St Mary's Church, Banbury

[roger]

I arrived home about an hour ago thanks to Dave for the lift!

As I hogged the limelight in my review of the Tewkesbury concert on Monday, I will let Dave and Richard say what they wish before adding my comments. Suffice it to say that the Banbury concert was wonderful and Hayley sounded better than ever.

Further details will follow shortly from all of us.

Goodnight!

Roger

[Richard]

Thank you for the cue Roger!

It was a wonderful concert at Banbury, but the programme was very similar to the concert in Tewkesbury, so I'm just going to give a brief account of the evening.

I met up with Roger at Banbury Cross at about 4:30pm, and we walked to St. Mary's Church where we lingered for a while. After a few minutes Hayley arrived with her mother Jill and her management team, Steve Abbott and Giselle Allier. It was cold outside the church, so we just said a quick hello as they went inside, then we adjourned to a hostelry across the road.

At about 6:15 we emerged and saw a small queue forming at the church. The seats were unreserved, so we joined the queue and met Ray from the official forum, who had travelled all the way from Leeds. He was seeing Hayley for the second time, having fallen under her magic spell at St. James's Church in London on 22nd September. The doors opened at 7:00pm on the dot, so we rushed in and grabbed a pew in the third row, and then Dave joined us.

Hayley was accompanied by Fiona Pears on violin and Ian Tilley on piano. Her programme was the same as at Tewkesbury, starting with "Pokarekare Ana", followed by Caccini's "Ave Maria" and "Who Painted The Moon Black?". Her voice sounded purer and clearer than ever with the acoustics of the church.

Fiona then played two pieces, "Winter Flames" followed by a piece simply titled "First Movement from a Sonata". Hayley then concluded the first half with "Bridal Ballad", "What You Never Know" and "Amazing Grace".

Fiona opened the second half of the concert with "The Zookeeper" followed by a Russian tune "Dark Eyes". Hayley then sang "Prayer", "May It Be", "Never Saw Blue", "In Trutina", and "Hine e Hine". Finally Hayley gave a truly wonderful performance of Schubert's "Ave Maria" as an encore.

St. Mary's Church was a wonderful setting for the concert, and I was particularly impressed by the blending of Hayley's voice with Fiona's violin. I can't really explain it in words, so you must all go and hear it for yourselves!

Hayley stayed for about an hour after the concert signing CDs and chatting to everybody, as she often does. We had a nice long chat with Jill before we joined the end of the queue, and finally we spent several minutes with Hayley, chatting and taking photographs. Hayley signed my brochure, which features some lovely photographs of her taken by Jill. We finally left the church at about 10:30pm and I caught the last train to Marylebone which was on time!

I must thank Hayley, Fiona, Ian and Jill for another memorable evening, and also thanks to Chiltern Railways for getting me to the church on time!

Now I'm looking forward to Hayley's concert at St. John's, Smith Square in London on 12th December.

See you there,

Richard

[roger]

I had noticed that Fiona's accompaniment tends to vary from one performance to another. She told me afterwards that she improvises most of the time!

As Richard has said, Hayley did a signing session after the concert:

Roger

[Lothar]

Hi Richard and Roger,
many thanks for your report and for the nice picture of Halyey again.
Have a nice weekend.
Kind regards, Lothar

P.S Today I received a CD
"Silent Night" with Duets of Hayley and Aled Jones ("Silend Night" and "Away and a Manger")