Stacks

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.

Caped Crusader

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!

Cons and pros

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.

Pizza slut

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.