Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt

 In the past few years we have held opera evenings with a few friends - French and English - at home.  We are really lucky to have access to beautiful recordings of performances from Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, La Scala and elsewhere.

I've already enthused over Mozart, but some of Handel's operas excite us nearly as much.  We have just rewatched the Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare with Sarah Connolly in one of the ultimate trouser roles as The Man Himself and the stunning Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra.  How lucky Glyndebourne has been that she has become a family fixture.

In fact, it is a cast full of outstanding singers, most of them high voices - two excellent countertenors , Patricia Bardon in a surprising 'true alto'  role (how rare) as Cornelia and Angelika Kirschlager in another trouser role as her son Sesto.  We are so lucky to have such beautiful recordings to watch  again and again, and Glyndebourne excels itself in promoting period instgrument  performances of such qulity.  The aria duet which Caesar sings with solo horn obbligato Va tacito e nascosto is a marvel in these days of virtuoso natural horn playing, with Sarah Connolly striding the stage in suitably imperial fashion.

The countertenors, Rachid ben Aslam and and Christopher Maltman, are wonderful and the rare male voice in a conventional male register, Christopher Maltman, is suitably evil though converted to the side of goodness before the end of the opera.  

Musical life here, BBC Radio 3, Opera and Elizabeth Jacquet de a Guerre

 As you will have gathered, Mary is still active in playing the cello - normally one day a week mostly playing in groups based around the music school in Vauvert, about 15 km east of Lunel, plus of course a lot of practice.  The neew term has just started, and M has kept up her practice when hot weather allowed - easier now the temperatures have dropped to nearer English summer levels.  My musical life in mostly listening now, though I would like to play the recorder again when distractions allow.

We often listen to at the BBC broadcast, Composer of the Week and this summer we had a treat listening to a series of programmes about Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.  The last of the 5 programmes is here as I write.  Others of our friends will not be surprised, but for us the quality of this music and of the woman composer favourite in the court of Louis XIV was a real eye-opener to us.  So many surprises - a woman in a man's world, writing music of real appeal, and the only disappointment is that - perhaps this is where the expected undervaluing of women musicians applies - so little of her output survived.  I was also much impressed by the thoughtful presentation of the week's programmes by Kate Molleson, one of a number of women presenters on Radio 3 whose style and voice have sometimes grated with us.  Anyway, I should not carp - since there are noises off about cutting BBC music broadcasts to Europe we must be thankful for all we get.

We have a small  group of friends who get together here at home every month or two to watch an opera - so far, Mozart, Handel, and Britten have figured.  We are incredibly lucky to have access to wonderful productions from Glyndebourne, Covent Gerden, La Scala and more.  We  try to mimic the Glyndebourne format with two halves of opera and a meal in the middle (though not with the classy garden setting).  Our last evening was Britten's Peter Grimes, completely  new to us and very powerful.  Then we were back with Handel, Rinaldo from Glyndebourne.   I am constantly on the search for good sound quality, and pondering investing in new speakers, especially to play our still growing collection of CDs! 

The Proms have been a regular background on Radio 3 this summer as always.  Our taste for chamber and bacroque music is better served elsewhere - the Proms are built around larger orchestral works, but by all accounts the campaign to attract new listeners to Radio 3 is succeeding so we need to learn to put up with the sometimes trying self-promotion of some of the presenters to try and ensure that the channel remains up and running.

Change of scene

This is a very occasional music blog.  And I'm writing now to signal the end of an era.  That is, I have decided to stop singing solo or in choirs (the bathroom is another matter!) though music remains a  very important part of my life - of our lives, since (as often) I am writing a blog while Mary practises the cello a few metres away.  My experiences as an amateur musician have shaped by life, and I often wish my career choices has centrered round music ratther than chemistry.

I started singing at primary school, and at the age of 10 I was successful in a local festival, singing soprano solo.  I still have the certificates from those early days,  My singing career in my teens was good - I still remember the words of the Quaker James Naylor set to music in one of 4 motets by Edmund Rubbra which I sang (one of 4 boy soloists) with the school choir in Saffron Walden church in the late 1950s, and the thrill of singing (age 14 - bass by that time!) with the combined choirs of 3 Quaker schools in the Verdi Requiem a few years later.  I expect I am not the only boy soprano who was teased for preferring singing to sport, but my early musical experiences continued after school with the exceptional encouragement of Philip Ledger, the first Director of Music at the University of East Anglia.  Even before he arrived we had staged Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, but he had bigger things in view and our choir sang Bach's St John Passion in Norwich Cathedral with Peter Pears as the evangelist in 1966.  

I had had singing lessons with teachers including James Gaddarn intermittently from the mid 1960s onwards, but I am the first to admit I never practised enough or developed a solid technique as a singer.  But it was, with enjoyment in the mid-1960s that I started to sing lieder with various accompanists.  My enduring love of Schubert began under the guidance of Joan Robinson, a brilliant pianist sadly no longer alive.  She introduced me to over 100 songs which we performed (shared with 2 women singers, Lisa Westerhout and Irmtraud Schorbach) at a succession of recitals and  residential  song weekends over several years.  As time went on Mary became a regular accompanist and made a fine job of accompanying the Schubert cycles (Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang) in Wirksworth and elsewhere.  She still plays the piano well though less frequently now, having decided to spend more time on the cello.  More recently, in France, I encountered our friend Kamala Calderoni who became for a while my singing teacher and then conductor of the Bach choir BaBach which is happily still going strong.

At UEA we performed Britten's St Nicholas in Norwich before Phlip Ledger's arrival, and that music has stayed with me - in the 1990s Mary was conducting our community choir when I sang the difficult solo role in Wirksworth - a challenge I still remember with some pride.   Here in France Mary and I have shared many summer residential events in the Ain département run by the multi-talented Stéphane Fauth.  Originally these trips were for Mary as a part of chamber music ensembles, but quickly I was included to sing with the group of the moment, Stéphane making splendid arrangements for chamber group and tenor of things as varied as Vaughan Williams' Songs of travel and songs by Stephen Foster, whom I'd not heard of till then but which have also stayed in in my memory.

Viv singing at my 60th birthday party

One of my early (age 20+) experiences was of playing recorders at Ruth and Heinz Liebrecht's home in the converted chapel they lived in in Holly Mount.  That  led to more recorder playing including summer sourses in the course of  which I met Mary!  The experience of visiting Hollly Mount included frequent glimpses of the early music group Musica Reservata, whose influence has remained with me ever since.  I was part of the Caneterbury Waits through which we acquired assorted renaissance instruments - a consort of crumhorns, many more recorders, an early hurdy-gurdy,called a sinfonye, even a sackbut (early trombone) for a while.  The recorders have stayed with me, all the other instruments have passed on to people who use them better than I would now.  We are proud to been involved in our friend Vivien Ellis's encounter with early music, where she blended her own talents in mid-European folk singing with  the medieval style we first heard from Jantina Noorman in Musica Reservata.  I'm not sure now shat I'll do with the recorders, but they need playing to keep their voices     and I quite fancy resumiing some playing.

In France we have enjoyed a variety of good musical experiences arising out of the Association des Musiciens Amateurs (AMA) which holds regular 'play-ins' (instruments and  singers) much like the Society of Recorder Players events we used to go  to in England.  Through this we met Charles Whitfield and Pierre Bonniffet still living not far from us, in the Cevennes.  The baroque trio sonata group we had together for many years gave Mary and me great pleasure and it is sad that for various reasons we coud not continue for longer.  We discovered a lot of excellent music together, including the works of Corelli.

With Pierre, Charles and Mary in our baroque trio sonata group

However, things had to move on and I have become a listener rather than a performer.  Despite too  little practice, I enjoyed my singing life enormously as long as my reasonable ability to sight sing made up for the lack of hard work in old age.  I stopped in the end because I found myself floundering in some Bach - it was a shock to lose my place in a polychoral piece, and I realised my brain had slowed.  For so many years I had often been the  'only tenor' in various choirs, and it was time to pass on the responsibility while there were several around me.  It was a great pleasure to go this last weekend (for the first time in ages) to a BaBach concert, to hear Bach well sung and played and to re-meet many old friends in the choir.  

I did try the mandolin for a while, but found my brain and hands could not manage two things at once.  A shame - it is a lovely instrument - thanks to Annie for lending it to me

All our sons have music in their blood, but Jeff has taken his interest in drums even further, running very mushc sought-after drum-tuning workshops aross the world.