Swaledale Festival 2012, with added PIRATES.

Stephen Anthony Brown

This is a short one to say that the premiere of composer Michael Brough's "Bacchus and the Pirates" was a success!

Composer Michael Brough, born in Leeds

The second Swaledale Festival for me, and certainly a joyful feast of breathtaking scenery, kind people, a genuine love of unusual and passionate music-making, and all the associations with All Creatures Great And Small in that area. Heck, I grew up looking at those dales. And men with floppy hair and fairisle jumpers thrusting their hands into cows to make them well or bring forth other cows, and tending to little shaggy dogs on rough-hewn tables.

The Festival commissioned Mr. Brough to compose a work for piano, tenor and mezzo, and what did he come up with? Only a 17-minute-long lurid Victorian (I almost wrote 'camp') mini-secular-oratorio! Crazy! Subtitled "Marine Variations for Two Pirates and Piano", The words are by Alfred Noyes (1880-1958). These are the first words I sing:

"Sea-roads plated with pieces of eight that rolled to a heaven by rum made mellow,

Heaved and coloured our barque's black nose where the Lascar sang to a twinkling star,

And the tangled bow-sprit plunged and dipped its point in the west's wild red and yellow,

Till the curved white moon crept out astern like a naked knife from a blue cymar."

Stephen sang heroically and I tried to keep up.

The piano roared, and many in the audience (faces beaming) commented that they'd not heard the piano sound like that during the whole festival.
The concert had to end with duets and we'd run out of ideas. "Oh don't worry, I'll arrange some folk songs," said Stephen. That he did. Those four song arrangements (Soldier, Soldier; The Trees They Grow So High; Golden Slumbers; Oh No John) will have a great future. Zita Syme, my soprano duet partner and also partner of Stephen, was coaxed onto the stage to do Golden Slumbers with Stephen, and everyone was completely enchanted. An unexpected voice is always a good thing in a recital, and when it's as limpid and meltingly gorgous as Zita's, well...it's magic.

Look at the variety of trees behind me...and how country-cottage the building is.

The next day we went and sang at a local Retirement Home as part of the festival's Community Outreach. It was in a small town called Bedale and it was a lovely, lovely place. Covered in climbing flowers, and round the side lovely gardens.

Ate lots of pies and didn't exercise nearly enough to make up for it.

End of the year gigs...

At the Forge...




...the Camden Forge

Blogging requires time, and photos to hand. I didn't have much of either in November and December! So here I am in the snows of January with my memories of the end of 2011.

There was the gig at the Camden Forge with some Flying Aces. Earlier that day I'd rescued a sick fox at the back of a pub in Hanwell.

A week later, or was it the next day? The Lovely Parlour Trio and I were on BBC Radio London's Saturday Breakfast Show, performing live. Jon Butterfield played their wonderful trusty studio upright, Matt Redman treated us to his guitar, and Nick Ball played spoons and washboard, a first for the studio. We did Button Up Your Overcoat and The Honeysuckle and the Bee. Listeners phoned in to say how good it was to hear something that wasn't anything to do with "X Factor Crap". I only quote. Joanne Good and Simon Lederman are the most fun, generous, fabulous people possible.

Photo by David Rowley. Ellen Smith, Patricia Hammond, Zita Syme.

Then I joined Ellen Smith, BEAUTIFUL harpist and Zita Syme, BEAUTIFUL soprano, to adorn the library of the Reform Club. We all wore red, and processed in singing the Hodie from Britten's Ceremony of Carols. Ellen can sing, too. I found a fabulous book on the shelves there: Ronald Firbank's "The New Rhythum" and other pieces. 

A random quote: 

"'He looks ever so much more like Narcissus than Apollo,' said Wildred, and seating himself on the river bank he recited to the first moonbeam that touched the lake, a poem of Verlaine." 

Then went to Switzerland to sing Rossini in a church at the top of an icy hill. It was recorded and photographed, but I have neither...yet.

Hugely looked forward to Ragtime Parlour's return engagement when I got back, and we tried out "Moonlight Bay", as it was written in 1912. A nice, neat century ago. Some dandy footage was taken, but if anyone knows how to edit MTS files, and intercut them with MP4 files, and overlay a WAV recording, please let me know! Then maybe those who weren't there can see how much fun we all had.

But as to the voice and harp combination, here's one Ellen Smith and I did a year ago. I'm wearing my pioneer grandma's pearls.