I Heard You Singing

Back in July, I wrote a blog post about whiskey and colds, and mentioned the New Zealand Opera Quartet.  I was accompanist for this group at one point in the sixties, and toured the country with the four singers presenting 45 minute concerts to secondary school pupils.  To great enthusiasm, surprisingly!

As a result of the blog post, one of the surviving Quartet members, Corinne Bridge-Opie, sent me a copy of her book, I Heard You Singing, in which the Quartet gets a whole chapter to itself.  It turns out it had a longer life than I knew about - I was just one of several accompanists who worked with it at different times.

I Heard You Singing is an autobiography/memoir that covers the careers of both Corinne and her husband, Ramon Opie.  Ramon was actually Raymond, which isn't quite so exotic, but as a result of a broadcasting error, Ramon became his performance name.  An announcer had mispronounced his name as Raymon Dopie.  It was quickly decided to change it to make future mistakes avoidable.

Ray was New Zealand-born and a Kiwi through and through.  He was very down-to-earth and a man of the people, you might say.  He was musical from an early age, and by the time he was a late teenager was gifted with a superb tenor voice. Even before he got some professional vocal training he was known as an outstanding singer. His voice was regarded as unique in Australasia, and like many other New Zealand singers he could easily have become famous well beyond our shores.  He learned all his roles (and the innumerable songs he sang) by ear.  He auditioned at  Covent Garden when he and Corinne spent a few years in England, but was turned down.  It may have been because of his age - he was in his fifties at that point - and the fact that he didn't know any of the operatic roles in their original languages.

Corinne was also born in New Zealand, but her parents were from England, and she spent some of her childhood there and some here.  Her parents were musical, and she sang and performed with them from a very early age.  By the time I knew her she had trained in London and worked professionally as a singer in the UK.  A call from the fledgling New Zealand Opera Company brought her back to New Zealand, and the Opera Quartet was formed a little later to give four singers work between NZOC productions.  That company offered more work than you might think; not only did they put on full-scale productions, some of which toured the country (Die Fledermaus was one that I was involved in), but they also presented Piano Tours, in which an opera would be performed by as small a cast as possible, accompanied by a pianist/musical director.  (I played for two of these, doing La Boheme, prior to the Opera Quartet tour.)  In these piano tours the cast would also act as stage crew, props and costume organisers, and shifters of scenery.  Even the bus driver who took the unit around the country would get involved backstage with the performances.

I lost touch with Corinne and Ray after the Quartet tour because I went to London to study and work. Strangely enough it turns out they went and worked in London a couple of years later, but our paths never crossed, which was a pity.  They were trying to get work with the opera companies over there, and had some success, but in the end it was decided that New Zealand offered better prospects for them, especially as Ray had some health issues that curtailed their stay.

Corinne's book is detailed and brings back memories of a wide range of people with whom I've had some association, or whose names were familiar to me from the 60s onwards.  In this respect it's like Edmund Bohan's recent book, Singing Historian, which covers much of the same time-period and includes many of the same names.

I Heard You Singing highlights the difficulties of being a full-time singer (or musician of any kind) in New Zealand.  The population is too small to support singers all year round, and the choice is either to pursue a career overseas (as Bohan did) or be content with juggling a job in the 'ordinary' world while working only part-time as a performer.  Corinne mentions innumerable occasions when she goes out and finds a job in order to make ends meet.  Sometimes this job fits in nicely with singing work; at other times the singing has to take a second place.  This increasingly became the case as Corinne and Ray grew older.  It requires considerable stamina (and an understanding family) to cope with the erratic nature of available work, and sometimes it's just easier to do your singing in your spare time.

Corinne's book is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on the work of New Zealand singers and musicians in the second half of last century.  I enjoyed it greatly.

A Cold, Whiskey and the Opera Quartet

I've got a cold.  Not so-called 'man-flu' - just a cold.  I thought I'd have a lie-in this morning, but my brain is fizzing so relaxing in bed doesn't seem possible, even though it was comfortable and warm.   And the dog came and joined me and lay in a place that kept part of me just that much warmer.  But I couldn't relax.  

I'd already been in bed all night, and had had a couple of sessions of being distinctly uncomfortable because of the nose playing up.  The first time was when my wife came to bed - I must have been asleep, woke up and shifted position and next thing I knew I couldn't breathe through my nose at all.  Suffocation must be a terrifying thing, and just having your nose blocked isn't comparable, really. It's mainly just irritating.  But it's still a very weird sensation: you have to focus on breathing, which for most of our lives we don't bother to do.  It just happens.  Have you thought about breathing lately?  

Anyway, I got up and thought I'd apply some Vicks - that eventually worked, and breathing returned to normal (at least as normal as it ever is when you've got a cold).  Woke again around five, and there was a lot of clogging going on in the nasal regions, though I was breathing pretty much.  (I've just noticed on the Vicks page that you're not suppose to apply it directly inside your nostrils - whoops!)

The thing is that on Saturday, in spite of having the first symptoms of the cold, I actually got a lot done.  And yesterday I was up most of the day, and though I didn’t go to church or Sunny Side Up, I took the dog for a walk and felt okay.  I’ve had whiskey in the evening the last couple of nights (some whiskey that someone gave me – it had already been opened at that point, but they never drank it apparently) – but I’m not sure that it’s made a lot of difference.  I remember when I was rehearsing for the Opera Quartet that I was at Raymond Opie’s house [see below] and had a shocking cold.  Don’t know why I was there particularly, but anyway, Ray, who was a bit of a drinker, insisted that I have some whiskey (and I think there was something with it – sugar?) and so I did.  I went to sleep not long afterwards in a chair, and woke up sweating but feeling fine.  But I’ve never been able to get this method to work since! Though another friend of mine recommended a bit of whiskey in a hot milk drink before bed.  That worked the first time, but after that the body obviously decided that it wasn't going to be fooled by that again.  

Just had a look at a page on the Net that supposedly answers the question of whether whiskey has any effect – the general response is that it doesn’t, though there are all sorts of variations in the answers.  Some say it’s worth having it with water and sugar, some with lemon juice, some suggest brandy instead, and so on.  And several insist there’s no cure for the common cold.  And then further down the page you get others who say it’s a great cure, particularly if you get under the covers and sweat it out.  Some say definitely not because it dehydrates you – they recommend lots of water instead.  Well, it just goes to show.  No one agrees on anything, except their own experience.  

There's another page headed Whisky Boys (which shows its bias). It recommends whiskey, honey, lemon, cloves, hot water, etc.   In spite of the detailed preparations it discusses it admits it's more of a pleasant drink than a curing one!

Apropos Raymond Opie.  He was a well-known New Zealand operatic tenor, who, by the time I met him was getting on in years, although he could still sing well.  Along with three other singers, Lucas Bunt, the baritone, and general organiser (and permanent driver), Kathleen Johnson, the soprano, and Corinne Bridge (all four of them mentioned here) and myself as pianist, we formed the Quartet, (yes, I know a quartet is four, but the pianist didn't count in the title) and toured secondary schools throughout New Zealand, in a fairly exhausting trip that took us from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South.  This was back in the mid-sixties before I went to England to study at the London Opera Centre.  

The five of us travelled in a station wagon with advertising for our sponsors, Rothmans, plastered all over it.  It was a bit ironic, since Rothmans was a big cigarette company; you can't imagine that happening now!  We presented a 45-minute recital of operatic songs, duets and quartets, and were generally well-received around the country.  We'd do two or three performances a day, and travelled as well.  Occasionally we did a full concert for adult audiences.  At the performance in Milton - about forty km from Dunedin - the lid over the keyboard fell down and hit my thumb.  I continued playing but by the time we'd finished I was in agony, with the bruising under the thumbnail swelling dramatically.  We must have been heading back to Dunedin, because we called in at my house and my mother dealt to it by putting a hole in the nail with a hot needle to relieve the pressure.  At least that 'cure' worked!

Twin still dying

I've been reading through the latest draft of my novel, My Twin is Dying, again, as I think I mentioned the other day. I've been pleasantly surprised, and, apart from correcting a few proofreading errors and tidying up a few odd sentences that didn't quite work, it's been easy on the editing. I think that's because basically the chapter I'm up to at the moment, and those preceding it, have all been thoroughly gone over several times. I'm still to come to the sections that haven't really had a good sorting out. And of course, the ending is nowhere near sorted: that's been one of the bugbears of the book as a whole. I know what I want to do at the end, but I just can't seem to get it all to work together. It needs to have things working out logically for the climax not to seem over the top, and at the moment, they're all a bit forced.
I've also begun the 'variations' movement of the string quartet I've been writing on and off for some months. The opening section seems fine - or it did when I first re-listened to it (!) - but the first variation isn't working at all well, so it might be time to abandon that and try something different.
On top of this I'm trying to memorise the rest of the lines for the play. For some reason my character suddenly starts spouting forth more than he does in a while towards the end of the play. So instead of popping an occasional line into a scene, suddenly I'm having real conversations.
I've just checked out HitTail, and find that Anna Leese soprano flower named after has turned up as a search phrase. Could it be because that's the current question on the Concert program's weekly quiz? I think it might just be! I didn't know what the flower in question was when I heard the quiz, but I suspected it might be a rose, and it turns out I'm right. Curiously enough, the phrase the other searcher put in didn't help them to find this out!
Here's the gen: The Anna Leese rose (WEKscemala), was bred by Tom Carruth of Weeks Roses, California, USA. It has blooms of an eye-catching combination of orange red suffused with apricot yellow, set off against mahogany red new growth. A bushy grower to one metre high. Bred from Scentimental x Amalia.
Sounds delightful, as of course Ms Leese herself does...!

What I've been up to

So what have I been doing on the creative front for the last couple of weeks?
Rehearsals for the Narnia play have been in full swing since mid-June, so there’s a couple of those a week; I’ve done some tidying up on the three Brass Band movements I wrote earlier in the year, particularly on the third movement, the fastest of the three. The ending of it hadn’t satisfied me for a while, and finally I cut out a chunk completely, bringing two sections together (with a small amount of connecting material), and then added about twenty bars at the end consisting of previously used music in a slightly different guise. At the moment I’m a lot more satisfied with it.
However, when you aren’t satisfied with something it isn’t always easy to see what the basic problem is. Someone else might come along and say, ‘Here, the problem wasn’t the end, but this bit of rubbish in the middle.’ Well, for the moment I think it was the end that was the problem, so that’s what I’ve fixed.
I’m going to go back to the two movements I wrote for a string quartet too, and start to do some serious work on revising those. One of them works pretty well, but again I’m not entirely sure that I’m comfortable with the ending, which could be said to peter out. That may be fine, but I’ll need to think some more about it. Usually what happens is I look at it and look at it and can’t see what I need to do to get it right and then go off and do something else (like sleep) and the answer will arrive.
I need to finish the Peter Olds songs too – I’ve written five of them and there are still three to go.
So plenty of work on the horizon!