HAYLEY AT THE NORTH WALES THEATRE, LLANDUDNO
Hi everyone, back from holiday--just--and oh dear, it does go on a bit!
Component PartsJust tittle-tattleThe Concert ProgrammeThe Concert ItselfAbsolutely Stunning HayleyJust tittle-tattleOh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! What tales I have to tell from Llandudno! One normally perceives Hayley as a ‘happy person’ by default of her being Hayley. At Llandudno on Sunday 25th June 2006 I saw a
very happy ‘Happy Hayley’! There could, of course, be many reasons: the sea, the sand, the mountains. I believe all three (and perhaps more sun, too!) are within half-an-hour’s drive of Hayley’s New Zealand home.
This was also her fourth (we reckoned, no one seemed too sure, including Hayley) visit to Llandudno. In every aspect of the girl there was no doubt at all she felt herself to be ‘at home’ and Llandudno felt Hayley was ‘their’ girl. Mind you, it could also be the natural outgoing friendliness of the Welsh, just like Hayley herself. I gained the feeling in Llandudno that I was given a glimpse of what it must be like to be amongst Hayley’s home crowd in Christchurch, an experience I hope to garner in due time.
One of the advantages of those of us privileged by circumstance to see Hayley often is that one acquires a general background ‘feel’ for her situation. I refrain from using the word ‘moods’ because we all have our off days and less ‘with it’ moments and one could never associate ‘mood’ with Hayley. An ‘off-day’ with Hayley probably equates with the average artiste’s best. Her performances are consistently so good that one sometimes feels any criticism is nit-picking in the extreme but it is because she is consistently so good that one feels one owes it to her to nit-pick.
Criticism of her has been expressed on this forum and I think rightly so (in the principle), for if HWI is to render proper service to her the last thing we want is a perception we slavishly adore her and that she can ‘do no wrong’. However, I have never expressed criticism here unless I have been honestly able to counter it with praise. One-sided criticism I have reserved for those golden moments of talking with her personally, as happened a week previously at Cardiff.
On indefinite holiday—likely ended when this is posted—I am at least a fortnight out of touch with HWI posts. I am, in fact, somewhat out of touch with the rest of the world in general for that matter! This has been a total ‘switch out’ holiday. Even opening the laptop has been anathema to me! I am assuming, therefore, that Roger/Dave have commented that in Cardiff we three had a glorious fifteen minutes walking Hayley back to her hotel! Later, I got it in the neck for having hogged her (thank you Dave for the lift to my hotel on your way home—or did you go back to ‘the party’ when you had dropped me off?). I just happened to be the one walking alongside her while Dave and Roger chatted with Steve!
However, I told her then that superb though her Cardiff performance had been she was slipping into being too casual with her casual audience chat, even to the point of not talking into the microphone at all, never mind about mumbling. The problem, which must NOT be viewed as a problem but simply a challenge to be negotiated around, is her accent.
For various reasons I am usually able to differentiate Canadian from Eastern sea-board US and most Brits are aware of the Australian accent. We are less familiar with the New Zealand accent. That means it takes us a little longer to register what has been said. Hayley, in normal speech, has a natural habit of speaking quickly. When she does this on stage she is already onto the next sentence while at least half the audience is still digesting the previous one. The accent is to be cherished. I enjoy it—but that could be the Hayley factor rather than the New Zealand accent! All it needs is a slower delivery, especially when she is being casual. Rather than undermining her naturalness, slowing her delivery allows us to share in, perhaps revel in, her Kiwi roots.
I have no idea if she paid any attention to me, if it was pure coincidence of the moment, or if it was simply the Llandudno effect, which was an extraordinary ‘home from home’ atmosphere all round. I suspect she had paid attention which proves, as I have always suspected, that while she may not agree, she does listen attentively to what she is told and at least ‘bears it in mind’, proving we do have a a value to her.
I raise this here for two reasons. As stated, we owe it to her to be critical, for in that open criticism we enhance the value of our praise as objective and not fawning. Second, on Sunday 25th I did
not have the opportunity to say to her, ‘Hayley, you were superb. You were back to how I first observed you regularly in the fall of last year when you started opening up more in your casual chat. I noticed immediately then the clarity of your diction without sounding stilted and without losing the beauty of your accent. Tonight, you seem to have heeded every word I said In Cardiff and your audience chat was superb.’
One also needs to remember that several of the Il Divo tour posts complimented Hayley on her audience chat as being so natural, whilst Il Divo's was criticised as being stilted and artificial.
The Concert ProgrammeI did chat with her last night, but it was a very rushed ‘after show’ moment to which I shall return. For now, let me deal with the show itself.
As at Cardiff, the programme was excellent. The prominent line on the cover was simply her name, white letter reversed out of a black and white picture of the whole choir over which was the head and shoulders portrait of Hayley used on Odyssey bonus edition promotional material. This picture works extraordinarily well in black and white.
Inside, a whole page was devoted to Hayley. More importantly, there were paragraphs on individual key people and most importantly (a failing I regretted with the Huddersfield programme on the band) there was a complete break-down on the choral voices, although this was not as valuable as a break-down on the Huddersfield band would have been, being simply four groups, two each of tenors and basses. It did enable me to prove my count (64, guessing people I couldn’t see hidden by the conductor and the piano) was in fact 70. In contrast with the massed choirs totalling 500 voices at Cardiff this choir—Côr Meibion Maelgwen—was not a disappointment but rendered a superb body of sound.
The idea of providing background notes on the songs themselves was good but not utilised as well as they might have been. For example, ‘Weimar’ was described as ‘Music composed by Fredric Weber and arranged for male voice choirs to a well-known hymn…’. Having gone so far, why not tell us the name of the hymn? Particularly since we are told the name of the arranger and that he was a former choir member from Anglesey.
In the programme page devoted to him (the whole programme being in both Welsh and English as was the whole of the compère’s on stage delivery) the choir’s chairman (Tony Tobin) paid tribute to Hayley. ‘We are extremely proud, as a choir, to share the stage tonight with such a gifted young artiste from New Zealand, Hayley Westenra and we once again enjoy the talents of the ever popular James Holme. In fact we didn’t as will be revealed later.
Both from the chairman’s programme introduction and the compère’s on stage introduction we learned the conductor (Trystan Lewis), one of the youngest choral masters in Wales, was largely credited with the choir’s most recent successes—winning first prize at last year’s National Eisteddfod and reaching the finals of Radio Cymru’s ‘Choir of the Year’ competition. It turned out that the couple sitting next to me were related to him.
The Concert ItselfBefore anything happened the audience warmly applauded the choir as they filed onto their three-tiered stands. The compère, Bethan Jones Parry (Head of Press and Relations for North Wales Police) is an experienced broadcaster and show host having previously hosted the Senior Women’s Police Conference, the North Wales Choral Festival as well as the National Eisteddfod of Wales.
Dressed in a dashing ‘whiter than white’ soap advertisement trouser suit she referred to it being a ‘great honour’ for them to be once more hosting Hayley who had been there three or four times before.
Since Roger said he would scan the Cardiff programme and I said I would follow suit for the Huddersfield programme and this one, I will simply advise that having enabled the audience to settle down, by reporting that England had won its latest match 1–0, the choir aroused expectations with
Christus Redemptor, a popular Welsh hymn. Then, most interestingly, a Welsh rendition of
Somewhere from Bernstein’s
West Side Story, a contrast from the opening number showing the subtleties that a male voice choir can deliver, with baritone Hywel Williams delivering the lead vocal.
Then, following
You’ll Never walk Alone from Rogers and Hammerstein’s
Carousel the choir filed, not offstage, but to three rows of chairs behind their open-framed stands.
Then, non-attributed in the programme but introduced by the compère, Fiona Pears, dressed in a closely fitting black dress and Ian Tilley came on stage, taking their respective positions stage left and behind the piano, stage right. My view of him being completely blocked by the piano I can only surmise that Ian was
not wearing a dress!
Absolutely Stunning HayleyThen, having been given a wonderful but in no way exaggerated build-up by the compère, Hayley came on. I really don’t know what to write, which of course means I shall write reams! I have never seen her like this, or in this way and may be it is I who am bemused rather than she who was bemusing.
Considering the number of times I have seen her on stage, and been close-up to her off-stage, even if only observing her sign for other people, she has never made the impression on me she did in Llandudno. Walking on stage, the girl who has of late often commented upon the heat, was clearly as cool as a cucumber.
I was unsure if the refrigeration trailer out-back with frost-coated pipes which I had seen the day before was for another show or was being used as a means of stage/theatre cooling but certainly the hall maintained a comfortable and consistent temperature throughout, although on the Sunday it was increasingly cold and wet outside.
Hayley was wearing a nearly lemon yellow satin petticoat whose straps simply sat upon her shoulders, its bodice being only of such substance as to provide decency without any support what ever to the beauty of her femininity. Over this was the dress proper, except that being of tulle of like yellow, over-sewn with sequinned patterns in gold and silver thread, making few folds around her body, it was effectively transparent—hence the prominence of the under slip.
I can’t recall the colour of her shoes, which were probably gold, my eyes noticing for the first time that she had painted her toe nails scarlet. Perhaps she always has, I just haven’t been close enough to notice. As for make-up generally, she wore only the minimum essential to counter the intrusion of the stage lights. Why, after all, paint the lily?
Her hair seemed longer than I usually had noticed and fuller and extraordinarily fine. As the woman related to the musical director remarked in the interval, ‘She looks like a porcelain doll, so fragile, so delicate.’
That too I seemed to notice for the first time. Of course I’ve seen her close up. I’ve felt that elfin-like hand thrust into mine but when talking with her one is mindful of her eyes and her mouth. One concentrates on what she is saying and listening to the animated inner spirit that drives the whole. One does not necessarily take in the rest of her, usually hidden behind a desk after the show and she has almost always been wearing jeans.
Last night she was wearing the most worn, almost to the point of being worn-out, jeans I have yet seen her in, so probably a favourite pair together with the yellow bustier, a nineteenth century undergarment turned by twenty-first century designers into an over-garment. Yet even in these jeans, which are usually nearly drain-piped around her, there seemed space within them! For some reason she came across as extraordinarily slender.
Although I have often been in the front row—a position I avoid if she has full orchestral accompaniment when I prefer to be a few rows back—I have never been so close to her when she has been on stage. So close this time, with barely three feet from my feet to the stage, a four-foot high stage and she but three or four feet from the edge, when she was on full voice I saw what normally only her dentist sees. I doubt there is a single filling in her head. It emphasised the perfection of the whole: beauty within and without, spiritual as well as physical. Thank God her feet, delicate as the rest of her, are so firmly and solidly planted on the ground.
Without that down-to-earth practicality, coupled with superb grace, elegance and poise, hers is a beauty that could destroy her. In another age she could indeed have launched a thousand ships. God forbid it ever be necessary but she could probably launch the modern equivalent. I suppose this is the effect Princess Diana had on those who met her, it is the nearest comparison I can make to the Hayley effect.
Taking the cue from the lady next to me, I don’t think I have ever seen Hayley so slender-looking before, yet this was a healthy slenderness. It was a body cared for outside and in, through care of looks and care by diet. That extraordinary practical observation of her dentistry hit me in the solar plexus with a powerful aesthetic appreciation that I had never twigged before—how appropriate the title of her first international CD
Pure.
This girl was pure in mind and body and through every facet shone the radiance of a pure heart and soul. I would love to know a psychic’s perception of her aura.
This was something different from meeting with her. Then I met the person, this was the performer. It was like being in an art gallery invited to gaze upon a masterpiece. One steps forward to examine the detail of the brushwork, to assess how a particular effect has been achieved, by building the pigment, the type of brush used and the manner and angle the brush was worked.
Regarding the seemingly flawless alabaster of every visible part of her skin, one would admire the reduction of pigment to a point almost of translucency. Then one steps back and finds the right distance at which one can see the component parts making the collective whole.
Suddenly, for the first time, despite those several meetings in person, I had the right position from which to appreciate properly Hayley’s sheer natural beauty.
The evening reminded me of that style of portraiture, particularly Regency and Victorian where the sitters are placed in a garden or woodland setting. This requires two completely different techniques from the artist: the art of portraiture and the art of landscape, each making different demands and each requiring a different understanding of perspective. So too here, as happened in Cardiff, Wisley, Cadogan Hall, not quite as strongly in Huddersfield where I felt the December band had the edge on the summer band.
Whether appearing with her, or alternating with her, the rest of the performers matched Hayley in their own right and the whole was a balanced blend of soloist (the portrait) and the choir and other soloists (the landscape).
Peter
Part 2 see next post--posting limit otherwise exceeded!
but I will be at Wisley :smokin and Newmarket 
