Saddo abroad

A ball and cock story

2012-02-24T19:03:00.001Z

A few days ago my cold water tank started overflowing at a steady trickle. So I emptied the loft cupboard of all the old tennis racquets, puzzles and bits of wood and carpet that I have bunged in there in case they might one day be useful, and I climbed inside on my hands and knees to have a look at the tank. I checked the ballcock and adjusted it a bit but couldn't find any problem. Thinking that as I couldn't find any problem there mustn't actually be one, and that somehow the mere act of climbing into a cramped cupboard and fiddling about with a ballcock might suffice to make the non-problem go away, I gave up and did what all good DIY-ers do: just hoped it wouldn't happen again. Much to my surprise the overflow trickle seemed to have stopped so I must have done something right and I felt suitably smug.
Half an hour later and the trickle resumed. Bollocks.
I turned off the rising main, turned on a hot tap for a bit, went back inside the cupboard and fiddled again, this time adjusting the ball to make the water level lower. I was surprised how pleasantly lukewarm the water felt as I sploshed around in it with my adjustable spanner. Surely that would do it.
Again the trickle returned.
Huh. I turned down the boiler in case the cylinder was "kettling" - where it get so hot it ejects steam up through a vent into the water tank. That didn't work. I had been on my own for a few days, not using much water. Could there just be too much hot water? Is that even a plumbing phenomenon? (Of course it isn't. There's a thermostat which stops that but I was beginning to lose my mind, not being able to figure out what was going on.)
I went away for 36 hours and when I got back there was no hot water and the trickle was a constant stream. The boiler was working but the cylinder was full of cold water. Was it the thermostat? Once the water was hot again I could feel the pipe that normally feeds the cylinder with cold water from the tank getting warmer and warmer. I ran a hot tap and the feed pipe got cold again, and the overflow trickle briefly stopped.
Aha! I figured out that somehow water was flowing the wrong way - from the cylinder up into the cold water tank. Madness. What could be causing it? Was there something wrong with the cylinder? The limescale is terrible around here and we've already had to replace the cylinder once because the inside of it looked like Wookey Hole.
I was on the brink of calling the plumber so that he could systematically empty my wallet when I thought I'd give Google one last go. And bless the patron saint of search engines but she came up trumps. I found someone who'd had exactly the same problem.
The culprit for the whole mis-functioning of the hot water system was... (drum roll)... the kitchen mixer tap. About the last place I would look and as far away from the leaking overflow as it is possible to be. A bit like saying the root of the Middle East crisis is a pub in Truro.
The kitchen mixer tap (pissed Cornish anti-Zionist bastard that it is) is fed by the hot water from the cylinder (natch) and by the rising main - the high pressure source of all water in the house. Something in the mixer had died of old age and while the tap was off, inside it the cold rising main water was forcing its way (it is much butcher after all) into the hot water's territory, pushing the hot water back to from whence it had come, all the way through the cylinder and into the water tank in the loft, making the tank overflow. Who'd have thought it eh?
So if you ever have a overflowing and baffling tank here's what to do to check for the same problem I had: turn on your mixer tap to hot only, until the feed pipe under the sink is warm. Turn off the tap and keep feeling the pipe. It it starts to cool rapidly then you know that your mixer is knackered, the rising main is pushing the hot water backwards and the tap needs replacing. Mine cost £49. I have a hunch if I'd called the plumber I'd already have a new cylinder, a new stopcock, a new thermostat, no new tap and a leaking overflow.

Pole dance

2012-02-13T10:00:00.001Z

In the early 90s I was working at the Vlaamse Opera, based in Antwerp, singing Pisandro, one of the three suitors in Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria by Monteverdi. I can't remember who the counter-tenor was. The first one was fired after three weeks of rehearsals. I can remember that. And as for his replacement, all I can recall is that he was busy doing something else at the same time, so for a few of the main rehearsals on stage there were just two suitors, which is quite a problem when you're trying to sing lots and lots of trios.
I have absolutely no idea who directed it - a German I think, or was he Greek? - or who conducted. Not a clue.
Does this have all the makings of a good anecdote or what?
Of the other singers I can remember only a couple. I suspect the feeling (or amnesia) is mutual.
The bass of our trio, however, I do remember; a Pole by the name of Piotr Nowacki. Surprisingly, Piotr and I got on famously. I think we recognised in each other a mutual streak of cynicism as well as a slight alienation from the "baroque lot".
Now I adore baroque music. Handel is probably my favourite composer. Equally, I love fish. To eat that is. I'm not suddenly confessing to some bizarre fetish. But a diet of fish alone would drive me round the bend. Variety is the spice and all that. Which is why I just don't get some (but not all) baroque "specialists". The pursuit of authenticity is all very commendable but, come on chaps, there's more to life and music than moaning about vibrato. I say that with all due respect and in the same vein I would say to another group of people I don't get: there's more to life than just football.
I have worked with many baroque musicians whom I love to blazes, but sometimes, unfortunately, you can find yourself in a group of people who know no music-making post the 18th century; for whom the next centuries were a descent into vulgar romanticism and overheated expression.
And it can be a bit weird.
You mention musicians and singers whom you revere - Tennstedt, Britten, Domingo, Callas... - and they look either blank or a bit pained. Yes, I've worked with musicians who have never even heard of Carlos Kleiber.
Now I should emphasise that this was a good twenty years ago and these days the lines of demarcation are less severe; expect possibly in France where the authentic movement has established itself into institutions as chic as any fashion house. "Arts Florrisants?! Oh daahling, that's soo last year! I simply refuse to listen to anything that isn't Lully and Les Talents Lyriques! Just divine!!" Back in the day, the Flemish were possibly the worst of the lot for cliqueyness and in Antwerp we were in the thick of it.
Piotr's background was definitely not in the authentic movement - he was on first name terms with Penderecki - and he greeted most of the conductor's commands with a degree of wry bemusement. He bored quickly and in a production as inept as this one (it was, frankly, risible) he liked nothing more than try to get his colleagues to corpse. In some colleagues this is infantile and tedious but with him, a bear of a man, it was endearing and infectious.
Piotr also had a car, and this was significant because, despite having arranged my digs in Antwerp, it turned out that most of our rehearsals were taking place in Ghent, where the show would open, a good forty minute drive away. It was a bit like commuting between London and Reading every day. Piotr offered me a lift and for several weeks we drove back and forth between the two towns making conversation as best we could. On one stretch of the dreary motorway there was some dingy woodland and Piotr would always slow down and peer into the trees. "I think good mushrooms in there!"
One day it was raining. I lie. It was Belgium. It rained most of the time.
Anyway, Piotr put on his windscreen wipers. The car filled with a heady and powerful aroma and I said "what's that smell?"
"Windscreen wash".
"Oh! Of course! Wow, it's very powerful."
"In Poland, after end of communism, they make big big tax on two thing - wodka and windscreen wash."
"Really?"
"Oh yes. No money in Poland. Many peoples cannot buy wodka and so many, many peoples is drinking windscreen wash."

I flew home for a weekend and on my way back bought for Piotr in Duty Free a bottle of single malt Scotch as a thank you for all his driving. Laphroaig I think it was.
The morning after I gave it to him we were in the car again.
"Thank you so much for beeeoootiful whisky."
"Oh Piotr, it was the least I could do."
"Last night I drink glass of whisky and say to my wife, "this is beeeoootiful, have some" but she doesn't like and so I drink whole bottle on my own."
"You drank the whole bottle?"
"Oh yes. Beeeoootiful. Thank you very much."
I think that's what you call old school.

Hot link

2012-02-11T19:08:00.001Z

"Who's My Bottom?" is Classical Music Magazine's Book Of The Month.

Bread head

2012-01-30T21:45:00.001Z

The funny thing about starting a blog is that you set out writing it for practically no-one. Not even a teacher who's going to mark it out of ten. You try your darnedest, you really do, to make it erudite and witty. You bung in jokes and telling observations. You tune, you edit. You post it.
And then absolutely no-one reads it.
Well your wife does, after enough nagging, and then possibly a child or two. You post a link on Twitter but as you have only 23 followers, at least four of whom are realtors from New Mexico and astrologers from Orpington, none of them bothers to click on the link. Yet another blog. Who cares? Who has the time?
After a month or so, if you're lucky, some friends and family will have given it a glance. Still you carry on. It becomes something of an obsession. You find yourself saying in conversation "as I wrote in my blog...", not because you're advertising it but because all your powers of observation are being focussed on your writing. You've forgotten how to have a conversation. You merely hold forth.
And still very few people read your efforts.
Then a popular popera singer says something silly. You write something about it, crack a few jokes at their expense. Suddenly your visitor counter is spinning like top. You take a swipe at a mezzo-poprano (nope, not a spelling mistake). Boom! Through the roof.
Then what? More of the same? It's very tempting, like a modern television producer, to be lured by those viewing figures into going on and on simply feeding the beast, giving the readers what they seem to want: mouthing-off. But this blog was never meant as a place for polemic. And I'm not comfortable as a satirical journalist. I did it elsewhere a few years ago but stopped after a couple of years. To do it well, with feeling, you have to be outraged a lot of the time. It starts to affect your very soul, to strand you in a permanent view that the glass is half empty. It can make you bitter and bitchy and that's the last thing I want to be.
So, while I have no doubt I shall be throwing punches from time to time, I hope no-one comes here looking for a regular dose of bile and venom. It's really not my thing.
Which is why today's post is going to be a recipe for no-knead bread.
I was told about this recipe by a friend who saw it in the New York Times, where in fact it was a bit more complicated. I'm going to make it from now on whenever I'm away from home. The photo is of a loaf I made in Chicago. Making bread is a lovely thing to do when you're away from home, in digs. It's creative and comforting. And this recipe doesn't need any equipment that you shouldn't have in decent digs. A lidded casserole is its only necessity. That's also why I've used cup measurements as kitchen scales are rarely provided.

For the first stage you can use your hands or a food processor. (I use, if there's one around, a food mixer with a dough hook but you'll be lucky to find one of those in digs!)

Mix together 3 cups of strong white flour, one-and-half teaspoons salt, about three-quarters of a teaspoon of easy-bake yeast, a glug of olive oil and one-and-a-half cups of a cup (possibly a tad more) of barely warm water. You should end up with a rather loose, sticky dough. Put in a good sized bowl (I just leave it in the mixer bowl) and cover loosely with some oiled cling film.

Leave for 10 to 12 hours. In the kitchen will do. It will double in size, straining against the cling film, and the surface will be aerated and bubbly.

For the next bit I use white cornmeal, just because we have a big bag we're trying to use up and because it seems to give a really good crust, but flour or even fine polenta will do. Or oats or bran.

Generously coat a work surface with cornmeal, turn the sticky dough onto it and fold the dough over onto itself. Now generously coat a clean tea towel with cornmeal and plop the dough onto one half. Dust the top of the dough with more cornmeal and fold the other half of the tea towel over the top. Lightly shape the dough, now wrapped in tea towel, into a ball. Don't overdo it. Just prod it into shape as best you can with cupped hands.

Leave for a couple of hours.

Heat your oven to 230c (450f) and while it's heating put in it a lidded casserole (pottery and cast iron are equally good), big enough to take a loaf a good bit larger than the lump of dough that's now proving in the tea towel. Leave it to heat for half an hour.

Open the oven, remove the casserole lid, and carefully drop the dough out of the tea towel into the casserole. It's best to get one hand under the dough and towel before you turn it out. It doesn't matter if it lands a bit off-kilter or looks a mess. It'll sort itself out. Put the lid back on and shut the oven door. (Sweep up the cornmeal that will have scattered onto the floor)

After half an hour, take the lid off the casserole and bake for another 15 minutes.

Let the loaf cool on a rack.

I've done this loaf and let the dough prove for only 5 hours then an hour and it has still turned out pretty well. The longer you leave it the better the texture will be.
It makes great toast, especially several days after you've baked it. If there's any left.

On the block

2012-01-10T00:48:00.001Z

I'm writing this in our small Chicago apartment. The day outside is chilly and flat, passers-by wrapped up well against the cold lake air. The blistering, steam-filled radiators in the apartment hiss and wheeze. There's coffee brewing on the stove. I'm wearing a polo-neck. Give me a pipe to smoke and a Remington typewriter and Central Casting really should be on the phone quicker than you can say "B movie".
So, we now own a Chicago apartment.
Oo er.
It's not in Downtown where all the skyscrapers live, but a few miles north in Edgewater. Not as far as Evanston. Still urban but with a feeling of neighbourhood. A mix of apartment buildings and archetypal American wooden houses. And Downtown is only a 30 minute ride away on the Red Line "El" (elevated railway) with a stop just three minutes' walk from the apartment. So it's a bit like living in Queen's Park if you're a Londoner.
And what a bargain we got. It sounds very swanky to drop that we've bought an apartment but when you realise it cost us less than what people are prepared to spend on a new kitchen, it seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Especially as it's, well, so lovely - particularly if you, like us, are into the whole "vintage" thing. ("Oh darling, we simply adooooore vintage.")
Regular readers will have twigged by now that if there's a bargain to be hunted, a-hunting I will go. When in early December we got the word that we would close (that's "complete" for Brits) on the day after Boxing Day, we went into overdrive to find all the stuff that turns an empty flat into a home. We had some stuff from Lucy's parents in store in Arizona that was to be shipped up but we needed a lot of basics like chairs of all descriptions, and a table. So I started scouring Ebay and Craigslist to see what was on offer. Let me tell you straight away that Craigslist came up trumps every time.
So it was that I found myself ringing a guy called Ron in La Porte, Indiana, about 70 miles from our new place, to the east of downtown Chicago. He had a 50s diner set - a formica-topped table with two extra leaves and four chairs, the whole lot with chrome legs - for $140, abut £90. Bargain. Ron could not get over the fact that I was ringing from England. "England? Wow! I don't think I ever had someone ring from England before. That's amazin'!"
I get this a lot. Not so much the ringing from England thing, but my lack of an American accent. I speak to someone, in a hardware store for instance, and for the first fifteen seconds or so I can tell they're not hearing me. They're thinking "He's not from round these parts! Is he Australian? Oh shit, what did he just ask me?" That and the fact that, in the area of DIY (or Home Improvement as they call it here), the amount of common terms for quite normal things are very few and far between. It's the tomato-tomato thing. Almost.
They call emulsion paint latex paint. A skirting board is a base board. A blind is a shade, but not always. Curtains, drapes. Varnish is polyurethane. Ask for a radiator valve and you'll get a funny-looking gizmo that sits on the side of the radiator and lets out steam. (The central heating in this place is still a novelty to me. A massive furnace sits in the basement and heats all ten apartments in the building. We have no control over when it comes on, but the apartment is warm all day, which feels like something of a wild extravagance to someone of Scottish blood who grew up in a house without central heating.) Visiting the hardware store, albeit one as fantastic as our local Clark-Devon Hardware, is simultaneously fascinating and petrifying. Yesterday I went in search of some simple lighting cable and a bog-standard lightbulb holder - the type you hang from the ceiling and which takes a lampshade. I was met with utter bemusement, as if I'd asked for a device for nailing a small pudding to my head. Pendant lamps are something of a novelty here - most people having "fixtures" or, as we have in three rooms, ceiling fans. I had to travel a couple of miles to get what I was looking for. One store, where I'd already bought a lampshade, wanted $20 for a length of wire and a lightbulb holder. Needless to say I gave them the heave-ho. Only days before I'd seen a new vacuum cleaner (albeit a small and probably useless one) for sale for $19. How on earth can a length of wire and plastic lamp-holder cost more than a hoover?!
Ron, in Indiana, despite my English accent and me ringing from England 'n' all, was happy to set aside the table and chairs until we could get to him just after Christmas. He was eager to tell me he is a man of his word. He told me so many times, which was slightly worrying. So while everyone back in Britain was eating turkey sandwiches, slumped for the umpteenth time in front of "Where Eagles Dare", we were headed out of town in a massive Toyota Sienna to pick up our bargain dining set. The car, or "mini-van" (or moderately-sized bus, as it felt) was a Zipcar. Zipcar is an international car-share scheme that is extraordinarily brilliant if, like us, your need of a car is rare and intermittent. It's all very high-tech (you can see how it works at zipcar.com) but thanks to an introductory coupon, the entire cost of renting the Toyota behemoth, including petrol etc, for the entire day was $8. So we not only had our road-trip to Indiana (not recommended for its scenery by the way - Gary for instance is a city that, with all due respect to people called Gary, is all you might expect it to be) where Ron lived with his son and dogs in a somewhat dreary corner of marshland, but we also took the opportunity to stock up with a lot of basics at Walmart (oh the shame!) as well as buy a couple of vintage chairs and a 50s step-stool, all of which fit in the in the back of the car with room to spare.

The hardware store has just rung, not to cast me as Pretentious-looking Would-be Writer in a movie, but to tell me that some storm windows I ordered (a process of unimaginable complication due mainly to the guy taking the order understanding about three out of every four words I said, compared to the one-in-three of his I got - so a win for England!) are ready. So excuse me while I wander off and stand outside the local pub to pick up their wifi, go online, book a Zipcar for half an hour, and then pick up the new windows.

No Sachs please, we're British!

2011-12-27T03:21:00.001Z

Given the amount of time I spend banging on about the cost of working abroad, you might think the obvious corollary would be that singing at home, albeit less well paid, is a whole lot cheaper. That, my friends, rather depends on where you live.
There's a thing I find odd - and here I should point out that I speak here not just as myself but as a sort of unofficial rep for every singer in the land, a conduit for what they all think but never say, a sort of Hans Sachs if you like; I find it odd that English National Opera, for one, presumes that all singers live in London when in fact very, very few singers do. It isn't called London National Opera after all but English National Opera, and the last time I checked, England extended all the way down to Lands End and as far north as Berwick. Every regional company in the nation makes the assumption that their guest singers don't necessarily have to live in either Cardiff, Leeds or Glasgow to work for them and accordingly they hand out various expense allowances to help singers cover the added cost of working away from home. Not ENO though. Despite the capital being one of the most expensive places on earth to find digs, as far as England's "national" opera company is concerned any singer's decision to live outside easy commuting distance from London is an act of unconscionable eccentricity and certainly not one to be rewarded with any sort of financial assistance. So they give you nothing by way of travel or housing expenses. Not one train fare, not one penny. Zilch. Nada. Not even if you live outside England in Scotland.
Unless you are a foreign artist that is. Describe yourself as a Yorkshireman from Darlington and you'll have to pay all your own travel costs and living expenses; a Frenchman from Paris, on the other hand, and you'll get a rail fare and a place to stay in town. Considering both are roughly equidistant from London (and I imagine the train fares are roughly the same), where's the logic in that?
In an era when anything more than four weeks of rehearsal was an extravagance the issue of rehearsal expenses really didn't arise, but now that six is frequently the minimum - on top of which getting the odd day off to do other things, like teach or give a quick concert, is like getting blood out of a stone - the lack of any income can be very troublesome and irksome. (In fact I could happily turn that last simile around; getting blood out of a stone is probably far easier than getting an NA from ENO. Climbing Mount Everest in roller skates would seem like child's play by comparison.)
Now you could be forgiven for thinking - if you have no experience in these things - that rehearsing at ENO entails an easy commute to Charing Cross, but that particular fantasy would have to run along side one where singers usually stroll over to the Coliseum from a night's stay in a suite at the Savoy Hotel. Only the last two weeks of stage rehearsals ever take place in the Coli. For the rest, if you're lucky, you might find yourself rehearsing in West Hampstead. This is where ENO owns the old and redundant Decca recording studio. Unfortunately, for a company turning out three productions at once, the studio has only one decent-sized space where the ceiling carries dire warnings about something that lies between it and the roof which must never be disturbed. Asbestos I can only assume.
No, the odds are two-out-of-three that for the first four or so weeks of your entirely unpaid rehearsal period with ENO you will find yourself travelling out to Bromley-by-Bow in East London, where you leave the tube station, trek alongside the A12, past a big Tesco and into Three Mills, a complex of old sewerage treatment buildings now converted into rehearsal spaces. Hopefully it isn't raining - the spray from the HGVs as they hurtle by can be quite alarming - and if it's a Saturday morning rehearsal there's every probability that due to "essential maintenance" the tube isn't running; which adds a whole new frisson of excitement to the morning commute, not to mention an extra half hour. There are no singers I know who, on being told they have to rehearse out in Three Mills, don't emit a low and heartfelt groan.
So it is that the out-of-town singer, which would describe pretty-well 90% of all British singers, finds himself either on the scrounge to friends and relatives for a place to camp for several weeks or on the lookout for decent yet inexpensive digs to rent. I take a more scattergun approach, sometimes staying with an elderly second cousin in Ealing (so, completely the wrong side of London for Bromley-by-Bow) and sometimes hunting down cheap hotels in which to survive a couple of nights between the pilgrimage to the sewerage. I've stayed in some doozies, including one near Victoria where my basement room had no lock on the door, large holes in the walls, a non-functioning shower and a couple of chips (of the potato variety) at the foot of the bed.
If I'm lucky and careful I can keep my travel and housing expenses for a job at ENO to around the cost of one performance fee. No wonder then that ENO doesn't want to emulate its cousins in the regions if it means coughing up another fee to every Brit singer resident outside London. It's just a money thing that would need a lot of administration. (Well it's either that or they simply don't give a shit - but we're not a militant bunch and we're not usually given to expressing that possibility, except when wearing the Hans Sachs hat.)
Some singers commute for rehearsals from as far afield as Leicester and Bath. Not only is that very expensive and time-consuming but every minute you spend confined in trains and buses increases your exposure to other germ-laden commuters who don't seem to have any qualms whatsoever about redistributing their viruses via smeared handrails and uncovered sneezes. Only last week I felt droplets of germy moisture land on me as a teenager behind me delivered a massive and uninterrupted eruption of mucus and germs to the back of my neck.
The truth is we all may want to get a bit more time at home and sing in England's national opera company. It's just a pity that doing so can be one big, fat, expensive, exhausting and unhygienic pain in the arse. Speaking as Hans Sachs of course.

Woman gets an award no-one has ever heard of

2011-11-30T19:06:00.001Z

When the news spread last week that Katherine Jenkins had been given a "Mozart Award", the sound of serious music lovers' jaws dropping could be heard in outer space. Many simply couldn't believe it. They thought it was a hoax. How could they give a Mozart award to Jenkins? Had she ever tackled Cherubino, Dorabella, Sesto, Idamante or Zerlina? No, of course she hadn't. A Barry Manilow award would surely be nearer the mark.
But there on Twitter was her photo and in her hand a thing that looked like a pyramid of Ferrero Rocher.
A trawl on Google could find nothing about a UNESCO Mozart Award. It found their Mozart Medal, but the object in Jenkins' hand looked nothing like a medal. And besides, the Medal seems to be given, in general, to very high achievers. Its past recipients include Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the Purcell School and Mstislav Rostropovich. And while a couple of its recipients might be described as dodgy - Tikhon Khrennikov was basically a Stalin henchman and the last recipient, Mehriban Aliyeva got hers for "strengthening the intercultural dialogue" (though I don't know what that actually means) - it is clear that the Mozart Medal is a serious award given to significant people. Surely, given the size of her PR operation, if Jenkins had been awarded the Mozart Medal we would be hearing about it from every corner of the media, let alone from UNESCO itself. But instead we were being treated to a staged photo op of her "busking" (always with the trusty microphone) at Leicester Square tube station.
Her own fans on the forum of her website, while eager to tell her how much she deserved it, also seemed bemused and asked for more information. None has been forthcoming.
Had she lied about getting the award or misunderstood and been too embarrassed to admit her mistake, hoping the blunder would just disappear? The plot thickened when emails to various offices of UNESCO could find no-one who had ever heard anything about the "Mozart Award" or could find out anything about it. All they could tell us was that you can buy reproductions of the Mozart Medal in their gift shop.
So here we had Katherine Jenkins claiming to have received an award from UNESCO when no-one at UNESCO could verify such an award exists. But then my son Adam, who can find a needle in the internet haystack, discovered that this time last year Paul Potts had announced that he had been presented the "Mozart Award" at the same gala, at the same hotel in Dusseldorf. Only he could actually spell the German city. I tweeted this new piece of information and much to my surprise, Potts tweeted me back saying that's what he "was told it was. If wrong, not down to me. It was given to me at gala in Germany. Done gala 3 times." (We then started a fascinating and touching exchange of tweets in which he asked me what I was working on at the moment - "always interested in the real opera world" - and we compared youthful experiences of singing Britten's "Rejoice In The Lamb").

However, this raised some new questions. First, why did Potts' award look like a medal when Jenkins' looked like a glitzy pyramid? Second, if there really is a UNESCO Mozart Award why is no-one prepared to acknowledge its existence apart from its recipients?
I think the clue lies in the gala itself, which appears to be a mid-range celebrity bash paid for by god-knows-who.
UNESCO is a strange organisation. Simon Jenkins said so in last night's Evening Standard:
"If ever there were a tax-free job-creation scheme for a vagrant bourgeoisie, this is it. Unesco staff cruise the world, living it up at some hapless taxpayers' expense, handing out bouquets and brickbats like a cultural Sepp Blatter. Their judgments are without accountability."

I think this is how it works: somebody throws a celebrity, black-tie bash and a popera singer is invited to perform (because that's, you know, a bit posh), lured possibly by the promise of an award. Let's not forget that award ceremonies of dubious merit, of which the Classical Brits must take top billing, are the lifeblood of the pop-classical music biz. Something is found from the UNESCO gift shop. This year it seems to be a replica of the thing they gave the actor Clive Owen, the Pyramide con Marni, for work in Rwanda. From photos I've seen they seem to give one to pretty-well anyone who turns up. Last year they gave Potts one of the Mozart Medal replicas in a frame. Some minion (probably a diplomat's niece who's just been thrown out of a Swiss finishing school and who is on 45 grand a year being a useless PA) sticks on a little plaque and the evening's host announces to the assembled freeloaders that the evening's entertainment is being given the Mozart Award! Everyone goes "ooh", checks themselves in the mirror, and then they move swiftly on to present Naomi Campbell with the Ghandi Award for her work against domestic abuse. Or something like that.
Basically, it would seem to be a load of bollocks.
So, yes, Katherine Jenkins did get a Mozart Award at a Unesco gala ("in Dusseldorff"), but it holds as much weight as saying I once got awarded some crystal glasses from BP in recognition of buying ten gallons of petrol.

Preaching to the choir

2011-11-22T17:07:00.001Z

I don't know Katherine Jenkins. I've never met Katherine Jenkins. I have no personal beef with her and I have no idea what she's like.
These facts, these demonstrations of my personal disinterest (note the proper use of that word), and my own thirty years-plus of experience as a professional singer qualify me well I would think to give you my informed opinion that she is a pretty poor singer. Or to refine that a little: she's a pretty, poor singer.
That's alright. There are plenty about. I'm not about to claim that I on the other hand am a great singer, because my abilities are actually irrelevant. It's my experience that is crucial here. I'm not writing about my singing, I'm writing about hers.
My field of experience is classical music and opera and I can tell you straight away that Katherine Jenkins is not very good at singing opera. This could be because I'm told she's never actually sung an opera, and contrary to what you may think, we opera singers are all waiting for her to sing one to see how well she does in the exercise. On the evidence so far, "badly" would be the likely outcome. In a general audition for an opera house, she would be swiftly on her way out of the stage door and her agent would be in receipt of a tetchy email from the casting director.

And yet Katherine Jenkins is terribly rich and famous. Do I envy her wealth? Not much. Do I envy her career? Not a bit of it. I wouldn't do what she does for all the tea in China.
So, there we are, I think we've established that I'm not writing this with any sort of personal axe to grind. If I have a sense of outrage, and I do, it must be fuelled by something else. And in trying to pin down what that outrage is I've decided it must boil down to the way that Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson, and all the others of the pop-opera ilk have taken a beautiful art form and turned it into a chintzy piece of crap, solely with the aim of making someone a lot of money.
Ah, there's the rub. I said "making someone a lot of money".
There's an old story about a tenor going up to Doncaster, I think it was, to sing a concert. The morning after the gig, he was waiting for a train back to London and a man approached him on the station platform.
"Are thee t' singer from last night?"
"Why, yes I am" said the tenor, flattered to be recognised.
"Aye, well, I don't blame thee. I blame them that sent thee."
I don't blame Katherine Jenkins. I blame the people around her who clearly know a lot about public relations but sod-all about serious music; the people who are quite happy to fire this operatic poo out of their glittery cannon.
Their strategy is getting very tired. Basically it is this: play up the humble, unstuffy, girl-next-door origins of the protege while simultaneously describing any critic of the protege as a pitiable, elitist, over-educated snob. The genuine ingenue versus the snooty establishment. It's basically how George W Bush got elected.
Now the PR monsters have over-reached themselves. They've pilloried critics of Katherine Jenkins as bullies. A spoof Twitter account which brilliantly parodied Jenkins' cutesy self-promotion, and a blog, We Love Katherine Jenkins, which did the same for the the fanzine culture that surrounds the singer, have both closed down under pressure, I can only suppose, from Jenkins' "team". There's an excellent blogpost by Steve Silverman here about this.
Let me now retract my so-called qualifications for making a judgment about Katherine Jenkins' singing. Let's say I'm not a singer at all. I'm an accountant. Why shouldn't I voice my opinions about someone who is trying to sell me her goods? If I think a washing machine is a pile of rubbish, do I have to be a qualified engineer to say so? No. Might I not be entitled to say "it looks very flash, with lots of knobs and lights, but it does a very poor job of cleaning my socks"? And if I thought the manufacturers of the said washing machine were spending far too much money making outrageous claims about their product, conning innocent people out of their hard-earned cash, wouldn't we all consider it outrageous if my attempts to wake people up through the ancient and revered art of lampoonery were silenced by the manufacturers? Of course we would.
What particularly gets my goat, and my goat has been got, is when the corporation involved (and I use the word advisedly as Jenkins is the product of a commercial venture) starts throwing its weight around using the press. I'm no fan of The Daily Mail - you only have to glance online and see its Femail section, which seems to be devoted to discussing the state of celebrity breast enhancements, to get a measure of its standards - largely because it is unusually happy to print vapid publicity puff as news, especially if there's a pretty girl like Jenkins involved for a photo op. And so it was that last week The Daily Mail was more than happy to reveal the name of Jenkins' "cyber-bully". The piece started with the usual glamour shot of Jenkins and then peppered the rest with as many unflattering pictures of the so-called stalker as it could find. The message was clear. They were trying to make the "cyber-bully" out to be some sort of lonely, sick weirdo. It really didn't matter if people read the body of the text. The pictures would do all that was necessary. It was a beauty contest and Jenkins was, on the surface, the clear winner. And then the on-line commentators, swollen with righteous indignation, weighed in and ravaged the loser of the contest in quite revolting fashion: "One word: jealous". "JEALOUS". "Jealous". "Jealousy". "JEALOUS".
Quite apart from the fact that the word they were looking for is ENVIOUS - I don't believe the victim of this abuse has any designs on Jenkins' fiancee - I am appalled by the notion that the only motivation someone could possibly have for pillorying Jenkins' singing is a hatred born of wanting to look more like her. And if you're going to attack someone on the basis of how they look (and I'm talking here about the commentators) isn't that THE worst form of bullying? In fact, given that the entire gist of The Daily Mail's article is rooted in mock outrage against bullying isn't the whole thing a disgusting and massive exercise in irony? I've yet to witness a more blatant piece of intimidation by an organ of the press.
And if your weren't outraged enough (and I know I am), the person they've picked on so viciously ISN'T the author of the Twitter account that Jenkins found so offensive. She may be a small thorn in the side of the Jenkins empire, vocal in her dislike of her singing and plastic image, but, as I think I've made the case, she has every right to be!
(Actually I can think of another instance of such extraordinary intimidation. When Joanna Yeates was murdered last Christmas, several tabloids, including The Daily Mail, decided that her landlord looked rather odd and that was all they needed to rip him to shreds and pretty-well string him up for the murder. The landlord later won substantial damages.)
Now a paranoia has descended on the social media. One word against Katherine Jenkins and people fear they will feel the hand of PC Plod on their shoulder. Good grief.
But I don't blame Katherine Jenkins. I blame them that sent her.

A short post-script. On Sunday Katherine Jenkins announced on Twitter that she had been presented the Mozart Award at "Unesco in Dusseldorff" (sic). Aside from the howls of derision from the operatic community, no-one can actually find any confirmation of this claim or what the award is. There's a UNESCO Mozart Medal, whose past recipients include Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Rostropovich. Is it the same? If so, the PR machine has been remarkably subdued. You would have thought they'd be all over this news like a cheap suit. Perhaps at an overheated celeb gala something was mis-heard. But if it is indeed true and she has been awarded the Mozart Medal by a United Nations organisation, then this is one of the few instances when you can actually say that the world literally has gone mad. And I'm not afraid to say so.

Not a fan of Dorothy

2011-11-14T20:48:00.001Z

We went to see "The End Of The Rainbow" in Bath on Saturday. It's a play with songs about Judy Garland's final performances in London shortly before she died at the age of 47. It was a big hit in London, garnering huge plaudits for Tracie Bennett as Garland. I'm not about to write a review. I'm also decidedly not a Garland fan, but I could recognise that Bennett's impersonation of her was impeccable and sensational, and she certainly ripped up the stage. She was extraordinary. And yet I found the whole experience curiously unpalatable, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
(If anyone says or even thinks "if you're not a Judy Garland fan then why did you go?" can I swiftly point out that I'm not a fan of Richard lll but so far it hasn't stopped me wanting to see the play.)
It's an odd thing to watch a play about a famous person, especially when that person is a singer. If Bennett were doing a musical in which she played, say, Wallis Simpson she might impersonate her speaking voice to a degree but she would no doubt sing in her own voice, the better to express some inner feelings for which speech alone might be considered inadequate. I mean, that's pretty-well the whole point of any form of music-theatre isn't it? A song well sung lifts the mask of the character and let's us into the soul of the singer. It's not about realism. It's about creating an extraordinary and vulnerable connection where the music touches the very sides of the singer's core as it leaves her throat.
In this play, Tracie Bennett only gets to sing the songs that Garland sang, so it's not the same as a conventional musical where a character sings in order to express something of her inner self. While she pulls off a faultless impersonation of Garland's singing, it's simultaneously fantastic and excruciating if, like me, you can't actually bear the sound. Don't get me wrong, she sings the songs with enormous passion but ultimately, for me at least, it means nothing if it's not HER voice. I can admire an impersonation at that level of accuracy and devotion but I can't love the experience. I don't get it in the same way I don't understand the allure of Madame Tussaud's.
I'm not sure if many of the audience were there to see a play or, in the absence of the real thing, to enjoy an evening with a "tribute" Judy Garland. All-in-all it was a strange and unsettling experience. I wouldn't go to an opera house to hear someone impersonate Maria Callas singing Tosca, no matter how good the mimicry (but I bet if someone did it they could sell plenty of tickets). I know this isn't exactly the same but it's close enough to bemuse me.

The moment that did stand out for me in the play was when Garland, desperate not to have to perform that night, says "It's a terrible thing, to know what you're capable of and never get there."
Nobody likes to admit it in public but it's a thought that plagues nearly every performer I know - at least the ones I like - and especially those like me who are starting to look down the barrel of the September years, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. I've had many discussions about it in pubs and bars the world over, with singers of many creeds and colours. Well, it's easier to be vulnerable after a pint or two. When you scratch a little at their veneer of self-confidence, those few who appear to be immune from these fears, and who are full of bravura and bullshit (I could name some big names), reveal all kinds of clues as to what they're really feeling. And no matter how full of vim they may seem to be, you know for sure that one day they're going to hit the wall of disappointment, when their body just won't deliver what they ask of it anymore. Personally, I think it's better to be prepared for that day rather than steam along in a state of denial, hoping it never comes. But that could just be me.
I guess it's the belief that occasionally, just occasionally, you can "get there and deliver what you're truly capable of" that keeps most of us performers going in the face of unspeakable fear and self-criticism.
That and increasingly short memories.

My Struggle

2011-11-03T18:28:00.001Z

I just don't fit in with the opera world and I often think I never will.
I make no bones about it, compared to most opera singers, my roots are in the wrong class. My parents had nothing to do with music. They didn't play instruments and they certainly didn't sing in any choral society. All my friends were far more interested in sport and girls than in classical music. My dad was into boats, my mum a simple housewife. My early childhood was spent listening to pop and, like everyone my age, I was a big fan of the Beatles. I was sent to a school which had a terrible reputation for music but which was strong on sport. I sang treble in the choir but I asked to leave after two years for fear of being beaten up. By now I was listening to Pink Floyd and Yes and if asked what I was going to do when I left school, some sort of office job seemed to be expected answer.
You can imagine the horror and surprise when I announced to my parents that I wanted to sing professionally. I might as well have said I was going to join the circus, the idea was so alien to their experience and their expectations. But become a singer I did.
I think my parents sensed that I might feel out of place in the world of opera. After all, as I said, I was from the wrong class. The only opera singers they'd really ever heard of came from...yes... WORKING-CLASS backgrounds. There, I've said it. And they were usually Welsh to boot!
How would I ever fit in, given my solidly upper middle-class background?
My parents' fears weren't misplaced. Quickly I discovered that my somewhat posh West London vowels didn't sit easily amongst the regional twangs of most of my workmates. I didn't have a football team I supported. I didn't know how a car engine worked. I had never been clubbing in the depths of winter wearing a t-shirt. I was born in West London for God's sake! I'd never owned a whippet or a racing pigeon! What on earth was I going to talk about in coffee breaks?
My singing teachers at the RCM, Robert Tear and Edgar Evans, came from very humble backgrounds. Both grew up in council houses. Perhaps the Opera Studio would prove less challenging and more "my class"? But no, its director Michael Langdon spoke with such a thick midlands accent I could barely understand a word he said.
Every big name seemed to come from the lower classes. Gwyneth Jones, Janet Baker, Domingo, Pavarotti, Carreras, Elizabeth Harwood, Margaret Price, Geraint Evans... How would I ever make it?
After the Studio I did alright I suppose, but always I felt I was carrying the burden of my background. All around me there were singers having big careers and not one of them had been to public school like me. It just didn't seem fair.
How could I ever become The People's Tenor with my BBC accent, my erudition and my ability to read music?
Lesley Garrett took pity on me and asked if I'd like to be put forward for some Raymond Gubbay gigs. I said no. I knew I just wouldn't fit in. "A Night At The Opera" and " A Celebrity Night At The Opera - Featuring The Music Of Andrew Lloyd Webber" were not for me. I knew it in my bones.
And now they just won't let me in.
Now I'll never sing "You'll never walk alone" or Take That's "Love Ain't Here Anymore" in Italian with full chorus and orchestra.
The elitist bastards.

The naked truth

2011-10-30T00:42:00.001+01:00

If there's one thing for which I am eternally grateful it is that I have never had to take my kit off on stage, which is quite remarkable given that I worked with Opera Factory back in its heyday. If that means nothing to you, suffice it to say that nudity in their shows used to be pretty-well de rigeur. You would have thought that the piece I did, "Mahagonny Songspiel", populated as it was with lumberjacks and tarts, would be an obvious choice for a bit of exposed flesh but it was not to be. Given the other two pieces in the triple bill had loads of dangly bits on view, perhaps it would have been too much to finish the evening with yet another dose of pink, wobbly flesh. Opera Factory was pioneering in its use of improvisation during rehearsals so I suppose if one of the cast had decided to strip off (as some were often wont to do) then I could have found myself in the horns of a dilemma. But no, I escaped. We did have to do a sort of mad dance with a naked inflatable sex doll, but the doll was not considered a working member of the company, so the remaining members of the company could keep their members in their trousers without fear of letting the side down.
I've come face to face with plenty of other nude bods on stage, notably in an opera in Amsterdam, where I had to do some pretty odd things to the lead soprano (pour ink all over her naked torso, stuff her inside the carcass of a horse and rape her - you know, the usual thing) and at ENO when we did "Die Soldaten". In this production, by David Freeman who had also directed "Mahagonny Songspiel", the café scene featured a professional stripper from Stringfellows. It's a very tricky scene but gosh we rehearsed it a lot. Rather more than seemed strictly necessary. Some of the other singers had to be naked for a bathhouse scene but luckily not me. Another narrow escape.
Hopefully I'm now considered too old to do naked-on-stage, though I do have a new opera coming up in a couple of years where I have to have some vigorous sex with the lead soprano, so I'm not totally out of the woods yet.
So what led me to ponder this subject?
I belong to a local health club, just outside Bath and I'm often struck by the abandon with which old men wander around the changing- room completely starkers. These are probably ex solicitors and car salesmen and yet, unlike me, the professional performer, they seem free of any inhibitions. They probably haven't manhandled many ink-stained sopranos in the course of their work. Me, I'm a towel wearing sort of chap. I keep everything covered up until the very last second, when it's off with the knickers and on with the swimming trunks in, hopefully, one rapid movement. But not these chaps. They wander around for ages, arranging their gym bags, drying their hair, winding their watches, all without a stitch on.
The other day I returned to the changing-room after a swim and there was nobody there except a maintenance man who was fitting a mini spin-dryer to the wall. While I was relieved that I didn't have to find my "personal space" amongst an army of posturing pensioners parading their pendula, the presence of a plumber plying his trade by the lockers did pose something of a dilemma. I considered it for a brief moment and then reckoned he must have known what he was in for, working in a changing-room, so I went about stripping off and changing as I usually do.
Still, it did feel odd, getting naked with a workman a couple of feet away. I suppose there really is a sort of code of behaviour in changing-rooms which is totally at odds with the real world. A bit like opera really. I couldn't help thinking how strange this is though, on closer examination. Why is it considered utterly normal to strip your clothes off in the presence of a plumber at the gym, when if I did it anywhere else I'd be thought of as a pervy nutter? Our boiler at home has been playing up and Mr King our trusty engineer has been in to have a look. I wondered how it would have gone down if, while he was tweaking our pilot light, I had wandered into the kitchen, removed all my clothes and started nonchalantly talcing my scrotum.
Not well, I would think.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: Free all-you-can-eat bonus Gob!

2011-10-22T14:09:00.001+01:00

This Gob has almost nothing to do with singing abroad, but by the time you are singing abroad your career will probably have progressed to a level where this über-sexy subject has caught your attention. Yes, let me talk you through the warmed, scented massage oil that is... Value Added Tax. Mmmmmm.

Reading this could save you quite a lot of money.
There, that's got your attention.

Once you get an agent you'll quickly realise that not only does he/she charge you 15% in commission for every concert you do (hopefully less for every opera performance) but also another 20% of that on top in VAT. So on a modest fee of £1000 you need to pay your agent £180 (£150 plus £30 VAT). On a good opera job where your gross fee for the run tots up to £20,000, you may find yourself saying goodbye to £600 in VAT.
But you really don't have to. You can get it back.
If you are grossing more than £73,000 in any 12 month period then you HAVE to register for VAT by law, but if you are earning much less you should still seriously consider registering voluntarily.
Once you are registered for VAT then you can claim back any VAT you have had to shell out on business-related expenses. The chief amongst these are your agent, hotels when you're working, your accountant, your mobile phone, car servicing and even the VAT on a new laptop. You can get the VAT back on fuel but only if you pay a regular so-called "scale charge" and personally I don't find it worth it. You have to drive a lot of miles in a year.
You can't claim back the VAT on a new car so forget that. Train and plane tickets don't include any VAT so there's nothing to be saved there. Singing lessons and coachings are usually VAT free, though I guess a VAT registered coach would have to charge you tax on their services. Ive certainly never been charged VAT for either.
"So why aren't I registered already", you may be asking yourself, "when it can save me so much money?"
There are two caveats.
Once you register for VAT you have to charge VAT on every fee. So your £1000 fee now costs your employer £1200. That's not a problem at all for professional companies who just claim back the VAT you charge them, but it can cause you problems if a lot of your work is for, say, amateur choral societies, which it may well be in your early years. They cannot claim back the tax and if they cannot afford to pay you another £200 (and the chances are massive that they cannot afford it) then you'll probably have to make the fee inclusive of VAT, in which case your fee has suddenly dropped to £833.33 (plus 20% VAT equals £1000) and you have to hand £166.67 to the taxman. (Having written all that I realise that the likelihood of a small choral society forking out £1000 for a concert is about as remote as a certain popular mezzo making her way through the role of Carmen.)
The other caveat is that you really need to be on top of your book-keeping and accounting skills. There's really no need to get an accountant to do it for you, unless you are a total dimwit (see Carmen remark earlier). Every three months you have to do a VAT return where you tot up the VAT you've collected on fees (your Output) and deduct the VAT you've paid on expenses (your Input) and pay over the balance. You are, in effect, a fully-functioning tax collector. It sounds grim but in truth it's very straightforward and usually takes me about an hour, four times a year. (It also keeps me on my toes with my accounts, which is no bad thing.)

I work abroad a lot but you don't charge VAT to foreign employers, so it's quite common for me to get to the end of a quarter yet collect no VAT on my fees. However, my agent still has to charge me VAT on the commission, and I'll have paid lots of VAT on my UK expenses. So when I come to do my VAT return I have often paid more tax than I've collected; meaning that I get a sizeable refund popping into my bank account after I've handed in my figures (which you do online these days). Which is rather nice.
You can ask to do your VAT return just once a year but I don't believe that's a good idea unless you are prepared to stick all the VAT you collect during the year in a special account. Imagine the shock of discovering you owe the VAT man, say, £10,000 which you've already carelessly spent! Nope, once every three months is good for me. Oh, and don't even think of being late with your VAT Return or you'll be storing up a large heap of bother to deal with. Inspectors, fines... You get the picture. You've got their tax and that's the end of the matter.
If you register will probably find yourself having to issue VAT invoices to each of your employers, setting out the fee, the VAT and the total. As I used to have to do these on a typewriter, with carbon paper, nowadays there is nothing to whinge about. These days I can even do one on my phone for gawd's sake. In fact my agent now sends out all of my VAT invoices so all that fancy technology is wasted.

Once you get the hang of it, it is very easy. Google VAT and look at the HMRC website.
If people want a seriously detailed guide to "doing your VAT" I can do that too, but only if you ask nicely. This was just intended as a taster of what you can look forward to. Don't wait to see if you can cross the £73,000 threshold. Get onto it sooner and save yourself some money.

Aled The Ashtray

2011-09-28T16:34:00.001+01:00

Despite being a non-smoker, I own an ashtray that's made from a piece of granite from the old London Bridge. And it's just like Aled Jones.
No, I don't mean that Ex Boy Soprano and TV's "Cash In The Attic" Presenter Aled Jones has carved out a career as an object without any practical use; that he's a crumbling fragment of his past and he's living off his former glory. I wouldn't do a thing like that. Uh huh. No way. Tsk.
I should explain.
My ashtray is a chunk from the London Bridge that was dismantled in the late 60s and transported to Lake Havasu in Arizona, where it was re-erected and now spans one end of the lake for no better reason than to act as a tourist draw. The bridge that is, not the ashtray. Whether the bridge is covered in ashtray-sized pockmarks I couldn't really say as, despite having been to Arizona many, many times I've never felt much compunction to go and visit the mother of my ashtray. The ashtray used to be my father's, who was big in the City of London which, I can only suppose, entitles you to chunks of old bridge turned into ordinary household objects when they become available.
There is an urban legend that the man who bought the bridge, one Robert P. McCulloch (who was big in chainsaws), thought he was buying Tower Bridge and was hugely disappointed, having coughed up over a million quid for the thing. My dad, eager no doubt to get his hands on a granite ash receptacle, was actually at the photo op in his capacity as City bigwig when McCulloch took possession of his new-but-old bridge. The photographers lined up the shoot with McCulloch leaning against the parapet of his purchase and with Tower Bridge in the background. One of the photographers indicated the far-off bridge and said, larkily "Hey Mr McCulloch I bet you wish you'd bought THAT bridge, eh?" and McCulloch, joining in the fun, replied in mock disbelief "Oh no, you don't mean I bought the WRONG bridge?!" How they all laughed.
Well of course the media ran with the story in the way they so often do when there's a chance to make all Americans seem completely stupid and ignorant. And the public, happy to believe that a man could, through his own industry, amass a vast fortune and yet be as dumb as a stump, lapped it up. I suppose the fundamental problem was the notion that anyone who was eccentric enough to pay a million pounds for a massive old edifice and ship it thousands of miles away to a dessert must be several ashtray-sized granite chunks short of a full river-crossing.
Yet, no matter how ridiculous the assumption is that a shrewd businessman would buy the wrong bridge, the myth continues. Only recently I heard it repeated by the BBC's top investigative sofa-jockey, Bill Turnbull on Breakfast News. Yup, a television news anchor man in the 21st century was all too happy to share a snippet of Americans-are-so-dumb drivel as fact. And have a little patronising chuckle about it too. Right there on the telly box. I was shocked.
Then a few days ago I saw a TV ad for a new album by Aled Jones. The voiceover described him as "one of the nation's great singers". Again, I was shocked.
And, like the London Bridge story, it just proves you shouldn't believe everything they say on the telly.
Which makes Aled Jones just like my ashtray.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 5, Keeping Your Head Together

2011-09-17T00:30:00.001+01:00

All the stuff that has gone before in these Gobs - getting the work, doing it, and the logistics - those are in so many ways the easiest aspects of singing abroad. The hardest task when singing abroad is stopping yourself going out of your mind with boredom and loneliness.
"How can this be?" you are probably asking yourself.
Let me give you a scenario. You are in your early thirties. You career is moving along and you are in demand on the opera circuit. Your agent feels you should no longer be aiming at regional British companies but at the more lucrative world stage. It's all part of the half-formed plan you have in your head which probably features good roles in good houses, posh concerts with the major orchestras, and some recordings thrown into the mix. Nothing wrong with that ambition. If you weren't ambitious the chances are you wouldn't be reading this blog in the first place.
But, as your are in your early thirties there's also every chance you are in the depths of a very important personal relationship. You may even be married. I was, and had two young children to boot.
Scenario: You go abroad on a job, let's say to Liege. You have five weeks rehearsal and then shows every third night over a period of three weeks. What does your partner do? Come with you? Have you ever spent eight weeks in Liege? Come to think of it, have you ever spent eight hours there? Eight minutes just about wraps it up. Believe me. And seven of those will be spent cleaning dog poo off your shoes.
Have you spent eight weeks anywhere while your partner goes off to work and you have to find something to do to amuse yourself?
Say you have children, are they in school or are they young enough for your partner to bring too? Again, I ask, what do you do for eight weeks in Liege with two young toddlers and no-one else you (or they) know in town? Beside the shoe-cleaning thing.
This is assuming your partner doesn't have their own job which keeps them tied to your home. There's a good chance your partner is also a singer. Which of you gives up the important job that's on offer to look after the children? Eh?
What tends to happen (though there are some exceptions) is that someone stays behind at home with the children and the singer flies home as often as is humanly possible. This isn't without its own set of problems. Because everything is scheduled day-by-day you won't know until the eleventh hour when you'll be free to fly home during rehearsals (let alone what day you are needed back), by which time the enormous fares will make you wonder how you'll ever again afford to buy clothes for your dear offspring, and when you do get home, one of your dearly beloveds will complain of a sore throat and then cover your mouth with adoring and slobbery kisses. You get the picture.
Chances are you will fly the family out to join you for a week or so once the show has opened and you have more free time. So then you are faced with a dilemma when you first book your digs as to whether you book a large enough apartment (at a much higher cost of course) for the entire gig or whether you make special arrangements just for the time your family is with you. And that's complicated too.
When your family is with you, you probably have shows in the evenings and won't get to bed much before 1 a.m. Then your kids are bouncing on the bed at 6.30 the next morning, a good four hours before you normally haul yourself out of bed the day after a show. You spend the next two days trying to be SuperDad (or SuperMum) to make up for all the time you haven't seen them in the last two months and when it comes to the next show you are surprised to find yourself utterly knackered.
But at least your are not lonely. That will kick in the moment you wave the family off at the airport, the day they return home and you are left behind to finish the job. That is the day when you say to yourself - and believe me, you will - "remind again, me why do I do this job?" It doesn't become long before you find yourself depressed at the idea of every upcoming job that takes you away from home, and that's not the right frame of mind in which to rehearse and perform.

So how come you will be bored? Quite simply because you spend so much time in a virtual waiting-room. You're waiting for your next rehearsal, you're waiting for your performance. You might like to think of yourself visiting all the galleries, sites and cute restaurants (but can I just play the Liege card here one more time...) but when push comes to shove you are in town to work, to perform at your best, to earn your fee and pretty-well any activity on your days off that doesn't involve lying prostrate on a sofa gazing at something mindless on the laptop or telly quickly seems far too much like hard work and something that will detract in some way from the hard task of singing opera. It's nothing to feel ashamed of. You don't see Olympic athletes or Test cricketers pottering around the National Gallery on their days off. They're in their hotel rooms playing Nintendo.

There has been a significant number of singers who try to escape their loneliness and boredom by resorting to rampant affairs, heavy drinking and even the odd but of drug abuse. Guess what? It doesn't work. I could name names but on one hand I'm far too discreet and on the other it saddens me too much to think of once-great singers who have ended up on the scrapheap or even dead.

Here's my solution, but it's one that can only work in a relationship which allows it to work and it only works if you are making the effort to be present, and I mean truly present, when you are at home and not working. Use your time away as "personal time". As Billy Connolly once said, and we have it pinned to our fridge at home, "you cannot spend your whole time away missing the ones you love". So don't sit around moping. Get up and do something that interests you but for which you don't have time at home. Write lengthy emails to friends with whom you've lost touch. Paint. Draw. Read. Build your own website (I did, in between rehearsals in Milan). Start a blog. Knit. Be indulgent in something that interests you but which is perhaps of no interest to your partner. It doesn't mean you are ignoring their needs. It means you are taking care of your own. And by doing so, you are probably making yourself a much happier and more pleasant person to be with.
There'll be times when the stay-at-home partner may envy your freedom to do what you want for yourself while he or she is left at home in domestic drudgery. Make sure you do your best to ease that drudgery when you get home, but please don't think for a moment that sitting in your grotty rented apartment desperately trying not to enjoy your time away will actually make your partner feel better. Uh-uh. Let's face it, that's absurd and doesn't reflect very well on the health of the relationship. It's an easy trap though and I fell into it in my first marriage. See? I speak from experience.
Of course most of the pastimes I mention are fairly sedentary. Some people use the time away to visit a gym regularly and get fit. Many opera houses have arrangements with local gyms. I do a lot of walking and, in Amsterdam especially, cycling. Cooking is another thing I enjoy, especially in Italy and France, though it can be deflating to be constantly cooking for one in a poorly-equipped kitchen. Have colleagues round for meals. If you get into the habit of eating and drinking out with your colleagues, just be aware that you probably won't have an understudy. Very few opera houses employ them. No-one, but no-one, is going to be impressed if you are too hungover to work or if you fall sick due to what your co-workers or management interpret as the result of over-indulgence. There's also nothing worse than finding yourself hoarse from shouting just to have a conversation in a noisy bar or restaurant, something of which, bizarrely, opera managements are woefully ignorant when they plan cast parties.

I said it to the young-uns at British Youth Opera and I'll say it again: a lasting career in this profession we call opera depends less on those little cords in your throat and more on what is in your head and your heart. Keep the latter two happy and your voice will thank you for it. However if you have the greatest voice in the world but neither the will nor the wit to stick at it and to endure this difficult lifestyle, all those singing lessons will have ultimately been for nought.

That's the last of these Gobs, though there's every chance I will think of something I've forgotten to wag a finger about. So who knows. I have a notion to set up a website as a singers' resource, full of specific info about as many cities as I can, but this is a huge task. I could only do it with lots of input from other people and also if I can find a cunning way to pay for it!
Meanwhile do read "Who's My Bottom?" which not only lifts the lid on my personal experiences as a jobbing singer but which is also now on Amazon and order-able in all good bookshops!
Oh look, here's a link for Brits: Amazon.co.uk
And for Americans: Amazon.com

Anyone else will have to google and figure it out for themselves.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 4b, More On Money

2011-09-10T12:21:00.001+01:00

It's interesting to report that of all my recent Gobs, the one that provoked the largest response from fellow old pros was the one on money. Some of them, prompted by their own experiences, felt that there were more gobbets of information that I should be sharing. I'm not remotely surprised by this. I was once at a post-concert dinner in Amsterdam where the salaried administrators were all talking about music and the working musicians (including two top composers) were talking about the best place to exchange their fees into pounds. (It used to be the Bank of Abu Dhabi near Hyde Park Corner but anti money-laundering laws came in and the bank hurriedly closed; not surprising as you could walk in with a thick envelope of foreign cash, but without any ID, and quite simply change it into pounds, and at brilliant rates. Now, if it's cash it's Marks and Spencer for me. Much less exotic.)
So here, in fairly random fashion, are a few more things on the money subject, some of which may have nothing in particular to do with singing abroad, but which are mind-numbingly dull:

Cash-flow is almost certainly going to be a worry at some point in your career, no matter how successful you are. As I said in the Money Gob, you will come across times when you have massive and regular outgoings but you have to wait for a good while, sometimes two to three months, before you get paid. You will almost certainly need an overdraft facility of some sort to tie you over. Personally, but it's not everyone, I have found a mortgage bank account to be a life-saver. But of course you need to have a home/mortgage to have the account and, ideally, a fair amount of equity in the home to spare too. So, if you're reading this as a struggling beginner who's still living at home, then you're probably already thinking "yeah, well, bollocks to you, thanks for nothing". But, further down the line, when you're up and running, it's something to bear in mind. In the immediate future, be prepared to talk to your bank about a facility. Shop around for a bank that understands your needs. A small business account may end up being your best bet, especially if they offer you a couple of years of free banking. This is all sounding worryingly like the Personal Finance section from the Mail on Sunday.

Someone suggested I should bring up the idea of having a euro account. You can have them in the UK now but I've always thought they're not worth the money; last time I looked I thought they were too expensive to run. Besides, you may well find yourself having a bank account opened for you if you work for various companies. As I said before, in Barcelona the Teatre Liceu opens you an account - a proper account with internet banking and the works - which I kept open for a while. Los Angeles Opera offers something similar, though in dollars obviously. My wife worked in Strasbourg where they did the same thing. We also have a German account, a hangover from Lucy's days on contract in Cologne, which is handy mostly for the next thing on my list. Just a few euros in one of these accounts (and you probably should stick with one in the long term) should keep it ticking over.

German pensions. I alluded to this in the last Gob. If you work in Germany for any length of time there's every chance you will be enrolled in the Bayerische Versorgungskammer, a pension fund. While you're working there, payments will made into the fund, building you up a little nest egg. However - and this is the reason I bring this up - if you stop working there you MUST keep paying €150 a year into the fund or they will wind it up. If they do wind it up you lose every pfennig that's ever been paid into it. Having a German account makes it a lot easier to set up a standing order to make sure you keep enrolled. It may not seem very exciting right now to be thinking about your old age but a little German pension when you retire could prove to be a very good idea.

Being paid abroad. There are so many variants on this. I'll give you as many as I can from my own experience. Most houses will ask you where you want your fee wired at the end of the run. Chances are you will just say your bank account in Britain. You will probably be landed with half of the wiring fees, sometimes all of them, sometimes none. I would strongly advise against any express wiring as it will cost a bomb. These days a normal international wire should take very little time indeed. Some houses pay the day after your last show, some leave it until a specific day of the week when they do payroll and some (tut-tut Italy) leave it a good fortnight for reasons best known to themselves. It is not unusual for there to be a flurry of emails between colleagues who have just returned home from a job along the lines of "I'm getting worried as I haven't been paid yet!" Italy is the only country where I have not been paid for a job. It was a long time ago. I was doing three concerts in Tuscany. I got 2/5ths of my fee in cash while I was there and was promised the balance by wire. It never came, nor did it for the British soprano. In trying to get it we hit a mafia wall. Seriously. The fees had been purloined by a promoter with connections to the mob and it disappeared into a bank that didn't really exist. Back then there was nothing we could do. Italy has long had this reputation and it is still quite common for a theatre's money man to come round in the interval with your pay statement to demonstrate that you have been paid. This is to encourage you to continue with your performance - a throwback to the days when things got so bad that people refused to return to the stage for the second act until they'd been handed their fee in cash. Anyway, back to the present. There are still some dodgy practices around (Nice Opera had a bad record for quite a while - again, a mafia town) but though I've had to wait longer than I would like for my fees to come through, a little trust generally seems to get you by. Though in these straightened times I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few horror stories getting ready to hit the airwaves.

Some houses will let you take your fees in chunks, as long as you've earned them, but if you're wiring them home piecemeal be aware that you will probably have to pay a wiring charge each time, even if it's to a euro account. Some won't pay you until the run is done, full stop. In the USA they may well give you a cheque at each performance, which you then have to pay into the bank account they have helped you set up. It's rather out-dated but what they're used to. The Monnaie in Brussels used to give you a cashier's cheque at the end of the job, which you then had to take to a specific bank to cash and from where you could arrange to wire the fee home. I'm not sure if that's still their arrangement but it was a pain in the backside. In Milan, you never have any dealing with a money man in La Scala. Instead you have to go a particular bank around the corner, take a ticket, wait for about 20 minutes, then talk to a specific cashier who deals with the theatre's account. It's all rather strange but given the chaos in the opera house it at least reassures you that your fees won't be purloined. Probably. Don't forget your passport.

Whatever method you choose, it's a good idea to have a record of your BIC, IBAN and Swift Code numbers before you leave home for a foreign job. These are your bank details in funny form which are probably somewhere on your bank statements. I seem to remember that this may be changing and the Swift Code at least may now be defunct. Whatever - take every scrap of detail about your bank account, including your bank's address.

For what it's worth, in general and if I can, I try to live within a budget determined by how much cash I can draw from the opera house as an advance on my fee plus the reimbursement for my airfare. That usually covers most of my cash needs and saves me having to visit ATMs and drawing money out of my bank at home. The rest I pay with my trusty Post Office credit card (see Gob 2: Logistics) which not only means no exchange commission but which also means, with luck, that I may not have to pay the credit card bill until after I've received my fee. Of course if the opera house won't give me an advance then that whole scheme goes for nothing.

When your wire comes through from an opera house the exchange rate at which your bank will convert your fee from, say, Euros to Pounds can vary enormously from bank to bank. It's annoying. You could possibly save some money by using a foreign exchange service like Travelex that give better rates of exchange on large amounts but I've yet to be convinced it's worth it. Have a google and see what you think.

If you get a foreign bank account, make sure you can easily arrange wires home, say via online banking, or you could find yourself stuck with a pile of cash in a foreign account and no way of getting it out of the country!

It has been pointed out that some European countries are currently taking 15% in withholding tax and others, as well as Holland, are taking nothing. I wish I could draw up a chart. Not even the good old internet has a list that I can find. HMRC does a list of withholding rates for counties with which the UK has a double-taxation agreement (I can feel your eyes glazing over) but that's for share dividends, not hard graft. Needless to say it's complicated. "Double-taxation agreement" means that the tax you pay abroad can be offset against UK tax. If you can find a country that pays you as a singer that doesn't do this then I will eat a very large and extravagant hat, topped with hat sauce and served with a large side portion of hat.

Somebody thought I wasn't clear that you should take an A1/E101 to every EU country to prevent them taking social security payments off your fee. As I said, some houses won't need one, but err on the side of caution and get one anyway. Things change.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 4, Money

2011-09-02T23:12:00.002+01:00

It's time to talk about money. But let's not get our knickers in twist about whether or not we should. We should. We are professionals after all. This is how we earn a living and anyone who does it because they think it's a lark, and that a fee is some kind of fun bonus, will probably end up on the scrap head faster than a soprano can flutter her eyelashes (albeit in vain) at a casting director. 
When I was young no-one told me about tax. When you sing abroad, with very very few exceptions, you will have tax deducted from your gross fee at source. The only places that don't, off the top of my head, are the Netherlands and Monaco, though don't ask me why. The tax rate varies wildly from nation to nation. Last time I was there, Italy and Spain took 25%. That's about the going rate you should expect, and as I said in Gob 1, they will usually take it off your airfare too.  
In the USA you pay not only 30% Federal tax but a State tax too. In California it's another 7%. In Germany there was a time when they were trying to discourage footballers from living over the border in Lichtenstein so they hit any non-resident earners with a massive surtax. Add onto that the reunification tax and singers found themselves having over 50% of their fee withheld in taxes. 

At the end of your job, the opera house will send or give you a fee statement which will show how much tax they have withheld. They may also give you a tax certificate. Either way, these are EXTREMELY important documents. Put them in a safe place. When you come to do your annual tax return back in Britain, you give these documents to your accountant. He then gives them to the Inland Revenue as proof that you have already paid so much tax and, in principal, this is offset against any tax you are due to pay on your annual earnings. If you work abroad enough in a year there's every chance that you will end up paying no income tax in Britain because you've already paid enough abroad. So, the fact that foreign companies withhold tax can seem a bit rich when it happens but at least it saves you the bother of having to set aside a chunk of your fee for the tax man, which is what you sensibly should do with every job (but which practically no-one I know actually does).
I'll spare you a long and dreary discourse on more complex matters to do with this tax stuff. Be warned that some accountants don't fully understand the complexities of "foreign tax credits" so make sure you have an accountant who does. From time to time the Inland Revenue gets snippy about the issue and threatens various measures that would be bad news (like we need more of that...) for the struggling singer. But so far so good. 

Reading an opera house's pay statement can be a baffling experience. In France it will have all kinds of things that seem to be deductions from your fee but which (so long as you have given them the precious E101/A1 that I warned you about in Gob 1) are in fact all paid by your employers. If you haven't got the E101/A1 then a whole slew of your dosh will be winging its way to various organisations from which you'll never get it back. 
However, the nice surprise in France is Congés Spectacles. French theatres are obliged to pay you holiday pay. The amount depends on the length of time you have worked there and the fee you were paid. With your payslip you will be given a small blue Congés Spectacles slip. It's another important document. My first, because I had no idea what it was, ended up in a bin. These days it's all done online and here is the website with an English explanation of what it is. 
 http://www.conges-spectacles.com/congesspectaclesite/jsp/index.jsp

It may seem like a lot of faff, but come the spring after you have done a French job you can find yourself picking up a nice little bonus. It's well worth it. Quaintly, you can even book a discounted holiday train with SNCF. I've never done that bit but it does conjure up wonderful images of French theatricals pottering off to the seaside à la Monsieur Hulot. (Mon Dieu, I hope you get that reference...).
The ONLY theatre I have encountered in France that refuses to pay the CS is the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. I think they're breaking European employment law but they say they're not. It's a long and frustrating story and too dull for these pages.  

If you work in Germany you may find yourself subscribed to a German pension fund. I'm sorry, at the moment I have no more info on this but it's something to look out for (and something which somebody might like to comment on at the bottom of this post... hint hint).
American houses will make you join the union, AGMA. You have no choice. It's $500 to join and they take 2% of your fee. There are benefits though, the best of which is their Health Fund. You will end up with a pot of money they hold which can be released to pay medical bills (including visits to your dentist or a new pair of specs) - though they only pay out in dollars of course, though the expense can take place at home in Britain in pounds. 

If you earn an awful lot in France then you'll end up having to do a French tax return with the help of a French accountant. German fest singers will have to do the same. I've never had to do either.

So, your massive fee that you thought was going to keep you in champagne and frocks for quite a while is already looking a lot smaller. You've had to pay for digs and you'll have to leave behind the tax. That's about 35% of your fee already accounted for, if you're lucky. You're probably going to have to pay your agent at least 12.5% of your gross fee too (plus VAT). Take off various other expenses like local travel and food and the fee is down to half what it was when you signed the contract. And that's your usual rule-of-thumb. Any foreign fee: slice it in half for an idea of your take-home pay. 

I talked in Gob 3 about the people you should befriend in an opera house. I didn't mention one other person: the money guy. Somewhere there'll be a man (well, it's usually a man) who you have to see about money. Normally you'll take him a copy of your air ticket and your A1/E101. He'll ask you where you want the fee wired at the end of the job (though in Barcelona they open a Spanish bank account for you into which they pay your fees and leave the rest up to you). There are some houses, but hardly any, who will pay you a rehearsal fee or per diem of some sort. If not, some houses will let you take half or a whole fee (minus tax, natch) in advance of the first night so that you can pay some bills. Some won't. Your agent should be able to find this out before you get there. That advance can be a life-saver.
Imagine you're starting a job abroad in late January. You're paying a mortgage or rent on a home in Britain. You haven't worked since a few Messiahs before Christmas (but for which you still haven't been paid). Christmas itself was crucifyingly expensive what with the new Mario X-Wii Play-Nintendo that the kids had been clamouring for and the cost of having your entire family including two grandmas stay for a week. You've had to shell out for the flight to the new job and the landlord of your digs wants a fat deposit as well as a full month's rent on arrival. And it being the end of January, it's time to pay your UK tax bill. The upcoming job pays well, but there are six weeks' rehearsal and you won't open until mid March. Your bank account is already in the red and your credit cards are groaning under the weight of debt. You arrive in the exciting city for the exciting job you've been looking forward to for ages. How on earth are you going to feed yourself for the next six weeks? 
Ooh, that was a bit gloomy but I hope you get my point. Think ahead. Plan. The last thing you want (but which unfortunately I know too well) is the feeling that when you've finished the lovely job abroad all you've done financially is fill a big fat hole. 
Keep every receipt you collect when working abroad. Get good at managing your accounts. Being something of a nerd I have a spreadsheet app on my iPhone. I start a new spreadsheet for each job I do and in it I keep a log of all my costs, from groceries and rail fares to agent's commission. It works a treat; in a slow moment during a rehearsal when I've nothing better to do, I can tap my expenses into the phone and keep everything up to date. I'd like to pretend that was cool, but clearly it isn't.

Oh, and one last thing. I can bet you all the tea in the Coliseum canteen, that when you are in the last week of the foreign gig with the prospect of finally sending home your fee, you will watch the exchange rate turn against you (thanks probably to an anti austerity riot in Greece or a bunch of sharp-suited wide boys having fun on Wall Street) and the fee you once thought was so huge will suddenly shrink by 5%, not because of anything you have done or could have done, but simply because that's just the way it is and no doubt will always continue to be.

Next and final Gob will be called KEEPING YOUR HEAD TOGETHER.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 3, The Work

2011-08-26T18:03:00.000+01:00

So how come you have landed this fancy job in a far-off land? Well, as often as not you discover that they really wanted someone else but ended up with you instead. Don’t worry. Get over it. It’s how the world works. You’ll be amazed once you step onto mainland Europe just how many singers there are in the business, most of whom you have never heard of, all singing away and scratching a living.

Don’t let it daunt you. Just be thankful for the job you have and realise that it’s OK to be a small fish (that no-one has heard of) in a very big sea. You’re in good company and you must have done something right or you wouldn’t be here in the first place.

It also makes you realise that your paranoia that various casting directors “don’t like you” is almost certainly misplaced. They have a huge pool of people to choose from, most of whom are actually (like you) terribly good. The fact they don’t hire you isn’t personal. It simply means they already have a good supply of people they know and like.

We all need to be reminded from time to time that we’re all good at what we do. Sometimes things just don’t go our way, and that’s how it goes. Don’t dwell on it. Move on. Someone who used to be high up in Welsh National Opera’s administration once told me that casting often came down to whose file happened to be on top of the pile on a given day. That’s how random it can be.

British singers are well-liked and trusted abroad. We are considered very calm and professional, hard working and not prone to tantrums or funny tricks. In some cultures, the throwing of a “sickie” in order to do a job elsewhere is quite common (though it’s pretty dumb these days when you can find who’s singing what and where at the few clicks of a mouse) but Brits are considered to be too honest for those pranks. I’ve met many foreign directors who love the British school of acting. They think we are subtle, cunning, funny and willing to try anything. Our standard of musicianship is also very high and we have the reputation for being responsive to suggestions and ideas. We’re considered to be expert at performing difficult modern music.

All these assets count for a lot and have probably helped secure you the job in the first place, so make sure you are well-prepared and live up to the standard. Or else.

So you’ve got your role, quite probably small to start with, and you’re in a foreign opera house. What can you expect?

Well, most opera houses look pretty-much the same the world over. They have stage doors, corridors, rehearsal rooms, offices and stages. The French, instead of saying stage right and stage left (which are also
reversed as far as Brits are concerned in several countries), say Court and Jardin. I can never remember which is which and I’ve survived intact so don’t fret about it. German houses will often have one dressing-room corridor for men and another for women, sometimes on either side of the stage. I have no idea why. Some houses have fancy dressing-rooms with daybeds, pianos, TVs and en-suite bathrooms. Many decidedly do not. (I don’t recommend the loos in the otherwise beautiful Reggio Emilia opera house. A hole in the floor awaits you.) In the Teatro Reggio in Turin they hand you an allowance of loo roll on your first day. The Teatro Real in Madrid has an abundance of uniformed flunkies backstage who don’t seem to do anything at all except become agitated if you try and fetch yourself a glass of water.

It’s the people who really make an opera house and while the people who work in opera houses are generally jolly the world over they do tend to conform to a few national stereotypes.

German houses tend to be kunst factories, knocking out one show after another. The fest system does tend to ingrain a clock-in, clock-out mentality into a lot of contract singers. German opera houses are generally efficient places with well-run canteens serving German food but not filled with much joie-de-vivre. Many, except the top Stadt houses, do all their rep in German. You really need to speak German to get on in the German system.

Italian houses are everything you expect them to be: chaotic and crazy. It’s piss-up in a brewery time. There are swarms of people who probably inherited their job from a relative and who have very little to do except sit around and gossip. The volume of backstage chat during a show can be astounding. And yet for all the huge number of people working in the house, you can find it very difficult to speak to someone who can actually deal with a particular problem you’re having. Bring a lot of patience to Italy and smile at the chaos.

Spain and France are more organised, the latter prone to strikes and walk-outs. The French divide singers into Lyrique (singing over acting) and Comique (acting over singing) and can be a bit snotty about the latter. The Dutch and Belgians are laid back but efficient and generally very helpful.

American houses are by far the friendliest and most welcoming. Performers are treated with respect and politeness, though you are expected to return the compliment by attending large numbers of fund-raisers and social events where you rub shoulders with immensely wealthy patrons who know next to nothing about opera but whose pockets are deep.

Never swear in American opera houses. It is NOT done. Don’t wear perfume or aftershave either. A lot of houses have strict rules about these things.

Your first port of call is the company manager or artists’ liaison. Be nice to this person as your happiness can be in their hands. They usually speak English, though not always very well. Some will give you a welcome pack full of useful information about the house and the city. Some will not. The rule of thumb tends to be that the smaller the house the more helpful the company manager. Big houses often have several and they’ve seen it all. They’re hardly likely to be impressed by a squirt like you.

The other people you need to cultivate are the stage manager, the assistant director (if he or she is on the house staff) and the music staff. These are terribly important people and your relationship with them can make all the difference not only to your immediate work but to your career. They will also, in my experience, be the best people to talk to about local knowledge; where to eat, where to buy groceries, how the trams work etc. Often they can become your friends. (Many music staffers are also more than happy to earn a few extra quid on the side if you pay them to coach you on something you have coming up.)

Most houses plan their rehearsals on a day-to-day basis. You’ll be telephoned or emailed in the evening with the next day’s planning. If you’re doing a small role this can mean you end up with days and days of no rehearsal but without the luxury of being able to make any plans, let alone pop back home. It can be very, very frustrating, especially if you’ve had to turn down, say, a concert because you’ve been expressly told that the opera house cannot spare you any time at all and they won’t give you the NA. Don’t moan about it too much. It happens to us all.

Use the free days to sight-see, to do something you don’t always allow yourself the luxury of doing at home (for me it’s reading), to get some exercise, to learn your next role. You probably won't though. You’ll end
up doing what a lot of us do – getting up late and wasting the day doing sod-all.

It is usually stipulated that you can’t leave the city without permission to do so. That doesn’t mean you can’t do a day trip on a train but you should think twice before flying off anywhere without asking the company manager. Once the show has opened, presuming you have a couple of days off between performances, you can go further afield (though you’re still supposed to ask) but you will have to be back in the city the night before your next performance.

The Icelandic volcanic ash episode made it quite clear how you can’t casually assume that you are always able to get anywhere in Europe in an hour or two. I was performing in Amsterdam at the time of The Ash and had to spend all day on trains getting back to the Netherlands Opera from London in time for my next show. Our mezzo, trying to get there from

Sweden

, didn’t make it, losing thousands of pounds on cancelled flights as well as the fee for the show she missed. Between shows is a good time to go off and do some auditions for other houses, if you can get them, but don’t venture further than you can travel back with an alternative to flying. Just in case.

German houses usually rehearse in the morning and evening with the afternoon free. It can be a culture-shock and it is worth bearing in mind when booking your digs. You don’t want to make the mistake I made of having to spend all afternoon travelling back and forth to a dreary flat in the suburbs of Frankfurt from the opera’s equally dreary rehearsal space many miles away in another corner of the city. In Germany it pays

to live near the opera house.

Some houses have very flexible working hours and you can find that there’s just one rehearsal a day, say from midday to 5 pm with a long break in the middle. Very civilised. In smaller houses with a limited season and no other shows on the go you may find yourself rehearsing on stage almost from day one.

Rehearsals, particularly the further south you go, can be scatty and erratic. I’ve grown quite used to having pretty-well no direction at all. I have done whole productions where I have barely exchanged two words with the director. There’s a lot on this in Who’s My Bottom? My advice: bring lots of your own ideas. Don’t expect to be told anything apart from where to come on and where to go off. Be creative. They’ll love you for it and won’t hesitate in taking all the credit.

Germany

there’s every chance that production will be heavy on Konzept. There’ll be machine guns instead of swords, comedies will be played as tragedies and, god help us, someone will sing an aria into a mobile phone. In America everything will probably be very old-fashioned and literal and all the baritones will have regulation goatee beards. There are no hard-and-fast rules on this. Except the German bit.

As for conductors… there are some real doozies out there and many of them work in opera houses. In Italy I have experienced the strange phenomenon of the maestro (and do call them maestro, especially in the States) who won’t come to any staging rehearsals but who thinks everything can be sorted out in music calls.

It must be a hangover from the park-and-bark era where people didn’t really move much on stage; they just assumed a position near the front of stage and bellowed.

Again, don’t assume you’ll ever develop much of a working relationship with the conductor. Sometimes it happens and often it doesn’t. Many aren’t that much inclined to give you notes or discuss anything with you.
That’s the job of the music staff, in the bad conductor’s opinion. They may also insist on a prompter, in which case you have the joy of someone hissing words every few seconds, slapping the stage to keep time and generally being a nuisance bang in the middle of the front of the stage. If there is a prompter you won’t get any cues from the conductor. That’s not his job. His job is the orchestra. It’s seriously strange.

So, all-in-all it can be a thrilling, bumpy ride. Oh and just to make it even more interesting, in some houses the first night audiences are made up of über-wealthy subscribers who secretly hate opera but who love showing off their latest mistress/boyfriend/shoes/jewellery. You bust your balls trying to get them interested but they are simply not. Not unless you’re a household name. It can be seriously dispiriting when the patter of applause at the curtain call is drowned out by the sound of Porsches revving up outside the opera house doors.

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 2, Logistics

2011-08-25T17:25:00.003+01:00

Whenever I’m heading off on a foreign job, my friend Stan, awriter, asks me if I am being met with a limo at the airport and transported toa five star hotel.

Ha!

Okay, okay, if the job is some concerts with a niceorchestra then there is a good chance you’ll be met and driven to a decenthotel (though, curiously, never in Berlin…) but opera is almost always adifferent beast and before you arrive in a new and unfamiliar city all mostcompanies will do for you is tell you when and where your first rehearsal takesplace. The rest is up to you.

DIGS

This isn’t to say that opera houses won’t help you finddigs. They will, but I find that I almost never use the proffered digs becausethey are usually much more expensive (but also much pokier) than digs I canfind on the internet. This is something that has definitely changed since thebirth of the internet, and massively for the better.

Here’s a short extract from mybook Who’s My Bottom? penned in the days before broadband and wifi. Theprices are a little old; you can add 33% at least. I should also point out herethat 99% of the time you will have topay for your digs out of your own pocket.

---

Ifyou imagine that all opera singers are wealthy camelhair coated, Rolex-wearingtypes who lead a plush existence in five-star hotels and chauffer-driven limos,then you already have most of the qualifications needed to become the landlordof a rented apartment in a foreign city. Say the words “opera singer” to anyonewith whom you are going to perform a financial transaction and you canvirtually hear the cash-register ker-chink ringing inside their heads, or seetheir eyes spin like the wheels on a one-armed bandit stopping on a line ofcherries.

Howit usually works is this: the opera house for which you are going to work willhave a list of apartments available to rent for a couple of months - these areusually owned by people with connections to the theatre – and for which youpersonally will have to fork out quite incredible sums of money. You can findyourself in an apartment that a “normal” tenant would rent for £200 a month,albeit on a longer let, but for which you pay £1500. How do they get away withit? First, by keeping the price slightly lower than the cost of a hotel.Second, by knowing that it’s a Hobson’s choice. Most of the time you have noidea what the going rate is until you are well and truly committed.

Furthermore,you usually arrive at night-time, tired and laden with luggage, too grateful tohave stopped travelling to exercise your best judgement on the comfort-to-costratio when surveying your new home, and it is usually not until 48 hours laterthat you start to realise that you have been well and truly ripped off. Whenyou search in vain for a halfway decent kitchen knife or cheese-grater you realisethat once again you’ve been duped; how naïve of you to expect these things whenyou’re handing over such vast wads of cash! Oh yes, and the owners of theseplaces always want cash alright, strictly hush-hush and well before you’ve evensmelled a pay cheque for the job in hand.

Ionce arrived in Lausanneon a cold November night and checked into what was a very comfy littleapartment for which I was paying enough to put the entire Family Robinsonthrough yodelling school. The only snag was that the phone didn’t seem to workand I couldn’t ring home to say I was safe and sound, nor could I connect mylaptop so that I could e-mail. The ritual of getting satisfactorily connectedup gives me perverse pleasure, and to prove it I have a small sack positivelybulging with phone gizmos, adapters and cables, of which I am absurdly proud. Imanaged to contact the landlord the next day.

“Is everything alright? It’s a lovelyapartment. Very desirable.”

Yes,fine, only I can’t get the phone to work.

“Phone?! No it is not connected. You wanta phone??! Haven’t you got a cellphone?”

Wellyes of course but the cost of international calls is prohibitive.

“Oh (thinking: but you are surely a camel-hair coated Rolex wearer whodoesn’t give a toss about the cost of a phone-call), well in that case I’m going to have to rip you off even more and chargeyou another £100 to have a phone connected.” (Or words to that effect.)

Blimey(or words to that effect).

Inthe end, outraged by such tactics, I decided to manage without a landline andopted for a Swiss SIM card for my British mobile (to make incoming callscheaper) and spent long hours in freezing phone booths talking to my childrenvia cheap phone cards.

Thesame landlord, when it was time for me to leave ripped me off again.

“Have you arranged for the apartment to becleaned after you leave?”

“I beg your pardon? I am very clean and I’ll hoover, strip the bed etc…”

“But when you leave a hotel someone cleansthe room for the next person and I have someone arriving very soon”

“Butsurely the person who is leaving the hotel doesn’t pay a surcharge to have theroom they are vacating cleaned?”

“No no, this is not correct. I am sorrybut you will have to pay for a cleaning service!”….. and I ended up, fool that I am, coughing up theSwiss franc equivalent of £85. For that price I hope they polished the floorswith wax rendered from the rarest Edelweiss. But I got my revenge by notstripping the bed and leaving the place just a little bit grubby. I also didn’town up to the fact that a knob on the washing machine had broken off in my(ahem) vice-like grip and I’d bodged it back on really rather better than wasnecessary with some glue and a chunk of a chopstick. That showed him.

---

Recently my wife Lucy was working in Geneva. The opera’s list of digs mostlyconsisted of apartment hotels that cost over £3000 a month for a studio room.She found a large well-equipped flat for less than half the price by spendingsome time online.

Some points:

You can ask your agent to handle all your travel arrangements and digs but, frankly I think they have more important fish to fry, like finding you work. In my experience the fewer people that get involved the better; ultimately it is you who are going to live in the digs for two months so why not make the effort to find a place you like and can afford rather than risk the choice to someone else? You wouldn’t do it for a holiday so why do it for work?
Ask on Facebook for recommendations. Google “apartments for rent”. I often use www.homelidays.co.uk and www.halldis.com . Make sure you ask for a discount for a long stay. My top priorities are: location (make sure you can get back there after a show but I don’t see any real need to be within spitting distance of the theatre – just be near good public transport), internet access and laundry facilities. You’ll be living out of a suitcase for eight weeks so your wardrobe will be in the machine a lot.
Staying with friends and family will save you money but you’re in town to work and the hours you lead are often at odds with “civilian” hours. Relying on someone’s hospitality for two months can be the quickest way to lose friends.
Book your digs at least three months in advance. Don’t rush into a choice.
You will almost certainly have to pay a deposit in advance and you may have to pay for the full rental as soon as you arrive. That’s just the way it is.
Use Google Street-view to check out the area where you’re planning to stay. It’s amazing how much information you can pick up.
Keep in mind what your needs are going to be for the entire rental. If you’re planning to have friends or family over, make sure you have room. On the other hand, there’s no point in paying a fortune for a two-bedroom flat if it’s going to be just you for the whole time or if you think the odd visitor can actually make do on a blow-up bed for a couple of nights.

TRAVEL

Very few houses will book your travel for you. Again it’ssomething you should do yourself rather than hand over to the agent (in myhumble opinion). More and more houses these days offer a “global” fee, meaningthat it’s up to you to get to their city and they won’t pay any travel expensesat all.

Don’t necessarily take the view that as the opera house is paying your airfare it doesn’t matter how much you spend on the ticket. In most cases they will tax the amount they reimburse you. So if you spend £200 on a flight they say they’re going to pay, chances are they will only give you £150 and hold back £50 in tax.
A lot of companies, especially in Italy and Spain, have a habit of saying your first rehearsal is on, say, a Monday and then at the eleventh hour, say the Friday beforehand, changing that to the Wednesday. There’s not much you can do about that, especially if you’ve booked a non-changeable flight and rented your apartment from the Monday. Either turn up too soon or fork out to change your plans. Don’t expect the opera house to give a shit.
Don’t travel to a city on the morning of your first rehearsal (unless, possibly, it’s an evening rehearsal). Give yourself time to move in, get acclimatised and get your bearings. First rehearsals are nerve-wracking enough and you need to make a good impression. You don’t want to sound like you’ve just been travelling for six hours.
Make sure you know where your first rehearsal is taking place. Don’t assume it will be a short stroll from the stage door. In Milan it will probably be the other side of the city. Do some homework to make sure you know where you’re going. First impressions are very important.

OH, AND…

If you’re working in the EC (and some other counties), makesure you have your European Health Insurance card up-to-date but moreimportantly you need to apply for an A1 (used to be called an E101). I’massuming you’re paying Class 2 National Insurance in the UK (£2 a week?).The A1 certifies that you are already paying NI and nine times out of ten you’llneed to hand an A1 to each foreign opera house for each job you do. It willprevent them deducting potentially whopping rates of social security from yourfee.

Oh look! A thrilling but important link about this: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cnr/osc.htm

Your agent can prepare the paperwork for you but DON’T WHATEVER YOU DO sign a form which certifies that they can act as your agent on your behalf with the HMRC. It’s a common mistake. When HMRC says “agent” they mean “accountant”. If you sign the form you’ll suddenly find all your tax stuff is going to your agent, and neither of you wants that. Believe me. My agent prepares my A1 application forms, sends them to me so I can sign them and then I send them to HMRC.
DO THIS WELL IN ADVANCE. HMRC are hopelessly slow. I applied for an A1 in April for a concert in Berlin in May. I received it in August but luckily in this case the promoter didn’t need an A1 after all.
If you haven’t received the A1 by the time the job starts, don’t panic. The important thing is that the opera house gets it before the end of the job, when you’ll be paid.

RANDOM

If you’re not flying on Easyjet or Ryanair (but there’s every chance you are!) then do join frequent flyer programmes. Some day you may get lucky and find yourself flown business class on a few long haul flights (it does happen, especially to the far east) and you’ll quickly earn enough miles for free flights and upgrades. Hotel loyalty cards too. Think like a corporate lacky.
Get a non-commission credit card like this one http://www2.postoffice.co.uk/finance/credit-cards-loans/credit-card . Most credit cards charge you hidden amounts of commission every time you use them abroad. The Post Office card is one of the few cards that doesn’t.
In the future you may have to consider getting a second passport. This is so you can submit one to an embassy for a visa and continue to travel for work on the other. There’s nothing dodgy about this though it’s unlikely to be hurdle you’ll have to jump for a few years.
If you do find yourself being booked for work in countries which require you to have a visa (USA, Australia, Japan, Russia…) then the employer will certainly have to help you, but you’ll probably have to buy the visa yourself. A US visa is about £200 by the time you’ve paid for all the bits and bobs. Time to turn to your agent for some help and expertise.
I’m an O2 customer. Before I go to Europe for any length of time I pay about £10 per month for the MyEurope bolt-on which cuts a fortune on roaming charges. Incoming calls cost me nothing and Lucy (and anyone on O2) can call me for free on my mobile. I’m sure every mobile company has a similar package. Worth setting up before you go. I have in the past bought local SIMs and stuck them in a second phone but I don’t think it’s worth it any more.
Why not enrol for the IRIS programme? It can save hours. http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs-travel/Enteringtheuk/usingiris/

Next post will be about THE WORK (though reading Who’s My Bottom? will give you a pretty comprehensive insight into that…)

Gillett's Gobs Of Advice: 1, Getting Started Abroad

2011-08-23T19:26:00.000+01:00

I’ve promised to hand out of gobs of knowledge to the youngsingers who attended British Youth Opera’s career advice day (and also to thosewho didn’t) so if you’ve come to the blog today hoping to read about, say,barmy tenors, pancakes or train journeys you’ll be bitterly disappointed. Youmight learn a thing or two though. Some of this is stuff I said at the seminar,some of it is new.

GETTING FOREIGN WORK

Getting work abroad in the first place is pretty difficultunless you have an agent. Well, that certainly always used to be the case, butit is feasible that you can simply contact the casting department at most operahouses and see if they’ll give you a general audition. And who knows what mighthappen next? Certainly it shouldn’t put you off because for all the auditionsyou do that provoke no response whatsoever, you will possibly do one that hassomeone in the stalls thinking “Eureka!”

Very few casting directors will give you feedback, though thereare some who will tell you exactly what they think straight afterwards whileyou’re still gasping and trembling in the wings.

Some companies send people to London to hear singers, but not so much thesedays, and if they do you can bet that the agents have all their timepretty-well sewn up.

My first work abroad didn’t come as a result of auditions.It came from British-based directors and conductors asking for me to be hiredby foreign companies for their productions. And that would be true for manysingers I know.

If you want to work abroad then your best bet is probablybaroque repertoire (especially if it’s in English) and modern British musicfrom Britten onwards. There are a lot of foreign companies who recognise theneed to have Britten operas in their repertoire but who aren’t entirelycomfortable with casting them. They know who would be best for, say, Verdi, butnot for Britten. I once found myself helping a Franco-Russian director in Rome cast “A MidsummerNight’s Dream”. All he could see was a list of British names but I knew whichones would be good for the piece and which ones wouldn’t. If you go to aforeign house and try and sell yourself as a Nemorino, you’re up againstsingers from every corner of the earth who are also selling themselves asNemorino. If you sell yourself as a Novice (from Billy Budd), you’ve narroweddown the competition by a massive margin. So bear that in mind when you chooseyour rep and when you’re thinking about what it is you are trying to achieve byauditioning in the first place.

Unless you have a Green Card I wouldn’t think aboutauditioning for American companies at the outset. The visa issues are immense.US opera companies won’t generally consider hiring you unless it’s for astarring role or something veryspecialised for which they can’t use one of their own, and even those roles areextremely rare. The unions are verystrict about keeping American work for American singers. You will probably findthat your first work in the States is as part of a visiting company on tour. Though,just because I can, I will enlighten you in future posts about some of the joysand pitfalls of working there. It’ll be fun!

On the one hand singing opera abroad can be exciting andthrilling, but on the other it can be soul-destroying, lonely and miserable.There’s no escaping this and I’d be deceiving you if I didn’t make this clear. Ifyou are a travel junkie like me (and I use the word “junkie” advisedly) itpresents enormous possibilities. You can truly immerse yourself in anotherculture for a significant amount of time, visit fantastic museums at yourleisure, buy food at wonderful markets… always remembering though that you arethere to work and you may find that all you actually want to do at the end of aday’s rehearsals is buy a frozen pizza and slob out in front of the TV. Youwouldn’t be alone. It’s what a lot of singers do. More on that later.

There’s no doubt about it: singing abroad is generally goodfor you domestic career. Apart from the fact that it gives you a certain amountof kudos, learning and performing a role away from the acid gaze of the London critics can bevery useful. What can be better than bringing a role home that you’ve conqueredabroad?

The fees abroad are generally much higher than at home. I’vebeen paid four times what I get at ENO for the same role. But don’t let thesize of the fee fool you into thinking you have struck it rich. More on thatlater too. Besides, I’m afraid the recession is hitting everywhere and fees areshrinking the world over. More good news eh?

That’s it for this gob. Next time I’ll be writing about LOGISTICS.Thrilling stuff, but which comes to occupy your every wakingmoment once you are climbing the greasy pole. Believe me.

Hardy's dog

2011-08-17T15:20:00.001+01:00

Thomas Hardy lived outside Dorchester in a house called Max Gate. He often entertained famous guests to lunch, many of whom were surprised to see the great author share his meal with his pets. Most notable of his animals was his terrier Wessex who would climb on the lunch table and snatch food from visitors. He was also famously vicious. Wessex is buried in the garden of the house, which is where I caught up with him just a couple of weeks ago.

CG: Hello!
Wessex: Morning guvnor. Where to? Just so long as it's not south of the river.
CG: I beg your pardon?
Wessex: Sorry, sorry. Later incarnation of me messing with the psychic ectoplasmic thingamybob. Yeah, after I died, I was reborn as a London cabbie. Not many people know that.
CG: Interesting.
Wessex: Yeah. If was you I wouldn't go round the other side of the garden. All dug up innit. Go the long way around from the other side. Might seem like it's longer but it'll take the same time. Honest.
CG: Oh OK. I was hoping to ask you about some of the people that came to Max Gate.
Wessex: Oh, yeah, well, I seen them all haven't I? You watch the football last night? Oh deary deary me.
CG: Uh no, missed it. Um, the famous people?
Wessex: Oh yeah. Well, that A E Housman, I bit him a couple of times.
CG: You bit him?
Wessex: Oh absolutely mate. I've bitten all the greats I have. Yeah, Housman, Siegfried Sassoon, Rudyard Kipling, er... Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw...
CG: You bit George Bernard Shaw?
Wessex: Oh yeah. Irish tosser, pardon my french. I was on the table as I always was and there was this beardy git yacking on and on, and all I wanted was a sausage...
CG: But Shaw was a vegetarian. He wouldn't have had a sausage.
Wessex: Well, yeah, I know that NOW but at the time I thought he was just being a stingy bastard didn't I? So I bit him. On the hand as I recall. That shut him up. Yeah. Who else? Gustav Holst. Sounded a bit dodgy to me. German. Well he didn't sound German but his name was German and that was good enough for me. Bloody Germans, coming over here, stealing all our sausages...
CG: Who else did you bite?
Wessex: Mrs Patrick Campbell. She was lovely. Tasted of violets. Oh and Virginia Wolf. Another one that went on and on and on. Scrawny cow though. My teeth went straight through to the bone. That James Barrie, he was tasty. Robert Graves too. Ah, now, wait though. I'll tell you who I never bit and that was that T E Lawrence. You know, the one from Arabia? Yeah there was something about him. He was always willing to give me his sausage. A real gent. So I didn't bite him. Didn't say much though. Much shorter than he looked in pictures. Yeah whoever caused that accident wot killed him should be strung up if you ask me. Only language they understand. And I'll tell you something else for free: what happened to national service? Eh? That's wot I want to know.
CG: Well this has been fascinating, but I must go.
Wessex: Right that'll be seventeen quid. Mind if I drop you here? Can't get any closer.
CG: Er...
Wessex: Shit, sorry. Bloody ectoplasmic whotsitsname.
CG: Thanks very much.
Wessex: Cheers mate. Mind how you go.

If O2 ran the Royal Opera

2011-07-22T12:40:00.001+01:00

Scene: the auditorium of the Royal Opera House. A stage and orchestra rehearsal of Vito Odafone's opera "La Merde d'Orange" is in progress. In the pit, conducting, is the Music Director Tony Mobile. He's generally very happy with the progress of rehearsals but the soprano keeps singing a wrong note. He picks up the telephone on the wall of the pit behind him and dials 0800.

"Welcome to ROH O2 Performer Services!" says a cheery voice.
"Ah, hello..."
"The number for ROH O2 Performer Servies has changed!" continues the recorded voice. "Please dial 0844 1234578973623322!"
The line falls dead.
Maestro Smith finds something to write on and a pencil, redials the 0800 number and writes down the new number. He dials the new number.
"Welcome to ROH O2 Performer Services!" says a different cheery voice.
"Hello! I just..."
"If you want to find out how much rehearsal time you have left, press One! If you wish to add more rehearsal time, press Two! If you are thinking of leaving the production, press Three! For all other enquires, press Four!"
Smith presses 4.
"Hello!"
"Ah, hello..."
"I'm sorry we are experiencing a high volume of enquiries at the moment. Please wait while we try to connect you to a member of our performer services team!"
Smith holds the phone well away from his ear while the phone blares some 80s rock music at him.
After a minute or so a distorted voice comes on the line.
"Hello. You are through to Performer Services."
Smith waits, assuming this is another recorded message.
"HELLO! Performer Services. My name is Kumar. This call is being recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How can I help you?"
"Oh sorry, hello. The soprano is singing a wrong note and..."
"Can I have your production name please."
"Oh. La Merde d'Orange."
"Fantastic. And a few security questions. What is your name?"
"Anthony Mobile"
"Brilliant. And are you the prime conductor of this production?"
"Yes, I am"
"Brilliant. And can I have your password please."
"Pardon? Oh, I didn't know I had one. Um, crikey what could it be. Can you give me a hint?"
"Your mother's maiden name."
"Oh, Cellulare."
"Sensational. And the first line of your current address."
"Royal Opera House."
"Brilliant, Fantastic. And how can I help you?"
"Well, the soprano is singing a wrong note. On page 124, fifteenth bar, she keeps singing an F when it should be an F sharp."
"Hmm. One moment sir, but I don't see you on our system as the conductor of this production."
"What? But I'm the Music Director of the Royal Opera!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, you've been put through to the Visiting Conductor service team. Hang on one moment and I'll put you through to our Music Director team."
Again the 80s rock plays through the earpiece.
"Hello! You are through to Music Director performer services. My name is Jarleen. This call is being recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How may I help you?"
"Well, the soprano is singing a wrong note. On page 124, fifteenth bar, she keeps singing an F when it should be an F sharp."
"OK, brilliant. First we'll have to go through some security questions."
"Oh god, not again."
"Sorry?"
"Never mind."
"Right sir, What is your name?"
"Anthony Mobile"
"Brilliant. And are you the Music Director of this opera house?"
"Yes, I am"
"Great. And what's the name of your current production?"
"La Merde d'Orange."
"Brilliant. And can I have your password please."
"Cellulare."
"Fantastic. And the first line of your current address."
"Royal Opera House."
"Brilliant, Fantastic. And how can I help you?"
"Well, the soprano is singing a wrong note. On page 124, fifteenth bar, she keeps singing an F when it should be an F sharp."
He can hear typing on a keyboard.
"Brilliant. And when did this problem start?"
"Well, day one, really. A month ago."
"Fantastic. OK well it's in the system now and we'll make sure that gets seen to. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
"Well, every time I ring the number you gave me to call Performer Services, 0800, I have to redial and then I get put through to the Visiting Conductor line and then be redirected through to you. Can we get that fixed?"
"Brilliant. Let me have a look." There's tapping at a keyboard. "Well, Mr Bomile, according to the computer that shouldn't be happening."
"But it IS happening."
"Brilliant. Well, I'll put a note on the system and have our team have a look at it."
"Thank you. Good bye."
He hangs up.
An hour later, while he's conducting Act 3, the phone in the pit flashes at him. He picks up the receiver, worrying that some calamity has happened.
"Hello. Am I speaking to Mr Mobile?"
"Yes"
"My name is Brooklette and I'm calling from Cello Customer Surveys on behalf of ROH O2 Performer Services and I was wondering if you have a few moments to take part in a survey about your recent experience contacting their Performer Services team."
"Well I'm quite busy right now"
"The survey will only take a couple of minutes."
"Oh alright then."
"Fantastic. This call is being recorded for training and monitoring purposes. On a scale of five to one where five is Very Satisfied and one is Very Dissatisfied, how would you rate your recent overall experience with the ROH O2 Performance Services team?"
"Well, the soprano is still singing the wrong note."
"I'm sorry sir, I'm not here to address the nature of your original problem. We are an independent survey company that has been commissioned by ROH O2 Performer Services to help them assess the performance of their Performance Services team."
"Well in that case I would have to say One, Very Dissatisfied."
"And how well would you say they performed it tackling your particular problem?"
"One. Very Dissatisfied."
"And how would you rate the friendliness of the members of the team who dealt with your problem? Five for very friendly, one for very unfriendly."
"Well they were friendly enough but they didn't solve the problem. Three. This is turning into a colossal waste of time."
"Brilliant. Just one more question. Given your recent experience how likely are you to stay with the Royal Opera? Five for Very Likely, one for Very Unlikely."
"Five."
"Fantastic. Thank you Mr Bromide."
The next morning Tony Mobile receives a text message from ROH O2 Performer Services. It says "Thank you for contacting ROH O2 Performer Services. We have sent you an email about the problem."
Mobile fires up his computer and his email programme but there is no email from ROH O2 Performer Services.
At the morning's rehearsal the soprano is still singing the wrong note.
Then he gets another text message. "We are sorry you have been unhappy with your recent experience. We take our performer servicing very seriously and one our Team will be contacting you shortly to discuss the issues you have raised. Please do not reply to this message."
Again, the next morning Tony Mobile receives another text message from ROH O2 Performer Services. Again it says "Thank you for contacting ROH O2 Performer Services. We have sent you an email about the problem."
Still there is no email.
He decides, much though he dreads it, to ring the 0800 number again.
"Welcome to ROH O2 Performer Services!" says a cheery voice.
"Ah, hello..."
"The number for ROH O2 Performer Servies has changed!" continues the recorded voice. "Please dial 0844 1234578973623322!"

Come the first night, the soprano is still singing the wrong note.

So the tenorman told when he had grown old

2011-07-19T15:43:00.002+01:00

SometimesArt and Life can collide in the most extraordinary way, where each informs andenlightens the other.

RichardSuart is one of my oldest and closest friends. Two weeks ago his 26 year-oldson Christopher died after a battle with cancer that first struck him as infantleukaemia, which was beaten back by chemotherapy, and which then re-emerged twoyears ago as tumours in his brain. I didn't know him much as an adult but Istill remember him as a newborn, before he first became ill.

Yesterdaywas his memorial service and the church was full of Christopher's friends, allin their 20s. In fact I'd say I lost it as soon as I saw the first group ofthem, smartly dressed but not in mourning, waiting for the service to begin. Somuch for the "me-me" generation who think of no-one but themselves.Here were well over a hundred young adults who had come to share the pain oflosing of a friend in a way I don’t think my generation would ever had done.

Theservice was extraordinary. Richard spoke, brilliantly, and two of Christopher’sfriends too, their tributes full of funny stories about him, his humour, hiskindness and his lust for life. As a child Christopher had struggled to makefriends - a symptom of his combat with his disease and his long periods ofhospitalisation - but he'd later flowered at a local theatre club and then atuniversity.

Andof friends he clearly had no shortage. Someone wrote and played a song. Tearswere shed by the gallon. But there was no anger, no sense of outrage atChristopher's too-short life; just wonderful memories, deep gratitude to haveknown him and lots and lots of love.

Andthen the vicar spoke.

Earlierin the week I could think about nothing but vicars.

There'sgoing to be a memorial service for Bob Tear in King's Chapel, Cambridgein November (as well as the one planned in London in September) and I'm very touchedthat Philip Ledger has asked me to sing a few songs with him in tribute to Bob.We've been figuring out what to do and there was no doubt that we must performBritten's The Choirmaster's Burial from "Winter Words", his cycle ofThomas Hardy settings. The poem, related by "the tenorman", tellswhat happens when the choirmasterdies - "choir" relatingnot to singers but to a choir ofviols or "lutes", commonplace in the West Country before churchesinstalled organs. Hardy's novel "Under The Greenwood Tree" is allabout this. The choirmaster hasasked his players that when he dies, they'll play his favourite psalm, Mount Ephraim,at his burial but the new-school vicar poo-poos the idea as old-fashioned andhe is buried in silence. That night the vicar is awoken by the sound of the choir, dressed in white, playing and singing Mount Ephraimat the grave of their friend.

It'sa wonderful song and you can see how it just has to be sung for Bob.

Bobwrote a set of poems as a response to Winter Words which became a song cycle byJonathan Dove called "Out Of Winter" and they performed the cycletogether a few times. I'd hoped I could do their song about the vicar at Bob'smemorial. It describes how the moment the vicar said "no" his soulturned to a husk. Bob's poem is very "Bob" in that it can seem like acoruscating attack on the priest and his kin, whereas, if I had to offer mytake on it (which I suppose I do as I'm the one writing this blog) I'd say hispoint was that you don't have to wear a dog collar to understand the truenature of God. Far from it.

PhilipLedger and I discussed long and hard whether we should do the song, the worrybeing that people might miss the point Bob was making and they'd feel that hisown memorial service wasn't the place to be having a vicious dig at the clergy.So, sadly, we decided against it.

Wewant to celebrate Bob's deeply-held spirituality and the best way we can findto do that is by singing Salutation from Finzi's "Die Natalis", hissettings of Thomas Traherne. And we'll do a song from Schubert's "DieSchöne Müllerin". When Bob taught me, these were both pieces that I took to himfor lessons.

Justas the vicar who appears in Hardy’s poem (and later in Bob’s) is spirituallydisconnected from his flock so, it seemed, was the vicar at Christopher’sfuneral. He launched into a sermon that sounded as if it had been pulled from afile marked “for funerals of people who die too young”. In his third sentencehe said “death often strikes me as being at odds with nature” at which pointthe entire congregation collectively thought “what the hell are you talkingabout?” I don’t think one person therethought that death was at odds with nature. Death is entirely natural. He wenton in a vein that presumed we were all angry with his god for snatchingChristopher from us too young. And his solution to this was to ask his god intoour lives.

Hadn’the been listening? Hadn’t he heard the tributes of gratitude for Christopher?Didn’t he hear how joyous these young people had been to have knownChristopher? Had anyone manifested any sort of anger? Er, no. The only anger Iwas now feeling was that he seemed to be turning the death of my friend’s soninto a campaign to drag a large number of young adults back into his fold.

Godhad already been in the church, in the hearts of Christopher’s friends, but thevicar was so locked into his dogma and his own job description that he couldn’thear him/her.

Luckilythe vicar shut up after ten minutes, by which time no-one was listening, and wecould all lustily sing the final hymn, leave his church and hug Christopher’sfamily.

Burned at the steakhouse

2011-07-06T17:55:00.002+01:00

Thepenny has dropped. I have spent years and years wondering why American touristsin London flock to Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses and now I think I have it figuredout. Because, let's face it, you'd have to be something of an idiot to take aclose look at one and not realise that they're awful. If, like me, you grew upin the age of the Berni Inn you'll associate the word Steakhouse with somethingnaff and third-rate, barely a short step up from a Little Chef. In the States asteakhouse is an altogether different beast.

InChicago we were hunting around for places to eat. Our first night in town wewent to a Michelin-starred place called Boka which I didn't like much. Thecuisine was what you could call Italian-Pacific fusion. That stuff always makesme wary but I was up for an experiment. The first course was great - stuffedbaby squid on a bed of spinach. The second was just weird. Ravioli, filled withbeef ("steak tips"), were dotted around a large oblong plate whichwas also covered in tiny gobs of various vegetable purées as well as littlebits of morel, the odd pea and dribbles of "truffle jus". It looked amess and it tasted a mess. The ravioli were greasy and would have been fine ina good old-fashioned tomato sauce but not like this. Perhaps I wasn't in thebest of moods, having just lost my reading glasses for the second time on thetrip, but I also found the service cloying. Each item was described fully onthe menu (which in itself is overkill - I don't need to to know every singlebloody ingredient in the dish) so it struck me as fairly ridiculous when theexpeditor (the odd name they give to the bloke who delivers your food to thetable as opposed to the waiter who takes your order) laid down our plates andobsequiously described the dish in minute detail all over again. You do reach apoint where you want to tell him to just fuck off. Lucy had a fish dish withpiles of mushy red rice. The point of the redness of the rice utterly eludesme. It was a bit of a disaster and she couldn't finish it.

(Theevening was saved by seeing an excellent play, Middletown, brilliantlyperformed across the road at Steppenwolf.)

Thenext night I was in the mood for something much more old-school with whitelinen tablecloths (Boka's were black - oh puh-lease...) and less pretentiouswaiters, and the more I hunted on Yelp the more it because clear that, downtownat least, our best bet would be a steakhouse. Yelp was telling me thatsteakhouses were places where you went on special occasions, dads' birthdaysbeing a favourite, and especially when you wanted to push the boat out. Notexactly my experience of steakhouses in England but I was intrigued and as itturned out, Yelp wasn't wrong. (It was wrong about Boka though.)

Wedecided on Benny's Chop House principally because a review had described it aslike stepping onto the set of Mad Men, and that alone sounded like our idea ofa good night out.

Well,let it be said that on the evidence of Benny's a Chicago steakhouse is about assimilar to an Aberdeen Angus as a Rolls Royce is to a tricycle. The service isimpeccable for starters. Lucy had an organic, grass-fed Kansas strip and I hada 12 oz dry-aged rib. We shared two sides: a charred romaine salad and a basketof fries. The salad was the star of the meal. A romaine is split lengthways,singed on a griddle, drizzled with a citrus dressing and topped with Parmesanshavings. The fries came in a little deep-frying basket (and cost a whopping$5.99). Rather than ask us how we wanted our steaks cooked we were asked whattemperature we would like them. A new one on me. I can only guess that in acountry where meat thermometers are commonplace some people actually answerthat question with some digits. We said "medium rare". The food wasvery good but let's face it, not exactly the stuff that demands thehighest-trained chefs in the world. That's not to diss the skill of the peoplegrilling the steaks - there's nothing worse than duffly-cooked meat - but"haute cuisine" it isn't.

Thefood was expensive, no doubt about it (and I guess those poor buggers inAberdeen Angus see the menu and think they may be onto a bargain), but thedrink pricing was a whole other ballgame.

WhenI eat out in Europe I'd say the norm is to be handed the wine list with themenu and once everyone has decided what they're eating there follows adiscussion about what to drink and someone chooses a bottle. Not so in theStates. We sat down and after a moment our very slick waiter presented us witha cocktail list and the wine list. Well, being in Mad Men mode we had to ordera couple of martinis and no sooner had we done so than the waiter whisked awaythe wine list, well before we'd even seen the menu. So we had to ask for itback. Speaking personally, after a large martini there's no way I can tackle halfa bottle of wine so now we were into the realm of ordering single glasses ofwine. In fact, ordering single glasses is what they expect (and want) you todo. I don't know how they do it but waiters manage to turn drinks ordering intoa strictly one-by-one affair. Perhaps it's rooted in a culture of expenseaccounts where everyone at a table wants separate checks. I don't know, but yourealise at the end of the meal that you've spent a vast amount on a very smallamount of wine. I'm told that the typical policy is to charge for a glass whatthe restaurant actually pays for a bottle. Add onto that price sales tax anda 20% tip and it gets positivelybonkers. Lucy had a glass of an Oregon Pinot that cost $21. That's about $28(£17) by the time you've actually paid for it. For a 6oz glass. My Zinfandelwas $17. And these were on the cheaper end of the list. You can see why the DonDrapers of this world stick to Martinis at $12 a pop. Benny's Chop House sellsa Richard Hennessy cognac for an astounding $375 a glass. How that singlebrandy would then merit a $70 tip beats me, but so it goes.

Whenyou're spending that sort of money on a bevvy then you must surely be in amacho world that I find quite disgusting; one where businessmen try andout-impress each other with the size of their willies, I mean expenseallowances.

Don'tget me wrong. We had a good evening. I just think I'd rather blow $100 a headon, say, a tasting menu of small dishes at a French restaurant with a sharedbottle of wine, than a meal that, let's face it, consisted solely of a bigsteak, chips and salad, washed down with a couple of drinks. That is, afterall, all that we ate. No starters or puddings.

Sothat's your Chicago steakhouse for you.

A bitstunned, we walked around the streets of Chicago and into the lobbies of someof its astonishing buildings. Then we bought a tub of Ben & Jerry's"Americone Dream" from a Seven-Eleven and ate it with plastic spoonslying on our hotel bed, watching The Late Show.

----

I'llbe posting this from back home in England having only had time to write on theovernight flight. I had hoped to sleep but that didn't work out.

I'msure we're all used to looking around a departure area and thinking "ohplease, please, don't let me be sat next to him." No? I do it all thetime. The guy I picked out was a 70 year old Indian man who must have beensitting a good ten feet away. The thing that was bugging me was that every twominutes he would clear his throat noisily, as if dealing with a serious case ofpost-nasal drip.

Wellsure enough he's in the very next seat to me and he has cleared his throat forthe entirety of the eight hour flight. Not only that, but he has quitestupefying BO, so bad that I worry it is seeping into my clothes as well ashis.

So ifthis is full of typos I apologise but I haven't slept a wink.

Where Texas Eagles Dare

2011-06-26T23:20:00.001+01:00

I'm trying my best not to be disappointed. That's especially difficult when you haven't had much sleep. It was Lucy's last show last night and afterwards we went to The Tent (the marquee with a bar where cast and audience mingle after performances) so we could make our farewells. There had been the odd rumbles of distant thunder earlier in the evening but the skies were pretty clear. Within half an hour we were in the grip of a full midwestern storm.
Now, the weather in Saint Louis is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. For starters I'd never heard a tornado warning until this trip. Sirens blare and a barely intelligible voice echoes around the city telling everyone to get into their cellars. With recent news of Joplin, where hundreds died when a massive tornado touched down, a twister so fierce that it stripped the bark off trees, and seeing for myself Saint Louis airport, which had been hit at Easter and where half the windows are still boarded up with chipboard, you bet I was down in that cellar the moment that siren started wailing. Luckily no tornado landed on our neighbourhood but a few other parts of town got visited upon for a moment or two and the odd roof got stripped.
Thunderstorms have a habit of whipping up in an instant, or so it would appear if you're not a meteorologist. I think what they really do is zoom across the empty plains like vicious joyriders, smacking things around a bit for a few moments of noisy chaos and then leaving as quickly as they arrived. Last night's was no exception apart from the matter of its departure. It arrived quickly but it clearly liked beating up Saint Louis and so, oddly, it hung around for four hours. Only during a brief lull in the torrential rain were we able to escape The Tent and run to our car to drive home. At 3 a.m. the storm finally eased up and staggered off to bed, like a belligerent drunk.
We were up again at 6.15 and off to the railway station by 7. We're taking the Amtrak train, The Texas Eagle that began its journey more than a day ago in San Antonio, up to Chicago. I'm on it now as I blogify.
America has some fine railway stations. Washington DC's Union Station is lovely. New York's Grand Central is stunning. A pity that most useful trains go from the much duller Penn (though I would loved to have seen the old Penn Station, notoriously flattened before its destruction could be prevented). Los Angeles' Union Station is another beauty. Saint Louis used to be one of the busiest rail hubs in the country and its old Union Station reflected that - a manorial terminus built in stone. As I've blogged recently, the Amtrak station has been moved and Union Station is now a chain hotel and third-rate shopping centre. The new station is a steel-framed shed that makes Bristol Parkway and Watford Junction seem luxurious. Such a pity and a real downer when you've envisaged something from a 1930s movie, with a steaming station buffet-cum-oyster-bar (as you find in Grand Central), that's peopled with ticket clerks wearing green visors and sleeve bracelets, with porters wearing smart blue uniforms and beaming smiles.
Amtrak would have you believe many of these things and a few others besides. They offer a free checked baggage service. We thought this would be a good idea rather than handling our four suitcases ourselves. So we rolled up good and early only to be told that the service wasn't available. We waited for a half hour, not unlike waiting to board a Ryanair flight, and schlepped our luggage onto the train. The carriages on this route are double-decker and you leave your bags below and ride up top. Oddly, like Ryanair, you have a train reservation but no reserved seat. A conductor asks you where you're headed and points you into a carriage where you look for a seat that doesn't already have a ticket above it, or a person in it, and climb in. Shortly the conductor comes along (there are plenty of them on American trains), checks your ticket and scribbles out a reservation slip for the seats. That's you set for the rest of your journey. Now you can wander around the train or sit in the observation car (or Lounge Car as they call it).
Amtrak's blurb says this train has a dining car. You can even look at the menu online. There are photos with smiling chefs and white linen table cloths. I was up for a bit of this and last night had already punted on French toast with maple syrup served, so I imagined, from an elegant metal jug with Amtrak's logo on the side. And coffee in a cup, china of course. On the white linen cloth.
We asked the conductor if the dining car was open for breakfast. "The dining car is not in operation but you can buy snacks from below the lounge". Oh. No apology or explanation. No smile. That's just the way it is, and I suspect it's the way it always is on this leg of the journey. That explained why we saw several passenger detraining at Saint Louis (where the train stops for about an hour) and popping into the station's KFC for some hot, albeit disgusting food. Yes, that's what you get instead of the steaming buffet-cum-oyster-bar, a KFC and a Pizza Hut. So much for progress.
As the train crawled out of Saint Louis and across the seething Mississippi I volunteered to get us some breakfast. Lucy bagged a booth in the Lounge Car and I went downstairs. The buffet made First Great Western's seem positively opulent. A guy who had clearly been to a special Amtrak clinic to have any bonhomie surgically drained from his system responded to my request for various breakfast items from the menu in a flat negative which kind of implied I was several kinds of idiot to even ask for them.
"Two of your yoghurts please."
"There ain't any." (Thinks: what kind of moron wants yoghurt?)
I gave up scanning the menu (Bagel and Cream Cheese? Nope...Muffin? Nope...) and just ordered what I could see scattered about him. So we each had a plastic-wrapped Sara Lee cinnamon danish and coffee in paper cups. It turns out he was doing an egg, sausage and cheese muffin because someone else got one, scalding hot and still wrapped in cellophane, which can only mean it had been electrocuted in a microwave. I think I'd rather stick with the eternally "fresh" danish. Funny that, as it was trying very hard to stick to me.
Next to the Lounge we could see a Dining Car. My hackles preparing to rise, I asked a passing steward about it. "Only open to sleeper passengers" was the response. Sleeper passengers get meals included in the price of the ticket so feeding the few people I could see in there was an obligation. I couldn't see any table cloths though. Or jugs of maple syrup.
The Lounge Car is all very well with its curved ceiling windows and outside-facing seats but on this stretch of journey there is very little to look at. The countryside of Illinois is an expanse of dull farmland, mostly vast fields of corn. Otherwise it's all suburbs or, worst of all, large tracts of ruined industrial landscape. You could be forgiven for thinking, from looking out of the windows as you pass through most of these cities, that America is pretty-much broken. It's an impression that riding in its slow and inefficient trains does very little to dispel. What a pity.

Huh. No sooner had I plonked down that last full stop when something rather sweet happened. A conductor announced that there was pizza for the whole train, a slice each which we could collect from the Lounge Car. She called us in, coach by coach (there are only three coaches aside from the sleepers and the Lounge and Dining cars) and everyone took back to their seats a slice of cheese, pepperoni or sausage pizza, on an Amtrak (plastic) plate as well as some cookies, crackers and dried fruit. It looked like the pizzas has been delivered straight to the train at the station where we last stopped.
How very surprising and I've no idea why they did it. I also see that we are now running along side the old Route 66. Things are looking up. For $32 (£20) each for a ticket it seems churlish of me to moan.

A fine line

2011-06-22T04:44:00.000+01:00

Before I got here I assumed that the Opera Theatre Saint Louis (let's just call it OTSL from now on) was a repertory opera company that performed throughout the year, but it's actually a summer-only set-up. Its closest equivalent in Britain would be Glyndebourne, although that gives entirely the wrong impression. For starters no-one here wears evening dress to the performances, nor is OTSL a company that aims to appeal to an exclusive audience as part of "the season". It performs in an unusual theatre that seats about 900, which is intimate by American standards, and the audience is arranged in an amphitheatre around a thrust-stage. There is a proscenium too but because the audience is arranged in a 180 degree arc anything played behind it is lost to a large chunk of the house. So they don't tend to do that.
The theatre is on a university campus, not in the grounds of a country manor, which is handy; as term is over the army of young artists that come for the season can live on site in student digs. The young artists cover principal roles and make up a chorus where necessary; a bit like the Glyndebourne Chorus, but the emphasis is on their solo abilities as opposed to their use as choristers. From what I've been able to hear they are a talented bunch. Some of them do principal roles.
The big surprise for me was that all four operas they perform each season are sung in English. This season they kicked off with Don Giovanni and each subsequent week sees the opening of the next opera, until the last two weeks when all four shows are up and running in rep. This week, the last of the season, they will give eight performances, two of them matinées.
Something else unusual: they pay the singers a weekly salary rather than a performance fee. Because of the staggered start dates the singers arrive in waves, one cast a week after the previous. The earlier in the season your show opens, the more performances you will have (and the more time off between shows), but because you are in Saint Louis for longer you will also take home more pay. It's a pretty equitable system I must say. It also means that if you fall ill for a show you still get paid, though it has to be said that if you're sick you still have to walk the part while your understudy sings from the side. Understudies are never sent on to act. I assume the thinking is that they are so busy with all their other commitments that there's no way they can be rehearsed sufficiently to bung them on stage.
The Saint Louis Symphony, which is a very fine orchestra, plays in the pit. Their concert season is over for the summer so it's an ideal arrangement. The Symphony basically splits into two with each half playing two operas apiece.
Another difference with the usual country house opera set-up we experience in Britain is that there is a large and loyal local following for OTSL. Some punters attend every single show in the season, something that boggles my little mind. After each performance, audience and performers are encouraged to mingle in The Tent, a large open-sided marquee on a lawn by the theatre, and booze the night away. There's no long interval but punters are encouraged to picnic before and after the show. OTSL even gives the singers vouchers to use at the bar after the show, something I don't recall Glyndebourne ever having done.
It's all very collegiate, social and un-starry and I wonder how much of that is to do with the influence of Colin Graham, who used to be here for many years. I only worked with him once, in the early 90s at Covent Garden, and a more considerate and diligent director you would struggle to meet. I was just singing the Glass-seller in "Death in Venice" but was amazed to get a thank-you note from him after the run, as did everyone in the cast.
There are a couple of things at OTSL that I would find alarming if I were working here rather than simply observing from close quarters (for that read: bumming around while the missus brings home the bacon). Colin introduced the concept of The Wingers. These are patrons who, in exchange for extra financial donations, can sit in on practically every single rehearsal. They sit to one side (the wings) and aren't allowed to make a sound, but I know I would find their presence disconcerting. How could you have a good old swear if you screw up? And isn't screwing up a good part of the rehearsal process? If you don't dare to make mistakes it all gets a bit careful and dull doesn't it? What if a winger pays a compliment to one singer and not another? Wouldn't that be the seed for a good dose of paranoia?
The other odd thing is that each show has only two stage-and-orchestra rehearsals and both of them count as public dress rehearsals. So the very first time you step on stage with your full kit and make-up on with a band in the pit, there will be a few hundred bods watching you.
I can see this is all part of a plan to engender a sense of connection between stage and auditorium, which I'm sure helps with patronage and support, but they are sailing dangerously close to the line of demarcation between performer and punter, a line that I rather like. While I applaud the idea, there are times - many of them in fact - when you want that line to be a twelve foot wall, for reasons no other than your sanity and sense of self-preservation. It also shields you from all those questions like "How long did it take you to learn your role?" which are of genuine interest to the civilian but which are totally baffling to the foot-soldier.
But this is America where you have to do everything in your power to bring in revenue, and in OTSL it clearly works. I believe I'm right in saying that despite some adventurous programming over the years they have never gone over budget. Compare that to the train wreck that is happening at New York City Opera and it's a pretty remarkable thing.

California jaunt

2011-06-20T18:26:00.000+01:00

I went to San Francisco with very few preconceptions. I've seen the Steve McQueen movie "Bullitt" a couple of times and various other films set in the city. So I knew it was hilly, that it had cable cars, the Golden Gate bridge and Fisherman's Wharf, but that was about it.
I took the BART train from the airport, as it seemed the sensible thing to do, and it wasn't at all bad. It's a subway train really, though who thought it a good idea to put carpet in a subway train is clearly someone who doesn't travel by public transport very much. I was downtown in about half an hour.
I'd booked a small hotel in Nob Hill on the basis that it looked close enough to the opera to walk - there's nothing worse than getting to grips with a strange transport system on the morning of an important audition - and it wasn't expensive, nor was it seedy. The Nob Hill Inn fit the bill perfectly; a twenty-five minute stroll to the War Memorial opera house and quiet and comfy. No bells and whistles, no gym or trouser press. $89 per night including a light breakfast and free wifi (though why ANY hotel charges for wifi these days is a mystery). My room was a little gloomy I suppose as it faced an inner courtyard, but I wasn't there to spend any daytime in my room and I didn't mind in the slightest.
There are three things in a singer's life which are pretty-well equally terrifying and they are The First Night, The First Day Of Rehearsals and The Audition. I try and treat the whole audition process with a sort of take-it-or-leave-it disdain. "This is what I do and if you don't like it then clearly we're not meant for each other" is the attitude I try and have in mind. Not that I do very many auditions these days; certainly not as many as I had to do when I was a nipper. Longevity in the job is no bar to having to go through the process though. Certainly not in an age where companies like ENO make every Tom, Dick and Harry sing for directors who have absolutely no experience in the medium and yet, for some reason beyond my understanding, feel the need to be consulted. I once had to fly in to London from Amsterdam at a godawful hour, the morning after a show, travel halfway across town and sing to a neophyte director who confessed to having no idea what we were supposed to do. I said "how about I sing a bit of Britten?" She stood there while I let her have it and all she could say afterwards was that I was fine, but she thought that when we got around to doing the opera I should be sure not roll any Rs. In fact, a couple of years later when we eventually rehearsed the thing, that was about the only piece of direction I got during the course of eight weeks. Not a happy time.
Anyway, I did my thing for the bods at San Francisco Opera on the stage of their very large theatre, standing by the prompt box on the set of The Ring. Unexpectedly, the pianist completely stopped playing at one point and I fluffed the next line, but I hope no-one minded. And then I went and had lunch.
I went to a kitschy diner called Lori's and ordered a Club Sandwich with fries. It was only then, hearing a bunch of Yorkshire accents from the booth behind me, that it dawned on me that I was deep in the heart of touristsville. Now, I know I was done with work and was also technically a tourist, but I hadn't come to San Francisco with the aim of being a tourist and so I felt entitled to feel superior and up myself in the way every singer I know does when they're working in a city as opposed to visiting it for, you know, pleasure. Of course, having spent the last four weeks in Saint Louis where I've seen and heard no European tourists at all, to suddenly find myself surrounded by Dutch, Germans and Brits, all of them in their standard issue, horrid tourist clothes, with their backpacks, guidebooks and cameras, was something of a shock. I felt snobby and horrified. As you can probably tell.
It didn't stop me doing the touristy things though, albeit with a very superior attitude. The man at the desk of the hotel had advised me, if I planned on getting around on cable cars, to buy a three day "passport" for $20. A single ride costs $5 and as the Inn was near the top of a considerable hill and near the junction of the two cable car lines, I imagined myself popping all over town on the quaint old cars, hopping on and off at will. So I bought a pass.
As it turned out, this was a mistake. One line, that goes West-East along California, isn't working and there's a replacement bus instead, for which the single fare is only $2. This, I'm sure, has put a lot more pressure than usual on the other line, the Powell Street line, that runs North-South, not because of the direction it's travelling but because all those bloody tourists want to have a go on the cable car. I first tried to catch a cable car a few blocks up from its southern terminus but it was packed and no-one was being let on. Every car that passed was full. It soon became clear that the only way to get on was at the very extremes of the line. I eventually managed to get on one later at it's northernmost stop, near Fisherman's Wharf but I had to queue for about half an hour and wait until the third car pulled up. It struck me that this really wasn't a means of transport at all but a theme park ride. I really couldn't be bothered to use it again as it was a pretty useless way of getting around town.
I did use the F line a few times. That runs from the heart of the city out to the Ferry Building and then past all the piers to Fisherman's Wharf. It's unusual because it uses a variety of beautiful vintage trams from all over the States, painted in different liveries, and even an old wooden tram from Milan. Though when I first took that route I thought my travel karma was particularly bad; I waited for a good twenty minutes while loads of trams passed in the other direction and when something did eventually turn up it was, of course, a replacement bus.
The Ferry Building is full of foodie fun as it has become a posh gourmet market. It was almost the highlight of my visit.
Pier 39 at Fisherman's Wharf is a tourist magnet and the best way I found to deal with it was to skirt along the very outside of the pier, thus avoiding the plethora of cutesy restaurants and retail outlets that draw the throngs. I saw Alcatraz across the bay. I could just about see The Golden Gate through the sea mist and dazzling sun. And I saw the harbour seals. Then I left again, annoyed by the swarms of touroids who were spoiling my tourism.
In the evening I ate at a very basic Italian café a few blocks from the hotel. I was too tired to be adventurous or to enjoy eating a fine meal alone. Besides, I had no idea where to go where I could avoid couples from Croydon in Hawaiian shirts. Yelp!, the handy online guide, was suggesting restaurants but they all seemed to involve a trek across a town. I reckoned I'd already spent a good hour or more queuing for transport. I'd lost the will to do it any more that night. I could have walked to Chinatown but I never think that a Chinese meal for one is a great success. Besides I'd eaten some noodles the night before, straight after checking in at the hotel. A nice quiet wine bar would have done me perfectly but I just couldn't find one.
The next day I had a few more hours to kill before heading to the airport, so I ambled around the shopping streets near Union Square. I thought the Apple shop, so close to Silicon Valley, might be the mothership of all Apple shops but it was just like all the others. A bit at a loss as to what to do in a limited time, I took an old Boston tram back to Fisherman's Wharf with a view to getting a better look at the Golden Gate but there was still a lot of mist engulfing it. So I walked a bit further on and ended up looking at the fishing boats and the plethora of fishy restaurants nearby. Curiously, no-one was bothering to walk along the pier where the boats were moored - too busy gaping at the freshly-steamed crabs I suppose - and I had it to myself.
With time running out and concerns about how long it would take me to get back to the inn to collect my bag (given my persistent bad luck with transport), I thought "what the hell" and dove into one of the fishy eateries for lunch. And it wasn't at all bad. I had a cup of clam chowder then some crab cakes, with some sourdough bread on the side. Service was brisk (I had barely finished my chowder before the crab arrived) but polite and I was out again in forty minutes. Just as well because the trams were running slow again and it took me a full hour to get back to my hotel.
San Francisco is rather alarming compared to sedate Saint Louis. Perhaps tourism attracts them but there were awful lot of panhandlers and, I hesitate to say it, strange people around Downtown. I saw one poor woman who was walking along, arguing loudly with herself. She stopped suddenly, dropped the carrier bags she was carrying and slapped herself sharply across the face before picking up her bags and continuing her noisy promenade. Apart from the yelling, she appeared to be perfectly normal. Perhaps she'd just done a few too many ENO auditions and it had finally got to her.
When I was lunching in Lori's Diner a man dressed in classic gay leathers shimmied in for a look at a glass case that contains a dress once worn by Elizabeth Taylor. He had huge circles of bright red blusher on his cheeks and put on a performance of such over-the-top adoration of the Taylor reliquary that for a moment I thought he must be taking the piss. But he wasn't. Just a bit eccentric. Or perhaps not.
California is known as the land of fruit and nuts. Los Angelinos, or whatever you care to call them, are all about show business, so I get them. I know why they're there and what drives them. They're still mostly bonkers though. San Franciscans I have yet to figure out. It could take some time and who knows if I'll ever be back. That could all depend on how the audition went, and frankly I haven't a clue.

A cheeky condition

2011-06-16T07:01:00.001+01:00

I think I've discovered a psychological condition.
Nessun Dorma Syndrome, or NDS for short: the state-of-mind on realising the gaping chasm between singing a popular aria from an opera and the ability to sing the entire role from that opera in an opera house. Also known as the Habanera Delusion and the Brindisi Complex.
The patient may, with plastic surgery and lots of eye make-up, learn to live in the state of delusion or simply be too dim to see the inherent problem as a problem at all. In this case it helps if the patient cannot actually sing the popular aria itself, except possibly in a much lower key, and thinks of the words of the aria as a sort of nonsensical shopping list in a funny foreign language. In time the patient will give up any intention of singing the entire role and may possibly marry a daytime TV presenter. In this case NDS can, hopefully, be safely contained within a very small area of Wales.
In some cases, amongst those with enough awareness of the inherent problem, NDS can manifest itself in an outburst of rejection: the patient, on realising his (or her) possible shortcomings, spurns the entire medium of opera rather than face his (or her) dilemma head on. "If I dump it, it can't dump me" is the essence of what is happening, and the patient never faces the danger of revealing his (or her) shortcomings to a more discerning audience. The general public then believes the problem to be with the medium rather than with the NDS sufferer himself (or herself). In this way the patient can live with the condition, eventually convincing himself (or herself) that he (or she) never actually had NDS but rather that he (or she) was never given the opportunity by the opera establishment to prove what he (or she) could really do.

Stacks

2011-06-16T07:01:00.000+01:00

If you find yourself in Saint Louis and in need of breakfast, I have just the place for you: Uncle Bill's Pancake House. There are two branches, open 24 hours a day, and we've now been go the one on Kingshighway twice. It's not much to look at. The neon sign is broken and it is half-timbered on the inside as well as the outside. But once you've slid into a booth and one of the long-serving waitresses has given you an iced water and your first cup of coffee you realise you're in American breakfast Nirvana.
The first time we went I had the 2+2+2+2 Special for $7.95. That's two eggs, two link sausages, two strips of bacon, two buttermilk pancakes and an order of hash browns. I don't know their secret but the pancakes are very, very good with just the right balance of cake-iness and syrup absorbency.
A couple of days later and we were back. This time I had biscuits and gravy with some scrambled eggs on the side. If you've never had biscuits and gravy you must give them a go. The biscuits are best described to Brits as very light scones, a bit like a very soft soda bread. You get two, split in half, with the gravy poured over. But this is not gravy as we Brits know it. For starters, it's white. I've made breakfast gravy and this is what you do: crumble some breakfast sausage (the innards of a good banger or two will do) into a hot pan, keep breaking it up with a spoon, and cook it until it is well done and has rendered its fat. Lift out the little lumps of meat with a slotted spoon and sprinkle a tablespoon of flour onto the remaining fat, cook it for a mo, then stir in full-cream milk, or "half-and-half", or milk and cream - it's up to you - until you have a good white sauce. Bung back in the sausage bits, stir, season, and there it is. Pour over the warm biscuits until they are well and truly smothered.
Uncle Bill's were good, though I do think my home-made were better, though I'll confess to not having made the biscuits from scratch. Just about everyone in the States buys those tubes of ready-made dough which you break open to reveal several ready-to-bake biscuits, so I did too.
I ate half of Lucy's pancakes. She wasn't going to make it through her whole stack, not with her corned beef hash and poached eggs.

At the other extreme we dined with our hosts in an extremely smart restaurant called Tony's, in the heart of Downtown. Our hosts' daughter worked there many years ago as a pasta chef. She died of AIDS seventeen years ago, but how she became infected is still a mystery. All of her sexual partners were contacted and tested negative and she never had a blood transfusion. The best guess is that she became infected when a burn was being treated. It's a tragic story, made all the more poignant by the fact that yesterday, when we dined at the restaurant, was her birthday. Dinner was a thank you from the four of us staying in the house to our extraordinary and unbelievably generous hosts.
The cuisine is high-end American Italian and the service is very high-end with a large army of waiters to keep an eye on you. The walls are covered with good modern art, except in the bar which has a vast rogue's gallery of signed photos of celebs (including three ex-Presidents) who have dined there. Dishes are finished and plated at the table with plenty of pizzazz. I had a Tony's salad to start - mostly green leaves with strips of salami - and then one of their signature dishes, Lobster Albanello; big chunks of lobster tail cooked with mushrooms, cream and brandy. It was delicious but was nearly eclipsed by the expertly-cooked side dish of spinach. A pity that my trousers were, inexplicably, a bit too tight.
It was a lovely evening but unless you're on an expense account (which, clearly, several people were) it's not a place where people on a normal income can afford to eat regularly. As an indicator, their tasting menu, with wine, is $210 per person. Wine-less it's $180. Bung on top of that tax and a 20% tip (which is what they would expect), as well as paying the parking valet, and the eyes start to water. I'm pretty sure the tasting menu doesn't include caviar. I say this because I noticed that one ounce of the stuff a la carte is $110.
I'm not sure if you get a stack of buttermilk pancakes with that but somehow I doubt it.

Caped Crusader

2011-06-16T06:40:00.000+01:00

I've had it with Norman Lebrecht. I enjoyed his book The Maestro Myth. I enjoyed even more handing it to a well-known French conductor for a gander and watching him dive straight to the index to see if he was mentioned. (He wasn't.)
I like the idea of a journalist who takes a particular interest in the workings of the classical music trade. Unfortunately Lebrecht seems to think he is the ONLY journalist with this interest and has turned himself, so he imagines, into a sort of caped crusader with super x-ray vision that can see through the veneer of PR. Supernorm and his Sword of Truth can cut through agents' bullshit with a single stroke! Summoned by the Normphone he will jump into the Normobile to do battle with musical injustices, arrogant divas, people who don't like Mahler and, er, fees that he thinks are too high!
Sometimes he gets it right but too often he gets it wrong, imagining skullduggery where none exists. And he loves a headline, even though it might be total bollocks. Bad news for the music profession is good news for Supernorm. He adores it, drooling over the imminent collapse of various orchestras, and pronouncing the death of opera and record companies even though they are in fact still breathing. In fact Supernorm has become so obsessed with being the first to break a story with an eye-catching headline that he seems to have stopped bothering to find out if a story may be accurate or not, and if a few musicians get hit while he's fighting music crime then so what? They're victims of friendly fire! Supernorm to the rescue! That's what's really important!
I used to follow Supernorm on Twitter but last week he overstepped the mark. First he tweeted a headline "Lady Rattle gives way to Plain Jane", the story being that Magdalena Kozena was being replaced in a performance of "Das Lied von der Erde" by Jane Irwin. To me this smacked of the worst form of sexism, the implication being that rather than getting his Mahler fix from Harrods, it would now be coming from Woolworths. Now, if Supernorm really knew his stuff he would know that Jane Irwin is a fantastically talented, world-class singer. Perhaps he did know that but he didn't care, simply because he liked his headline too much. Someone has argued that he was simply making a joke about titles. Even so, the implication is still that somebody was getting short-changed, and I find that offensive on Jane's behalf.
It was the story that Supernorm "broke" a few days later that really did it for me. Another hugely talented singer, Sandrine Piau, has withdrawn from Glyndebourne's "Rinaldo" because of a knee injury. Supernorm smelled something fishy where no seafood was in evidence. He sneered, he quizzed. He cast doubt upon Sandrine's professionalism. Joyce DiDonato has sung Rosina with a broken leg, why couldn't this French woman buck up and do her job? I'm not going to begin to pull this apart. It does it for itself but I'm sure that what Sandrine really needed when she's probably depressed and in pain is Supernorm jumping up and down on her injured knee. That really scored a victory for classical music.
There are other instances I could cite of Supernorm's thirst for sensationalism, a thirst that would be more appropriate if he were writing about premier footballers for the Sun, but I think I've made the point.
Classical music, and I mean real classical music and not all that Brit Awards tosh, is under serious threat. What we need is considered and thoughtful journalism fighting its corner. What we don't need is a twat in a superhero cape beating the living daylights out of its practitioners just because it makes him look important or clever.

Cons and pros

2011-06-11T14:29:00.001+01:00

Life for me in St Louis isn't all blogging, swimming pools and smokehouses. No siree, no. I am actually squeezing in a bit of singing too. And, oddly, I've actually quite enjoyed it.
Now, if you're not a professional singer, if indeed in singers' parlance you're a "civilian", you possibly won't get that remark. You would naturally assume that we singers enjoy singing all the time. Well, no, that would be an amateur who does that, in the literal sense of the word. I'm not saying that professionals never enjoy singing. I'm just saying that professionals don't have the luxury of singing exclusively when we feel like it. We have to do it an awful lot of times when it's about the last thing we feel like doing. And I'm not saying that professional singers don't love singing (and I use the word "love" advisedly); it's just that, like all affairs of the heart, it can be something of a stormy and complex relationship. In fact I'm finding these days that it's a bit like dealing with a parent that's going through the onset of dementia.
As the parent/voice gets older the instances of lucidity and clarity become shorter-lived. The real person/voice is in there somewhere but he is befuddled and it takes a lot of patience and gentle coaxing to get him out. This can lead to frustration and tears, culminating in putting the parent/voice in a home that smells of pee and forgetting all about him. Well, perhaps not so much on the last thing, but you get my drift.
In spite of these difficulties that the ageing singer faces - and these are inevitable and undeniable truths; I'm not being twisted and cynical - I can still find myself being pleasantly surprised by the physical act of singing.
Take yesterday. I drive Lucy into her piano dress rehearsal, go to my usual haunt for a cappuccino and a catch-up on Twitter and Facebook (which takes a long time in the mornings when you're six hours behind most of your friends) and then drive back to our digs.
Despite every fibre of my being opposing the idea, I think I should do some practice. I have an audition next week (and I'll get to auditions in another post). I start warming up, very gently at first to coax the old bugger into life and then with a bit more gas. It seems to take an age to feel like a tenor again. Finally I have my full range. I sing through all my numbers, fiddling about, trying new things. Playing a bit. I have no real idea if any of it is any good but after a while the rush starts. It must be something to do with taking in larger quantities of oxygen or the release of endorphins, but bugger me if I don't start to feel the old sensations of elation. They are nothing to do with any sense of self-satisfaction but are entirely physical. I carry on for a good hour. Normally I hate practising if I think anyone can hear me, but once the rush has kicked in I'm past caring. And after I've finished, when my voice is getting tired, the chemicals keep pumping through the veins and I'm on an up for an hour or two more.
Am I back at the piano the next morning? Like hell I am.
Like a middle-aged subscriber to an expensive gym, all the elation is forgotten and all I can see is the struggle up the vocal hill, while my nostrils seem to be filled with the faint smell of pee from the Silver Meadows Home For The Elderly Vocal Cords.

I've also watched a dress rehearsal of The Death of Klinghoffer, and I was bowled over. The Opera Theatre, like Glyndebourne and Garsington, has a young chorus during its short festival season, made up of young artists on the foothills of the profession. John Adams' choruses are fiendishly hard and to see these young singers go for it with conviction, passion and finesse was a very moving experience. All the moaning and sniping, the accusations about opera and the resultant outrage - all of that seemed insignificant in the face of such commitment to the art.
So, if some people aren't comfortable with the world of opera, there are very many of all races and classes who are, and who are hungry for the chance to prove it. Watching the rehearsal I was overwhelmed, bathed in a sudden sense of reassurance. I found myself thinking that if anyone in my profession doesn't realise that we are all eventually replaceable then they must be an idiot. Oddly, rather than making me sad, this makes me feel extremely happy.

Pizza slut

2011-06-07T21:01:00.001+01:00

Now the dust has settled a bit on Alfiegate, it might be a good time to reflect on what happened in the last couple of days. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that Alfie may well have no intention of singing many, if any, opera roles again. He may have said what he said on Desert Island Discs because he is in the process of rationalising a choice to leave conventional opera behind.
Who can blame him? The temptations are huge.
On the one hand the life of a regular opera singer: long rehearsal periods leading to relatively few performances. A limited audience. Difficult repertoire. Public anonymity, save to a few enthusiasts. Critics dissecting his performances. Long stints away from his family. Loneliness. Auditions. Opera managers sucking their teeth about which repertoire is right for him and his voice. A modest income (despite all the rumours to the contrary). Worst of all perhaps - and something that is oddly peculiar to opera as an art form - the very real possibility that a few fanatics will one day develop an irrational loathing of his singing and boo loudly at the end of a hard evening's work (which singular phenomenon alone could be the subject of a whole different blog).
On the other: all the trappings of popular success. Earnings well beyond anything he can possibly earn on the regular opera circuit. The love and adulation of a relatively unsophisticated public (and I don't mean that in a sneering way). The luxury of being critic-proof. Repertoire which he likes but would never sing on the opera stage. A certain amount of self-governance in his career path. Amplification - that is, never having to worry about fighting an orchestra or being told that his voice isn't loud enough; the microphone can take care of those problems. The chance, in musicals, to inhabit a role for more than a handful of performances at a time.

Whenever pundits start banging on about opera singers having "a responsibility to their art" I find myself grimacing. Afie's first and foremost responsibility is to himself and his family. Singers leave the opera profession on a daily basis for a plethora of reasons, the vast number in complete obscurity. Who on earth has the right to say to someone else "you have to keep on doing on what you're doing because it makes ME feel better"?
But this is all speculation on my part. Whatever Alfie chooses to do with the rest of his life is alright by me. I hope he does return to opera because he was starting to manage the rare feat of being a popular singer both inside the opera house and away from it. And that could be a very good thing.
A lot of people (and I include myself until I took the time to reflect on what this fuss is all about) took umbrage because the implication of what Alfie said was that unless he was in an opera it was going to be very boring. Well I for one don't think Alfie is capable of that sort of malice. I just believe that he didn't think it through.
No, if there's a villain in the piece it has to be the PR types. They've got exactly what they want. Opera is back on the stand as elitist and snobby. And Alfie is the populists' champion. And, more immediately and important to them, Les Mis has garnered vast amounts of absolutely free advertising.
The truly extraordinary thing about this is how this idea of opera snobbery came about. I remember a time when I was completely unaware of any charge of elitism. I went to Covent Garden in jeans, standing in line for cheap tickets with lots of perfectly ordinary people from all backgrounds.
Then Classic FM came along.
Suddenly we were in a new world of bleeding chunks and popular arias. While claiming to bring classical music to a new, wider audience, all they were really doing was establishing a new class system in music appreciation. The PR people got to work and when they heard the word opera they immediately glammed it up with images of people in evening gowns and dinner jackets. There were black limousines, champagne and red roses. The message was that by listening to classical music, people were tapping into a whole new world of sophisticated glamour. But - and this is the really insidious part - heaven forbid that ordinary people think that they could eat at the banquet itself. "Oh no, that's far too glamorous and refined for the likes of YOU. You can have some tasty little morsels, some scraps from the table. You can go in your jeans and baseball caps to big arena concerts where you can see singers in lovely dresses come out and sing the bits you like and know, but the real stuff, proper operas, that's hard. That's for an elite who dress up in their finery and go to stuffy, intimidating places called opera houses. Keep out you ignorant plebs!"
You can just look at "Popstar to Operastar' to prove my point. I haven't seen it this year. I saw one episode last year and, even though I'm told it's supposed to be a bit of fun, was profoundly depressed. Not by the godawful singing, but by the perpetuation of the idea that anything to do with opera necessarily involves everyone bunging on dinner jackets and getting tarted up. What better way to reinforce the idea that opera is, above anything else, elitist and snobby? And none of this has ANYTHING to do with the music or the drama. It is all to do with a marketing image. Opera is now a publicist's easy shortcut to depict a type of lifestyle, a lifestyle that is utterly and bizarrely at odds with 99.9% of the people I know that love the art-form.
And if that doesn't make you want to say "grrrr", I don't know what will.
So-called opera snobs don't react badly to the various assaults on the genre because they're elitist. They do it because the stuff that is being force-fed to the unknowing public is simply bad.
I use the Italian food argument. Lots of people eat pizza, which they regard as Italian food, at Pizza Hut. Lots of people except Italians, that is. Italians of every class and income would regard the food that Pizza Hut sells as an affront to their civilisation. Yes it's edible, barely, but it is as close to authentic Italian food as a poodle is to a racehorse. You wouldn't call Italians snobs for not eating at Pizza Hut. You'd say, well, yes of course they wouldn't eat there. Because it's not the real thing. It's not really Italian food.
And so it is with the pulpy, glutinous, pineapple-chunk-topped atrocity (which comes with a huge cola and garlic bread) that is the thick-crust pizza known as "popular classics". It isn't really opera.

A little Boe peep

2011-06-05T19:26:00.001+01:00

Alfie Boe is a very nice guy. We did A Midsummer Night's Dream together at ENO about seven years ago when he was Lysander and I did my usual Flute. He even asked me if I could give him some advice about a section which sits in an awkward part of the passaggio, the area where the voice "turns" into the higher register. I can't remember what I told him but he sorted it out. He acted well too, quite happily playing the buffoon.
A couple of years later we met in the green room at Television Centre. We were both on BBC Breakfast News, he to promote his first solo album and I because there had been a lot of media interest in a project I'd done, photographing everything I ate for a year and displaying the photos as a collage. It was a slow news day in the Silly Season. I was introduced as an Artist and he as a Tenor. It was quite strange because, at the time, of the two of us I guess I was the one with more of a track record in the Tenor department, though in a very different area of singing. That's television for you. Not that I cared very much. I was just so confused and flattered at being described as an Artist. Alfie had two minders with him from the record company's PR department. I was on my tod.
A couple of years after that I went and saw Alfie backstage, very briefly, after the Dress Rehearsal of La Boheme at ENO when they did the new Miller production. I thought he did a great job. So, his voice didn't have quite the oomph that the Coliseum needs for Puccini - it's an awkward bugger that way as I know all too well - but it was a lovely performance and his singing was always true, never pushed.
I heard that Alfie's record label, I think it was EMI, dropped him after a couple of discs because he refused to sing crap. I'm not sure what exactly but I think it was the genre that can be best described as taking a banal pop song, translating it into Italian, bunging in an orchestra and choir and, bingo, transforming it into "classical" music. It is total and utter bilge and I wish the Mylenes, Katherines, Russells, Hayleys etc etc of this world and their Hello! magazine approach to culture would be flung from a very high cliff, but I don't suppose that's going to happen. I digress. Anyway... I admired Alfie for saying "no, I'm a trained opera singer and I don't want to do that stuff." He moved to another label and knuckled down to building his opera career, singing large roles at ENO and small roles at Covent Garden. The last role at the Garden I saw him down for was The Messenger in Elektra, who has about three lines, albeit difficult ones.
The thing about Alfie, I always thought, was that he had the talent and the will to do all that Classic FM stuff which I so hate but he also managed the rare feat of sticking at his opera career at the same time. Good for him, I thought.
In the last year or so (in which I believe he switched again to a big record label), I've noticed that Alfie's publicity machine has been out in full force, and he's hardly been out of the media. This, I'm sure, has everything to do with him going into Les Miserables at the end of this month. I don't know the show - I'm not a huge fan of musicals - so I have no opinion on whether this is a good or a bad idea. That's up to him. I have no problem with opera singers doing musicals. My wife Lucy does both and very well too. Opera companies in Britain can be a bit snooty about it. They tend to assume that once you've done a musical, that's it, you've turned your back on opera, and it can be very hard to persuade them otherwise. I have no idea if this is something that bothers Alfie. We will see what the next years bring.
Today, Alfie appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs. I haven't heard the programme but apparently he said that he finds going to opera pretty boring and only enjoys it when he's in it. Good for him for being honest but he surely can't be surprised if this is making a lot of opera people upset. It's the sort of thing Jonathan Miller says all the time, but from a slightly different perspective. And let's give Alfie a break. He has a young family. Why should he go and see operas in the evening? It sounds to me like he and his publicists have decided that they want to project an image of the ordinary bloke, a bit anti establishment, with whom other "ordinary" people can identify.
I don't go out to the opera that much either, for many reasons. In the last six months I think I've seen four productions I've not been in. But I have a huge respect for my fellow professionals and for the punters who do love and support opera. I hope Alfie said something like that. If he didn't then he certainly shot himself in the foot as far as the opera world is concerned.
The more I think about it, the more I find that my biggest problem with today's Alfie "scandal" is that he was on Desert Island Discs at all. He's sung a few operas, made a handful of records and is about to debut in his first musical. He doesn't have a career in Europe and is little-known in the States. In what way is he a prominent candidate for this flagship radio programme? The only reason is that he is currently very much in the public eye due to all the publicity surrounding his upcoming appearance in Les Mis. But is that the remit of the programme? Has DID become just another publicity vehicle for people with stuff to plug? If so, then fine, have Alfie on. But if it's to celebrate the life and work of a renowned singer or public figure (which is what I thought the programme was about), for my money, he's a few more years of hard graft to do to collect those laurels. I can prepare a list of much more qualified interviewees. And no, not for a moment would I put my own name on that list. Do me a favour!
I don't blame Alfie for doing the programme. Are you kidding? He should say no? I blame the publicists and the producers. Do you know that the great humorist and columnist Miles Kington never appeared on DID? That rather demonstrates how off-kilter this is. Why not get Katherine Jenkins on? Or Justin Bieber? Or Jordan?
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Quietly slagging off the very genre that started your career in the first place doesn't seem like a good plan if Alfie is serious about continuing as an opera singer. And when I say opera singer I mean someone who sings whole operas, not just little chunks of the stuff. You know, like some of those twats I mentioned earlier.
I think Alfie, like so many before him, finds himself at something of a crossroads; but if he thinks that by taking the yellow brick road which promises arena concerts, frequent appearances on daytime telly and massive wealth, he can later roll up at Covent Garden or any major opera house and expect them to take him seriously and offer him some decent roles, I think he's being led up the garden path. But what do I know?

A bunch of flannel

2011-06-02T22:50:00.006+01:00

I haven't posted in several days, partly because my brother was in town for the Memorial Day weekend and partly because I've been out being a tourist. One day I tried doing this on public transport, as I'm a firm believer in the stuff, but while the MetroLink train - a fairly new light train system - was very good and shot me from west to east in no time, the buses were a bit crap. I had very long waits - I gave up once and walked the two miles I wanted to go - and the sad fact is that in this town (unlike New York for instance) bus travel seems to be exclusively for the impoverished or the slightly deranged. In my khaki shorts and pink polo shirt I looked and felt desperately out of place. Fellow travellers looked at me oddly, thinking perhaps that I must have been caught Driving Under the Influence and banned from driving; though one man tried to engage me in a conversation about some recent shootings-cum-killings and I really didn't want to get into that on a crowded bus.
Sad to say that most of the impoverished are black. Indeed the only army recruiting office I have seen so far has been in a neighbourhood best described as poor and predominately African-American. Ugh.
This is not The South though. Indeed, without getting into a history lesson, Saint Louis has played a massive and pivotal role in the advancement of Civil Rights.
What have I seen? A quick rundown:
The Arch, Saint Louis' most famous landmark. Built in the 1960's it's America's tallest monument at over 600 feet and very impressive it is too, bang next to the slightly flooded Mississippi. There's a lift-tram thing that takes you up the inside but we ran out of time to do that. Just as well as I suffer from vertigo and I think I would have been in several kinds of torture at the top. We did watch a fascinating old documentary on the building of the Arch and the aerial views of steeplejack floating around on girders hundreds of feet above the ground were enough to give me the heeby-geebies. Try and work out how to erect an enormous arch built out of stainless steel and your mind quickly boggles. The way they did it was extraordinary and too long to detail here. No wonder it took well over two years to build.

The Art Museum is really excellent and FREE! As is, wait for it... the zoo! I haven't been to the zoo, but when was the last time you saw a free zoo? Free entry is guaranteed by statute, which is a very civilised thing. Both are sited in Forest Park which is simply enormous; bigger than New York's Central Park, and the site of the World's Fair of 1904. The Art Museum's collection is not especially spectacular but there are some lovely things in it, especially the German Expressionists.

Also in the park is the Missouri History Museum, also free, and worth visiting especially for its exhibitions on the World's Fair and on Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic in 1927 in the Spirit of St Louis. I had no idea that he became an environmental campaigner in the 1960s. The size of the World's Fair was and is truly extraordinary. The Art Museum and a smallish pavilion are the only two buildings remaining from the Fair. All the rest were built out of timber and covered in a sort of plaster which gave them the appearance of massive, classical pavilions complete with columns and domes. Disneyland is small by comparison. They held the Olympics here in the same year but it was little more than a side show.

The Cathedral is really quite new but built on very traditional Romanesque lines with mosaic covered domes. It's impressive but oddly un-enthralling. Well, to me at least. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood after a long and fruitless wait for a bus to get there.

The bus I eventually caught from the Cathedral to Downtown dropped me near Union Station, once one of the busiest train stations in the country. Now it's a hotel and shopping mall and really rather shit. Trains now leave from a characterless shed a few blocks away. The demise of railway travel is one of the saddest things in this country and every attempt to reverse the decline seems to hit the buffers. We're taking the train from here to Chicago in a few weeks' time. Might as well while we still can.

Downtown near Union Station is bleak and grim but just a few blocks north and the city is hip and lively. Saint Louis is a beer town, thanks largely to its German immigrant roots. There used to be several big breweries in town, most of which were sucked into the Anheuser-Busch empire. They are the people who make the unspeakable gnat's piss called Budweiser, and who are now owned by Belgians. In the last twenty-odd years several small breweries have emerged to satisfy the thirst of people who want proper beer, pre-eminent among which is Schlafly. And by golly their beer is good. We went to their Tap Room, a bar-cum-restaurant in their downtown brewery, ate really well and drank a black beer and an American Pale Ale which were knockouts. The APA is strong, about 6%, and has an extraordinary aroma of caramelised orange peel. I ate a big dish of mussels with salsa verde and fries and was a very happy camper.

Not so far away is Pappy's Smokehouse, a good old-fashioned barbecue joint that closes when it runs out of food. The first day we tried it was the day after the Memorial Day holiday. We got there at 5.30 and they had already run out of what we were after, their spare-ribs. We made do with brisket and some turkey. We went back the next day at about 4 and secured a half rack each. They were very good but, I have to say, not as good as the sample I got from Bogart's in Soulard, despite having the same executive chef. Bogart's is only open at lunch from Tuesday to Saturday so there's no two ways about it; lunch it will have to be.

Waist expansion

2011-05-28T16:26:00.002+01:00

I like a good diner, I do, and in the last two weeks I've managed to visit a few. It's a tough gig.
Dr Jazz in Webster Grove is a terrible name for a sweet little old mom 'n' pop place that is more of a soda fountain than a real diner. But it has booths and stools at the counter and at the lunchtime we went they were doing a special, which was a cheeseburger with the cheese of our choice (I had pepper jack and Lucy, Swiss), fresh-cut fries and a proper milkshake, all for $6.99. The burger was juicy, the fries still had their skins on (delicious) and my shake (just vanilla ice cream wazzed with milk) was frothy and refreshing. I was very happy.
The City Diner is a twenty minute walk from our digs and has all the trappings of a 50s diner; formica tables, two-tone leatherette booths and a checkerboard floor. It's not actually that old but it's menu is authentic (meatloaf is its specialty) and at weekends it stays open 24 hours. We've been twice. The first time I tried a St Louis oddity - fried ravioli, which is as it sounds. Crispy, deep-fried ravioli are served with a marinara dipping sauce. It's not bad. I wouldn't order it again and I've yet to understand why tomato pasta sauce is called "marinara" as there's not much that's marine about it, but there you go. I also had a slice of rhubarb and strawberry pie "a la mode" (with a scoop of ice-cream) which was very, very good. The pastry was crisp and the filling not too sweet or gloopy.
The second time we went I had the blue plate special, a grilled chicken sandwich which was nothing to get excited about. The waiter, hearing my English accent, brought malt vinegar for me to slosh on my fries. But I didn't use it. So there. Lucy's tuna melt wasn't very good at all. Not much melting going on for starters, so even though it's a jolly enough place and the service is good, we won't be in a rush to go back. It's pricey for a diner too. $2.25 for diner coffee? Mm, no.
Now the Courtesy Diner, of which there are two branches, is more my speed. It's the real deal, small, with the griddle just behind the counter in full view of the customers. Chilli ($3.95 for a small bowl) sits warming in a pot and comes served with oyster crackers and a pile of shredded cheese. It's open 24 hours, though biscuits and gravy are available only between 11pm and 11am. Men with cowboy hats perch on the counter stools and the waitresses are perky, brisk but always polite. For a late breakfast yesterday I had a short stack of pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon, each item arriving simultaneously but on different plates. We had to wait for five minutes before we could get a seat but as soon as eleven o'clock struck, the place emptied. I'm not sure if that was because people had to get back to work or because the biscuits and gravy curfew had started. I'll have to go back and figure it out over some steak and eggs.

Route 66 passes about one-and-a-half miles south of our digs and we drove along a few miles of the old road the other day. It's not called 66 anymore. It shifts from 30 to 366 and then it disappears into the 44 freeway. But they still have signs telling you you're on the old "mother road". Even though most of the old businesses along the road have gone, I think you can still get a flavour of the old route just by the way it undulates like a gentle, tarmac roller-coaster. They wouldn't build a new road like that anymore. There's the odd, old bowling alley ("with Cocktail Lounge") that I'm dying to explore, if nothing more than for a Big Lebowski moment: "a fine sarsaparilla for me and an oat soda for The Dude..."
We stopped at a St Louis landmark on Route 66: Ted Drewe's Frozen Custard, which has been going for over 75 years. (Fellow Brits: frozen custard is what we call ice-cream, which is, er, usually frozen custard.) At a large roadside shack you can buy a mind-boggling array of flavoured "concretes" - their name for frozen custard blended with, say, M&Ms, chocolate chips, banana, Oreos... you name it. Concrete refers to the consistency. You're not buying mush and your server briefly inverts the open cup to demonstrate its solid texture. You can also buy various sundaes including a banana split that looks quite incredible.
On a warm evening, such as when we dropped in for a large Heath bar concrete, the place is humming with families and groups of friends. They take their custards back to their pick-ups and cars, where they slurp and chat under the Ted Drewes neon sign while the traffic drifts by on America's most famous road.

We're all crap at this

2011-05-24T18:58:00.004+01:00

Earlier today a soprano friend of ours tweeted "Too many notes, too little time!" To which I responded "Better than not many notes, too much time." She's busy and to reinforce her excitement I reminded her that she's far better off than many of her fellow singers in having lots of work. Lots of singers don't. I'm not working at the moment either, but that isn't a problem. Nor did it provoke my response. I have savings, my outgoings are low and my wife is bringing home the bacon. And I've been doing the singing lark for a very long time. I'm not worried.
I suppose I was saying to her "Be grateful and don't moan about being too busy." Don't get me wrong. I know she tweeted what she said because she is genuinely concerned about having too little time to learn a lot of new music, but I'm sure she's thrilled to be busy and as the saying goes "be careful what you wish for..."
Another friend of mine, a globe-trotting bass who moans to his agent if he has two weeks off, texted me last year with "At Heathrow. Just back from New York. Off to Tokyo in the morning. What a life." I texted him back with "Just done a pee. Need to do a poo. What a life". He called me something rude after that.
But the more I think about it the more I realise we all do it. Twitter and Facebook are awash with remarks like "Crazy busy at the moment!" "Knackered!" "Rushing to catch a plane!" I'm as bad a culprit as anyone. We're always trying to assert how much we are in demand, how much we are liked. We never, ever say "Having a tough time of it at the moment. Really worried about my future. Can anybody help?" We NEVER, EVER say anything like "Having a few vocal problems which I'll have to sort out before my next job."
We've all fallen victim to a salesman culture in which we are constantly trying to impress everyone. We try and impress our friends, we're desperate to impress our parents (even after they have died) and we're even trying to impress our children.
What the fuck is that all about?
Of course I understand, as an addicted impresser myself (you have to ask yourselves why I write this blog don't you?) that anyone mad enough to be a freelancer in the arts knows the score. People don't like failure. They only want to hear about success. They don't want to have rumours floating around about flaws and insecurities.
Isn't this all a bit bonkers? If social media have a proper function shouldn't they be places where we can at least be honest with our FRIENDS? Do we really have to spend so much energy on showing off to people who shouldn't really give a toss, and who, let's face it, privately roll their eyes whenever they read yet another posting on how fabulously your career is going? As Gore Vidal said: 'It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." Ghastly though that is, I bet we can all identify with it a little.

The burning question for me is this: When did we all become so insecure that we have to expend so much energy asserting how fantastically secure we are?

Oh for cluck's sake, not more?

2011-05-22T23:04:00.002+01:00

I knew this would happen. No sooner do I mouth off about the quality of chicken than I have to start backtracking on what I said. This is not to say I have eaten some good chicken since I last blogged, but I will admit that my implied generalisation - which repeated pretty-well every prejudice that Brits have about America - that the produce over here is all tasteless pap, was unfounded and unfair. You can buy just as crappy food in Britain as you can over here. I've seen awful meat and poultry on the shelves of all of Britain's supermarkets, with the exception perhaps of Waitrose. I'm just irredeemably smug because when I'm at home I get to buy all of my meat from local farmers.
That smugness got a good slap across the face when we went to two farmers' markets yesterday. The first, and by far the biggest, is a covered market in Soulard, just south of Downtown. As soon as we parked the car and wandered the streets I got that sensation, that bumping on the skin, when you realise that this is a place where you could actually choose to live. The houses are Victorian redbrick, as are the pavements. There are trees and inviting pubs and coffee shops. The market itself has been going since the 18th century and is made up of two long galleries, filled with stalls. It was a Saturday and the place was humming. A stall was selling good-looking Bloody Marys - too early for me - and was doing a roaring trade. I was already on a high because I'd just been given a taster in a smokehouse across the road called Bogarts. It is an offshoot of the very popular Pappy's Smokehouse and if the one barbecued rib I tasted was anything to go by I'm going to have to make some frequent trips. The rib was fleshy and beautifully moist. It wasn't dripping with sauce, just a thin layer of glaze on the top, and the smoking enhanced the flavour rather than smothered it. It was without doubt the finest piece of barbecuing I have ever tasted. Bogarts only opens at lunchtimes from Tuesday to Saturday or I think we would be there tonight. Pappy's is also closed on Sunday evenings, more's the pity. Both places close when they run out of food - as they always do; as simple as that, so we'll have to go early.
The market was strong on fruit and veg, less so on meat, and not much good at all for fish (but then we are a very long way from the sea). I would call it a general market rather than specifically a farmers' market, though a good few of the vegetable sellers were bringing produce from their own farms. But if you lived in the neighbourhood you wouldn't have much good reason to go anywhere else for your food.
The second market we visited was in the middle of a nearby park, Tower Grove. These really were home producers and by the time we got there at about 11.30 many of them had already sold out. An interesting distinction from an English market was that anyone who was selling meat had it in freezers rather than fresh, and I can see some sense in this. For one thing it was extremely hot yesterday, but more crucially they don't have to worry about what to do with unsold stock. Still, I'd be reluctant to buy a frozen chicken, even if it were free-range. Freezing mushes up the texture. And the things are always so wet. A good chicken should be dry when you cook it, not sopping wet. When I've bought chickens over here in Wholefoods, even their poshest ones have been hermetically sealed in thick plastic bags, sloshing around in water. Contrast that to a chicken that has been hung in a butcher's. Not a drop of water to be seen.
I digress. The Tower Grove market was very good. One man was even selling "English bacon". I quizzed him about this and we quickly established that it's back bacon, American bacon being universally streaky. He'd sold out. He does do "cheek bacon" though, which I must try. It's a bacony form of Bath Chaps.
As in most farmers' markets I've seen in the States, everything was generally on the pricey side. I think it's worth it, ultimately, but whereas I like to think of farmers' markets as a way of farmers cutting out the middle man and retaining all of the retail price for themselves, sometimes there's a danger that producers will overstep the mark so much that we're into the area of "boutique food", designed to appeal to people with more money than sense rather than people who just want to buy decent food straight from the people who grew it. There's a store I visited today called Local Harvest. It claims to source as much of its food as possible from local producers. They have two labels which you can find on some products. One says 150 and the other 300, and each refers to the maximum amount of miles something has travelled. Quite apart from the fact that I don't consider 150 miles to be exactly local, I could see very few items which carried the stickers. Most of the stock, I'm sorry to say, was stuff you'd see at any health food store. Their strawberries, albeit organic, came from Driscolls, the largest supplier of soft fruit in the USA. A bunch of three small beetroot, with the leaves still attached (which I often use instead of spinach), was $3.99. That's about £2.40. For one portion of beets. As well as thinking that's just taking the piss, it highlights another problem with food pricing over here. Everything gets rounded up to the nearest 99 cents. So a producer comes along with a bunch of beets that he wants to sell to the store for $1.50 (still more than I pay for a good bunch of local beets at home). The store then doubles the price in mark-up, but rather than sell them for $3, it rounds the price up even more to $3.99. Well, that's just bonkers and cynical. But they all do it.

These gripes aside, it's good to know that the movement towards decent produce is as strong here as it is at home. I despaired of ever buying free-range pork here as most pigs are raised in enormous sheds, but no, you can get it. Restaurants are springing up all over town which boast of their local sourcing. Some are even getting into the nose-to-tail movement. All power to their free-range elbows.

Cluck cluck

2011-05-21T03:26:00.001+01:00

I made Arroz Con Pollo last night, a sort of chicken paella. I've made it many times before. It's easy and tasty. Well, not last night it wasn't. We got all the ingredients at a local supermarket, Schnucks. It's generally a good store that caters well for the local community and which takes care to stock foods that appeal to every ethnic background. We bought onion, garlic, green peppers, short grain rice, tinned chicken broth, fresh plum tomatoes, paprika and chicken thighs. Nothing odd, no funny spice mixes, no pre-packaged shortcuts (except for the broth I suppose). I cooked it up as I always do, frying the chicken first in olive oil, then the vegetables and paprika, adding the stock then rice... I let it rest for ten minutes before serving. It looked good but tasted of nothing. The chicken was awful with no flavour whatsoever. We had looked for a free range bird but in vain, and this was the best we could do.
I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not. Just very disappointed. The very strange thing is that the rest of it had no flavour to speak of either. The onions, garlic, peppers, paprika and broth had achieved nothing. It's no wonder that Colonel Sanders has to lather his chicken in a gazillion spices, a ton of salt (sugar too II'll wager) and breadcrumbs then deep fry it, because without all the extra crap the meat itself would taste of nothing.
I wonder how many Americans, or Brits for that matter, when they say "it tastes of chicken" actually know what chicken tastes like?

Mr Creosote rides again

2011-05-19T22:09:00.001+01:00

For foodies, a quick run-down of eateries so far...

Crown Candy Kitchen is a candy store cum soda fountain cum diner which opened in 1913 and which hasn't changed dramatically since. There are only a few booths, more like tiny wooden cubicles, and if there are more than four of you, you might as well head elsewhere. Likewise if you don't like queuing for a table you might as well head elsewhere. The extraordinary thing about this is that Crown Candy is in a pretty desolate corner of town, north of Downtown. Millions of dollars have just been spent by the city in at attempt to rejuvenate the area and nearby there are lots of old stores that have been spiffily renovated but which currently stand empty, waiting to be occupied by boutiques and art galleries. Personally I wish they were becoming shops that actually serve the immediate neighbourhood, like bakeries and butchers, but that doesn't seem likely.
Anyway, the fare at Crown Candy is basic stuff but good. I had a Ruben, which is a toasted corned beef sandwich with sauerkraut and thousand island dressing. The beef is what we Brits called salt beef rather than the stuff from Fray Bentos. The sandwich came with chips (crisps) and a long, salty pickle. However the main courses are merely the prologue to what Crown Candy is really about. Sundaes, shakes and malts (basically a milkshake thickened with malt powder - Ovaltine?) are the reason you can't get a table. I would have had a malt if my birthday-boy heart wasn't already on a sundae. At 24 fluid ounces (one-and-a-half wimpy American pints) each their malts are massive. They have a challenge that has stood since 1913: if you can drink five malts within half an hour you get them free. Only an idiot would try that which is why the bloke off the ludicrous US TV show "Man vs Food" has attempted it. I have no idea if he succeeded and frankly I don't care. As I wrote on this blog back in August, the idea that the enjoyment of food is to be had solely in stuffing as much of the stuff inside your face as you possibly can is so revolting that the show's presenter should be struck down with the heart attack he so richly deserves.
I had the Crown Sundae and jolly good it was too. Two scoops of excellent homemade ice-cream of my choosing, topped with chocolate fudge sauce, pecans, whipped cream and a cherry. I surprised myself by choosing the cherry ice-cream - not normally a flavour I'd plump for - but I'm glad I did as it was very, very good, the cherries large and, well, fruity.

Shaw's Coffee in The Hill, from where I blogged yesterday, is a real find. There is a large roaster right in the middle of the cafe and when they have a roasting session, as they did yesterday afternoon, the doors are flung open and the street fills with with the smell of the the hot beans. Lucy met me after her rehearsal and we wandered down to Amighetti's, an Italian cafe and bakery that is something of a local institution. I couldn't resist the spaghetti with meatballs - as good a barometer of an American-Italian eatery as anything - and for seven bucks got an enormous portion that I couldn't finish, quite. There were four meatballs nearly the size of cricket balls. But they were very good, and every time I said "that's it I'm done" I found myself having another forkful a couple of minutes later.
Despite my distended belly we couldn't resist wandering into their bakery shop after lunch and buying a couple of cannoli "for later". We ate them today and they were much better than you get from Roma in New York, the pastry lighter and the ricotta less cloying.

Finally I have to mention World's Fair Donuts, just east of The Hill. It's an old nondescript looking place, barely more than a shack, but it's charming and, dare I say it, quaint. But not in a self-conscious or deliberate way. Apparently the same people have been working there for the last 30 years or so and they open at four in the morning. It might sound silly to say it's nice to meet a donut seller who's passionate about his work but that's the impression he certainly gave when we stopped for a glazed ring and a glazed-cake. There was an old biddy in front of us who had stepped out of an old Lincoln with Arkansas plates - perhaps she had spotted the shop from the freeway and told her husband (a Vietnam veteran - it said so on his licence plate) to pull over for a box of treats - who was umming and aahing about what to chose, and the server described each nut in turn with what I can only call good old-fashioned courtesy and patience. My glazed ring, perhaps not the most original of choices, was superb. Much better than a Krispy Kreme. It was firmer and less gratingly sweet. I'm going to have to go back. Apparently the buttermilk donuts are to die for and how can I resist a "fried pie", the size and shape of a small pasty, filled with jam or custard? I adore these old businesses and would happily pay over-the-odds to give them my custom, but you get two top-notch donuts for a dollar and who can argue with that?

Zing zing zing went my heartstrings

2011-05-18T21:36:00.002+01:00

This is my idea of a good trip. The biggest factor in that is that I'm not here to work; Lucy is. It isn't that often that I'm free for the duration of one of her jobs, or vice versa, and more often than not we'll spend weeks thousands of miles apart. I could have stayed in England, watering the garden, being a Saddo and pottering about at home, but it seemed infinitely more sensible to come to St Louis and have, you know, a married life.
Lucy is singing three cameo roles in John Adam's "The Death of Klinghoffer" for the Opera Theatre so it's not as if she should be rehearsing a great deal, nor does she have the pressure of a major role to worry about. Unlike most companies the Opera Theatre doesn't work downtown but out on a university campus to the west of the city. They perform four operas, all in English, over about a month and that's it for the season.
The other thing that makes this a good trip is that I get to explore a new city. So far I'm liking St Louis a lot. And by the way, for those of you who think it's pronounced Saint Looey, it isn't. It's Saint Looiss. Despite the song from the movie.
And talking about the movie, let me tell you a little about our digs. The fees are not generous here. Not by any means. But there are willing hosts who will put you up rent-free for the duration, and that makes a substantial difference to the take-home pay. Now normally I would run a mile from such an arrangement. I like my privacy. But first off, this isn't my call (not my job) and secondly, on this occasion the toast has landed butter side up.
If you have seen "Meet Me In St Louis" you'll remember that Judy Garland's family lives in a sizeable Victorian villa in a leafy suburb. And so it is with our hosts. This makes them sound grand but far from it. Nor are they intrusive in the slightest and, more remarkably, they seem more than happy for us to potter about the house as if it were our own. We are more restrained than that, but any day now we'll take advantage of the swimming pool and hot tub knowing that they'll be very pleased we have. We have a huge bedroom and our bathroom is, I think, as old as the house. It is panelled with marble and has a massive claw-foot bath. So, all-in-all not bad.
Since we've been here we haven't watched one second of television. In America that is absolutely extraordinary. I've been in houses where the TV is on pretty-well all day, jabbering in the background. There is one in the house but I haven't seen it yet. Best of all, even if the TV were on I'm very sure it would never be tuned to Fox News.
So, so far so very good. There's a singular absence of anything to moan about or which could lead me into a state of scornful apoplexy. I'm typing this - and I'd look a right poseur if I were the only one doing so - while sitting outside a thoroughly lovely coffee shop in The Hill, a sort of Little Italy. The coffee shop used to be a bank and while it is sad that this clearly used to be a neighbourhood with a main street of bakers, butchers and greengrocers, it still has maintained a cultural identity that is charming and interesting. There's a wonderful deli next door and nearly every corner has a tempting Italian-American eatery that makes Manhattan's Little Italy look corny and fake. I'm enraptured.
To get here I walked through a couple of miles of old suburbia. Neighbourhoods change dramatically from block to block and occasionally I felt very conspicuous by my Anglo Saxonism. But, without wishing to sound preachy, the world might be a happier place if we all learned to walk through each other's neighbourhoods and care a little less about our cultural and ethnic differences.

Packed

2011-05-15T14:12:00.001+01:00

I'm a good packer. I make no bones about bragging about that. I have sought ways over the years to whittle down my travel necessities to a tidy minimum. Advances in technology have helped enormously. Sixteen years ago, if I was going abroad for any length of time, I would pack in my suitcase a small Canon printer and a fax machine. It seems extraordinary now, but back then email was in its infancy. We had no home computer. Who did? Who had a mobile phone? Barely anyone I knew. Who had a laptop before 1995? Back then, they were the preserve of the very rich or high-flying businessmen.
I did have a Psion organiser though, packed with 128kbs of memory. It was a nifty gizmo that could fit in a jacket pocket. I could type documents on its clamshell keyboard, which I then printed and faxed. The Psion could do basic spreadsheets too and if you held it up to the mouthpiece of a telephone it could tone-dial phone numbers in its address book. That seemed just so cool at the time. The more I think about it, the more I realise it was a truly advanced gadget. Palm Pilots came along, touch screens became all the rage and Psion stopped production, but if someone produced a similar-sized device with everything that such a gadget is capable of now, it would probably sell like hotcakes.
Why all the faxing? Phone bills were always a massive part of the expense of being abroad. I used to spend many hundreds of pounds on phone calls during every opera job I did. It was just something you had to do. There were no cheap phone cards, there was no Skype. There was rarely any competition between phone companies too, so prices were high and there was nothing you could do about it. International phone calls were simply very, very costly.
So when faxes came along it wasn't hard to see how you could save a lot of money by replacing a fifteen-minute conversation with a one-minute fax. A printer and fax machine (which cost about £100 each) could easily pay for themselves in the course of one job. When I moved into new digs, the very first thing I would do was unplug the phone and replace it with my fax machine. Then I'd find somewhere to set up my printer. The mileage of cables I needed for all this staggers my mind today.
I always dreamed though that a time would come when I wouldn't have to fill half my suitcase with office equipment and now... Well it's easy, isn't it? Except that luggage allowances have also tumbled so the pressure to miniaturise and cut weight has stayed the same. Gone are the days when I could bring a folding bike as well as my suitcase. After years of carrying around a laptop (as well as, in the early years, an external modem and all kinds of adapters) I'm not even doing that anymore. An iPad can do everything I need.
No, there's no doubt, I'm a good packer. I like to steer well inside the weight limit. The missus, not so much. It's the toiletries I reckon. I'm packed in 20 minutes. The missus, half a day. Toiletries again. And then, when we get to the airport hotel, she repacks all over again. Or so it seems. It's possibly a Mars vs Venus thing.
And so it was today. Unfortunately she felt the weight of her bags compared to the weight of mine (damn!) and on the quiet I have become encumbered with a vast 2 kilo score of "The Marriage of Figaro", a raincoat and a large bag of electrical stuff. All hers.
I addressed the Figaro issue. Didn't go down well. I was rewarded with a look. So now I'm a luggage mule who's in the doghouse.
She is en route to St Louis via Washington DC whereas I, going most of the way on Virgin airmiles, am travelling via Chicago. I've just got to remember to slip the bottle of cologne she had me buy for her at Terminal 3 into my checked luggage when I get to Chicago or I'll have to negotiate it through security before my connection. I have no liquids in my hand luggage at the moment. See? Good packing that is.
Now the only issue left is: if I post this will she ever speak to me again?

The economy option

2011-05-07T18:59:00.007+01:00

Two days ago I shared a photo of my hotel room in Berlin on Facebook. It's a small room, about 8' wide, with a single bed, a desk, an armchair, a sink and a cupboard. And a small welcome pack of gumi bears on the pillow.
I posted the photo asking friends to hazard a guess as to who was paying for my hotel expenses; me or the promoter of the concert. Plenty of people cracked jokes about the size of the room (and the gumi bears) but no-one actually took the plunge and guessed. Or if they did, they didn't say so.
It isn't the easiest call to make. Some promoters are more generous than others and in these straitened times the five-star treatment on concert trips is less likely. But I'll come clean. I booked the room.
Berlin is rare amongst European cities. Normally when you're booked by an orchestra (but not an opera company) they cover your travel and hotel but every job I've done here has paid a "global" fee from which I have to pay all my expenses. It's also the same in the States, in my experience, but I'm no expert.
Now call me a cheapskate if you like but I have never seen the merit in spending a vast percentage of fees in needless expenses. It's a bad business strategy. Surely the point is to take home as much of your fee as humanly possible? And people who say that business expenses are "tax deductible" are, well, wrong. Business expenses allow you to reduce your taxable profit, not the tax itself. £1 spent on expenses isn't £1 saved in tax. Not by a long shot.
But that's niggly stuff. The broader picture is this: there's no point in earning a living as a singer if you blow everything you earn on hotels and travel. You're just feeding an insatiable beast. That's fine if you have nothing else in your life except flying on planes and sleeping in hotels but, nope, that's not for me. I have other fish to fry and the less I spend in expenses on the road means the longer it is before I have to go on the road again to top up the piggy bank. Of course it's not quite as simple as that; that makes me sound like some sort of medieval troubadour, but the principle is the same.
So, I never let my agent book my travel because they always budget far too dearly. I do it all myself and I delight in finding good deals and interesting places to stay. And this hotel - though it's really a small "pension" - is no exception. The room may be small and sparse but it is as clean as a nun's conscience, the staff are lovely and best of all, including a decent breakfast I'm paying only €38 a night. The pension - it's called Hotel Modena - is on the second floor of a "belle epoque" style house at the very poshest end of Kurfürstendamm, Ku'damm to the locals, and is surrounded by loads of fancy shops - Prada is on the corner - and fun restaurants. It's a great area.
I'll stay here again, though probably in a room with a bathroom (though I've had the one down the hall entirely to myself) next time, if there's a next time. There's no telly but that's something of a bonus and with free wifi, who needs it? It'd all be in German anyway...
And now to wander the boulevards in search of a good dinner-for-one.
Here's a link to the hotel's site
http://www.hotel-modena.de/index.de.php

Hustle

2011-05-06T22:15:00.001+01:00

I already know I'm a loony magnet but now it seems I'm an obvious target for con artists too.
I'm just wandering along the side of the Philharmonie when a car pulls up next to me and the driver leans over and winds down the passenger window. I assume he is in need of directions and in my best German I tell him I'm English.
"Ah eenglish! I am Italiano, from Milano."
We continue the conversation in mixture of Italian and English, though he's doing all the talking.
Well, you'd never believe it but this guy, very smartly dressed, has just finished a fashion fare in town and not only that but this friendly and total stranger wants to give me two leather jackets! Free!
"You know Emporio?"
"Er, no..."
"Emporio Armani?!"
"Well, yes..."
The bag he is showing me doesn't say Armani anywhere. Just Emporio.
He takes out the jackets and my first thought is "yuck". The black one looks plastic and the other, a suede job (antelope? Is that what he said?), doesn't look much better. He tells me to feel them. I'm not convinced but I'm no expert. He's pointing at labels and telling me they are exactly my size. He puts them back in the Emporio bag and stuffs its handle in my hand. "They are present for you!"
Oh yeah?
"I just need to ask you a leetle favore."
Here it comes...
"I was in casino in Potsdammerplatz (he has a leaflet from said casino and I'm thinking "why would you have that?") and my credit card, five thousand euro, he is feeneesh. Basta. I need to buy da gasoline to get back to Milano. Look!" He points to the petrol gauge but I can't see it and besides, he has switched off the engine.
Ah, so that's the scam.
I release the handle of the bag containing what I am now absolutely convinced are two five-euro jackets, look at my watch and exclaim that I'm late for a meeting. I walk away while he yells something which leads me to think he isn't my newest, bestest mate anymore.

Learner

2011-05-02T16:09:00.001+01:00

Ihave nothing to learn.

Wellisn't that going to need a littleclarification - and as that is a rhetorical question I'm going to deliberatelyomit a question mark. Nope, that doesn't look right at all, so here's one toput things right? Oh crap, this is just getting worse. I'll start again.

Ihave nothing to learn.

Bywhich I don’t mean that I have become some paradigm of knowledge acquisition, aMaster of Technique, or a guru; someone who has learned it all, whatever “it”might be.

I meanthat, normally, I have a pile of music on the top of our upright piano (whichfancily calls itself a “bungalow grand”, don’t you just love it) which iswaiting for me to tackle. But I don’t. Nada. I have no new repertoire coming up(and more on that anon) so there’s nothing for me to learn.

“To learn” has broadly two meanings for asinger. First it means to note-bash; to painstakingly work over and over on apiece until you can perform it with the score, probably for a concert. When Iwas younger I used to spend an awful lot less time on this process, relying fartoo much on the sight-reading ability I had acquired at King’s and also, I haveno doubt, being an awful lot sloppier. My sight-reading has grown rusty withage and lack of use, not to mention my short-term memory, so I am a gazilliontimes more fastidious in my studies these days. Besides, when you are young allthe repertoire is new. There’s just so much new stuff to learn. I have theluxury of revisiting old repertoire these days and can afford to spend a largerportion of my time on the new stuff, such as it is.

Also,and I’m not alone in this, I have much less trust in my brain and body than Iused to. If I am not thoroughly prepared for a gig I know I will be overwhelmedwith anxiety. I have lost all of the bravura and ballsiness of youth. It isn’tfun, I can tell you. I need to spend an awful lot more time in preparation sothat I can feel comfortable in performance.

Thesecond meaning of “to learn” is to memorise, which cannot be done without thefirst learning process; though that is a moot point, given the number of us whoperform stuff from memory complete with fat fistfuls of mistakes, the result ofpoor preparation. The trouble is that once you’ve memorised something you’ve learnedbadly it is incredibly difficult to correct the errors.

Memorising is a fantastically boring process that is also becoming increasinglydifficult as I get older. I can still remember huge chunks of roles I memorised in my twenties but somethingI committed to memory two years ago has all but faded into a dim mist. Gettingit back is like coaxing a frightened cat out of a tree. It takes time and immensepatience. As well as a tin of tuna and the fire brigade. If only. At least thatwould be fun.

So, Ihave nothing new to learn or to memorise.

I’msure there are some people out there thinking to themselves “Well why don’t youlearn a new role just for the hell of it?” Quickly stifling the voice inside mesqueaking “What? Are you kidding? Unpaid?!!”(not that you’re ever paid to learn a role I might add, just to perform it) Iwould answer that this would be like moving to Lewes. I should explain. There’san old superstition amongst British singers that if you seem to be “in” with theGlyndebourne Festival the last thing you should do is move to Lewes, the nearbytown, because as soon as you do, Glyndebourne will stop asking you back. It’s avariation on Sod’s or Murphy’s Law. And so, as soon as you decide to learnsuch-and-such a role because it seems like a good thing to do you just knowthat you’ll never get to sing it. Well that’s my rationalisation and I’m sticking toit. Besides if I went to all the bother of learning a role I’m not booked tosing, the chances are that by the time I ambooked to sing it I will have forgotten the damn thing and it will all havebeen a colossal waste of time that I could have better spent doing somethingelse. Like writing this blog! See?! Wouldn’t that be a terrible price to pay?

Or itcould be that I’m just far too lazy. And if this whole hour spent composingthis post has done anything at all, it has now given me the idea that I shouldreally prove myself wrong.

Ihave everything to learn.

Teenage angst

2011-04-23T10:37:00.001+01:00

I was back in my old alma mater yesterday, King's College Cambridge, singing in the Chapel. I think I may have finally conquered the fear that overwhelms me whenever I start to sing in the place, but I'm not sure. It's a fear rooted in my first ever experience of singing under it's famous fan-vaulted ceiling.
It was September 1975 and I was seventeen. I had applied for a Choral Scholarship to King's which, if I was successful, would get me a place in the choir the following academic year. I was desperate to get into King's. Nowhere else would do, but the system was that you listed in order of preference which other colleges you would also like to consider. Such was the rivalry between King's and St John's that if you put either of them second you could forget it altogether. They weren't prepared to be anybody's back-up.
What I didn't know then was that the Choral Scholarship also guaranteed a place in the University without the need to sit the entrance exam that I was currently cramming for, not too successfully.
The selection process was pretty tough. All the applicants descended on Cambridge for two days and were put up in college rooms. The first round, the one I actually dreaded most, was where you were sent into a small auditorium and were made to sight-read in front of all the choral directors. The ability to read well was key as the top choirs covered a lot of repertoire and there wasn't enough rehearsal time to cope with stragglers. I was crap at reading which I blame squarely on poor education in that department in my early years.
After the first round a list went up of who was through to round two and who could go home. Despite having made a hash of my sight-reading they let me through.
The next round the next day involved singing an aria in either St John's or King's or both. I had to do both, St John's first. All the candidates sat in a line on a pew, and one by one we got up and did our party piece. Mine was a Handel aria. Various choir masters were dotted around each chapel, mostly looking pretty bored. We were all incredibly nervous.
Half an hour after my St John's audition (which wouldn't have been in my case for St John's itself, as I'd nailed my colours to the King's mast, but which was for any other colleges that might be interested) I was down the road in the choir stalls of King's waiting my turn. I sang my aria in this wonderful building that I already loved with a teenage passion, and when I finished, thought "that's it, nothing more to do", when Philip Ledger the King's Organist announced he was worried about my sight-reading and wanted me to have another go at it. Oh crap. He handed me a copy of some Magnificat or something, told the organist to start from such-and-such a bar and off I went. And when I say off, I mean it. I hadn't a clue. Not only that but all the other candidates were still sitting there watching me melt into a pool of humiliated goo. I think I remember wanting to jump into the Cam and drown.
When I'd finished wrecking the brief piece of Howells (I'm pretty sure it was Howells), Ledger said I could go but to wait outside. So I walked out in a state of despondency. He'd found me out. I was a fraud.
A few minutes later he came out of the chapel and told me that he was giving me the scholarship. He said my voice was "terrific but for God's sake go away and learn how to sight-read".

Despite the happy ending, it's always been the seventeen year old in me who turns up first when I've gone back to sing as a soloist. "This is it," he tells me, "this is the moment they find out you really are a fraud." If I'm lucky I've been able to shut him up, but not always. Yesterday I actually felt too old to be putting up with that shit anymore. But that's not to say he won't put in another appearance sometime.

The weather was warm and gorgeous yesterday and it reminded me of a tour of Japan when I was in the King's Choir. We used to sing concerts in our cassocks, worn over white shirts with college ties, trousers and black shoes. The boys had to wear their Eton collars.
It was August and unbearably hot and humid, and back in the 70s air-conditioning was not so common, even in Japan. One night the heat was awful and the men went onstage looking angelic as we always did in our red cassocks, but underneath none of us was wearing any trousers. We were wearing underpants though.

Tuning in

2011-04-18T22:48:00.002+01:00

I had my first full "In Tune" experience today. For those who don't know, it's a two hour show on Radio 3, the BBC's classical radio channel, which highlights concerts and musical events which are coming up in the music calendar. Every day they have some guests who perform live in the studio.
I say my full experience because I have been on the show before but then all I had to do was chat about the St Matthew Passion from a studio in Bath. We were promoting a performance with The Bach Choir and luckily they already had a tape of a broadcast performance we had done a couple of years beforehand. I sat alone at the other end of an ISDN line while in Broadcasting House in London Sean Rafferty, the host, fired me questions over the ether and we listened to bits of the tape.
Today I was helping to plug a concert I'm doing in Cambridge on Friday - the rarely-performed "Golgotha" by Frank Martin - so I had to take a train up to London, rehearse with a pianist, hang about, do a sound check, hang around some more and then, well, go for it. It's an exhausting business this promotion lark.
I wasn't alone. Our soprano Ailish Tynan, and mezzo Sue Bickley (an avid reader of this blog as it turns out. Hi Sue!) were in on the act too, each of us with bleeding chunks to contribute. The difficulty was that none of us has performed the piece before and though we're all prepared, we haven't done any proper rehearsals yet, despite Sean Rafferty saying on air that we had. We do that on Thursday. So our knowledge of the piece as a whole is confined to our stuff and not much more. None of us, apart from the conductor, had got a handle on the entire oeuvre and yet we had to go on the radio and sell it.
The concert will also be broadcast on Radio 3 so this was our chance to tickle the taste buds of the potential listener so that he'd eschew all the other distractions on offer on Good Friday evening and tune their dials to us instead. It's a tough sell and we did our bit, spouting enthusiasm from every pore. Sue was so enthusiastic that during my stint of being interviewed (about which I can remember practically nothing) she hurled a plastic cup across the live studio. Well that's how it sounded as I struggled to find a cohesive argument for a piece of which I am familiar only in bits. I think perhaps that in her relief at being done she just dropped the cup, but I like to think of her chucking it in a fabulous display of upstaging.
The studio is a grim environment in which to sing - acoustically dry and unforgiving, though I think (and hope) they add a bit of flattering reverb in the mixing booth. More unnerving perhaps is the immediate presence of your conductor and colleagues who have nothing better to do than listen to you from only a few feet away.
The odd and surprisingly pleasant thing is that it feels as if we've got the hard bit out of the way. Friday's performance may well feel like a walk in the park compared to the scrutiny we've faced today. Well, you can but wish.

Le Flaneur Genevois

2011-04-06T19:33:00.001+01:00

I have been in Geneva a week now and I think I have the measure of the place. Let's skip quickly over the excruciating prices and the rash of impossibly chic designer shops that make me want to raise the barricades and start a revolution. Oh, I'm not that radical but the vile smugness of them drives me mad. And where do their employees get off on looking so snooty and disdainful? Don't you dare try and sneer at me! You work in a bloody shop for God's sake!
You see? That's the trouble with Geneva. You just want to yell at all the self-important bankers, financiers, jewellers and spoilt-brat Porsche drivers that you find around every corner.
So, moving swiftly on, I have found a few things that can make the cheapskate, like me, reasonably happy.
A couple of transport tips for the Geneva neophyte:
When you arrive at the airport, there's a ticket machine in the luggage hall that will give you a free ticket, valid for 90 minutes, enabling you to use any form of public transport to get to your destination in town. So you can take the train and then a tram or whatever, absolutely free. Very civilised.
If you're staying at a hotel, the hotel will give you a free travel pass for your entire stay!
As we're staying in digs we don't benefit from this but there are all kinds of passes you can buy for not much money. I only discovered a few days ago that there are various ferries that ply across the lake which are also part of the public transport system. It is perfectly feasible on a sunny day like today, to plant yourself in the stern of a boat and potter back and forth all day, all for seven francs (about £4.40), the price of an all-day pass after 9 a.m. And the boats don't seem to stay on just the one route, but switch their routes every time they arrive at a pontoon, so you're not repeatedly covering the same stretch of lake. (If you're hotel hasn't given you one, you can buy a day pass from the machines at every tram or boat stop. You need coins though; exact change.)
The other day, just because I could, I took a tram to France. I got on by our flat and took the 16 for about ten minutes to the end of the line at Moillesulaz. I got off, walked about ten metres and crossed the unmanned border. I love doing that. (In Strasbourg once I did a very dreary walk out of town just so I could invade Germany on foot. Well, it makes a change eh?)
Not that there was much to see the other side. Just more of the same really, which was pretty dull. I ended up buying some groceries in a Casino supermarket, which was a bit cheaper than doing it in Switzerland. I did feel oddly furtive though as I recrossed the border (even though I'd spied several Swiss doing the same thing) and walked the half hour back to the flat.
There are some decent museums in town which are free and oddly empty. I like that though. I'd rather see some good paintings in a quiet gallery than fight the crowds to glimpse a celebrity piece elsewhere. Though some joy in the latter can be had in opining loudly on the ghastliness of Renoir in front of a bunch starstruck tourists. It can be a bit like going into a MacDonalds and saying at the top of your voice that you think the Jonas brothers are talentless twats, but so very worth it.
The last tip is a restaurant we stumbled upon in the Paquis. It's a scruffy Italian place with indifferent service, but it's homely and authentic. Pavarotti's name is emblazoned on the outside and the chef, who waddled in from time to time, doesn't look dissimilar.
I had the 32 franc menu (about £21) - a mixed salad generously topped with anchovies, rigatoni with pesto, saltimbocca with sautéed vegetables and a slice of strawberry tart - amazing value for Geneva (or Milan for that matter), while Lucy had what we thought was going to be just one course, but turned out to be two, for 22 francs. She had a mixed salad then two scaloppine served with linguini in a fantastic tomato and garlic sauce. She had some of my tart, of course, and the waiter anticipated this by bringing her a fork. If I went again, I'd do what Lucy did and choose a so-called single dish as the portions are massive. My only quibble was that we weren't shown a wine list, just offered some suggestions, and we only found out our half-litre bottle of Nero d'Avola cost a disproportionately expensive 24 francs when the bill came. It's cash only and we just scraped by with what was in our wallets.
I'd definitely recommend it for chic-weary visitors and it's called La Locanda Toscana, and is at 61, rue de Berne.

One last Bob story

2011-04-06T18:04:00.000+01:00

A story Bob Tear told about himself:
Bob sang the Verdi Requiem only once in his life, in unusual circumstances, when he was quite young. "Once was enough, love."
Bernstein was conducting it at the Royal Albert Hall and Carlo Bergonzi was due to be the tenor soloist but fell ill. Bob was called in at very short notice and being the consummate musician, pretty-well sight-read it.
At the end of the concert, in full view of the audience, Bernstein grabbed Bob's face in both hands and planted an open-mouthed kiss full on Bob's lips. Then as they were taking their bows Bernstein, holding Bob's hand, turned to him and said:
"You know, if you had a proper high B flat you'd have one of the great tenor voices of the world... Bad luck!"

A few Bob anecdotes

2011-04-04T20:21:00.002+01:00

Scene: a crowded cafe in Newcastle.
Bob looks around the room, waits for me to take a sip of coffee, then says at the top of his voice : "SO CHRIS, IS YOUR BROTHER GAY LIKE YOU?"

Scene: Durham Cathedral, packed for a concert. Bob is the conductor. Tonight is the night when there are loads of simultaneous performances of the Creation taking place all over the country, in aid of the hospice movement. One of these performances is being relayed live on Radio 2 and the idea is that all the concerts will start at exactly the same time, so while we wait on the podium the radio relay is being fed directly through the cathedral's tannoy system. A cheery Radio 2 announcer is describing the scene in detail and the plan is that he'll give a countdown to the opening downbeat, at which point the tannoy will be silenced and we'll start. Bob, next to me, is fidgety.
Announcer "And now coming on to the platform are tonight's soloists, Helen Screechy, soprano, (I've obviously changed the names to protect the real, well-known singers) Justin Yelp, tenor, and finally David Strained, bass. They have rehearsed this afternoon and I can tell you they are in fine voice... "
Bob turns to me, baton poised, and says really rather loudly: "WELL LOVE, THAT MAKES A CHANGE!"

I posted this one on Facebook but it's my favourite and it shows Bob's wisdom to perfection.
A very well known bass said to Bob "My ambition is to be the best bass in the world."
Bob: "That's lovely. How will you know?"

Bob Tear - "sublime and celestial greatness"

2011-03-29T19:55:00.002+01:00

A neighbour of ours died last week and his widow asked me to sing something at his memorial next Friday. It's always very hard to choose something for these occasions and I suggested Britten's arrangement of "The Salley Gardens". It's short, it's beautiful and it's ripe with poignancy. The last time I sang it was just over two years ago in the dining hall of King's College Cambridge, my old alma mater, at a dinner to raise money from fellow Kingsmen. It was a great evening. Philip Ledger accompanied me and amongst the diners were Stephen Cleobury (the College Organist), David Willcocks, and Bob Tear with his wife Hilary.
It was the last time I saw Bob and today I learned that he has just died.
Like so many tenors of my generation I grew up with Bob's recordings. He represented a new vigour in English singing that made a break with the immediate past and that enormous influence that Peter Pears had wielded for so long. Where Pears gave refinement and, I dare say it, a certain prissiness, Bob was gutsy and visceral. Well that's how he seemed to me and I loved it. Bob's was the first recording of "The Salley Gardens" that I heard and owned, and it was always my favourite. The emotion was real, the picture vivid and alive.
So to have him listen to me do it, to have him hug me later and say nice things... today means more to me than I can possibly share.
I first met Bob at King's in the late 70s when he was in the chapel making one of his many recordings. I was going to the RCM after I graduated and I hoped he would teach me. A few weeks later I went around to his house, then in Holland Park, so that he could give me a lesson by way of audition. I remember my hands quivering with nerves as we had coffee ("Oh I'm just as bad love, look at mine go!) and then he led me down to his garage - it was a modern townhouse - where he had a rather dilapidated upright, and we sang through the Britten Serenade. Bob was a very good pianist who could play anything I put in front of him. He used my vocal score and gave me his miniature score to read. Over the notes of the opening horn solo he had pencilled a text that he and the horn-player Barry Tuckwell had dreamed up as a piss-take on Aldeburgh sensibilities. I won't repeat it all but it started "I like boys. I like small boy's bottoms..." And that was my proper introduction to Bob. He felt the music intensely but he loved to laugh and be irreverent too.
Bob taught me for two years at the RCM. His heart wasn't in teaching technique - something I think he found pretty dull. He wanted to develop the human, the spiritual - the real musician. He gave me, as I'm sure he gave so many, a copy of Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity" - a brilliant insight into what I suppose you could call Western Zen - as well as books of poems by his beloved Traherne. He took me to art galleries (often with a purchase in mind) and gave me tips on racehorses. We drank beer at lunchtime and talked about love. He was a mentor in the true sense of the word.
When I got good enough, he gave me jobs. I jumped in for him on several occasions and he used to recommend me for things he couldn't do or didn't want to do. The last of these was last year when he suggested me for a recording of a piece that had been written for him. I stupidly never rang him to thank him.
He conducted me a few times. We did the Britten Serenade together, during which he would mutter encouraging things ("Marvellous darling, marvellous!"), and "The Creation" in Durham Cathedral, where he introduced me to the choir and orchestra by saying I was going to be singing the part of Urinal.
We took to writing to each other, often immensely long ramblings on spirituality, and when he finally got a fax machine (he was no technophile, always writing in longhand and never as far as I know touching a computer. He also couldn't drive) we engaged for a while on an idea of his where we would write alternate chapters of a book. It didn't work. His prose was always much more fantastical and elaborate than mine and leapt into realms of spiritual ecstasy (all that Traherne you see...) which sat uncomfortably with my more down-to-earth efforts.
We only appeared in one opera together simultaneously, and that was "Sir John in Love" at ENO, five years ago. It was a wonderful show to be in, with an extraordinary cast, and Bob gave it his all, but I believe his heart wasn't in singing any more. He was much more interested in painting and writing, and he found singing physically exhausting.
There's so much more I wish I could have shared with Bob. If ever I found myself down in the dumps about anything, I knew I could go to him for a few pints and some solid spiritual counselling.
But now he's gone. To quote The Salley Gardens: "...I was young and foolish and now am full of tears."

Time Waster

2011-03-26T01:15:00.002Z

Despite having done this singing malarky for over thirty years now, whenever I go to the theatre I still find myself being taken in by the magic of the proscenium. By which I mean, when I see singers or actors (not that the two are mutually exclusive) leave a scene, rather than visualising them going into the wings and back to their dressing rooms I still get taken in. I do actually imagine them going into the street and climbing into a carriage, or strolling in the streets of Montmartre, or in the case of this Billy Budd, being somewhere else in the school.
Considering the amount of time I've spent in the wings, you'd think I would have got the hang of this by now but sadly not. It's especially odd given that I'm in my dressing room right now, typing this while Billy goes on trial on the stage. The tannoy is belching impassioned music and I'm on my iPad. Well at least I'm being somewhat productive. I could easily have been catapulting squawking birds at grunting pigs, as are half my colleagues right now (those that haven't already achieved three stars on every level) or playing Scrabble, another favourite time-waster, for me at least, backstage. I think the Novice and Squeak are already propping up the artists' bar - this theatre being one of the few that has one - as apart from their curtain calls they're done for the evening. Me, I've still got a hanging to do.
So there you are. I know how it really works and yet when I go to, say, Richard lll this summer I really won't picture Gloucester sitting in his dressing-room doing the crossword for half the play, as he almost certainly will be. He'll be in his castle, or on his horse, and certainly in another century. He won't be playing games on his phone. I'm sorry he just won't. Isn't theatre wonderful?

Last suppers

2011-03-22T23:15:00.002Z

I'm into my last performances Billy Budd now which also means I'm on the Last Week Diet. This is not some special nutritional programme structured around a regimen of vitamins and protein with the aim of building up strength to get over the final hurdle. Psssh. Are you kidding? No, the Last Week Diet is one designed solely around the aim of finishing up all the bits and bobs of food that you've stocked up over the last two months so that you don't leave a stack of uneaten stuff that is either going to be thrown away, or more likely, squirrelled away by your landlord who, to be frank, has already taken what feels like more than his fair share of your hard-earned lucre. Why on earth should he also benefit from a cupboard full of free, unused comestibles? (Though I will say that in my current digs I have a gem of a landlord who is also a good friend so I begrudge him nothing, especially as he laid on some groceries on my first arrival.)
It's not just about waste though. I'm enough of a food nerd to see the tidying out of the larder as a culinary challenge; a bit like a perverse form of Ready Steady Cook where, rather then be presented with a bag of fresh ingredients, you have to see how many meals you can knock up from the mangy things lying forgotten in the back of the fridge.
At the moment I'm mulling over nearly a whole bottle of olive oil, a net of garlic bulbs, half a pack of spaghetti, half a bag of polenta, a block of mature Gouda, a pot of apple syrup, two potatoes, a chunk of celeriac and a tin of corned beef. I'd love to see what Ainsley whatshisname could knock up with that lot.
Hmm, I wonder if corned beef and polenta meatballs would go with spaghetti... topped with Gouda and whole garlic cloves roast in olive oil...

Trailer

2011-03-19T10:39:00.001Z

You can watch a fine trailer for our Billy Budd here

You can see the odd radio mic in a singer's hair. They were for the archive recording (and this) and NOT for amplification. We all hate the damn things and are thrilled they have now gone.

From one cheese nation to another

2011-03-18T14:38:00.000Z

Between my last two performances of Billy Budd I made a flying visit to Geneva to spend a couple of days with my wife Lucy. She's rehearsing "Punch and Judy" at the opera, a show which opens at the start of April. It had been three weeks since our last rendezvous and it will be another two before I return there for a week or so when the Britten is done here in Amsterdam. Sorry if you've heard all that before but if nothing it serves to remind everyone of the strange way in which opera singers (especially those married to other opera singers) have to conduct their marriages. Our rule of thumb is never to spend more than five weeks apart, even if it's only a two day catch-up between two chunks of five weeks. I don't know what we'd do without video calling.
Lucy was busy for much of the time I was there so I wandered around on my own for a bit and, as I tweeted at the time, I spent all my time wishing I were the other side of any of Switzerland's borders. Geneva is EuropeLite. It isn't France (far too Calvinist and lacking in joie-de-vivre). It certainly isn't Italy (too prissy, again too protestant, too clean). It isn't even Germany where at least you know you can duck into an inviting pub and see people having a good time. It's just there, stuck in the middle, being neither one nor the other. It's a diet yoghurt of a place; worthy and difficult to enjoy. And it is ridiculously expensive.
Lucy and I dined at a very modest chalet-style Swiss restaurant. The sort of place that appeals to tourists if I could figure out why anyone would visit Geneva for pleasure. We thought we'd have some meat fondue as I've never actually eaten it. It was generously portioned - so much so that we couldn't finish all the meat - and it came with chips, just to up the fried quotient. We shared a salad, a bottle of water and I had a small bottle of beer. No puddings or starters and yet the bill for us two came to about £70. For a fondue.
I'm an habitual menu-checker when wandering about cities. I'll stop outside pretty-well any eatery and check what's on the carte. Well in Geneva you'll never get away with paying less than around £20 for a main course, even if that means having bangers and mash. So, unsurprisingly, the restaurants aren't fully of happy carefree diners but are modestly replete with businessmen and diplomats on expense accounts or people like us who are feeling the pinch with every mouthful. I don't honestly think anyone goes out in Geneva to have a good time. It certainly doesn't look that way. At night the streets are fairly deserted. Everyone has rushed home to count their money.
I'll try harder to like Geneva when I go back and I'm sure I'll have more to say on the subject.
Coming back to Amsterdam presented an emotional paradox. On the one hand it meant leaving Lucy again but on the other, Amsterdam is familiar, homely yet effervescent and has so much more to offer the itinerant than Geneva. Last night I met up with a few of the usual Billy Budd suspects in the Engelbewaarder on Kloveniersbrugwaal, a lovely brown bar in a canal house, where we had a couple of Palms before pottering north to O-Cha, a good little Thai café just north of Nieuwmarkt. There a couple of courses and pot of tea cost us just €17 each. After dinner I took Clive, our Claggart, to De Oloofsport Prooflokaal, the jenever tasting bar at the top of the red light district that was built in 1619 and which has nothing to do with its seedier environs. It's a beautiful little bar and was utterly empty but for us and the owners. The landlady was more than happy to chat to us about the bar and its many ranks of bottles of gins and flavoured brandies.
Getting there we wandered up Zeedijk, one of the main arteries through the red light district which, I confess, I don't think I've walked up before in its entirety, believing it to be full of crud and seediness. And I think I used to be right but not any more. Now it is full of promising-looking restaurants, many full of Amsterdammers and not tourists as I expected, as well as smart boutiques and bars. You think you know a city and then it takes you by surprise. I shall have to go back in the last ten days I have here.

Balls

2011-03-13T16:46:00.000Z

It hasn't all been nothing but opera in the week since we opened. Far from it. 
I've returned to a few old  noshing haunts and tried a couple of new eateries too. 

Hemelse Modder on the Oude Waal, not far from Nieuwmarkt, I've been to lots of times in the last ten years. It's always good value with decent rather than dazzling cooking based around top quality ingredients, which is just my bag. There were five of us and we all ate from the three course €29.95 menu, which seems to be the going rate for a set menu in town. I started with some duck confit; wild duck I'm guessing as the two legs were very small but intensely flavoured. Next most of us, including me, had pigeon served with a chicory gratin and proper potato croquettes. I like chicory but some of the others found it too bitter. Pudding was a small chunk of berry crumble that was nothing much to write home about. I should have had their signature pudding "heavenly mud" (the restaurant's name) - gobs of dark and white chocolate mousse. But all-in-all a fine meal.  

At the first night do there had been no food - which isn't very clever as we'd been on stage for three-and-a-half hours. So, well after midnight, most of us drifted over to the Blauwbrug pub across the road, had a couple more beers and few portions of bitterballen. 
For the unitiated, bitterballen look like spherical, deep-fried, crunchy croquettes, just smaller than a golfball. Whilst lukewarm to the touch, and therefore easy to pick up in your fingers and dunk in the obligatory mustard, the insides are in fact made of molten lava and many's the time the bitterballen neophyte has burned off the skin on his hard palette by popping one whole into his mouth and starting to chew. In truth the inside is a meaty-potatoey goo found only in Dutch cuisine as far as I know, which manages to be revolting yet strangely seductive. Bitterballen are so hot because the deep-fried breadcrumb crust locks in all the heat from the fat fryer, not as the name might imply because they're spicy; though when your mouth is combusting it does cross your mind that they may as well scrap the Hadron Collider; what's going on in your gob must be as close to the Big Bang as anyone on earth could possibly recreate. 

The day after the first night, just twelve hours after we'd left the pub, a tired-looking bunch met for a late brunch of pancakes in the imaginatively named Pancakes! on Berenstraat in the canal ring. It's a tiny place but for €10.50 you can get a so-called American breakfast that includes a good stack of smaller cakes, topped with bacon and doused in maple syrup, with a very large tumbler of freshly-squeezed orange juice and a coffee. Just the ticket after a beery late night. That's what I chose but I felt guilty for not having a Dutch pancake which is like a thick crepe and best ordered I think with apples, raisins, lots of butter and plenty of stroop (syrup).

Sukabumi got a visit too. It used to be right by the flower market but is now nearer Dam Square, just off Singel. I think it's cheap-and-cheerful Indonesian food is pretty good but I'm not an expert by any means and I'm willing to have my eyes opened to some top Indonesian cooking so that I have a better understanding of what to expect. I feel like I'm reviewing, say, Indian food on the basis of a few visits to our local curry house. 

Caffe 500, so called as it has an old Fiat 500, sliced lengthways, in its window, was somewhere I tried to take Lucy, but my landlord and friend Michiel took me there instead. He had trouble securing a table as it's very popular. Again it prides itself on its produce, much of which arrives daily from Italy. The mozzarella was outstanding. That came in a plate of good antipasti. There was a large birthday party in, and it's a small place, so I think we were unlucky but our secondi took nearly three quarters of an hour to arrive. That's just too long and I wolfed it down hungrily without fully appreciating if it was anything more than fine. It was fagotto - a thin, breaded slice of veal stuffed with two cheeses. We didn't have any pudding - it was too late - and the bill was rather hefty for what we'd had so I can't enthusiastically recommend Caffe 500. It was also incredibly noisy and conversation was only possible by cupping ears and yelling. Not good for a singer. Why did it have to have background music? Why does anywhere have to play music, especially if they are busy and people are trying to converse? It makes no sense to me whatsoever. Personally I love quiet restaurants and wish all muzak was totally banned, except possibly oompa music in Bavarian eateries which is just too hilarious to forego. 

I'm off to Geneva for a couple of nights to see Lucy. Often dubbed The Most Boring City in Europe I'm not gasping in anticipation, nor have I bothered to do any research beforehand. But it will be nice to hang with the missus for a few hours. She's in the thick of rehearsals so that's all we'll manage. I'll be back there for a week after I'm done here so I have plenty of time to, um, unlock its hidden treasures. I'm expecting burnt cheese, cake and chocolate to feature in the diet but I don't know if that's fair. We will see.

Dubious stunt

2011-03-11T00:44:00.002Z

I've not held much truck with the way ENO has taken its marketing in the last few years. It strikes me as a combination of X-Factor-esque, panting hyperbole and glossy mag vapidity. And now the Netherlands Opera, faced with plummeting subscriptions, subsidy cuts and a desperate need for box office revenue, has decided to market one performance of Billy Budd as a "Gay Date Night". This is picture they're using on the publicity:

Needless to say the image has nothing to do with our production. Elsewhere on the web couples are urged to see Britten's "gay opera" on this particular night. They are even offered massive ticket discounts.

I find this depressing on several levels.

I really thought we were beyond this now. Isn't every night at any opera Gay Date Night? I've never known any environment with less prejudice than an opera house and I'm more likely to bump into gay friends at the opera than anywhere else.

If they're going to promote Gay Date Nights are they also going to start Straight Date Nights for operas that they think will particularly appeal to randy heterosexuals? Because, let's face it, that's what this poster is trying to say - "Gay guys will find this sexy". Why stop at sexual stereotyping? Why not have, say, a Black Date Night for Otello? Asian Date Night for Madame Butterfly? What on earth would they do with Death In Venice?

Which leads me to the more important issue: the labelling of Billy Budd as a "gay opera". I might not know as much about Britten as many, many people but I have a hunch that I know a whole heap more than the marketing twerp who thought up this one, and I am fully confident when I say that Britten would be horrified to have Billy Budd described as a "gay opera". Of course the homo-eroticism is a massive factor in the plot but if I had to describe it in one word - and would that I didn't - the word would be shame rather than gay, though I readily concede that "shame opera" would hardly put bums on seats. I don't think anyone on the stage is playing this production as if they were in a "gay opera". It's just so much more massively complex than that.

And finally, isn't it terribly patronising to sell an opera with the implication that "ordinary" opera isn't as interesting to the gay community as one where some sailors might get their kit off? Where do they get THAT idea? I know many more self-professed opera queens who would rather spend an evening with Suor Angelica than the cast of From The House Of The Dead. (How many naked sailors are there in The Wizard of Oz for gawd's sake?) Conversely, the label "gay opera" might put off a bunch of straight people who really should see Billy Budd because it's such a wonderful opera and they might learn a thing or two. If I saw an evening being sold as Gay Date Night I don't think I'd be alone in thinking I might not be welcome in the opera house that night if I took my wife along.

We'll learn in a couple of weeks whether the experiment in barmy Dutch liberalism has been a success. I'm dubious, as is anyone in the cast, gay or straight, with whom I discuss it, but as a card-carrying liberal I'm prepared to eat my words if I'm wrong. It probably isn't anything to do with liberalism though; just misguided opportunism by the marketing department. And these days, even in opera, the publicists rule the roost.

Pre-premiere ejaculation

2011-03-08T01:46:00.000Z

What is it about first nights? Does anyone enjoy them? And in that I include audience members.

Let's get the audience out of the way first. It's not such a problem here in Amsterdam but certainly in many continental houses first night audiences are largely comprised of great swathes of punters who have no interest in opera other than seeing it as an opportunity for showing off their newest wife/man/frock/earrings/handbag etc etc. And that's just the men. You can smell their indifference across the footlights. Try playing comedy to that lot. It's about as much fun as pinning medals on a Rottweiler.
Then there are all the opera professionals who make a habit of attending premieres, largely I always suspect so that they can scoff all the free food and booze that's on offer at the post-show reception. These are the agents, casting directors, intendants and all their ilk who also make a point of looking straight through anyone they see backstage whom they consider to be beneath their interest or professional sphere. That's usually most of the cast for starters. Unhindered by having to get out of costume these freeloaders are always first to get to the buffet table, so much so that I have been to some post-show parties where they've run out of comestibles by the time the performers have made it to the party. So, you stand there, clutching a forsaken sausage roll and a glass of warm white wine, insecure about how the show has gone for you (because the ritzy and indifferent audience is hardly likely to demonstrate any enthusiasm for anyone but big-name stars) and try to make conversation with people who spend most of their time looking over your shoulder to see if there's anyone more important in the room with whom they should be talking.

Then there are the critics. Hardly there to have a good time are they? Or so it would seem. The least said about them the better.

And finally there are the performers themselves. Wracked with nerves most of them, their careers are on the line. (They are always on the line.) Even the most comprehensive of rehearsal periods cannot prepare you for the sudden and awful intrusion of an audience. "Like having strangers in your living-room" someone once called it. I've never heard anyone sing their best at a first night. I've even heard it said that the anxiety causes blood vessels to expand in your neck which in turn hinders by several percent your ability to produce sound. If that's just a singers' myth, certainly it is very hard to feel as relaxed and in control as you would really like. And who came blame us? There are thousands of damn people watching us and a fair percentage of them, like Romans at the coliseum, have come to see us fail.

Nope, they're no good, first nights but you have to do them anyway. But if I'm buying tickets to a show, I'll always avoid the first night if I can.

High Kleiber diet

2011-03-02T23:03:00.021Z

It's funny how a few things in life can come together to plant a single notion in your head. Today, everything for me has suddenly become about authenticity. Not so-called "authentic performance" as it relates to classical music (which, I'm afraid, 50% of the time is about as authentic as a TV advert for stain remover) but meaning being genuine and true.
I was lucky enough to see the National Theatre's "Hamlet" before Christmas where the desperate search for authenticity was the motor for Rory Kinnear's brilliant performance, so perhaps there's something in the air, or this has been germinating in my head for a few months.
If I have one chronic sadness it is that the publicists have become as adept at lying about classical music and musicians as they do about pop. I rail against pop not because the music is always bad - it isn't - but because the industry itself is not interested in the quality of the music but only in its commercial potential. Now, this ethos has all but taken over the classical world and my industry is awash with people in charge who care neither for the abilities of a performer nor the music he plays. They only want to know if the performer can be sold. Just look at the modern classical recording industry which is dominated by beautiful young things, often of very ordinary ability but with great PR skills.
This seems to be so much at odds with the way things were when I started out 30-odd years ago. Perhaps I'm looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses but back then we we seemed to spend more time concentrating on music-making than wondering what would sell. This came sharply into focus when I started watching a documentary yesterday on YouTube about the great conductor Carlos Kleiber, called "Traces to Nowhere". Thanks to Clive Bayley for steering me to it. I'll add a link at the end of the blog.
Kleiber held no truck with PR. It didn't interest him in the slightest. To watch him rehearse on the film is an utter joy. I was lucky enough to work with him twice and to have one brief conversation with him. Even though my role was small (Roderigo in "Otello") I still hold those experiences to be up at the very pinnacle of my professional life, because for every single second I was with him I had no doubt whatsoever why I was doing what I was doing. I was being a musician without any distractions from the essential task of being a musician. It was the only thing that bothered him so it was the only thing that mattered to us.
I'm lucky enough at the moment to be rehearsing with a director, Richard Jones, for whom authenticity is also at the heart of his work. That could sound odd when I also tell you that this production of "Billy Budd" is not set upon an 18th century warship but in a 1950s English naval school, identical to my own school, Pangbourne. While that may have puritans up in arms when it comes to the many textual references that don't, as a consequence, make any literal sense, the fact is that the new context allows for a theatrical experience that is devastatingly authentic and real. At the end of the hanging scene I have to help carry out Billy's corpse. As soon as we got to the wings after that scene today, I was so overwhelmed by what I had just witnessed and experienced - the institutionalised cruelty of public schools if you like - that I just burst into tears. I hadn't had to "act" anything beyond taking part in a ritual, yet the very lack of acting was what made the scene so devastating. I can't think of a better opera which better demonstrates the idea that it is usually best simply to play the action, nothing more.

Here's the link to the Kleiber documentary. I challenge you to watch it without feeling a sense of wonder and loss. Traces to Nowhere

March of the trolls

2011-02-26T17:18:00.002Z

As you can see if you look to the right, I tweet. I don't like Facebook but I like Twitter. I like the way you have to focus an idea into 140 characters.
One of my fellow Tweeters is Rebecca Caine, a soprano whom I worked with in the early 80s when we did "The Gondoliers" at Sadler's Wells. I didn't get to know her very well - we only had one scene together I think - though we bumped into each other once while doing different operas in Nice in the 90s. I haven't seen her since. I stumbled on her on Twitter, decided to follow her and it turns out she's an excellent and witty tweeter. The other interesting thing about her is a parallel with my wife Lucy in that she has managed to work both in opera and in musicals. Indeed Rebecca was in the very first cast of "Les Miserables", a show I've never seen, nor I confess have much desire to see. But the point is, she's no slouch.
So what's the relevance of all this? The other day Rebecca tweeted that she was going to unfollow Nick Jonas. They had performed together in the O2 concert of Les Mis (again, something I know very little about apart from what I get on the grapevine) but I gather that, nice young fellow though he might be, his tweets were all of the obnoxious and dull self-promoting type. You know, all about how much he loves his fans. All that bollocks.
What followed the un-following was bizarre in the extreme. Rebecca was submitted to a torrent of rage from Jonas fans, most of them teenagers apparently, who usually laced their abuse with the attitude that young Master Jonas was a gazillion times more famous than "that old bat", therefore how DARE she insult his name by un-following him? Of course they didn't use the word "therefore". Are you kidding? Their tweets had the literary skills of a gibbon that's just drunk five cans of Pepsi and they were laced with the usual plethora of OMGs and LOLs.
I'll confess I take a delight in not knowing who most pop singers are. Why should I? I'm not interested in pop music. Give me a copy of "Hello!" magazine and I wouldn't know who most of the people are inside its covers. That's fine by me. I don't feel any sense of loss or shortcoming whatsoever. It doesn't strike me as very important.
What I have witnessed in the last few days has been an extraordinary sort of inverted snobbery where all that is cheap and crap, and which has no intrinsic value (beyond what it makes for publicists and all their ilk) is held in higher esteem than what is authentic and true. Of course, the inverted snobs don't see it this way. They really do seem to believe that the fame-o-meter is a real indicator of ability and that if someone, their idol, is more of a celeb than someone they've never heard of, then their idol has the moral high ground. And if the idol has the high ground then, logically, so do all of his fans and they can hurl as much as idiotic abuse at non-fans as they like. Kind of like religious fanatics then.
I've experienced this before. A couple of years ago I got an email inviting me to watch "a bright new talent" on YouTube and leave a comment. She was a soprano that had been "discovered" by ex Take That member Gary Barlow, who as we all know is one of the world's great experts on classical singing. She was called Camilla Kerslake and her singing was the usual, bog-standard ordinary, pop-classical product. She might get a job in a professional chorus if she can read music. It wasn't her singing that bothered me though. It was the thing that she was singing. It was a pop song, by Barlow apparently, that by the device of translating the text into Italian and bunging in an orchestra and choir had been magically transformed into Classical Music. I was incensed and, as invited, left a comment saying precisely why I thought the whole thing was a cynical exercise in exploiting mediocrity.
Well, did I get it in the neck or what? Not from anyone who knew anything about the subject mind, but from irate fans. What right did I have...? I mentioned some professional credentials (I probably shouldn't have) and was rewarded with "well how come I've never heard of you?" It didn't go well after that and I gave up when someone reckoned that I was an idiot because if I knew anything I'd know that Beethoven was like a pop star in his time (er, no he wasn't) so Gary's music was up there with Ludvig van B.
I'm waiting for Barlow's first string quartet but I won't hold my breath.

And so today, I couldn't resist joining Rebecca in her conflict with some gormless fan-bully called xox-Jennie. She had called Rebecca "that old bat" because Rebecca had make a light jest about Justin Blieber. I was greeted by xox-Jennie with "and you are?" meaning I assume "who are you to make fun of Justin?"
I kept my response brief. "No, after you. I insist."

On the good ship Lollipop

2011-02-22T21:31:00.000Z

It's a funny thing, rehearsing a tragedy.
I'm no dramaturge or theatre theorist so I'm not sure if there's a strict definition of Tragedy. I've always supposed Tragedy to mean a drama in which the "hero" comes a cropper, in some shape or form, as the result of a fatal flaw, event or decision. And I've always supposed that in the best tragedies there is usually a moment at which the plot comes to a crossroads and, despite the entire will of the audience to take one route, the other fatal direction is the one chosen and the story takes off towards its inevitable, terrible conclusion.
If only Desdemona hadn't lost her hanky eh?
Is Billy Budd a tragic figure, or is it Vere? Hmm, I had better not go into a lengthy debate about that here or we'll be here all day, but I have already hit a problem in my Theory of Tragedy. Yes, there's a moment when you know Billy is doomed, when he bops Claggart on the side of the head. You really wish he wouldn't. But surely his fate is sealed the moment he steps aboard the Indomitable. Or is it even earlier, the day of his birth? Were he more ordinary-looking he might never have been the object of Claggart's affections. Or Vere's for that matter. Does this make him a tragic figure? I would think so. And, just touching on what I wrote earlier, if there's a crucial moment in Vere's journey, when is it? When he fails to defend Billy? Or is he a tragic figure too, but unlike Billy, gets to reflect on his fate?
The more you think about it, you just wish Billy never set foot on the damn boat.
And so it is with rehearsals sometimes. You often find yourself wishing, no matter how great the masterpiece, that you didn't have to go through the emotional mangle every single day. It's not so bad for me in this opera. Red Whiskers could never claim to bear the brunt (though I like to think I have my own little journey in the scheme of things) but he still witnesses all kinds of stuff he could do well without. Me too.

Reach for the skrei

2011-02-19T16:26:00.003Z

My wife Lucy has been here for the last three days, which has been good for me but not so good for blogging. She leaves again tomorrow just as we have grown used to being together again. Contrary (probably) to what you may imagine, a few days if reunion isn't like a brief honeymoon. I'm having to work during the dreariest part of the rehearsal process - stage and piano technicals, and Lucy is readying herself for her next job which starts in Geneva on Monday (a new house for her), and try as hard as we might, it is often hard to relax. Besides, the organisation of my digs has so far been entirely left to me. I know where stuff goes, how much I need, there's just my laundry to do... In other words I have been leading a selfish and solitary existence for the last three weeks and now all that is disrupted. Don't get me wrong; I want it to be disrupted but the price of company is the loss of "it's-all-about-me-ness" and it takes time to adjust.
I'm quite open about saying this because it's an entirely common experience and when I pop to Geneva myself in a few weeks' time for a couple of days, the shoe will be on the other foot. Let's face it; it's much easier to be a singer and do the job of being a singer when you have no-one to take care of but yourself. I may have actually said all this before in a blog last September, but I really cannot remember and as I write this offline, I have no way of checking. Oh dear, oh dear, I may be starting to repeat myself...
In spite of a few teething troubles of an entirely minor kind (usually provoked by some funk of my own where I contemplate out loud what it's all about, this life malarky) we have managed some good meals out and a particularly enjoyable wander around the new photography museum FoAM.
The first meal was up in the Jordaan in the unpromising-sounding but excellent Burger's Patio. It has nothing to do with hamburgers but serves a limited menu of modern French/ Mediterranean dishes in typically Amsterdammy surroundings; i.e. a sort of minimalist shabby chic which combines formica tables with subtle lighting. We were lucky to get a table but we both ate skrei, "a white fish like cod", we were told. I think it's what we call Pollock. Nevertheless it was excellent. (I've now had a chance to look up skrei and in fact it's a strain of cod in its own right - the Norwegian-Arctic. So there you go.)
Last night we celebrated Lucy's birthday a week early. Rashly and foolishly I thought our luck was good and rather than book led the way to a well written-up Italian place near the Albert Cuyp market, Caffe 500. This neighbourhood, De Pijp, twenty years ago is not somewhere where you'd lead a date for the evening unless your idea of a good night out involved munching at a cheap Indonesian caff and dropping by a seedy-looking brothel. Incidentally Pijp is also what the Dutch call a blowjob. I don't how I know that. But De Pijp is on a rapid rise upward, as are most areas of Amsterdam including the red light district, and it is now home to some very fine eateries. The reason is probably because this is where young professionals can now afford to live and the restauranteurs are hot on their tails. It also home to one of the best chefs' shops in the world, Duikelman, but that's another blog.
Needless to say Caffe 500 looked great but was fully-booked. We tried another place around the corner. No luck there either. A Friday night - what did I expect? Everywhere was looking full. I led us down Frans Halsstraat, heavy with the sense that wandering the streets on a cold night in search of a table wasn't the birthday celebration that Lucy had in mind. Frans Halsstraat has plenty of eateries. Surely one of them would have a small table for two? We stumbled on an elegant-looking place called SenT (the capital T is deliberate), busy but not full, and chanced our luck. After a lot of lip-chewing we were given a table by the window, we glugged down a glass of prosecco and started to relax. Another great meal followed. Phew. I had the 3-course chef's menu at €29.50 and it was a bargain.
I don't usually do this, but here's a link to their website: http://www.restaurantsent.nl/Restaurant_Sent/Home.html

Being studious

2011-02-15T16:01:00.002Z

So, I've had a few days off rehearsals. Days off rehearsals are both adored and resented by singers, in pretty-well equal measure, though I lean much more to the former.
I'll explain. The resentment bit first.
You're away from home to work, you're not being paid (because singers are never paid to rehearse, only to perform, something which I keep banging on about because very few people believe me), and yet you have to stay in the city. In theory you might be able to go home but as often as not it's impractical or hideously expensive. Some opera companies forbid it; you are not allowed to leave the city without the consent of the boss. You're renting expensive digs (and yet you're not being paid). You're thinking: I could have arrived here a week or two later, paid less rent, and still got the job done in the time I've been used. You could find yourself in a city that is, very often, an absolute armpit (I'm thinking Liege here) with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and sod all to do.
No wonder then that resentment can sit heavily in the breast like a dump in a baby's nappy.
On the other hand you can find yourself with no-one to please but yourself. You have time to potter about, as I did today, buying tea and toothpaste. I even have found myself polishing my shoes. Angry Birds becomes a task rather than a guilty pleasure. I can read, watch Mad Men by the ton. I can even find time to....PRACTISE. Yes, I've been using a studio in the Muziektheater for long sessions of preparation for my next jobs. Even at my age I have to practise. Well, that music doesn't get learned by itself. Though it has to be said that the ability to use a studio is a rare and luxurious facility. I can't think of many other houses I've worked in where you can do it so readily. There's something very satisfactory about going out to a studio to work rather than doing it at home. A set period of study after which you leave and turn out the lights is much better for focussing the mind than working at home where the piano sits piled with music that you mean to get around to tackling as soon as everything else like paying bills and washing the kitchen floor has been taken care of.
It's a bit like the gym. The amount of people I know who have exercise equipment in their bedrooms that has become an expensive clothes horse... The thinking is "why bother to go to a gym when we can do it at home?" without realising that it's the the going to the gym that is the vital step out of indolence.
So, you see I don't resent having a few days off. I'm getting much more done than if I were at home.

Tour guide

2011-02-13T12:49:00.000Z

It's a lazy Sunday in Amsterdam for me. Saturday would have been lazy too; no rehearsals, for a change, and nothing pressing to do. But it didn't turn out that way. A handful of Brits, despite a free weekend on the cards, decided to stay put in town rather than cough up the ridiculous sum it now costs to pop home for a weekend. Gwynne Howell, despite his mammoth career, has never spent anything more than a few days in the city. He's 73 and his wife is joining him in a few weeks' time. He wanted to know where they should be going, what the city had to offer, and having established my credentials as the cast's longest-serving Amsterdam hack, it was only natural that he should turn to me for advice. I volunteered to take him on a little tour.
Gwynne had both his knees replaced in the last year or so, so his mobility is not what it was, and in Amsterdam this can pose a problem. But I remembered bringing my recently widowered dad here thirteen years ago, when he was much the same age, and it is possible to steer someone around who isn't as nimble as they would like to be.
When I woke up it was teeming with rain, but it often lets up mid morning so when Gwynne rang me to ask if I was still up for it I said we should go for it. I cycled to the theatre, a brolly in one hand, the other on the handlebars and we met at ten. There was hardly anyone about. The weather can't have helped. We took a number 14 tram from the stage door and headed a few stops west to the Westekerk, which is next to the Anne Frank House. I offered to take Gwynne inside, but he thought he'd leave that til Mary, his wife, got here. Though it was something of a missed opportunity as there was, extraordinarily, NO QUEUE! I haven't been inside for years, but now it is part of the Museum Card scheme and I can get in for free by waving my pass, I shall probably go again. Early on a midweek morning would be my guess as the quietest time to go.
We pottered northwards, the rain easing into a drizzle, all the way up to the Saturday organic market on Noordermarkt. We nosed around the stalls. Gwynne got some fine looking sourdough bread and I picked up some stewing goat, some minced beef, a squash and some leeks. That little lot cost me a bomb. I had planned to get a chicken but at €13 a kilo I reckoned an average chicken was going to set me back almost £20, which seems a tad too steep. I can get a free range chicken at home for half that price.
The rain started to pick up again, Gwynne needed the loo and it was mid morning, so we dived into a café and had some coffee and shared a truly awesome piece of apple pie. It seemed to be the only thing they served in there, or it was famous for its pie, because portions of it were already served up, waiting on plates for the stream of customers who were piling inside. I was offered slagroom - whipped cream - and accepted it, thinking only, hem hem, of Gwynne of course who had never experienced this Dutch delight. I asked for two forks, but hadn't noticed that the plate was already armed with two. They expect you to share a piece. It's the default. I like that.
Gwynne is full of stories and it's always fascinating to hear him talk about singing Luisa Miller with Pavarotti, about how nervous Domingo was in the wings before Aida in Barcelona... He represents a different and, dare I say it, golden age that I suspect has passed, unlikely to return.
We moved off in the direction of Central Station, ambling gently along the Brouwersgracht, which is simply lovely. I wouldn't normally go this way but we were going to rendezvous with Henry, our Lieutenant Ratcliffe who had spent his morning learning Meisteringers in the theatre, poor bugger. When he turned up, I led them into the red light district. Well you have to, and hidden amongst the garish crap are some gems. There's the ancient bar that sells wonderful jenevers, shut til the evening, but more immediately, Ons Liever Heer Op Solder (the merchant's house with a Catholic church in the attic) and the Oude Kerk. We did both of those and I got that smug feeling of sharing something that I'm sure they wouldn't have seen had I not been there to steer them. Worth it I can tell you.
From there we headed south and into De Engelbewaarder, aka the Literary Café, a great old pub just five minutes from the Muziektheater, where we had a bowl of soup and a Palm to warm our chilly bones.
After that it was all downhill. We met up with our Mr Flint, Stephen, and went on a rather silly journey out to the Ajax stadium to look in MediaMarkt, a vast electronics warehouse stuffed with boys' toys, and Decathlon, the sports shop next door. Retail wasn't on my plan. It wasn't on anybody's. Gwynne got a power cable for some gadget or other but otherwise we spent our time getting separated from each other, then wandering around trying to find the rest of the group. Over two hundred years of life among us and we were still like a bunch of small kids.
The end of the day out, for me, was so absurd I cannot find the words to describe it. But it involved making an unwanted journey to Central Station in order just to swipe my travel card to avoid paying a penalty fair of €15 for a journey I hadn't made. Sound nuts? I hope so, and it proves that for all the wizardry of the new travel card system they have here, and of which I wrote so much last year, it still isn't working sensibly.
Now the lads are standing outside my front door and we're off in search of Sunday lunch. Oh boy.

Move over Sharapova

2011-02-10T16:40:00.001Z

It's a strange thing about being a singer, that you far more readily remember your failures than your successes. Well, I suppose that's probably true of any performer and it's not just confined to the singing fraternity. The difference is, I guess,  that singing technique is very much tied to confidence; half the battle goes on in the brain rather than in the throat, and anything that makes your brain say "really, are you sure you can sing that high note? Well, best of luck but don't count on it!" is far from welcome. 
The truly great singers, or the ones we celebrate the most, all have their bad days and duff performances. But either they don't let it bother them or they brazen it out so well that the world quickly forgets their shortcomings. I'm not going to name names or cite examples but I certainly could. I think the great singers are like great tennis players. They may lose a set or two but they don't confuse losing a set with losing a match. They move on from their unforced errors, immediately put their lapses behind them and focus on the next point. The rest of us are inclined to stew in our own shortcomings and descend into an Andy Murray-esque funk, slamming down our proverbial racquet and moaning that it's "not fair!"
Equally upsetting is the performance that you know went well but which is greeted with indifference or even a snotty review. We all get snotty reviews. Domingo gets tons of them in the blogosphere. But I bet he doesn't waste any of his time on Google, wondering what people are saying about him. It's the rest of us who fall prey to that sort of thing. Everyone has an opinion and these days they're only too willing and capable of broadcasting it. I'm a fine one to talk as I type my blog. The internet has emptied a whole new and vast bucket of vitriol on the poor performer's soul and it's harder than ever to not only keep one's head in the game but also from having your poorer moments telegraphed all over the world. YouTube can be a useful selling tool but it can also be like a window on the Oudezijd Voorburgswaal where you are unwillingly exposed like a naked old tart, your flaws and blemishes exposed for the world to laugh and sneer at.
What brought this meditation upon me? I'm not going to tell because it's simply to self-indulgent and boring, but getting it off my chest has certainly helped. So, the internet has its uses after all. Thanks!

Meat and two veg

2011-02-06T19:54:00.000Z

I had some of the cast, all Brits, over for a good old-fashioned Sunday lunch today. Despite having come to Amsterdam regularly for the last 21 years I've never done this before. There are many reasons for this.
First, for many, many years I used to fly home most weekends so it wasn't a possibility. Second, this is the first time in a long while that I've done a show here with enough old friends who not only understand the concept of Sunday Lunch but who are also not flying home themselves every possible weekend. I've got used to spending Sundays here on my own. And third, this is the first time I've found a butcher who sells roastable joints of meat. Roasting is not something the Dutch generally do. Meat is normally stewed, fried or grilled. There must be historic reasons for this which I can only guess at, but the mere existence of the so-called Dutch oven, which is really a heavy stewing pot, must be a clue. It's not something in which you'd stick a leg of lamb.
I was nosing around the Albert Cuyp market the other day and was surprised to see several roasting joints in one of the butcher shops that line the street. Not only that but they sold pork in joints with skin still on. This is something I'd never, ever seen here before and I was so excited I promptly bought a piece of belly for my supper. I've only ever seen belly in slices with the skin removed. I also bought a craft knife from one of the market stalls so that I could score the skin for crackling. Got to have crackling.
The same butcher had lamb shoulders and legs so I headed back there yesterday for my Sunday joint. Bugger me if all the lamb had gone. None in the cold store either. Damn. I'd even bought mint for some good old fashioned mint sauce. There was a large slab of beef but it looked unwieldy and difficult to roast because of its uneven shape. I was sure if I had a go I'd end up with a joint that was overcooked and dry on the outside and raw in the middle. Too risky. A shoulder of lamb would have been perfect. The only option was a shoulder of pork that was still on the bone - not how you'd buy it back home where it would be boned and rolled, but it would do.
I realised later that I could probably have got a shoulder of lamb at a halal butcher, or even a leg, but to be honest I worry about the welfare of animals that end up in halal butchers. That might be terribly unfair, and I really need to find out, because if could be sure of that I would have absolutely no problem with buying halal meat. Why should I? I've bought it before but always with a slight feeling of uneasiness. A quick trawl on the internet and I'm none the wiser. Some claim that ritual slaughter is humane and others claim it isn't. More research needed I think, and even if the slaughter is painless, under what conditions have the animals lived? It's something I really miss from home, the ability to buy meat direct from the farmer without having to mortgage the house first.
Enough rambling. Lunch was a success. There were five of us. Our Dansker, Gwynne, is 73 and has sung with all the greats in a long and illustrious career. It was an uncommon treat to share lunch (and the two bottles of red he brought) with him while he told stories of productions he had sung with the likes of Pavarotti, Sutherland and Boris Christoff. And the crackling was pretty good too.

Sea interlude

2011-02-02T16:02:00.004Z

There are days when you are reminded that Amsterdam sits below sea level and today is one of them. That's not to say that the city is literally underwater but it is so shrouded in damp and dankness that we may as well be a few feet under the North Sea that lurks, a grey and grumpy beast, just a few miles to the west, barely tamed by dunes and dykes. I used to swim in the North Sea as a child, on its western edge in Essex, and it has always struck me as grim and unhospitable. Cycling in to work today, to board the HMS Indomitable so-to-speak (a little nerdy opera speak for you there - it is the ship on which Billy Budd is set), it felt as if the clouds were joining the canals in a damp marriage. It wasn't raining but it might as well have been for all the cold moisture in the air.
On my way in I usually pedal past a small café on the corner of Herengracht and Utrechtstraat. It looked so cozy today, with its regularly placed tables in the middle of which sat solitary tea lights (at ten in the morning, mind), that I could have happily given up singing there and then and become a humble barrista. No, not a mis-spelled lawyer, but a simple brewer of coffees. Polishing cups with a tea towel, frothing milk, chatting with the customers... It all looked so much more appealing than spending four hours in a windowless studio pretending to be a sailor.
But no, I cycled on and spent the day recreating The Royal Tournament instead. Brit readers will get that; Americans probably not. Suffice it say it involved lots of looking enthusiastic, running about, and assembling a field gun, as you do in the normal course of a day's work.
I'm off to see the premier of a new Dutch opera tonight. I've yet to meet anyone who has any enthusiasm for it but I'll try and keep an open mind. Even the conductor told me that it's "crazy". At least there's a party afterwards.

Teal we meet again

2011-01-30T14:49:00.001Z

My daughter Tessa is in town for a long weekend visit to celebrate her 24th birthday, along with her BOYFRIEND James. They're staying in the spare room, door firmly shut and me wondering whether I should have bought some earplugs. So far though all has been quiet though, thank heavens.
It's hard for someone like me with control-freak genes to let them wander the city and see what they want to see. I'm too easily inclined to say "go there, avoid that!", though I have made my opinions clear on some things; for instance that anything with Madame Tussauds on it will be utter tripe and a waste of euros.
Her birthday treat package from me includes tram passes, a museum card (James is borrowing mine), a boat trip and, best of all, a lovely dinner.
I took them both to Borderwijk, a restaurant on Noordemarkt that I last visited about fifteen years ago. It has the same owners but, I think, a different chef. Our meal was terribly good. The bread was so fantastic that I asked where they bought it, but it's made by the owner's wife on site and isn't for sale, dammit.
James and I started with a carpaccio of raw halibut with scoops of crab meat, slices or artichoke heart and various other garnishy bits, while Tess, who doesn't do fish (yet) had her baptism into the yummy world of foie gras - a substantial slab in which you could see the separate nodes, served with a wonderfully tangy, chopped Muscadet jelly that balanced the fattiness of the liver so well I quite wanted to cry (yes, of course I was leaning over her plate and helping myself to the odd chunk).
Next we all had Dutch teal; a sliced pink breast served with a confit of the tiny leg and a mound of the liver, accompanied with scoops of mash, wafer-thin turnip slices, some wild mushrooms and an intense reduced gravy, rich and yeasty ("Marmitey" said Tess, but I think that was the fungi making themselves known - like fish, something she doesn't yet do).
Tess and the BF took a cheese course. Very cleverly, sensibly and generously, the restaurant offers a choice of three, four or five course menus. Each one includes pudding but they don't make you commit to how many courses you want from the get-go; they ask you after the main course what you want to do next. I was happy to move straight to dessert but the kids liked the look of the cheese trolley so much that they opted for four courses. They had about six chunks each, mostly French, but I got to steal the odd mouthful off Tessa's plate.
Our desserts were based around a "white chocolate crème brulée pie", which really meant that they'd made a crème brulée enriched with white chocolate (I'm not a great fan of white chocolate but here it brilliantly gave density and richness to the custard) on a terribly thin pastry, which makes it easier to serve I should think. With it were a spoon of chocolate sorbet, some biscuit and chocolate decorations and small slices of mandarin and blood orange, peeled of course.
Like all good meals I felt I'd had exactly the right amount to eat - replete yet not stuffed. What else is there to say?

Shanks for the memory

2011-01-27T17:09:00.002Z

There's quite a lot of doom-and-gloom at the Netherlands Opera thanks entirely to the massive cuts they are about to suffer. Fees are being slashed and the word is that if you're not singing a major role then your only hope of working here is if you already live in Holland and are prepared to work for a pittance. So, a bit like England then. The new Dutch government wants the Arts to follow an American model of funding where rich patrons hand out vast endowments and have their names stuck on theatres as a reward. That's all very well but I'm not sure that Holland boasts too many of the sort of billionaires who fund opera in the States. And besides, flaunting your wealth is not really a Dutch characteristic. I don't see it catching on. There are very few statues in Amsterdam; people, even the eminent, are expected to know their place. Ostentation is greeted with derision and though the Dutch are rarely religious these days, the spirit of Calvinism still rules.

Still, things aren't too bad at the moment. This production of Billy Budd is set in what is basically my old school, a naval college. When I heard that at the director's introduction, I almost blacked out, so overcome was I by a sudden sense of panic and nostalgia.
More exciting though is a new branch of the "farmers' supermarket" Marqt, just around the corner from the opera and en route back to my digs. It has a proper butcher's counter and fish slab and the best selection of vegetables I've seen outside the Saturday market on Prinsengracht. The cheese table is also excellent.
I bought a couple of lamb shanks (not cheap though - £9 for them both) and slow-cooked them in red wine, onions, carrots and garlic. I ate one last night. It lay on a duvet of polenta, the dark gravy puddling around the edge, and was so tender my only cutlery was a spoon.

A question of size

2011-01-25T10:12:00.004Z

Well obviously, after so long an absence from the blogosphere, the very first things I want to blog about are bogs. No, I didn't misspell that. Bogs.
Loos. Lavatories.
There's something that has puzzled me for some time and after a couple of pints in the opera's local boozer, the Blaubrug, and a couple of visits to the smallest room, I felt compelled to bring it up. So I asked Clive, our Claggart: "these loos with two flush buttons, which do you reckon you're supposed to press? Is it small button for small flush or big button for big flush?"
Clive had no doubt that small for small and big for big was the correct flushing etiquette.
"Ah," I said, "but what if they're trying to encourage us to use only a small flush, so the bug button is the obvious button to push rather than the extravagant small button?"
"No, no, it's obvious. Big button, big flush."
But then Jacques, our Billy, weighed in. "No, it's big button, small flush!"
In comes John Mark, our Vere: "oh, what the hell, you just press both buttons."
So which is it? I side with Jacques, especially when you bear in mind the cisterns that have a very small flush button with a tiny, independent nipple set in them. The nipple is too small to find easily when making a blind stab at flushing so I can only assume the big button is the default and the nipple is an extravagance.
Still, I'm not entirely satisfied and I'm afraid I'm going to have to waste gallons of water (but there's no shortage of it here at the moment) and an unnecessary amount of time finding out for sure and making a definitive judgment about this, just, if for nothing else, to encourage some harmony amongst my fellow shipmates on the good ship "Billy Budd". Whatever I discover though I'm inclined to side with Vere. One button is very rarely enough.

Back soon

2011-01-12T07:02:00.002Z

ADVANCE WARNING!!
Blogging services will resume from Jan 24th when I start rehearsals in Amsterdam. I apologise for the lack of posts in the last several weeks but the title is Saddo ABROAD and as for most of that time I've been at home (or on holiday - give me a break!) I think the name speaks for itself. So... ner ner.
Besides, I've had a book to plug. Oh, have I just done it again?