HAYLEY AT GAWSWORTH HALL,
Macclesfied
Part Three
The conclusion of
Pokarekare Ana engraved the hallmark of appreciation the whole night was to stamp on every piece. There was a momentary, total silence. An almost imperceptible pause but an important break between the last detectible sound departing her lips, a sound so quiet it might not be heard in the average room, but to this audience of over 1,000 it rang loud and clear, before the silence was squeezed out by a solid wall of assured, prolonged applause of warm appreciation. This was how the night was to progress.
George or Grant has listed her schedule but has not included Fiona’s when I checked. As in the past, having introduced her accompanists and then sung another few songs, Hayley left the stage and Fiona introduced her first pairing with Ian,
Turkish Fantasie, one of her own compositions about which she gave some brief background as to the emotions she was feeling at the time she was composing.
I cannot recall if it was here, or between the two pieces with which she and Ian concluded the first half of the evening but she, unfazed by the need, explained that it was some time since she had last had to tune her violin on stage! An understandable need in an open air performance when the damp night air (following a couple of short bursts of rain) must have played havoc with her strings. The audience were unperturbed. If anything, I think as intrigued as I had been earlier when sitting in on their sound check.
Sorted, Fiona set too with a will, kicking off her shoes as she swayed to her music’s rhythm, a tune of her own she had dedicated to Martin and Mary, two people she had met in Ireland and given her a fantastic experience. An even stronger applause greeted her and Ian’s contribution to this closing of the first half.
It was apparent Ian was unhappy with the piano because, fairly soon after he had left the stage, the piano tuner came on and spent the next fifteen to twenty minutes struggling with what seemed like a recalcitrant note in the upper octave.
The half-hour interval ran into thee-quarters-of-an-hour by the time the audience was properly settled, but there was no rush, this was a laid-back affair and time was not seemingly of the essence.
The second part started with two selections from Fiona one being ‘Dark eyes’ or otherwise known in the Russian as (I think!) 'Otchi Tchornya'. The other was ‘Far Away’, another of her compositions. In the first, she unhesitatingly kicked off her shoes and really let herself go.
In the very early days of my acquaintance with Fiona I had been critical of her ‘abandoned gyrations’. Now, she gave us a disciplined, controlled expression of the pent-up physical energy within her creativity. This added power to her expression, as is so often the case, when raw emotion is channelled in a disciplined way. Power, constrained by control, is often more dramatic than undisciplined, free-ranging movement. She was like a leopard straining at its leash.
In both her opening pieces to the second half Fiona played with a gay abandon I have not seen before and it was a joy to watch Ian’s fingers thunder up and down the keyboard duetting equally with her rather than accompanying her. This
tour de force brought them one of the finest rounds of applause I have ever known in a Hayley concert. The applause was so prolonged Hayley delayed her return to the stage and it was Fiona and Ian who encouraged Hayley back on stage, when it has been so often the other way round, that Hayley has wanted the audience to appreciate her soul mates more fully.
Allowed to complete their natural impetus, seeing Hayley encouraged onstage by the two applauded artistes, audience appreciation for them quickly translated into the same strength of warm applause for Hayley’s re-appearance in her own right. This is why I say the extraordinarily strong performance from both Ian and Fiona strengthens, does not weaken, Hayley. This threesome, since ‘trio’ is perhaps not an expected appellation (but then, why shouldn’t it be?) performs superbly together in a variety of combinations and the whole was a stupendous evening.
Like Hayley, Fiona had opened up more in explaining the background to how and why she composed her music, while Hayley, who has been gradually opening up more over time with her audience chat really excelled herself tonight. She looked back as to when she had first sung some of the songs she was going to sing tonight and felt she was getting old, much to the audience’s amusement and several reassuring shouts that she wasn’t. She seemed genuinely surprised, even amazed that so much had happened to her in so brief a time that one wondered if she really had been rushing here and there with such speed she truly had not noticed all that she has achieved. Hayley, please ensure you take time ‘to be’ amidst your hurly burly and savour each moment to its full ripeness.
For the second half the darkness had gathered sufficiently for the lights to be effective. Showers of electric icicles hung down from the stage canvas and lay, haphazardly thrown in the bushes. This was a magic to which I was accustomed. I have performed Shakespeare in such surroundings as these. Been in a production where a thirteen years old Juliet and fifteen years old Romeo played to such a 1200 audience, a year or two before Zeffirelli achieved it on film. The stands formed as a ‘V’, for otherwise voices without microphones could not have carried across a sixty-foot deep stage, 120 feet wide, flanked by a pair of giant Lebanon cedars and backed by a deep woodland, with a one hundred yard glade down its centre. On such nights (unlike this night when we had cloudy skies) we’d cut the lights to play the balcony and tomb scenes in pure moonlight, every night for a week. On such nights a fox might run across the stage (fortunately NOT chased by a pack of hounds) and an owl might hoot and momentarily swoop up the glade.
On this night the reigns of the two Elizabeths, First and Second, seemed melded into the one moment of all time. Eliot expresses it superbly in the opening section titled ‘Burnt Norton’ of his
Four Quartets.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened,
Into the rose garden…’
Before the rose garden on this green sward, that has remained little changed over five centuries, all time seemed as one as, reassured by Tim and her fellow players behind the side screening, Hayley emerged with her friends for a last extra song, her choice being the Schubert
Ave Maria. The magic was about to end but for just a little moment longer, Hollywood’s often naïve view of ‘Merry England’ was a living reality, an encompassing moment embedded in our hearts and minds, enshrined in memories recaptured upon the moment by the name of ‘Hayley Westenra’.
Yet, for us HWI friends, a little personal magic was still to come.
A superb location, granted an idyllic summer evening, despite some slight showers of rain. I shall digress under the Photographic thread with the journey that led me to Gawsworth Hall. For now, the show had ended and a rather disconsolate group of eight WHI members were whiling time under a large chestnut tree supporting a temporary floodlight, while the departing aged and inform were collected by their various transports. Someone commented that car lights were moving in our direction across the blackness of the far field. The chances were, it contained Hayley.
‘She may well be in a hurry to get back to London, but seeing us—and I’ll bet she will be looking out for us (she knew we were there as she had seen us when she arrived)—she’ll at least wind down the window and wave.'
She didn’t!
The window was already fully down by the time the car drew abreast of us and immediately stopped.
‘Hi guys’.
‘We guess you’re in a hurry.’
‘’Fraid so, it took us over five hours to get here!’
‘Let’s hope you have a better trip back, we won’t delay you. Just wanted to tell you what a superb night it was. Oh, can we introduce someone who hasn’t met you, please?’
This was Wendy, the others had seen Hayley last at Newmarket, if not also previously.
Due shaking of hands through the open car window and ‘hi, nice to meet you.’
We assured her it was a superb evening.
‘Oh wasn’t it magical? Really lovely place. Wasn’t it a wonderful setting? She, of course, was referring to everything around her, the place to us, at this stage, being totally incidental.
‘YOU were superb. Right across the board, it was a superbly presented well balanced wholeness of top quality from all of you.’
‘Did you hear that guys, that means you?’ Hayley turns to ensure Fiona and Ian in the seats behind her heard they were included in the superlatives handing out ceremony.
‘Hayley, flight plans? You ARE going home, yes?’
‘Aaah, well! Something’s come up.’
‘Hayley, family needs you and you need a break.’
‘I make it 92 concerts this year.’
‘Really, that many?’
‘I’ll probably go out for just over a week at the end of August but…something’s sort of.’
‘Can you tell?’
‘No, not yet. Sorry guys, you’ll have to wait.’
A little more banter and we knew she had to go so we stepped aside. For a moment, because of its angle, the car looked as if it was heading straight for the wall!
‘Try the gap between.’
Window wound down again and a half-turned Hayley head enquired, ‘What was that?’
‘Try the gap between the walls, it might be easier.’
A giggle, a humorously dismissive wave of her hand and Hayley’s return journey to London had commenced, amidst a chorus of ‘safe journey’ that, we hoped, would only take just over three hours this time!
So, the sadness of another Hayley evening brought to its conclusion had been alleviated by the passing banter of interchange with none other than the girl herself. As her car drove slowly down the drive, picking its way delicately around the still departing audience, heading for their cars in the further car park, we followed slowly behind, delaying our own departures from one another. We did not want the magic to end. I felt as dissipated as I used to feel when a show had closed and once more my time was my own, no longer bounded by rehearsal or performance demands.
I thought of all such past moments and the words of Prospero’s speech in
The Tempest came to my mind’s eye as a fitting description of our parting. From my recollection we played with the ending so that Prospero’s speech in Act IV Scene 1 concluded our performance, which seemed a more fitting end then Shakespeare’s original text. It offended the purists but I have always maintained that Shakespeare should be interpreted, not blindly followed.
‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.’
Peter S.
The Water Is Wide
Ave Maria
Prayer
Scarborough Fair
Amazing Grace
Mummers Dance*
Bridal Ballard
Mists Of Islay
May It Be
In Trutina
Hine E Hine
Ave Maria (Encore)
*Edit, Richard PMd me with the thought that the above list I had simply copied from George. He is correct. i had, simply as a 'spur of the moment' thought to save people referring back for the list or wondering, by this stage, where it was. I overlooked the fact that George had listed: 'Mummers Dance (The first time I had heard this live)'. As Richard pointed out, this might have been the first time Geoerge had heard it but Richrd was sitting next to me when i first did a concert or two ago! PS
and spent the morning looking at Little Moreton Hall and Biddulph Grange Gardens (see ‘Photography’ thread for details) before dropping back to my hotel for a quick shower and change. 
These early arrivals must be something of a record as Tim, Gawsworth’s owner, made special reference when he opened the proceedings. 
There must have been many who would have liked to take that opportunity but to have been even-handed across so large a number of regular supporters would have delayed Hayley at least an hour and it was obvious that Hayley must have had to make it clear to them, she could not take that time. 
