The Harrogate Experience
The Main MealFor the Harrogate programme itself, simply refer to Andrew’s report on Gateshead. The differences for Harrogate are as follows. Andrew introduced his report with ‘…Hayley performing with ‘Northern Sinfonia’ (
aka “The Christmas Presence Choir”) one of Europe’s most exciting chamber orchestras..’ Well, he might think so, or perhaps he was just quoting programme notes, it did not feel the case at Harrogate. Frankly, the whole experience up until Hayley’s appearance was ‘run-of-the-mill’. I do not think this was due to any subjective mood of mine (but see later).
I had been unable to buy a programme with the rush to get us all into the hall on time and was mad at myself for my sloppy timing when I realised no one else in the audience had a programme either! What sort of concert was this that didn’t have a printed programme?
However, to my mind the audience response to the concert’s extended
hors d’oeuvres was polite to the point of being perfunctory. Without a programme we did not have any clue as to when Hayley was expected and I am convinced that I am being totally objective when I say the audience, like me, was beginning to wonder if we were at the right concert. In fact, I was beginning to be concerned that something had gone wrong or some disaster had befallen her--far more serious than being unable to button her dress up, as happened at Wisley!
This extended playing of ‘other music’ allowed one to absorb all that was happening, something I can never do when Hayley is on stage. It is why I can‘t fiddle with cameras (but mine isn’t good enough anyway) and make abysmally scrappy notes. Hayley so enraptures me I cannot tolerate anything but total absorption on her.
I cannot believe the Harrogate sound people (presumably the in-house team, but see later) had paid heed to comments at Gateshead, unless from overheard conversations, or perhaps a view from the performers themselves. If they had paid heed, the problem is a reported experience not an experience directly gained by a sound person at both venues able to take into account the differences between them. Unless, of course, ‘Christmas Presence’ did carry its own sound team, in which case they were trying to apply lessons learned at Gateshead without sufficient familiarity with the totally different sound situation at Harrogate. If ‘Christmas Presence’ does carry its own technicians I would have thought there was a golden rule of ‘universal’ constants regardless of venue which are then tweaked as necessary at the rehearsal but making allowance for the absorbing effect of an audience in that particular auditorium.
The
Evening Chronicle at Gateshead reported ‘…Central Newcastle High School Choir put in a valiant effort, though you couldn't help feeling they were swamped by the size of venue and had full Northern Sinfonia to compete with (perhaps the mics could have been turned up for them).’
At Harrogate the mikes (or the amplifiers) were so turned up there was distracting speaker static when nothing was being played and you could clearly hear feet shuffle and the turning over of the score sheets. The St Aidan ‘s School Chamber choir was so amplified the sound, so obviously coming from the suspended proscenium speakers, that they might as well have been broadcast and not have been physically present. There was not any seeming relationship between the fifty-voiced choir at the very back and the sound they were creating, apart from one’s logical assessment that the people at the back were related to the sound at the front, thirty feet in the air. This almost applied to the orchestra but for its positioning and spread which made ambiguity between speaker output and their actual output sufficiently vague as to seem to be from one comprehensive source but it wasn’t like a live orchestra.
Then Hayley came on, so lost amongst an over-crowded platform that you were only vaguely aware of her head threading its way between the music stands that the choir started the applause to let the audience know she was arriving at last, otherwise she might have got right to the front before the audience responded to her on their own. Respond they did. It is an objective assessment that the evening mood was lifted. Perhaps with relief, after all no one had a programme, so no one had any idea as to what was going to be happening and like me, perhaps they were beginning to wonder if they were at the right concert.
It reminded me of an incident in my childhood when I took my little sister to the cinema to see
The Wizard of Oz. All the stills outside had shown the colour part of the film and the film started and seemed to go on for some time in black and white. After awhile, she asked me, rather put out and sounding very disappointed, ‘I thought this was in colour?’
So it was at Harrogate, perhaps aggravated by the lack of programme. Certainly, there is an aspect of personal subjectivity here but I believe I can identify the cause of this and remove it from the equation to say objectively the audience as a whole felt likewise.
As with
The Wizard of Oz so at Harrogate, Hayley Westenra came on stage and the sun shone. The audience’s perfunctory applause turned to an applied applause determined to show its positive response to her appearance. She started to sing and I could sense the response in the audience was echoing my own, we were not just on another plateau, we were on another planet. In but a few phrases of song she took us instantly over the rainbow and we were no longer in Kansas.
It was then that I began to realise how very spoilt I have become. I wrote on my Christmas card to her my appreciation for the time she has so generously given through the year. Wonderful moments at Newmarket; walking with her to her hotel in Cardiff, chatting with her personally for a full ten minutes; two occasions on the street outside Cadogan Hall, to name but a few, I realise the extent to which my year has been taken up with listening to the best there is, live and talking with them. Not just Hayley, but also Kiri te Kanawa, Frederika von Stade, Nicola Benedetti.
When you have heard the best there is as often as that (and met with them), anything short of perfection is a disappointment. Normality is no longer acceptable, yet it is with her. Surely, she must be aware of the seeming failings of others when she, perfection itself, still striving not only to hold that standard but to still improve upon it, interacts with those for whom her excellence can be but a dream. Had I her talent and her desire always to deliver the best, I could not possibly hide my irritation at anything less.
I call to mind one of the Doctor series of film comedies where the junior intern (Dirk Bogarde) reassures a patient about Sir James Robertson Justice’s bellowing bombast of a surgeon. ‘You have to understand that he is so incredibly good at what he does that he simply cannot tolerate anyone who is not at least as good as he is.’ Hayley does tolerate it with extraordinary patience and an humility that is the epitome of the very great
artiste she is becoming.
It was not Andrew Greenwood’s fault. He held the orchestra together competently. The orchestration could have been more enlightened but when it did try to lift itself from the pedestrian it tended to sound gimmicky. The choir of young voices was adequate (ignoring the over-amplification) until singing with, or in contrast after, Hayley. Then one was all too aware of the inadequacy of ‘normality’ again.
From the beginning Andrew Greenwood was let down by a couple of instrumentalists. I’m not sure what happened, it passed so quickly, but I am sure someone had not kept their reed(s) wet and their tubes warm as the initial blast of sound encompassed a few squawks, possibly oboist’s rather than clarinettist’s and something sounded off in the brass section.
Then we came to the audience participation and Andrew Greenwood said, ‘At this point we usually ask you to turn to page 14 in your programmes…’ In fact, looking at the programme now it is page 11—and a left–hand page (odds are normally right-hand pages!) so obviously programme pages are re-arranged and made up according to the venue and local advertising/promotion/sponsorship. ‘Unfortunately, the programmes have gone astray but I am sure you know the chorus words’ which he then reprised for us as Hayley came on stage again with her copy. ‘Oh dear’, She said to Andrew Greenwood, ‘well perhaps you ought to do the solo as you seem to be the one who knows what is supposed to be happening!’
By the interval, the programmes had been found and I was able to buy my copy. At the close of the interval, as I regained my seat, Eugene O’Neill found me. He had flown in from Dublin with a friend and was staying overnight. I believe he is a visitor not a member of the forum. He would clearly love Hayley to perform in Dublin. His friend considered the journey worthwhile and in the session after the show I took Eugene’s photo with Hayley for him with his camera. Although he seemed to have fixed the focus I managed to gain a couple of shots with his and Hayley’s faces in a somewhat crowded frame, so I hope he wasn‘t disappointed. In moments like that you have to grab the moment quickly and he had thrust his camera into his friend’s hand who promptly denied any competence and thrust it into mine!
Following the interval we were now aware that we had Hayley, Hayley, Hayley, effectively for the rest of the evening and a sense of relief and anticipation was evident throughout the auditorium. However, she had hardly started her first offering for the second part before sound problems emerged. Until then, the sound had been balanced, regarding the relationship of the different parts with one another but simply overloud. This was advantageous to Hayley in her general audience addresses as she was unquestionably louder and clearer than I have known her to be in these little exchanges, which can be a little too casual regarding volume for my liking. I had assumed this was why Hayley had occasionally turned her head away from the microphone when she entered upon a crescendo. She knew she would overload the microphone at these points.
The best way to describe the sound problem is ‘dirty connections’, which caused the sound, as Hayley described it, to ‘pop in and out’. She must have been aware of it at the beginning but hoped it would be fixed. Following the second song she switched her microphone off to have a word with Andrew Greenwood. The conversation must have been something like, ‘shall we stop and sort or carry on?’ The answer had clearly been to ‘`carry on’.
She then told us that she was aware from her monitor that something was wrong but she was going to carry on singing anyway. That specific problem was sorted during her next song but somehow the sound didn’t seem quite as it had been during the first half, although I can‘t explain exactly why. The person next to me muttered that he didn’t know why she didn’t throw the microphone away and just get on with it. That was not the time to respond but I did afterwards.
Despite the initial sound irritation the second part of the concert was essentially a Hayley concert with a few interjections from others, either separately or in conjunction with her. Our Andrew has provided that programme and confirmed the superb delivery that is the Hayley style. She was unquestionably on top form. She was Hayley at her most superlative. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen her so happy and so full of life, so here I jump in, as earlier promised, with all six feet flailing in the air.
When she came to her last number, an encore, she sang ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…’ I have never known her sing with such exuberance, with such sheer
joie de vivre. Hemmed in by the podium on her right, all around her by music stands and players and in front of her the very edge of the stage, she had no room to dance. I am convinced she wanted to. Instead, she wiggled rhythmically. In anyone else but Hayley her movements in that reasonably close-fitting yellow dress would have been sensuous. It is the first time I have been so fully conscious of her hips, although not the first time I have noted that transition from girl to young womanhood over the period I have been seeing her.
What she exhibited was sheer undiluted happiness through every pore of her body. This was an exuberant young woman who wanted to kick off her shoes and just dance. This is a girl who
will include songs from the shows in her repertoire; who
will do musical theatre; who
will do song and dance routines. It is in her blood and within her ability: such expression of her sheer enjoyment of being is an integral part of her.
More than anything else at the close I had wanted to ask her, ‘Just how badly did you really want to dance during that number?’ I have previously commented on my dislike of Fiona Pears’ long-legged hi-jinks at ‘The London Palladium’ noting how much better she was when she restrained herself ‘to the spot’ in later Hayley concerts.
I recalled this when watching Nicola Benedetti a few weeks ago at Cadogan Hall. She, likewise, expressed herself through every pore of her body but her body movements were disciplined ones, being the servant of her instrument’s need.
That is how it was with Hayley. Had she had the width of the Palladium stage, every movement would have seemed abandoned, not because it was, but because it was a disciplined expression of her mood, in which every movement had a purpose. This was one very happy young woman expressing to the full her very enjoyment of simply ‘being’.
Dessert and
coffee follow shortly.
Peter S.