A little Boe peep
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. …
Zing zing zing went my heartstrings
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.…
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