Honours List

Honours List - Column 8: June 23 1993 

I am still simmering! It’s over a week now since the Honours List was published, and yet again my name did not appear on it!!

I realise Her Majesty had an ‘orrible year, because she kept telling us so, but is that any reason to continually overlook one of her loyal subjects? What do I have to do to gain Her acknowledgement?

I have worked for the State (being in insurance for five years) and allowed my brain to be on tap at the City Council. I delivered Her Royal Mail at two different times in my career. Like Her forebear Henry the Eighth, I’m a minor composer, writing my first song worth remembering when I was only a teenager.

I have written countless songs since then, some of which have been performed.

While accompanying four opera singers, I played the piano for thousands of schoolchildren around New Zealand, even continuing to play after the lid of the grand piano at Tokomairiro High School fell on my thumb – mid-aria.

I have accompany a pre-Dame Kiri. She condescendingly told me (and I put it down to her youth) that everyone makes mistakes sometimes. (I assume she meant in the way I played the music, rather than in my choice of singer.)

I have listened to more music than all the 19^th century composers wrote in total, much of it with my full attention. It has been music that ran the gamut from the extremely incomprehensible (like that by John Cage, who was opaque in everything he did) to the totally sublime.

I have sold goods door to door, and collected money door to door, so you could easily count me as being a community worker.

I wrote my first play before I was out of my teens, and two later ones which I destroyed, since, like Brahms, I didn’t want my juvenalia undermining the fruit of my later genius (which is still to bud).

I have submitted over 300 articles to various publishers not only in this country, but in the United Kingdom (of Her Majesty) and the United States. Two-thirds of them have been published. (And not all in this column, either.)

You’d think in the midst of Her Majestic year she would have noticed one of those, surely? Furthermore, I have read more books than are sold at the Regent Book sale each year, many of them from cover to cover.

Like Paul’s adopted son, Timothy, I have been a Christian since my youth up. I have worked twice for my church in paid capacities, quite apart from the countless hours I’ve spent shifting other member’s furniture from one house to another, and attending pot luck meals, and listening to those who are going through difficult patches.

I have watched thousands of movies, and untold hours of television (which is why I’ve watched thousands of movies). That any person should endure so much and still be ignored each year is beyond my comprehension.

I have enjoyed book-keeping, endured economics, delight in English, and been bewildered by maths – at times. I have studied Trachtenberg’s system of multiplication, the one he conceived in prison without any paper. I can read some Italian, German and Modern Cool.

I live in a house with four teenagers, amongst others. When I remind them that I used to carry each one in the crook of my arm they give that teenage ‘look.’

With all these credentials (and many more that I can’t fit in due to space restrictions), I ask you: Why wasn’t my name in the Honours List this year?

Distorting the facts

Back in 2015 I wrote about the play, Souvenir, which focused on the performances and life of Florence Foster Jenkins. In 2016, Meryl Streep starred in a movie about the same person, which we saw around the time it came out, and then watched again on Netflix last night.

I remember feeling somewhat disappointed in the movie, which also stars Hugh Grant as her husband, and Simon Helberg as Cosmé McMoon, the pianist who accompanied her in her later years. 

We discover that her husband, adoring of her, and deeply in love with her, also had an apartment (paid for by Jenkins) where he kept his 'girlfriend.' In fact, he and Jenkins were never officially married: Jenkins may not have been divorced from her first husband, the one who gave her syphilis. 

A number of things in the movie are based on fact, but equally there are curious distortions. Hugh Grant's character, St Clair Bayfield, is seen as a failed and fairly amateur actor. In fact, he had a long career in the theatre, and was plainly able to act much better than is shown in the movie. 

It's hinted fairly strongly in the movie that McMoon is gay, though this may not have been the case. Helberg camps the character up with constant simpers, quirky looks, and a generally effeminate air. I much preferred the down-to-earth version of Cosmé that appeared in the theatre production. 

Meryl Streep, as always, is brilliant, performing the awful singing with ease (presuming it is her voice, as Helberg seems to indicate in an interview), and she creates a character who is seemingly unaware of her awfulness while being wonderfully generous to those around her - and plainly needing all the love that she can get. 

In the last week we also watched The Imitation Game, supposedly a story about Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, and supposedly based on true events. Yes, there are a few true things scattered about, some actual persons portrayed, but for the most part this is a script based on the idea that it's good to wrap propaganda up in dramatic form, using fine actors to play the main parts and then forget about whether it actually connects with substantiated history. 

Thus Turing's difference (both his homosexuality and his genius) is made a basis for a theme about not bullying people who are different (though Turing is portrayed as even more of an arrogant bully in some scenes, as a man with no regard for the concerns of others). The feminist angle comes in by warping the history of a highly skilled person, Joan Clarke, proving, for the feminists, that women can be just as clever as men. In fact more clever, because she solves the crossword in six minutes instead of the required eight. The fact that she was already at Bletchley before Turing arrived is ignored. 

(The same sort of approach was taken with Hidden Figures in which the black women were treated in the movie as astonishing the male characters - all white, of course. This doesn't align with the facts that appear in the book the movie was made from. But it pleased the female audiences, who cheered at the men being 'put in their place' when we saw it at the movies.)

Cumberbatch adds another of his people-don't-understand-me performances to his CV (it's frequently on a par with his arrogant Sherlock Holmes) and while it's been highly regarded in some circles, he presents a character who isn't any easier to warm to than Holmes was. Quite honestly, when Keira Knightly slaps him, you think, About time. 

Review of War Hero

ODT, 24 July 2017
New opera makes mark by Elizabeth Bouman

War Hero, written and directed by Dunedin’s John Drummond, had its world premiere in the Mayfair Theatre on Saturday evening. 

Writing an opera is a massive undertaking, defining characters and complementing lyrics with scoring, but success is surely measured in whether the performance reaches out to the audience, holding them till the final curtain. The feeling and sentiment of War Hero, based on the play by Michael Galvin, certainly made its mark on Saturday’s large opening night audience.

A conscientious objector, Scroggs Hill farmer Archibald Baxter, received his call-up and War Hero covers his stoic defiance to serve, as he is shipped to England, mercilessly treated and forced on to the battlefield. 

New-Zealand-born tenor Andrew Glover’s characterisation of this central figure carried the entire work, with excellent support from a talented all-male cast of 10 sharing the large selection of supporting roles in solos, intricate contrapuntal ensemble numbers and tight chorus harmony such as For King and Country. 

Supporting Glover were Matt Landreth, Alex Lee, Murray Davidson, Mark Wigglesworth, Nathaniel Otley, Ridge Ponini, Antonio Della Barca, Robert Lindsay, Simon Anderson and Chris Lovell-Smith. Drummond tends to write challenging music for voice with large, uncomfortable leaps between registers, technically demanding for the singer, and often creating stark colouring to which the listeners’ ears eventually become accustomed.

Vincent Hardaker (Wellington) conducted four keyboard players and two percussionists (ominous military drumbeats often featured), who coped well with the passages of dissonance and a contrasting Intermezzo between Acts 2 and 3. 

Brenda Randell attended to authenticity of uniforms, and staging was sparse, compensated by many relevant projected backdrops. Battle scenes with barbed wire barricades and audio were poignantly effective and emotional, but there were moments of humour — We want to know what makes you tick, tick, tick! 

Opera Otago continues this centenary of WW1 commemoration until next Saturday.
 

War Hero
• Mayfair Theatre, Saturday, July 22 - 29th

Rehearsing War Hero

I've started a fourth book in the Grimhilderness series, but at the moment it's having to take a very definite second place to another project. I'm playing for the rehearsals of John Drummond's new opera, War Hero, about the period in the life of Archie Baxter when he was imprisoned for being a conscientious objector, during the First World War. Along with a dozen others her was taken to England, and then Flanders, where he was treated to considerable punishment - torture, in fact - by the British military establishment.

Andrew Glover

The rehearsals for this opera only began in late June, and have continued every day since, with - sometimes - three sessions a day. I thought this would be harder than it's been. Not every session has been a long one: the morning ones have sometimes only lasted an hour, and the afternoon and evening ones have varied between two and three hours. Still quite a long day, given that I'm playing the piano for a great deal of that time. But we get a reasonable amount of rest between the sessions, and that helps.

The tenor who plays Baxter, Andrew Glover, has had to be at almost every rehearsal as well, such is the extent of his part. He gets only a little time off stage. And the rest of the cast, around a dozen men (mostly young, and only just beginning their musical careers) play two or three roles apiece. So it's quite a complex rehearsal schedule.

Vincent Hardaker

I started work on the music a few months ago. I knew the music wouldn't be straightforward to read, so I couldn't get away with sightreading it on the spot at the first rehearsal. It isn't difficult music: it's what I call accessible music - in other words, people will enjoy it on first hearing because there are a number of themes that come and go regularly. These give the audience hooks to hang onto. But even though it's 'accessible' music it isn't always easy to play, and I've had to get my fingers used to playing certain chords they don't expect to play, and certain sounds which don't seem normal to them. They're coping. And I'm enjoying doing it.

We have a great young conductor, Vincent Hardaker. He's generous, patient and has a nice sense of humour. He's due to go off to Copenhagen shortly after the show finishes its season, to do a course. I'm sure he'll do well.

The season starts on the 22nd of this month (July) and there are four performances scattered over a week. I'm not sure what my fingers will do once the season ends (I'm playing one of four keyboards in the orchestra as well), but with singing and instrumental competitions coming up, I think we'll manage to keep them employed.

Music in my books...Not

I was just thinking how curious it is that there's hardly any mention of music in my four published books: the two most recent ones: The Disenchanted Wizard and The Blood Secret don't even mention the subject; there's one brief mention of it in Grimhilda!, and three passing ones in Diary of a Prostate Wimp. This is surprising to me, now, because music is as much a part of my life as writing. I've played piano for more than sixty years, and been involved in a lot of amateur shows as well as accompanying soloists in competitions and concerts. I was even a professional musician for a couple of years.

The old journal from the 90s that I'm typing onto the computer, however, has lots of references to the music work I was doing at the time, sometimes quite long sections, as when I was describing a trip to Wellington with the St Kilda Brass Band, where I not only accompanied some of the soloists in the solo competitions, but also played a percussion instrument in the full band's competitions.

Plainly, in the next book I write - if there is one - I'll have to be include music a good deal more, to make up for the lack of it elsewhere in my writing.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I'm more of a old-school pianist, and play classics and popular music from the earlier part of the 20th century in preference to more recent stuff. (So I don't have much interest in bass guitars at musiciansfriend.com.) But one of the teachers I play for about once a month has introduced me to more recent popular music, from shows I'd never heard of until I came to play a piece from them (such as Matilda). My education is sadly lacking in knowing what shows are current on the big stages these days, or what movies appeal to kids so much that they have to sing the songs from them. (Moana and Frozen, for example.)

Anyway, it's good to learn new things, and to contend with the trickier rhythms in these 21st century songs. Talking of new things, I'm working hard to learn how to play the vocal score of a new opera that's going to be performed here in Dunedin, in July. It's called War Hero, with music composed by John Drummond, who's written a number of short and full-length operas, several of which have been performed here, and even had their premieres here. This will be the premiere of War Hero as well.

It has an all male cast, which is probably not surprising, since it's set in the First World War, and it deals with the well-known pacifist, Archibald Baxter, and the virtual torture he went through because of his beliefs. I think it'll be a powerful piece on stage. The music isn't too difficult, now that I'm getting the harmonic world into my head. But it doesn't take concentration!

Amp me up, baby

I've written about amps before, usually with tongue considerably in cheek. My relationship with amps has usually been through our church, where for a while the size of the amplifiers seemed to increase every few weeks. Which just made things louder rather than more subtle.

When we did the New Zealand opera, A Christmas Carol, about three months ago, the four keyboard players and the conductor, tore their combined hair out on a number of occasions during the later stage of the rehearsals in the theatre, because it seemed no one was actually in charge of sound (a surprising omission) and yet we had sound to deal with. Keyboards don't sound good without amplifiers, as you'll know.

Thankfully, our assistant stage manager used her wide-ranging brain to bring the amplifier that we did have in-house under control. Initially it seemed as if all the sound from the keyboards was blasting its way around the orchestral pit. But gradually we worked out how to get some control, some subtlety and the audience heard a great sound, and those on stage heard more than enough to be able to sing along with.

All of which to introduce Bugera Amps, a kind of amp I'm not familiar with, but which are apparently available in all shapes and sizes, to suit all sorts of musical ears. (And probably a few unmusical ones.) The little stay-at-home-put-my-grand-composition-on-the-computer type to the I'm-playing-the-biggest-gig-I've-ever-played-so-this-amp-better-do-the-job type. Good old Bugera!

A (long) personal overview of A Christmas Carol

Young Jesse Hanan, who plays Scrooge as a boy, gets one of the few real solo pieces, a beautiful song about loneliness. It’s not long, but it’s very effective. Equally moving is Tiny Tim’s solo, a ‘thanksgiving’ for all the family’s blessings. This same song becomes his funeral dirge a few scenes later, and is even more moving at that point.

I've mentioned A Christmas Carol here once or twice before, but not much, even though it's taken up a great deal of my life over the last three months. 

It’s a somewhat curious opera in that almost all the chorus have specific roles, big or small, on top of their chorus work, so that there’s a requirement for the chorus members to be good singers as well as the principals. James Adams, playing Scrooge, the lead, has no aria to speak of ˗ when he’s onstage by himself he mostly sings a kind of recitative; the only ‘song’ he has is right towards the end, and it lasts less than a minute. Otherwise he sings in duets, mostly, and briefly in a quartet. But even most of these sections are not big sings; for a great deal of the opera he’s on the sidelines looking on, and commenting, or emoting with his mouth closed. Which makes it a difficult role. 

His opening piece, which is shared with Fred and his wife, Bob Cratchit and the chorus, is a tongue-twisting thing. Even though its tempo is a slow 12/8, Scrooge often sings long runs of semiquavers within it.

The rest of the principals are also mostly involved in ensemble music of some kind or other. Ben Madden plays Cratchit, and appears only during three consecutive numbers early in the first half, with only a small amount to sing; then he vanishes until halfway through the second, when he’s part of the Cratchit family ensembles. Marley’s ghost, played by Alex Lee, only appears in one scene, where he’s involved in two ensemble pieces, and curiously, is the only person listed with an ‘aria’. And a jazz one, at that. Alex spends his time in the chorus in the second half. He and Nathaniel Otley were present at all the chorus rehearsals and learned most of the chorus music. 

Nathaniel is probably one of the busiest performers in the show, mainly because of what he’s been cast as. He starts off as one of the three drunks, so is involved in both the chorus work at the beginning as well as the drunks’ trio. Then he appears as the solo fiddler at the Fezziwigs’ party, and plays two dances (from memory). Finally, in Act Two, he becomes the Ghost of Christmas Present and spends the rest of the opera in that role (in a wonderful green cloak, with a huge Christmas wreath on his head). He has a great bass voice ˗ still young (he’s not yet twenty) ˗ and holds his own well with the two female ghosts. 

The first of these, Ingrid Fomison-Nurse as the Ghost of Christmas Past, has some very high lines, often with words that are difficult to get across easily. The same applies to the Ghost of Christmas Future, played by Lois Johnston. Much of her music is slow, though often over fast-moving orchestral stuff, and isn’t easy to communicate. Composers have to tread a fine line between setting words too fast or too slowly. Philip Norman, the composer of the opera, has chosen to go to both extremes at times, making it quite difficult for some of the cast. Both the ghost ladies do an admirable job, however.
Another singer who has to contend with a lot of words in a short space of time is Nicola Steel as the Charity Collector. Her music is lovely, but it moves swiftly, and Nicola does very well to get the words across in the short space of time they're allotted (!) Nicola introduces the children onto the stage, with their plaintive Alms for the poor number. The children later have a scene entirely to themselves, and it's organised chaos, with games of tag and such going on. In spite of that, in a moment, it seems, the kids can be all in back in place and marching together - and singing together, which is even more important!

Fred, played by Matariki Inwood, is initially part of the chorus, then transforms in the blink of an eye. In the process he suddenly acquires Mrs Fred ˗ played by Caroline Burchall. (Caroline stepped into the role late in the proceedings after another performer had to pull out.) Caroline began the rehearsals as one of the eight dancers, and still appears as a dancer in other scenes. Matariki has a great voice with great potential, but has no solo to speak of. However he particularly comes into his own in the second half at ‘Fred’s party’, when he spoofs Scrooge’s behaviour.

The other two drunks (besides Nathaniel) are Geoff Swift and Sarah Oliver. Geoff also plays Mr Fezziwig, and acquired a new ‘wife’ the night of the last dress rehearsal. Brenda Jones had  been playing her, but became very ill with the ‘flu, and hasn’t been able to perform since. Kathryn Constable took over the role, but couldn’t cover Brenda’s other ‘role’ as one of the quartet in the ‘poorly dressed townspeople’ piece because she was already singing in it! So, Sarah Oliver sings it. And all three still sing in the chorus numbers.

Lilian Gibbs plays Belle ˗ Scrooge’s young love ˗ and Keiran Kelly is young Scrooge. They have a lovely duet as well as being part of Fezziwigs’ party, and being involved in most of the chorus numbers. Many of the chorus sing more than the principals. The chorus tells the story, really, and have several chunks of big stuff. There are also two quintets, an octet and a nonet that the chorus cover. A great deal of good singing is required by the chorus, and they’ve come to the party with enthusiasm.

The Cratchit family is a delight. This is the only time Göeknil Meryem Biner (to give her her full name as listed in the programme ˗ she’s Tom McGrath's wife) appears apart from the Finale. She leads the Cratchit family’s first ensemble number (sung without Bob, who arrives for the next ensemble), and her terrific family, who all have individual bits to sing, and are very busy at the same time with the preparation of the Christmas meal, are terrific. The children are sung by Madi Dow and Sarah Hubbard, two teenagers, along with four younger children: Samuel Kelly (as Peter Cratchit) and Massimo Pezzuto and Ayla Biner-McGrath as the unnamed pair of children. Tiny Tim (Joseph Kelly) completes the family, arriving with Bob for the second number. The music for this group is a delight, being amongst the best in the show.

There are two ‘waifs’ ˗ Sam Meikle, who looks well-fed enough, really (!) and Ozan Biner-McGrath, who happens to look skinny! Their brief cry of ‘Feed me’ is only just audible under a fairly noisy orchestral section as well as the singing of Nathaniel. However, they mostly have to look as though they’re at death’s door, and they do that well.

Finally there’s Grace Hill. She’s part of the children’s chorus (some thirty of them) but she also plays the fiddler in a couple of the early scenes, accompanying the carollers. Confusingly, there are two sets of carollers in our production. Not quite sure why, except that one group in the score is listed as a quartet and the other as a quintet. In fact both of them are quintets in this production for various reasons!

There’s a minimalist set: two windows and a door with a profile of 19th century London across the back reaching to about chest height. Everything else is achieved by lighting (which is very good, as far as I can see from the pit). I was a bit dubious about the lack of scenery at first, but my daughter, after seeing the show, said it looks very effective. Above the door is a clock, which at other times shows the sign, Scrooge and Marley, and also at least one of the ghost’s face ˗ Marley’s, I think, though I haven’t actually been able to see that as yet. I’m not even sure how this is done: it’s obviously some sort of electronic device, but I don’t know what. I’ll have to ask.

Scrooge’s bed is, for some reason, enormous. When it first appeared late in the rehearsals it looked as though it was going to take over the proceedings, but the director worked around it without too much concern. Other than that there’s little else in the way of furniture: a park bench for the drunks, a chaise longue at Fred’s party, and a table and some chairs for the Cratchits.

Christine Douglas has done a great job with the directing. The chorus was worked with extensively to bring out character and detail, so that things are kept alive and lively every time they’re on. They never just ‘stand and sing.’ And in other scenes, such as the two parties, and the Cratchit family meal preparation, there’s a heap of things going on. I’d like to be able to see it all, but unfortunately have only my memories of what I saw during rehearsal to go on. I don’t play during every piece in the show, so I can watch some of it, but there are great chunks that I never see now.

The costumes are wonderful. Considering that there were around eighty people to dress (including the dancers) Brenda Rendall has done an extraordinary job. There’s an authenticity about all the costumes; they fit, they’re colourful, and there’s a lot of detail. Both men and women have wonderful hats: not just top hats, but bowlers and even a pork pie for one of the men. The women have all manner of caps and bonnets. Plus cravats, shawls, aprons: you name it. What a job it must have been pulling all these items together. On top of this there’s a make-up artist who does most of the performers each night, and a hairdresser, who does most of the women’s hairstyles. So it’s a busy, busy production.

The music is played by four keyboardists, rather than an orchestra. We don’t each stick to any one group of instruments all the way through, but get to share things. Two of us play a triangle, for instance (a real one, not an electronic one), and most of us swap wind instruments and strings around. I don’t get to play piano, and I seem to have a lot of oboe, but I share the xylophone and celesta. At one point Sandra Christie is providing thunder while I’m adding in a rowdy wind sound. I’m fortunate that I have a keyboard that can be set up in advance so that it’s literally a press of the button to change a sound, but two of the others have a different model that requires the pressing of three buttons in sequence to get the next sound ˗ similar to what my own electronic piano at home requires. I think it’s probable that they could also have been set up in an easier way, but they’ve chosen to go this route, and it’s working. The third keyboardist, Moriah Osborne, has the same model as me, but she’s using it differently: turning one wheel to get the class of instrument and then another wheel to find the specific one she wants. Apparently she has time to do this. I only have to do it once, when I play one note on timpani (!). I find it a bit of a rush, personally. Ihlara McIndoe is the fourth instrumentalist. 

What of the music itself? It’s quite varied, from near-musical comedy to full-on operatic, and there are some quirky moments that could come from anywhere. A lot of it is very catchy, with syncopated rhythms, and much of it gets used at least more than once, so that the audience isn’t hit with an endless stream of new musical ideas to grasp. It certainly requires a lot of good singers; none of the small roles can easily be taken by people who aren’t up to the mark. We’ve been very fortunate in the cast we’ve got, I think. And our young conductor, Tim Carpenter, has all the energy required to keep the thing moving at a good pace.

Update: I only realised I'd missed out Shona Bennett's name when she made a comment on Facebook about this post. Shona is the choreographer for the show, and had already choreographed the dance pieces that were set in the score when we began production rehearsals. But then Christine George, the director, wanted the dancers included in other scenes, and Shona quietly slotted them in, gave them additional steps where necessary, trained chorus members - on the spot - how to dance in one or two scenes, and in general was an enormous asset to the production. This is apart from her being warm and friendly, full of smiles, and plainly having bundles of energy - and being shorter than I am. I only mention that because not everyone is....and she made the dancers' costumes. Does the woman sleep?
I should also add that Judy Bellingham took the chorus and small role music rehearsals with flair, enthusiasm (I'd come home absolutely whacked from playing for her rehearsals!), and in spite of claiming not to be a conductor, did an admirable job of pretending to be one. John Drummond also had a considerable part to play, early on. (He's the father of the young man, Jonathan, who conducted my own production, Grimhilda! back in 2012.) John took the original score and set it out so that it was playable by the four keyboardists. There are a couple of moments in my part that I wish he'd given to one of other keyboardists (and the same probably applies to the other players), but in general I enjoy what's been allotted to me.
Every time I add something here, you can see just how much additional work has gone into this show, work you're not aware of.

Procrastinating....

Philip Norman

Work on the neverending book, The Disenchanted Wizard, has sludged to a halt again, though we're only inches (yards, metres?) from the finish line. I've been so busy with working on Opera Otago's production of Philip Norman's A Christmas Carol, that my brain is struggling to think about the book. Rehearsals every evening, and afternoons on the weekend as well, plus keyboard rehearsals - three so far, and two more to come - plus practice at home for the bits I can't play properly, plus being at home alone because my wife is in the UK attending to an unwell sister, and I'm having to do all the housework and feed myself. (No biggie, really. I do both of these regularly anyway! Just thought I'd throw that in.)

A note comes up on Gmail notifications regularly, telling me not to procrastinate on the book. But procrastinating is what I'm doing. Of course there's time to work on it; I'm just using all the above as excuses, because even though we're close to the finish line, there are some difficulties I have to deal with, and I'm not a person who's enthusiastic about difficulties.

There's only one way to overcome difficulties in writing, and that's to write. Deb Vanesse says, in her book, What Every Author Should Know: I hate saying this, out of fear of jinxing myself, but I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, which is in part a writer’s term for procrastination, often connected to your fears of vulnerability and failure. Once you call those fears out for what they are, you can write your way through pretty much any stuck point, and the bigger problem may become forging ahead with a project when you should have stopped to assess whether it was heading in the best possible direction.

And in a similar vein, Steven Pressfield, in his book, The War of Art, writes: Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves "I'm never going to write my symphony." Instead we say "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow." [He uses the word 'resistance' to signify all those things that appear to stand in the way of our producing good creative work.]

So there you go. Having been told off by Gmail, by Vanesse and Pressfield, I'll go off and....walk the dog.

Update, later the same day: After going on about procrastinating on the book earlier today, I must have prodded myself into gear, and by late afternoon, I'd done the revision work that was needed. And of course it wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd thought it would be. So Progress!

Somewhat quiet on this particular front

Things have been very quiet on here of late, for a number of reasons. We were away on holiday for a week, and the weekend before that, my daughter and her son moved out of our house - after eight years occupancy of the first floor. Sad to see them go, since my grandson has pretty much grown up here, but they're not far away, and we'll see them fairly regularly, I guess.

In the weeks before that, and again this week, I've been repetiteuring for Opera Otago's production of The Christmas Carol, an operatic version by New Zealand composer, Philip Norman. This has been full-on, with rehearsals every day of the week. I'm also going to be one of four keyboard players during the performances (the original orchestral score has been rearranged for the four of us), so that's another thing that's had to be worked on. Good for my brain and for the fingers, which need to keep working otherwise they stiffen up, but tiring nevertheless.

Just today the Production Manager was looking for a person to work on the sound for the show. I suggested the guy who did the sound for Grimhilda! back in 2012. He was very good, and very helpful. I'd like to say he'd be able to use a Behringer x32 to do the work, but I doubt if that's going to be likely. It'll be some old machine that's been around the theatre scene for a few years, I suspect. The Behringer is a super-modern digital affair and has all the bells and whistles. The photograph below probably doesn't do it justice:

So who was Behringer, you ask? (As I did myself.) His full name was Uli Behringer and he founded his audio equipment company in 1989. Not that long ago in historic terms, but probably centuries in audio terms. His original company has now become of the leaders in the field, marketing in a wide variety of countries. Here's another interesting bit of information (since I know you're keen to learn everything you can from this post). Behringer has perfect pitch; hence the 'ear' on his company's logo. 

There you go!

Opera Otago's House Operas

I've been rehearsing with four young singers and two directors over the last two and a half weeks or so (with a few more days to go). Opera Otago is presenting two 'house operas' at Olveston on the 8th, 9th and 10th of April. It's going to be interesting to see if everything we've been rehearsing will actually work in the venue, which is not strictly speaking geared for opera, even small scale ones like these two.

They're an interesting pair, put together, I'm sure with both their similarities and contrasts in mind. The first in the programme is John Drummond's Dearest Maurice, a work that lasts around forty minutes. John is a well-known figure in Dunedin music circles, and has a good deal to do with Opera Otago over a number of years. (His son Jonathan conducted the premiere of my own children's musical, Grimhilda!, back in 2012). John has written several operas, but this is the only one I've had the opportunity to work closely on.

There are two characters, a young doctor, and a mysterious woman touring in the United States as a lady's companion. The third character, Maurice, never appears, but in spite of that brings the couple together. Unintentionally.

The other piece is better known, perhaps, having been presented by the Dunedin Opera Company at least once before. It's Menotti's The Telephone, in which that instrument plays an irritating and interrupting role in keeping the pair of lovers apart.

Both are romantic pieces, the former more serious in tone, the second lighter, with definite comedy running through it. In Drummond's piece, the tenor (Ben Madden) has the bigger role, not only being onstage for most of the time, but also very busy. The soprano (Ingrid Fomison-Nurse) has her own work, and some lovely duets. In the Menotti we have the reverse: the soprano (Julia Moss-Pearson) gets the majority of the singing, while the tenor (Harry Grigg) struggles - at times - to get a word in.

Musically Dearest Maurice swings between  enthusiastic, rowdy music and lush harmonies. Menotti's music is bright, sparkling, and often funny (something music isn't always good at). The soprano has several coloratura moments as well, while the piano frequently provides the 'voice' of one or other of the various people she encounters on the phone. Mixed with these are the warm melodies and harmonies Menotti is known for.

John Drummond is producing his own opera, and Claire Barton is producing The Telephone. The two operas are presented in the same programme, and each of the three shows starts at 6 pm. The whole presentation will take around an hour and a quarter.

Busy, busy....

Blogging has gone on the backburner because of a number of things. First was the ongoing efforts to finish my third children's book, The Disenchanted Wizard. And now that's gone on the backburner too!

Over the last month and a half I've been tied up playing first for Opera Otago's 60th Birthday Extravaganza Concert; I took over from the pianist who was originally hired because he himself got tied up with something else that caused him to weigh up his priorities. When that finished, just over a week ago, I went straight into rehearsals for two 'House Operas', short, one-act operas to be performed at Olveston, in just over a week's time.

The rehearsal period for these has been immensely short: around three weeks. I've had the music for several weeks, but had to practice and learn it at the same time as I was dealing with sixteen major items for the Extravaganza concert. Not only that, one of the operas was handwritten, and for my aging eyes, very difficult to read, so using the music programme, Sibelius, I put it on computer and printed out a readable copy. Which took several days, working a few hours at a time.

And then we've had some family ups and downs, as usual, and that takes energy, and we had to clear around the house because the scaffolders were coming to put up scaffolding so that the painters could paint the roof, and...

All in all it's been quite a couple of months, and though I've put some time into the book, it's been very inconsistent, and that's not ideal. There's been no blogging time at all, really, because I just haven't had the energy to keep at it!

Disenchanted Wizard makes progress...and the next project in line

Just found a post on my blog that was begun the other day and never completed. In fact I don't seem to have got beyond opening the page. So here was this good solid blank space just waiting for me to put some of my best thoughts in it.

Okay, it will accept second-best, third, fourth, etc.

Over the Christmas holiday period (which for me is as long or as short as I like, pretty much, being retired) I sent off a copy of the 'final' version of the my third children's book to my co-writer/editor/commentator/whatever and so far we've worked through the first eight chapters without the relationship busting up, or even showing signs of doing. (This hasn't always been the case with the books we've worked on.)

However, the first eight chapters have been written and rewritten and rewritten already, so it was a matter of making sure we were thoroughly satisfied with what was there. In one three-hour face-to-face session everything was pretty much ticked off, and that was after I'd already done a lot of further tidying up and reshuffling and all the other stuff that hopefully will comprise the book's first part.

From chapter nine up to twenty, however, it's going to be a different story. This section has already been completely rewritten after the first version was consigned to the dustbin of history. (What it is to have a co-person who insists 'You can do better.') However, we took a look at chapter nine the other day ('taking a look' consists of me thinking I've done my best and her replying with heaps of comments showing where I haven't done my best), and while it kept its framework and lots of its material, things had be shifted about, things had to be tidied up to make more sense, the irritable heroine had to be softened down a bit (otherwise, in spite of her status, she might have been replaced with a more amenable character) and so on.

Chapter nine has just been returned to me with further comments, but...and this is the good news...chapter ten is now under scrutiny. That sounds like progress!

In the periods while I've been waiting for chapters to turn up in my email again, with comments, I've been continuing to type up the letters I sent to my mother from London to Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1968-70, when I was studying at the London Opera Centre. The letters I've been doing over the last week or two are from a time when I'd finished at the Centre and was trying to make sense of what to do next, since in some respects I'd 'failed' the course. 'Failed' isn't the right word; it was more the point that I'd lost confidence in my abilities after coming from a place where I was a relatively big fish in a small pond, to the opposite status.

As I've typed these letters I've been posting edited versions online, on the Hannagan Family.blog. This began life as a place for our family to put on family news and history, and this has happened in a random way, but it's also proved worth using for these letters, which I began to post online back in in November 2012. They then wend their way through the months, those there's a gap at one point when other things took over. I'll have to go through and link them one to another, in order to make them readable.

However, I'm coming to the end of the original letters, and have been thinking for some time about forming them into a book, since a few people have found them interesting in their current, scattered format. So that's probably the next project after The Disenchanted Wizard finally makes gets himself sorted out.

Video splurge

Had a bit of a video splurge yesterday. Didn't start out that way, but circumstances just brought it about. I decided to see what Hitchcock films were available on You Tube, and found Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. It's one of Hitchcock's less action-packed films, relying on the subtle interplay of character, and has only one really big scene: a party hosted by Claude Rains, a Nazi-sympathizer living in Brazil after the war. The characters are vividly drawn, and the dialogue full of sub-text: the love story that underpins the suspense is the main focus of the movie in many ways. I've seen it a couple of times before, but had forgotten some of the story. It stands up well after fifty-plus years.

After tea my wife and I carried on watching the Australian legal series, Janet King, which is apparently a spin-off from some other earlier series about a legal firm. We're up to about episode five or six, and I think I haven't seen a series that's so full of improbable legal stuff in a long time. Because the Attorney General seems to be able to command that people do what they're told, for her own political reasons, the Department of Public Prosecutions (where most of the story is focused) jump and go through ridiculous hoops trying to prove cases that are unprovable. Added to that is the detective and his boss who seem to think that building a murder case on the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence is good police work, and you have a series that while it's full of solid characters requires them to do absurd things. The police seem not too fazed about producing witnesses who tell lies; the legal team seem careless about ethics, and so on. If it wasn't actually interesting, it would have been dumped by now. The main character is a lesbian, living with another woman and their twin children, who are toddlers. The lesbian angle seems to be just that: another hook to throw odd bits of storyline onto.

In spite of all this we actually watched two episodes last night, which goes to show how something that's well done can get away with plot-hole murder.

Puccini

Finally, after having written in one of my other blogs about a production of Puccini's opera, Gianni Schicchi, that I was involved in when I was at the Opera Centre in London in 1969, I decided to see if that was on You Tube too. It is, in at least three versions, and thankfully I picked the best-directed one to watch. The other two were okay (I checked out a minute or two of each) but the 2004 Paris version directed by Laurent Pelly, containing a very mixed European cast, was the one that I stuck with.

The opera, which runs for just on an hour, is a total ensemble piece, with a cast of fifteen or sixteen, nine of whom are on stage the entire time. There's no chorus, just larger and smaller roles (one lasting about two minutes). It's a piece of nonsense about a man, Buoso, who's died and left a very unsatisfactory will - that is, he hasn't left anything of substance to his relatives. They plot to bring in the cunning neighbour, Schicchi, and he, being even more cunning than they've thought, winds up replacing the original will with his own version, in which the bulk of the proceeds go to him.

The cast played the thing in a style verging on the comic grotesque, and there were even some surreal moments (a kind of ballet involving the moving around of the bed which features prominently). It's a lot of fun, and requires the main singers to do a huge amount of work. Those who are on stage all the time have to keep up particular characters constantly: there's no let up. Very enjoyable, even if it was sung in the original Italian with French subtitles....some of which I understood and some of which I probably misunderstood.

Magic Flute

I went with some friends to see The Magic Flute at the Mayfair Theatre last night. Let me say firstly that I was greatly impressed for reasons I'll detail in due course. There were also some quibbles, which I'll discuss as I come to them. However the being impressed far outweighed the quibbles.

John Drummond produced the piece in a 'renovated' version. This meant that some of the lyrics were altered to a more 21st century language, and were aligned to the idea of cellphones and iPads. The only problem with that is when you try and include a 21st century birdcatcher you immediately run into problems. Papageno came in on a bike, which was fun, but...birdcatchers don't really figure greatly in the 21st century corporate world.

Still, there was lots of busyness from the three ladies (now corporate-besuited PAs) and the Queen of the Night (or CEO) to distract from such difficulties. There was some fiddling around with the structure of the plot: the Queen appeared at the very beginning rather than later, as did Monostatos (a security officer, again besuited, though with hair that stood on end as though he'd been electrocuted -and no darkened face. Too PC for that these days.) Some of the dialogue was strongly 21st century which suited the overall tone - though was it really necessary for the Queen of the Night to use a four-letter word?

If you didn't know the story, or couldn't remember what happens, you wouldn't know that normally Tamino is chased on by a Serpent. No Serpent here, though the three ladies did some rather odd swordplay as a substitute. And equally, in the second half, if you weren't familiar with things, you'd wonder what on earth Tamino and Pamina were up to when they were going through their trials, which, quite honestly, wouldn't have caused much of a flutter to any 21st century person of self-esteem.

So much for the minor quibbles.

Only one major quibble, and this was a matter of casting. The 19-year-old who played Sarastro, Robert Lindsay, will have a good bass voice in time, but it was an awfully big ask to cast him in a part that requires an utterly rich bass sound, one that shocks us with its authority. I heard that he'd been subbed in when someone else couldn't play the part. Be that as it may, surely in the whole of Dunedin there is a bass singer with some gravitas who could have done this role. Why are Opera Otago's productions now being cast almost entirely with University students?  Dunedin has plenty of good singers and actors. Don't they get a chance to audition for these productions?

Okay, I think that's the quibbles. Better to get them out of my hair.

Here are the things that impressed: (non-University student) James Adams as Tamino. What a great voice this man has, and he can act as well. He was in Anthony Ritchie's This Other Eden back in 2014, and gave a great performance there. Here he did Mozart justice at every point. I was keen to see James perform, because he was in Opera Alive for two or three years; it was a group I was musical director for, for around seven years.

Tyler Neumann (whom I saw at a Jonathan Lemalu masterclass last year, and who didn't then seem to have the strength for an opera) gave a delightful performance as Papageno: good singing, good comedy and sheer enjoyment in everything he did.

Ingrid Fomison-Nurse played the Queen of the Night. This role doesn't usually require a lot of acting: it's the singing we're focused on. This young lady didn't disappoint. Those wonderful notes that sit high above the stave were all there, and in general she did an admirable job, even if a few notes were missing from the runs.

Her three Ladies had a good deal more to do in this version than I remember from previous productions; that was fine: Julia Moss-Pearson, Beth Goulstone and Claire Barton (another former Opera Alive participant) were all in fine voice and sang Mozart's wonderful harmonies superbly. Mentioning Opera Alive reminds me that Claire, who is short, sang a song in one of the OA shows alongside the tallest Opera Alive member we'd ever had. He was a singer from one of the Pacific Island countries, and I can't remember his name any more, but the lovely contrast of tall and short went over very well with the audience.

The other two soprano roles, Pamina and Papagena (here called Poppy Gainer, for some reason - there was a bit of inconsistency in renaming the characters) both did great jobs with their singing. From the point of view of the quality of singing this cast certainly shows that singing training at the University Music School is up with the best. Both the ladies gave good lively performances too.

There was no chorus, so three young men had to deal with all the work usually done by a larger number. That was a pity, because the male chorus music in this opera is beautiful. Why couldn't a chorus be found for the production? Choruses are an essential part of opera.

The three 'boys' were played by three girls, which was fine, as the blend of voices works just as well. The ensemble writing in The Magic Flute is consistently interesting musically, and it was a delight to hear it performed so well from all the cast.

The set design. Well, this was a bit of a curiosity. A kind of lattice hung down from the flies in the centre of the stage. It was well lit, but it meant that anyone standing behind it, or just underneath it, wasn't nearly so well lit. The remainder of the scenery consisted of a platform with steps leading off down the front, and a ramp leading off on either side. Extra work for the singers getting up and down these, as they did continually during the night. Yes, it gives variety of ways to place your singers, but it also means that audience really wonders, in their heart of hearts, why the singers so often go racing up the steps and then down a ramp, when it was far easier to just walk around the construction. Yes, I know, far too fussy.

There was also a large screen at the back on which black and white and somewhat fuzzy photographs were projected. These seemed to bear no relation to the story or the settings. I guess whoever designed this aspect knew what they were on about. However it wasn't clear to the audience - or at least this part of the audience, or the people I was with.

Costuming had its points: both Papageno and Tamino were intriguingly dressed, one in overalls and the other in hiking gear. But as the evening wore on the colour in the costumes became increasingly dull: Pamina wound up in something that was reminiscent of an army green, and Papagena/Poppy wasn't very bright for a character who's origin is birdlike. The members of Sarastro's community were dressed in long robes, but there was little decoration.

Well, you can't have everything, I suppose. The singing (and orchestra playing - from a smaller number of musicians than Mozart wrote for) was excellent. Mozart's music continues to shine - you even come out of the theatre humming the tunes. Those things in themselves are of great value.

Nobody Birds

The following piece was one of many I wrote for the weekly column, Column Eight. The pieces appeared in the Dunedin Star Midweeker in the early 1990s. I've edited it very slightly; there were also a couple of typos in the printed version. A now-deceased friend, Gaynor Smith, had cut it out of the paper and kept it with a host of other material. Her sister found it while going through Gaynor's multitude of papers.

Nobody Birds ˗ Column Eight ˗ November 8 1995

On one of several mornings lately when I haven’t been able to sleep through until a civilised hour, I got up and went for a walk. The day was overcast, the sun barely pinking the clouds. The cool air kept my hands in my pockets.

After wending my way round streets familiar to me through all my born days, I came across a blackbird sitting on a garage roof, singing his heart out.

I’d been aware of the birds all around me waking the day with their singing. I couldn’t help being aware of it, just as at night, if I happen to be in the Octagon or the Queens Gardens as the sun’s going down, I can’t help but notice thousands of sparrows setting themselves for the night by shouting and chattering all at once.

It’s as if they’re trying to hold back sleep ˗ or night ˗ like tired and boisterous children unwilling to go to bed, wearing their parents out with their caterwauling.

It’s easy to think that it’s only out in the open, in the country, that you really hear birds singing.

I remember lying in bed one morning in a place on Banks Peninsula, listening to a bellbird (so I called it, though it may not have been). Time after time he dropped his perfectly-formed notes into the still air, with the regularity of a tap dripping into a bath.

That morning is a glorious moment fixed in my memory.

But this blackbird, this particular morning, was a bird of a different feather ˗ of course. Not for him the hypnotically-repeated, fragrant full-formed notes.

No, he sat there and opened his throat, like a jazz singer in full flight, and the only consistent thing about his song was the regular pause between phrases when he took, I guess, a necessary breath.

He soared up and down the scales, he trilled, he twittered, he laughed, he sang a moment of beauty and topped it off with a scratch across a blackboard. He gave little screams interspersed with fragments from his favourite operas. He choked notes in mid-stream, and coughed. He threw music off the top of his head and caught it again, gave it a shake and a rattle and a roll, and turned it into a thing of beauty forever. He was an avian coloratura.

Across the road, oscillating on an electric wire, was another blackbird. He was doing some trapeze work with his song, swinging it back and forth in a much more regular pattern. Down the road another bird kept hitting his top note and sliding down the scale on a toboggan.

The French composer, Olivier Messiaen, spent a life-time recording bird songs and turning them, unaltered, into compositions for the piano and orchestra. (Personally, I think they lose something in the transition, though the attempt is admirable.)

But I think Messiaen would have found it impossible to cap

ture the wonder of this plain old blackbird’s song. I could only stand in awe as this minuscule scrap of creation gave forth praise to his Creator.

We’ve had a cockatiel in our house for many years. He’s lost whatever little bit of English he could speak, and he’s decided that chattering and squawking is sufficient to make his needs known. (Though he likes to join in when human singers come for a practice.)

Once in a blue moon, however, our cockatiel allows us to hear what he can really do with his voice. He opens his throat and puts Ella Fitzgerald to shame. Then with a casual cough he settles down and becomes just a nobody-cockatiel again.

Thinking entrepreneurially, I could see our cockatiel and that morning blackbird making a great duo. Borrowing a little, maybe, they could call themselves Bee Bee and Cee Cee Tee Winans, or the Daytime Nightingales, or even, Birds Blow the Whistle. 

This Other Eden

The following isn't a review as such; rather some general thoughts about the piece. 

I went to This Other Eden on Tuesday night at the Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin, (same place that Grimhilda! was presented at in 2012). This is Anthony Ritchie's new opera, and what a marvellous piece it is. The music is complex and rich and full of detail, and yet is accessible at first hearing, accessible enough to make you feel you're getting to grips with it without straining your brain too much. It has wonderful emotion, and a frequent use of motifs, echoings, and all sorts of other musical mechanisms that make it available to your ear.

The libretto is by Michelanne Forster, and is derived from a play of the same name that she wrote eighteen years ago. The story focuses on Thomas Kendall, an early missionary to New Zealand (he was a contemporary of Samuel Marsden, who also appears in the opera). Kendall was the man who produced the first Maori/English dictionary. The story is in part told by his wife Jane, an unfortunate woman who had to take second place not only to the making of the dictionary and the machinations of the tough Maori chief, Hongi Hika, but later to the Maori common-law wife Kendall took. Jane is the emotional heart of the opera, and was played by Elizabeth Mandeno, who sang with such beauty and purity of tone that her mere singing moved you, quite apart from what was happening to the character.

Kendall was played by James Rodgers, who has a notable list of achievements as a singer, performing both in his native country of New Zealand and abroad. His strong tenor brought great strength to the part - a long and difficult one - though early in the performance he seemed to be momentarily struggling a little with his upper register. Thankfully this didn't cause any issues and for the rest of the evening he was in fine form. Kendall is presented as an ambiguous character, torn between his work and the missionary society's aims, his desire to understand the Maori people and his reluctance to provide them with muskets in order to learn more about them, and finally between the two women in his life.

Joel Amosa played Hongi Hika with great force of personality and a considerable physical presence. His singing was rich and strong; a formidable character altogether.

A number of years ago I was the musical director for a group called Opera Alive. This consisted of talented young singers from around the town; the group had originally been formed to give these singers experience in the theatre and in performance. It had already been running for three or four years when I took over at short notice because their musical director had to leave Dunedin (her husband had got a job in the North Island), and I was with them for five or six years after that, I think. The group changed from year to year: some stalwarts remained throughout most of the entire time I was involved, but others might only stay a year.

James Adams was one of those involved with Opera Alive; in Ritchie's opera he played Samuel Marsden, the strong-minded missionary who made a considerable impact on early NZ society. He doubled this role with that of King George IV. The King only appeared in one scene, the funniest in the opera both in terms of libretto and music. It was great to see James singing so powerfully and performing so well. He always had plenty of talent, of course, but it's still good to see his progress in his career. James has apparently moved back to Dunedin with his family. Hopefully he'll have the opportunity to carry on singing from his home base.

Matt Landreth played the smaller role of Richard Stockwell, a man who falls in love with Jane Kendall, and gets her pregnant while her husband is away. Stockwell was the Kendall family's servant, and his actions in the story are relatively true to history. Landreth brought considerable presence to the character, who could have been treated unsympathetically. Stockwell's relationship with Jane had truth about it, and though it brought them both grief, was perhaps more true in some ways that Kendall's own relationship with his wife. Certainly Kendall, in the story, treats her badly, and leaves her behind in New Zealand to fend for herself while he goes back to London for a year, much to her anger and sorrow.

The rest of the relatively young cast did well; vocally there were no weak areas, and the small chorus in particular contributed strongly to the piece.

The director, Jacqueline Coats, chose to use a raked stage, which to me always has potential for accidents. I remember years ago that when the NZ Opera Company toured the opera Il Trovatore, they performed it on a raked stage (from memory it was more raked than this one) and one of the chorus told me that they were afraid every night when they came racing onto it that one of them would fall and break something. Though there are advantages in this production with having a raked stage - people can stand above others, and there is the neat way in which people climb up onto it at the back - but it seems to me that it's hard on the performers, who spend a good deal of time climbing up and descending. Hard on the leg muscles, I'd think, and requiring that much extra caution in terms of keeping your balance. James Adams does a spectacular fall from the top to the bottom at one point, so it has advantages in that dramatic sense too!

Tecwyn Evans, the very well-known NZ conductor (he was raised in Dunedin) was in charge of the orchestra of ten players, and how wonderfully they played! As far as I know they're mostly local musicians, but the level of playing was excellent. I noted that Ralph Miller played the trumpet part (a considerable one with some degree of virtuosity, and requiring a great deal of clarity). I've known Ralph on and off for a number of years because he's been involved with various brass bands around town as a cornet player. I've played for him in the past, and last year he did a couple of beautiful solos at a concert where I was the accompanist.

And while I'm dropping names, Linda Brewster, a friend from a very long way back, was doing her first job for Dunedin Opera, as Stage Manager. Plainly she did a very good job, because everything worked like tickety boo. And finally Ryan Walker is listed as 'Audio Visual Technician.' He happened to be doing a similar job (though with a less fancy title) on Hamp. 

Souvenir

Last night, courtesy of the surprise gift of a friend, we went to see Souvenir, a play being performed at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre. Souvenir was written by Stephen Temperley, a musician, actor and playwright. It began life as a full-scale play (presumably with a large cast), was abandoned, was tried as a one-woman show, and finally morphed around 2003 into the two-hander that was performed last night. This is the first time the play has been produced in New Zealand, so good on you, Fortune, for doing it. Sadly the house was only half-full, which is a pity, because not only is the play good and worth seeing, it's immensely funny and is performed with huge energy by Angela Johnson and Michael Lee Porter.

Johnson plays the incredible widow, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, who is convinced that the perfect music she hears inside her head is what she produces for her audiences. She's sadly disillusioned about this, and yet audiences flocked to hear her in her later years when she began putting on charity concerts, first at the Ritz Hotel, and finally at Carnegie Hall. She even made some recordings. Johnson, who in real life looks nothing like the dumpy Mrs J, gives a performance of such warmth and delight that you realise how people were willing to suspend judgement on the woman's singing. In spite of the fact that we know that she sings absolutely awfully - Johnson gives us dozens of samples of this awful singing - she had such resilience and enthusiasm that it was hard to turn her down on her ideas. Johnson adopts something of the chortly tones of the famous TV character Mrs Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) in order to bring her character to life, and gives great emphasis to certain words and lines.

Porter plays the role of pianist Cosmé McMoon. (Yup, that was his name.) He also narrates the story to us, and is onstage the entire play. (Johnson gets brief patches offstage, but for most of those she's whipping out of one costume and into another.) Porter not only has to tell us the story in speech, but sometimes in song (accompanying himself on the grand piano that takes up a good deal of the space) and then has to become Cosmé as he was twenty or so years earlier. Porter is an accomplished pianist, has a pretty reasonable voice, and performs the complex and constantly switching role of appalled pianist, counsellor, comforter, and possibly even substitute son with aplomb. His role is more difficult, because he's the audience's confidante as well, and sometimes is expected to give us the nod and wink while being in the middle of a scene with Foster Jenkins.

It's possible that people with some musical background might enjoy the piece more than those who don't have one, but it's certainly not necessary to know anything much about opera to appreciate the play. (There are a number of popular songs in the play too, mostly played and sung by McMoon.) The actors give every line great value, and milk every bit of comedy out of the script. It would be interesting to see a production of the play which wasn't played quite so much for laughs; I suspect it's possible to do it in an entirely different way. Here, of course, the laughs make the unfunny scenes all the more poignant: there are two strong scenes towards the end of each act in which Mrs Foster Jenkins has brief moments of insecurity about what she's doing. In the first McMoon loses his temper at her inability to see how she comes across to others, and is hurtful. Such is the way in which the script is written and performed that it's Foster Jenkins who we side with; McMoon is absolutely right in what he says, yet somehow we believe in the woman.

The play speaks to all artists, most of whom have an ongoing insecurity about what they're creating in the world. Is it of any real value, or will be forgotten as quickly as yesterday's news? Is the judgement of friends and family true, or does only the judgement of a wider audience count? And are we reading that judgement correctly, or are we interpreting it in the light of our own belief about what we're creating? Many great artists have been ignored in their lifetime and have only come into their own after they're dead. Many artists who seem to hold the stage at present will soon be forgotten forever. Actors in stage plays present something nightly for a week, or a month, or even years, and then nothing of it remains, except memories. Performance is perhaps one of the most ephemeral of the arts: a concert here, a play there, and next day it's as if it had never been. If an audience misses seeing or hearing it, there is no memory of it. And curiously, the videoing of live performances can often be disappointing: they're not big enough, they lack that buzz that the audience contributes.Things that the actors thought they were conveying seem to be flat and banal. Or they may seem so over-the-top that you wonder what the live audience actually thought.

There's no doubt that Foster Jenkins somehow missed hearing what was heard by others. Her recordings testify to this, and she has been hugely mocked and laughed at. But at the end of the play, when McMoon tells us that she died not long after her Carnegie Hall concert (not of a broken heart, as many claimed, but of natural causes), he speaks of the fact that inside her head she could hear the perfect music. And Johnson comes out on stage again at that point, in a dress that is lovely and not foolish (as many of her stage costumes were), and sings Ave Maria so beautifully that it makes your own heart break. Perhaps in heaven Mrs Foster Jenkins sings still, and now performs truthfully what she couldn't achieve in this life.

DJs

Apparently, the Revo 4 American DJ offers a moonflower effect with razor sharp LED beams producing dynamic and unique lighting patterns. It looks like a lot of fun, although I personally wouldn't have any use for it, not being  DJ. 

I met an artist the other day who's does DJ work three nights a week. He told me this while working on a large canvas of Tippi Hedren, the woman nearly frightened (and pecked) to death in Hitchock's The Birds. This artist applies the normal brushstroke to fill in the features of the painting, then uses a second, dry brush to give a kind of smudge effect that makes it look somehow as though there's a blur to the picture. Intriguing. 

I don't know that I've met many DJs in my time. It always strikes me as a rather odd job, but plainly it requires a great deal more skill than I've given it credit for. You have to be quite a technician as well as a bit of a showman. So, strike that off the list of possible jobs for me in my retirement. 

However, DJs sometimes go beyond their technical skill and musical ability. Take this extract for instance, in which Alexis Petridis is discussing Stockhausen's last but previously unperformed opera, which can only be said to bizarre in a multitude of ways: 

Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake has been cast in the role that Stockhausen intended for himself: interviewing the participants – players and pilots alike – after the Helikopter-Streichquartet, and hosting an audience question-and-answer session. "There's no context as to why they would have approached me," Arthanayake says. "I mean, I've seen an opera before, but I'll tell you how shandy an opera that was: it had Dawn French in it. To be honest, I didn't stop to ask them why, just in case they thought, 'Oh, we've got the wrong fella.' I thought, 'Oh God, it's gonna be one of those things where you're DJing dubstep and a big woman comes out and starts singing over the top of it' – but then Graham started talking about string quartets and helicopters. I don't think I've ever been in a meeting for an hour and half and been so dazzled and confused and inspired.

Yamaha

I can remember the days when Yamaha was a motor vehicle company, churning out thousands of Japanese cars per annum, in that sudden amazing splurge of industry that occurred in Japan in the fifties/sixties. 

The first Yamaha piano I came across was in Queenstown.  I was touring with the NZ Opera Company in one of their piano tours (a very much cut-down version of La Boheme, for half a dozen principals and no chorus) and came across this baby grand at the venue we were using.  It looked marvellous; it wasn't anything like it looked, and for some years afterwards I thought that Yamaha pianos were likely to be rubbish, as this one seemed to be.

However, there came a time when Yamaha got things right, and their pianos came within cooee of being as good as the famous old European names, like Steinway, even though the way the pianos were made was entirely different.

Afterwards, Yamaha turned to electronic keyboards and all sorts of other electronic musical devices, (such as the Yamaha emx5014c case for their stereo mixers). Now they're a brand name trusted in all sorts of circles, as you can see from these videos. 

Verdi Requiem...live!

Thank you, Signor Verdi, for writing the world’s most operatic Requiem.  Thank you for the wondrous moments when tears come to the eyes at the sheer beauty of what you wrote, or when the heart surges at those fearsome fortissimos where all four soloists are singing their lungs out and the chorus is blasting us with primitive passion and the orchestra is doing huge runs and enormous crashes.  Or when everything suddenly hushes and a breeze passes by, or a bird, and the mezzo or the soprano appears from nowhere with another of your endless series of melodies. What a gift this piece of music is. (And how marvellously strange is the sound of the soprano and mezzo singing an octave apart - it ought to be the most simple thing in the world, yet it's just magic.)

In this work Verdi, freed from the constraints of the stage – peasant, gypsy or courtier choruses, duets between lovers, maleficent basses and scary contraltos – is able to indulge in the luxury of just writing wondrous music as and how he pleases.  Yes, of course he has the wonderfully dramatic lines of the Requiem Mass holding it all together, but he isn’t affected by the mechanics of getting people on and off the stage, and all the other typical trappings of a 19^th century opera.  And he’s working with a script that has more depth, perhaps, than any other libretto he used in his career.

You can see how this piece came into existence on Wikipedia.   More important is its effect on an audience, and tonight at the Dunedin Town Hall I heard it live for the first time ever.  I’ve known the work since I bought an LP of it back when I was a teenager, and I’ve loved it ever since.  The conductor was Pietari Inkinen, the 33-year-old Finnish conductor who’s presently the music director of the NZSO.  He looks a bit like a schoolboy, but he had no problem commanding the forces: a large orchestra, four soloists and a massive (very much expanded) Dunedin City Choir.   Lisa Harper-Brown was for me the highlight of the evening.  That’s not to say the other soloists were unequal to the task, but this soprano has a superb command of her vocal instrument and a massive sound.  Several times she held solidly onto her music stand as though the sheer power of what she was doing might blow her away.  But she was equally capable of producing a wondrous soft sound that still managed to hit the back of the hall.  She was just fabulous.

 

Soprano Margaret Medlyn took the mezzo/contralto part.  It requires a wide range (as does the proper soprano part) and in her upper register, Medlyn was terrific.  Sometimes the lower notes seemed to get overwhelmed, but it may have been where I was sitting in the audience.  I suspect that being off to one side meant that some of the sound went by me.  Rosario La Spina was the tenor.  He’s Australian by birth, of Sicilian descent, and a former bricklayer.  He has a big solid tenor voice, somehow ‘thick’ in its colour.  Someone else tonight described him as a Helden tenor, but I don’t think that’s quite what he is.  Anyway, he rang his voice around the Town Hall with ease. Jud Arthur was the bass, and what a great sound he has.  His part in the Requiem is reminiscent of many of Verdi’s dark bass characters, and Arthur brought that great dark sound to his singing.  

What wonderful things Verdi does with the chorus - sorry, choir.  They're things that he could never have achieved on stage: eerie whispering sounds, the edginess of hearing well over a hundred people all singing softly at once, joyful counterpoint, massive harmonic stretches and utter excitement.  This aspect of the piece was terrific. 

The orchestra has plenty to do, though I don't think it's ever stretched.  Much of what they play is similar to music Verdi provides for his opera orchestras; it's just on a bigger scale.   And yet his simple tricks (they're things he does throughout his operas, particularly the ones in the first half of his career) - the little echoes from wind instruments, the shrieking piccolo in the climaxes, the bass note on the beat from cellos and basses answered by a chord from the upper strings: this last could be so banal, and yet in the one particular moment when I became aware of it I thought how wonderfully evocative it was at that point.  And of course there's the great brass fanfares early in the piece, reminiscent of Aida.  Only very late in his career did Verdi start doing really interesting things with his orchestra - The Merry Wives of Windsor is quite unlike early Verdi.  He was never a great colourist, and you sometimes feel he relied on the well-tested tricks that Italian opera composers had been doing for a long time (and many of those techniques were based on Italian popular songs).  For all that, what he does in the Requiem always hits the spot, and every so often there are moments that a spine-tingling: that hectic rush up and down that the orchestra does at one point - it only happens once, I think - lifts you out of your seat.  

Did I enjoy finally hearing the Requiem in a live performance?  You bet I did!