they loved it !

We met my past pupil and now possessor of a First Class Degree, F, as she lives next door to the restaurant.

I was so glad she was there, as on the off chance of a meeting I had taken over a gift for her.

It is tricky to find a suitable present on such an occasion, but having thought about it, I knew I had the perfect thing. As a mezzo in my professional days I sang much Elgar, my absolute favourite work being The Dream of Gerontius, a sacred piece telling the story of a soul travelling to meet his Lord after death. Sounds morbid - but utterly glorious !

For my 21st birthday I was bought a score of this work by some close family friends. They had it leather bound and my name imprinted in gold on the front. I used it many times, so it was already well loved, then I lent it to another of the finest voices I have ever taught, a dark and velvety mezzo, for her to use. She was at the time having lessons with Dame Janet Baker (lucky girl!) and so to my markings on the score were added many from Dame Janet. That young lady returned the score to me when her voice dropped so far that the Angel was no longer an option !

There is always a reason for life's happenings, and I felt in my heart that this score was now bound, for the last time to become the property of F. She will make a wonderful Angel, and I had no hesitation in passing it on to the next part of it's journey.

The score needed to be used once more for the purpose for which it was designed.

F needs to make it 'sing' again. One day I will travel to a performance of The Dream... and see the green leather and F join together to make wonderful music, just as I watched the green leather and E in the magnificent surrounds of Chichester Cathedral 10 years ago.

The 'book' deserves F, and she deserves the 'book', and it made me a happy woman to put it once again, into the hands of the 3rd generation.

Sing it F, and think of where it has been, and rejoice in the history. Elgar wrote a postscript at the end of the original copy which says 'This is the best of me'. It had the best of me, and the best of E, now it is yours, I know you will make it the best of you.



Legendary British mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker (b. 1933) sings 'The Angel's Farewell' from Edward Elgar's 'The Dream of Gerontius' (with text by Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman). SEE BELOW FOR LYRICS.

An anecdote involving this particular piece, about the strong bond between conductor Sir John Barbirolli and Dame Janet Baker:

'[...] Dame Janet was not immune to this [ i.e., the painful areas of human experience - mariandelochs ]; when Barbirolli died in 1971 he was a conductor so strongly associated with her in the first part of her career - there was a memorial service at Manchester Cathedral, at which the Angels Farewell from Gerontius was featured. The Hallé played the introduction, Dame Janet sang a couple of phrases, and then the emotion overcame her. She was unable to continue, and sat down while the orchestra played on to the end. She was a truly great artist, who gave everything she had to her public

Spring Waters, Rachmaninov and the young nun...

The child who played with the nun.



At the same piano ?





Is Sr Francis or young Olga one of these aristocratic girls - I like to think so.....

Going back to Sr Francis at the Convent school in Littlehampton...............this remarkable lady, who grew up in the last Csar's court between 1900 and 1917 in St Petersburg Russia also had a fantastical story to tell about Rachmaninov. My readers need to understand that nuns are not always very forthcoming about their pre religious life, and, I imagine, older sisters even less so. Thus it took some prodding on my part over the 7 years I taught there to release some of her childhood tales.

Her family were very friendly with the Rachmaninovs, and she seemed to spend quite a bit of time playing in the nursery with his daughters Tatiana and Irina. She had many memories of being brought down from the nursery with the Rachmaninov girls and sitting under the grand piano listening to the first performances by the great man, of his latest compositions for the piano. She told me that 'as a small girl, I thought it was a madman playing the piano, and I had to cover my ears'!

I still marvel at the thought that she, who was part of his life, was part of mine.

I sang a number of Rachmaninov songs in my career, notably Spring Waters and To the Children, both of which I loved. The sadness is that I can never, up here in Paradise, ever give them to my pupils, as in a zillion years, and a trillion piano lessons, I would never be able to play the accompaniments !

We were so blessed at the RAM with wondrous house accompanists who could play gushing and rushing Rachmaninov semiquaver piano parts, and bake bread at the same time! A small overstatement, but not a 100 miles from the truth!

Therefore my singers miss those rapturous and passionate songs which send a thrill racing up and down the spine.

Sorry guys! OK I'm a failure.....................however, in reading about his life I note that he and his family escaped Russia at the same time as Sr Francis and her mother and brother, and on my birthday!! I shall always remember that from now on.

Wikipedia

...The 1917 Russian Revolution meant the end of Russia as the composer had known it. With this change followed the loss of his estate, his way of life, and his livelihood. On 22 December 1917, he left St. Petersburg for Helsinki with his wife and two daughters on an open sled, having only a few notebooks with sketches of his own compositions and two orchestral scores, his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel. He spent a year giving concerts in Scandinavia while also laboring to widen his concert repertoire. Near the end of 1918, he received three offers of lucrative American contracts. Although he declined all three, he decided the United States might offer a solution to his financial concerns. He departed Kristiania (Oslo) for New York on 1 November 1918. Once there, Rachmaninoff quickly chose an agent, Charles Ellis, and accepted the gift of a piano from Steinway before playing 40 concerts in a four-month period. At the end of the 1919–20 season, he also signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1921, the Rachmaninoffs bought a house in the United States, where they consciously recreated the atmosphere of Ivanovka, entertaining Russian guests, employing Russian servants, and observing Russian customs.

'An Sylvia' and other friends

Sylvia, the character in Two Gentlemen of Verona, about whom the two men are 'rapturising' !


I had such a good time at Saltburn Festival at the weekend. It is such a friendly and flexible festival - not afraid to 'shift things around' if needs be, and so the atmosphere for the entrants is relaxed, and not at all intimidating. Just the way I a) like it, and b) think it should be !

There were some big classes especially in the opera and oratorio, which makes it all the more worthwhile. I was adjudicating the Adult Singing, and dear M, my old pupil from Durham, brought 5 or 6 of her youngsters, so including the stalwarts who enter every year, the classes were of a high standard.

I heard a most interesting lady for whom it was a first time, and she sang some very interesting Scarlatti which was quite new to me. I say interesting, because, in one way it shows just how well we perform when we are 'at home' with the music. She began her day with some tricksy Bach, and to be honest I did not feel as though I had heard her voice at all ! As the difficulty level ebbed and flowed so did her sound, so it was like listening to half the aria, with none of the runs ! Thus I did not really think that she was very advanced, or had much experience or technique - then............she sang her Scarlatti operatic aria and was like a singer possessed ! She danced around the runs with ease, and soared up to a tremendous top A in the final cadenza, and I was blown away. During my adjudication I asked her what she felt about the music, and she replied 'I adore it!' - So there you have it.

As amateurs, when our income does not depend upon it, sing what you love!

Sing What You Love !

There was a young lady of around 18 with a deep alto, and a broad Tyneside accent ! When she opened her mouth to sing it was like listening to lava slowly rolling down a mountainside - hot and dense, but not dangerous! Another young lady also of around 18 sang with such intensity, and in such an emotional way, her An Sylvia, which was much slower than I would ordinarily like, made me want to bathe in the gentle shower of sound. I was unable to write a great deal - always the best sign !

I spent a day with my friends J&J at their glorious North Yorkshire home, and relaxed before the journey home.



The path in Saltburn Woods along which my parents and a 6 year old embryonic singing teacher, walked on sunny saturdays carrying a picnic......egg sandwiches, homemade cake, red apples.....


It was the best kind of adjudicating, and thus not nearly so exhausting. A sheer joy to be paid for what was so enjoyable!


The church where the Festival is held.


Am I lucky or what ?!


It could be me circa 1958..............

'Jesus bid us Shine' and a scrumptious roast dinner...

...Like a little Candle, burning in the night.....


It has been awhile since I have had time to blog - but finally I am back at home and on holiday for the next 4 weeks! How blissful is that!

In September we are giving a concert of Sacred Music, and so I have been looking for quite along time for some old Sunday School hymns for the little ones to sing. I trawled my music library, and then decided that I needed to look on the internet. The marvel that is 'Google' turned up both of the hymns I remembered for school and church.

I found the delightful 'Jesus bids us Shine', with the gorgeous line......you in your small corner, and I in mine......Is that just what we bloggers are doing? I write in my kitchen in Paradise, and some of you read from all the corners of the earth. That has got to be something mighty positive, and so wonderful for forging friendships and harmony throughout all 'small corners' which make up the big wide world !

Jesus bids us shine with a clear, pure light,
Like a little candle burning in the night;
In this world of darkness, we must shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.

Jesus bids us shine, first of all for Him;
Well He sees and knows it if our light is dim;
He looks down from heaven, sees us shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.

Jesus bids us shine, then, for all around,
Many kinds of darkness in this world abound:
Sin, and want, and sorrow—we must shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.



I also found 'Jesus Loves me this I know'......and although I really need the break, I am eagerly looking forward to teaching the said songs, and putting the 4 or 5 small people together and bringing back some rosy memories of Infant School, Methodist Sunday School, and listening to the wireless after a lovely roast dinner with my Mum's perfect Yorkshire Puddings.



Nostalgia reigns supreme this evening!

We have a something more to celebrate ! I had a call from FM, my very first Paradise pupil, a wonderfully rich mezzo soprano, whom I flew down to hear at the Wigmore Hall a couple of months ago. She was sitting on the steps of the Albert Hall opening her degree results. 4 years ago, she sat on the very same steps and called me with the fantastic news that she had been offered an unconditional place at the Royal College of Music. Well today, her voice held the same amount of excitement and quiver as she told me that she has gained a First Class Degree.

A good day indeed. Bursting with pride if you don't mind................