Bravissima
Henrietta Bredin sings for her supper in East Lothian
Sleeping on a shelf in the dormitory wing of a girls’ boarding school, rising at 7 and eating canteen food every day may not be everyone’s idea of a perfect holiday but it is mine, when allied to a week of intensely rewarding music-making.
A holiday with learning attached is a very fine thing indeed. You can go and paint watercolours in Tuscany, join an archaeological dig in Crete or birdwatch in the Azores; me, I choose to sing in Musselburgh. You may think that singing is for youngies rather than oldies but this is really not the case – it’s a gloriously lifeenhancing thing for anyone, at any age. I took it up at a very late stage and feel particularly foolish for being such an aged novice as I have spent most of my working life surrounded by and listening to singers. For whatever reason I never dared try it myself which means that now, having finally taken the plunge, my contemporaries who were onstage at English National Opera when I was running around behind the scenes are patiently and generously helping me embark on the learning process that they left behind a fair number of years ago. Their encouragement is extraordinarily heartening, especially as I am not only inexperienced but am brimming over with the embarrassing zeal and needy enthusiasm of the recent convert.
At the Oxenfoord International Summer School for solo singers you can find yourself listening one minute to a hugely promising young tenor currently studying at the Guildhall and the next to a soprano in her early 80s singing, perhaps with less volume than she could once achieve, but with astonishing purity and sweetness. The learning flows both ways.
This is only possible because of the inspiring presence of the venture’s artistic director, that prince of song pianists Malcolm Martineau, who plays for everyone from Bryn Terfel and Sarah Connolly to Anna Netrebko and Simon Keenlyside in recitals all over the world. He claims, and it’s difficult not to believe him when transfixed by his fervent lighthouse gaze, that the summer school week is his favourite week of the year, and the unique mix of ages and abilities that it attracts is very much due to him. It is because of his commitment that eminent
professionals are prepared to give up their time to work with singers of very varying standards and it is because of his example and teaching genius that skilled pianists fall over themselves to accompany sessions, back to back, from morning to night.
It is exhilarating for an amateur to be treated as a professional, to sing in English, French, German and Italian (Spanish, Russian and Czech are in my sights for future years), to have to memorise notes and words (very good exercise for the little grey cells) and to have your every phrase heard, analysed and shaped by the best ears in the business. I have sung Strauss while digging into my German consonants with determination, only to be exhorted to apply yet more vigour and emphasis. My French (Gounod and Fauré) is apparently good but carries an unexpected aura of the 1920s and sounds as if I was taught by someone ‘very elderly and rather grand’ (Mademoiselle Kalfleche would, I suspect, be outraged by the former and flattered by the latter). My Italian has come on in leaps and bounds since mastering the agogic (word of the week) hesitation, lingering over a note or a double consonant to propel one seamlessly into the next phrase. My English delivery owes a considerable debt to Julie Andrews, not to be sniffed at when picking one’s way with carefully enunciated precision through a phrase such as ‘Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, or the ham in a temperance hotel?’. My usual problem is finding the songs I want to perform so beautiful and moving that I quail at attempting them – but those lines by Auden come in a setting by Benjamin Britten that I find maddeningly arch, so the challenge with that one was to find a way of delivering it that made it palatable.
People carve this week out of their carefully hoarded holiday time from music college and from careers in radiography, business consultancy and Jungian analysis. As a result the conversations over yet another lunchtime baked potato are stimulatingly wide-ranging and unpredictable. Everyone gets nervous so everyone’s empathy antennae are sensitively attuned and constructive support is in abundant supply.
At the end of the day, in common with the best sort of holiday, you are tired but happy, you linger over a glass (or three) of wine, you swap stories and you laugh till your ribs ache. Then you come away, creative batteries charged and humming, wishing that you didn’t have to wait a whole year to do it all over again.