Ariel Abramovich and I have been working together for a couple of years now, mostly in Spain. Up till now we’ve concentrated on Dowland, Campion, and the composers who contributed to Robert Dowland’s Musicall Banquet, the anniversary of which falls in 2010.  We try to capture the spirit of the music by balancing the singing to the lute, trying to extend poetry into song. We will continue to offer these programmes, but for 2011 we will also be venturing into both earlier and later repertoire. Two composers that we’ve thought about a great deal are Thomas Morley and John Danyel, contrasting geniuses of the lutesong school.

Thomas Morley

Morley was a hugely respected figure, a link between the era of Byrd and that of Dowland. He seems to have been a keyboard player rather than a lutenist, and the harmonic constructions of his complex lute parts reflect this.  Danyel on the other hand, was a famous lute teacher and fearless explorer of the instrument’s chromatic potential. Both composers left only one book each, and so we can present a selection of their best surviving songs.

William Byrd

We’re also going to explore sacred music and have two programmes that are specifically designed for church acoustics. In this Trembling Shadow explores the idea that in aristocratic houses in 16th century England mass would have been celebrated in private chapels with whatever musical forces were available. For this programme we will perform the Byrd 3 voice mass in our own version for voice and lute, interspersed with sacred songs by Dowland, and Campion among others, and chant ‘propers’ which may change according to the time of year.

Josquin Desprez

The second programme, Transfer in Mysteria (which we will launch later in the year), applies a similar principle to the works of Josquin Desprez, but with 2 vihuelas rather than a lute. For this we will be joined by Lee Santana on vihuela, and soprano Anna Maria Friman.

This combination will enable us to perform almost any music from the 15th and 16th centuries in versions that may well have been common at the time but have rarely been heard since.

Rognoni title page

The final new programme for the season (which is available in secular, sacred or mixed versions) consists of late 16th century Motetti, Madrigali e Canzoni, taken from (or based on) the great division treatises of Bassano, Dalla Casa and Rognono.

These are a window onto the beginnings of solo song, and work very like jazz.  Performers (or composers – there wasn’t a lot of difference between the two) would take madrigals, chansons or motets from earlier in the century and create new highly ornamented versions.  Examples survive in the treatises, and we shall feature several of these, but we  will also create new versions spontaneously (and will be open to suggestions from the audience)…

…THE PROGRAMMES…

A Musicall Banquet

This ‘variete of delicious ayres’, as Robert Dowland described his songbook, is one of the first truly European song collections.  As well as three great songs and a Galliard by his father John, there are French, Spanish and Italian pieces, including the famous ‘Amarilli’ by Giulio Caccini.  The songs perhaps represent the highest point of the lutesong song tradition, before it was eclipsed by the continuo song.  A Musicall Banquet, and the Varietie of Lute-Lessons, both published in 1610, were the finest achievements of Robert Dowland, who went on to replace his father as court lutenist to King Charles 1.

Music that her echo is

Dowland is acknowledged as the master of the English lute song, but the poet-composer Thomas Campion has a unique place among his illustrious contemporaries. This programme features some of Dowland’s lesser-known masterpieces alongside neglected miniatures by Campion.

Painted tales & chromatic tunes

the songs of John Danyel and Thomas Morley

The English lute song had a very short life, but produced some of the most beautiful songs in the English language. The world of John Dowland was also that of many other extraordinary song writers, some famous, some less so. This programme explores the music of Thomas Morley, quintessentially English and pastoral by inclination, and John Danyel, the more radical man of the theatre. Each composer left us behind one book of songs: Morley’s exquisite love songs and Danyel’s darker chromatic poetry.

In this trembling shadow

Sacred songs by Thomas Campion & John Dowland and a Mass by William ByrdCatholics in late 16^th century England would often celebrate the mass in secret, making music in the any way they could. This programme is a tribute to that tradition. It is not a reconstruction of a mass but it uses the structure, within which we perform sacred songs, lute music, gregorian chant, and William Byrd’s Mass for 3 voices, intabulated for voice and lute.  The chant ‘propers’ given here are those for Advent, but can be changed to suit any day in the church’s year.

Transfer in Mysteria

Vocal divisions and intabulations of sacred music by Josquin Desprez

with Anna Maria Friman (soprano) and Lee Santana (vihuela)

For this revolutionary new project, to be recorded by ECM early in 2011, we have an ensemble of 2 singers and 2 vihuelas. Conventionally 15th & 16th century sacred music is thought of as a cappella, but we know from the surviving intabulations that a far more common way of performing this repertoire was with instruments. The programme will contain chant, a mass and motets, and we will be joined by Anna Maria Friman and Lee Santana to create a sound that probably hasn’t been heard since the 16th century.

Motetti, Madrigali e Canzoni di Diversi Eccellentissimi Auttori

Virtuoso diminutions & improvisations based on the publications of Dalla Casa (1584). Bassano (1591) and Rogniono (1592)

The ‘division madrigal’ represents the first flowering of vocal virtuosity in European music. This programme will include some of the most famous madrigals and chansons by Cipriano da Rore, Palestrina, Crequillon, Willaert and others in elaborate versions by later composers, as well as newly devised improvisations such as might have been sung by the most famous singers of the time.

If you’d like more details of these programmes or our future plans, please contact me directly at info@john-potter.co.uk. For details of availability etc contact Robert White Artist Management at RWhiteAM@aol.com.

Workshops with Finnish vocal Ensemble Versio Norwich (UK)

August 17

A Musicall Banquet

Radovljica Festival (Slovenia)  with Ariel Abramovich

August 18

workshop for early music singers (Radovljica)

August 28

German 16^th Century Song

with Alison Crum, Roy Marks & Andrew Kerr (early Renaissance viols)

Suffolk Villages Festival, Nayland (UK)

September 11

Being Dufay ( Offenbach-Hundheim)

Vokalmusik entlang der Romanischen Straße

September 24

Being Dufay (Bratislava)

Bratislava Convergence Festival

October 15- 19

Sound & Fury recordings (Vienna)

November 3

Dowland Project (Prague)

Strings of Autumn Festival

November 6

Gavin Bryars Ensemble

King’s Place (London)

November 11

A Musicall Banquet (Birmingham) with Ariel Abramovich

Birmingham Early Music Festival

These were mine:

“Ho conosciuto mia moglie nel 1966 quindi non potevo a quel tempo interessarmi di calcio.
Nel 1994 la canzone per i mondiali dei ‘Tre Tenori’ era numero 1 in tutto il globo dunque l’album ‘Officium’ dell’Hilliard Ensemble era fermo al Numero 2.
Quest’anno però ‘Being Dufay’ ha avuto un successo inaspettato, come Totò Schillaci in Italia 90…”

(with thanks to Ned for the Schillaci reference…)

We have performances in Germany and Slovakia over the summer, and we will soon be scheduling performances of the new programme (once we’ve thought of a title) for 2011.  Ambrose’ new piece will be a stunning audio experience (the extracts I’ve heard are like nothing I’ve heard before). It still has the old/new agenda, but this time he tributes fifteenth century composers who are tributing their own predecessors.  I’ve always found composers working with other composers’ music very moving (even just thinking about singing the three note ‘Ockghem’ motif in Busnois’ In Hydraulis can bring a lump to the throat), and this album and its associated multi-media event will do that in excelsis.

The Sound & The Fury in Vienna

The Sound & The Fury get together twice a year to record Franco-Flemish polyphony. The line-up varies at top and bottom depending on the music, but normally consists of David Erler (countertenor), Klaus Wenk and me (tenors),Thomas Bauer (bass) – whose idea the whole thing was – and Richard Wistreich (bass).

The recording project is a collaboration between Bernhard Trebuch of ORF and the artists Markus Muntean & Adi Rosenblum. We’ve made 10 albums to date, all on ORF’s label, and this July we will return to Kloster Mauerbach just outside Vienna to sing more music by Ockeghem and Caron. There will be a live broadcast on ORF at midnight on July 9th (probably including the Ecce Ancilla mass). The eccentric timing is at least an improvement on the last live brooadcast,  when the temperature in the church was minus 12 with all of us wearing all the clothes we had with us and the audience covered in blankets.

It is, of course, a bunch of (mostly) old (-ish) blokes getting together to do the music we love and have been doing for longer than most of us can remember, and our sessions locked away in the monastery (we sleep in the cells) are among the most enjoyable things I do.  There is an added frisson provided by the fact that although we ‘know’ how the music goes, it’s nearly always new material that none of us knew existed, and there’s always lots of it so little time for re-takes. It’s a high-risk process…

Tampere Vocal Music Festival 2011

Details of how to apply for the ensembles and choir competitions have just been announced. You can download entry forms here. The Tampere Festival is one of the great vocal music weeks of the year anywhere, and I’m delighted to be back chairing the ensemble jury after doing my year as artistic advisor last time. For vocal ensembles the festival means maximum fun, lots of networking and plenty of performance opportunities. Some 30,000 people reckon it’s THE place to be in the second week of July every other year.

Work not in progress…

Liz Haddon and I have postponed what would have been our final ‘work in progress’ session. We’ll be finding interesting places to do similar events once I’ve left the day job at the end of September.

This was particularly important to me, as it represented everything I value about a performance MA, and it was the refusal of the Music Department to allow me to make the (currently taught) Vocal Studies MA in to a ‘research by performance’ course  that was the final straw in my decision to leave the University (more about that in future posts).

Performance by research is a much-contested idea in academic circles. My own take on it is that if you’re going to have a post-grad course it has to be related to the likely future performing life of the participants. This means it has to be grounded in the students’ own individual performative creativity, giving them the maximum opportunity to experiment. There can be nothing generic about it: it should be loosely structured, with almost no teaching. The role of the supervisor is as a facilitator, enabler, consultant – call it what you will – a role very similar to that of a PhD supervisor whose knowledge and expertise in the relevant area will eventually be outstripped by that of the student.

Nora Ryan is an American singer, dancer, performance artist who has created a portfolio of events both here in York and in Leeds, working in multi-media with musicians, dancers and visual artists. This was one of  her last shows before returning to the USA, where she will continue her career as a freelance performer, and featured some of the Music Department’s most creative improvisers. The event was a stunning tour de force.

Italian opera from scratch

The next day there was the ‘outcome’ (as we academics are obliged to call it) of my final undergraduate project. The Project System at York is unique, and the only reason it’s not copied in universities throughout the land is that the people in suits just don’t get it. It’s an incredibly creative way to engage groups of students over a period of time, enabling them to flourish as individuals within group activity that is challenging, stimulating and fun. It produces highly motivated students, who have a direct educational investment in the process, and highly motivated staff who can teach what they want in the way they want to do it. The suits have tried to rein it in from time to time: we have to produce in advance what they call ‘differentiated outcomes’ for different year groups  (around 3 of each!). This is completely daft, and is only there because (as one of my colleagues put it) our marking system has to be identical to, and understood by, people in the Biology Department). In practice what happens is that everyone takes away a completely unquantifiable set of ‘outcomes’ which is unique to each student and cannot possibly be predicted in advance. I suppose it’s not surprising that a centralising university bureaucracy committed to standardised rule making across the board, can’t get to grips with all that. I mean, what would a Handbook entry look like: we expect you to take away an unknown number of outcomes, none of which we can predict in advance…

The project was called ‘Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera’ (my original inspiration for it was Philip Gossett’s wonderful Divas & Scholars: Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera). I had 20 students for a day and half a week for four weeks. I started by giving them a brief history of the process of creating opera in Italy, homing in some more obscure composers but mostly Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini and Mascagni. We then set about creating an opera for ourselves, keeping roughly to the kind of process that might have happened in a provincial Italian opera house towards the end of the century. This particular opera house had a company of players but no music, so had to devise a complete show using only what they already knew or could find in time. They were also heavily into the game of Cluedo. I don’t know what Verdi and Bellini would think about some of their best bits being cut up and reused, but we had terrific fun with it. We also inverted the Cluedo plot so there were multiple deaths giving plenty of opportunity to raid the operatic death scene repertoire. It was in a mixture of English and Italian, and featured some of the greatest hits of the 19th century, arranged for an eclectic ensemble of instruments (including accordion and trumpet)  as well as spontaneously improvised recitative and dialogue. It was entirely student-devised and performed, and there were some stunning performances.

Work in Progress…

While on the subject of last performances, Liz Haddon and I are planning our final ‘work in progress’ session in the Music Department on June 22 (we hope to do similar projects elsewhere in the future). These have been an attempt to break down the oppositional nature of the recital genre, and to re-introduce something of the informality of 19^th century domestic performance (for which much of the repertoire was originally conceived). It’s work in progress because we’re not giving definitive fully-formed performances, but exploratory sessions where we sing and play the music at that very creative stage where you’re encountering things in the music for the first time. The idea is to share that experience with anyone who turns up. We don’t expect people to sit there and just worship the music. Eating, drinking, chatting and interaction are encouraged, and we’re quite happy to repeat pieces if we feel there are other interesting things to do. It’s a bit like an open rehearsal. We’ve even been known to start again mid-‘performance’ to look in more detail at something. Not sure what the music will be for this one yet (it’s important we don’t do too much cheating in advance), but it might include some Chausson, Duparc, Tchaikovsky, Webern and early Schoenberg.  The date’s not quite certain yet but I hope   to confirm it shortly.

Diary update

I will get around to doing this when things get a bit less hectic. The next Being Dufay is in Foligno on June 26th in the Dancity Festival (which has a football theme since it coincides with the World Cup). After that I’ll be recording in Vienna with The Sound & The Fury, and gigs over the summer include Bratislava (Dowland Project), the Radovljica Festival (with Ariel Abramovich), the Kultursommer Rheinland-Palz (Being Dufay) and even a couple of rare appearances in the UK. More details next time.

]]> http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/11/last-performances-in-york/feed/ 0 http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/03/villazon-horses-and-toothpaste/ http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/03/villazon-horses-and-toothpaste/#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:39:01 +0000 John Potter http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/?p=231 Well he was quite something, wasn’t he? What struck me, apart from his tremendous energy, humour and complete lack of divo-like arrogance, was his taste in tenors – Juan Diego Florez and Jonas Kaufmann  in particular – both not only supremely elegant singers but reflective and creative artists. It was great to see clips of old and young Domingo, and to be reminded of the influence of Mario Lanza (particularly apt in view of Marjan Kiepura’s comments further down these pages). There was a bit too much Verdi for me, and not enough Wagner (a bit of Ben Heppner wouldn’t have frightened people too much). Bizarre to have Alagna speaking in French when he’s perfectly competent in English. Rolando singing into the horn was a great idea (and his reaction priceless) – it really gave you a sense of what’s missing from early recordings.

I liked the format. I’m not sure my little contribution added very much – a lot of what I said in the original recording was actually illustrated very engagingly by Villazon himself and it was much better TV that way. It’s a pity I didn’t think to ask him if I could post the cartoon he drew of the two of us, because it’s absolutely him – you can almost hear it.  And it had all been rather tidied up – I remember lots of twinkly bits that didn’t find their way into the final cut. The best bits were where his spontaneous reactions were left in. But what a phenomenon – and that lovely bit at the end which could so easily have been tenor ego-mania in full flood but was just him being almost childishly amazed at what he was doing…

If you’re near a TV set on June 2^nd at 9.00 in the evening you might catch me being interviewed by the amazing Rolando Villazon on BBC4. I had a wonderful time at the Royal Opera House; Villazon is a real powerhouse and has an incredibly quick brain. When I arrived he was sitting on the floor doing a piece to camera on Franco Corelli. At the end of the first take I couldn’t resist suggesting he mentioned Corelli’s legs, which were reckoned by some to be the best pair ever seen on a tenor. He began again: …and Franco Corelli, he had it all, including two of the best pairs of legs in the business…immediately realising what he’d said, he added…though he only used one pair at a time, of course. I don’t suppose that will find its way into the final cut.  It was all enormous fun, with Rolando fizzing away the whole time. So much energy! I’d taken the precaution of bringing along my copy of his Massenet & Gounod album – one of my favourites – which now has on the liner a Rolando cartoon of the two of us talking tenor stuff.

Tenor paperback

Tenor: History of a Voice is to be reprinted by Yale as a paperback in September. There won’t be any updated content, but I hope I have  corrected most of the misprints etc – so thank you to all those whose sharp eyes caused me all sorts of embarrassment. There may well be a substantially updated 2nd edition in a year or two, so I hope people will keep sending suggestions for updates.

One of the difficulties of writing any sort of history is that you’re always at risk of colouring your narrative with the ideologies of the present. In Tenor: History of a Voice I had a small section on screen tenors and commented that history has tended not to look kindly on successful opera singers who later went on to have commercial success through recordings or films. Mario Lanza, Richard Tauber and Jan Kiepura were among those whose reputations seemed to have suffered in recent times in part because of spectacular success in their own lifetimes, reaching beyond the opera world with wider repertoires in different media.  I was taken up on this point by the pianist Marjan Kiepura, who is the son of Jan Kiepura and the great soprano Marta Eggerth.  Marjan reminded me that success on the screen (or with lighter material) in no way diminishes what these singers achieved in the opera house. He pointed to the example of the Three Tenors, whose legacy is surely to broaden the appeal of good singing, and who certainly wouldn’t have turned down the opportunities their commercial success brought them. Kiepura was ahead of his time in this respect: in the 1930s film was the new cutting edge medium, and no singer would have passed up the chance of screen stardom.  Of course, we can’t imagine what a reputation would consist of without all its constituent elements, but I wonder if in the case of Kiepura, Lanza and others our sometimes rather snobbish attitude to commercial success has coloured our judgement of their place in history. Kiepura, in contrast to Lanza who hardly set foot on an operatic stage at all, became a screen star as a result of his successful career in European opera houses. He happened to be blessed with the kind of full visual package that the new medium was crying out for, and the studios could expect considerable benefit from his already stellar reputation.

Most tenor enthusiasts would acknowledge the art of Kiepura as equal to the finest examples of his time. In his native Poland his reputation was close to that of a national hero, with streets, monuments and even stamps and trains in his honour (if you want to travel from the UK to Poland by train, you take a lunchtime Eurostar to Brussels, a high-speed train to Cologne, then the overnight sleeper ‘Jan Kiepura’ from Cologne to Warsaw).

Kiepura was, of course, successful all over the world (becoming an American citizen in the 1940s), but the old division of Europe into East and West has often resulted in the marginalising of composers and performers from the central and eastern republics. The former Soviet bloc, by isolating the East from research into both the post-war and pre-Soviet period, effectively prevented the development of a coherent historical narrative.  I’ve touched on the cantorial tradition, the roots of which go back into and beyond the history of eastern Europe, but I also hope to give much more attention in future to the wider tenor history outside the conventionally recorded West.

I’m extremely grateful for the assistance of Marjan  in writing this short post.The family’s history is an extraordinary one, and YouTube will provide hours of audio and video of Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth, and indeed of Marjan himself. A good starting point for those wanting to explore the Kiepura legacy is Marjan’s own website, where you’ll find details of his own Chopin recording and a double CD of Marta Eggerth.  The latter, ‘My Life in Song’ is a wonderful compilation of Eggerth recordings between 1932 and 2002 (when Marta was 90) and features both Jan and Marjan. There are YouTube clips of Marta performing at 80 and 90, and many clips of Jan, ranging from Verdi and Puccini to operetta. I will update the Kiepura entry in the Biographical List of Tenors in due course, though there are surprisingly few authoritative sources.  Open Library contains links to books and articles, and there is a biography (in Polish) from 2006 by Wacław Panek. You’ll find a short web biography at History of the Tenor which also has some sound clips. The German Wikipedia entry is more comprehensive than its English counterpart, but both are eclipsed by the Polish entry.  CD Re-issues of Kiepura’s substantial catalogue are not extensive so far.  Volume 2 of the Pearl collection My Song For You (GEMM CD 9079) is also available; the Lebendige Vergangenheit site has a detailed breakdown of their Preiser compilation.

The NME site gives access to a huge number of audio and video clips of Kiepura singing in various languages. Almost all of them are examples of his exquisitely lyrical sound and fine control, especially when combining a diminuendo with a rallentando.  There are extraordinary clips of Marta Eggerth singing as freshly as ever at  80 (video) and 90 (audio), accompanied by Marjan Kiepura.

If anyone would like to add more info about recordings and literature on Jan Kiepura, do use the Comments box.

photo of Marjan Kiepura by Diane Brown

other photos by kind permission of the Kiepura family

The possibilities of performance using the world wide web was something I encouraged the Tampere Festival to look at last year. As things turned out we couldn’t get it together on that occasion, but the Chicago experience has been a great  opportunity to look creatively at performance beyond the concert hall. We can, not merely in theory but also in reality, perform the piece in different countries simultaneously, or with the two of us in different countries from each other (though Ambrose is reluctant to do this until the technology is completely glitch-free) . But whether you’re saving the planet or your promotion expenses, Being Virtually Dufay reduces travel, accommodation and carbon costs…

I don’t have much luck with Chicago – though it’s one of those great American cities that everyone should experience if they have the chance. The Chicago Sun Times was one of the few papers ever to notice my performance as Pilatus in Arvo Pärt’s Passio. It reckoned I was ‘effete and degenerate’. This time round the Chicago Reader  promoted me to  ‘one of the most daring singers in the classical world’. They know a thing or two over there.

This was recorded at the 2008 Punkt festival in Kristiansand. Live recording is exhilarating, and most musicians today try to make even a studio recording as ‘live’ as possible – long takes, minimal editing and lots of risk taking. But usually you know in advance that you’re actually recording something.  Gavin often records his gigs as a matter of record, and certainly the Punkt Festival set-up was perfect for this, but none of us expected to see it end up as a CD. It’s a reminder that every second counts and you never know what might come back to haunt you (YouTube, for all its wonders, is also the graveyard of clips that can’t decay fast enough). But I love this CD. It’s vintage Gavin – exquisite playing from his players Morgan Goff, Nick Cooper and James Woodrow, with the man himself on bass (and occasional piano). What an amazing  quartet they are – sitting on stage listening to them playing the two instrumental Laude is just one of the best things there is. And, of course, nothing beats singing with Anna Maria Friman (who’s just agreed to join me for the Josquin project).  Gavin’s band is a bit like a family – we’ve all been with him for a long time – and it was typical of him to invite Arve Henriksen, in town for Punkt and the future Mr Friman-Henriksen, to join us for a couple of numbers. Lauda 37 ‘Ciascun ke fede sente’ is one of two tracks featuring Arve, and it’s absolutely unique in Gavin’s oeuvre (his pieces with trumpet are very few and far between). We only saw it for the first time that day, and the trumpet is improvising; it doesn’t get much live-er than that. The last piece is the beautiful  ‘Amore dolce senza pare’. I nearly lost it at the end, but Morgan’s fabulous portamento is what you’ll remember.

Performances aren’t complete until they’re absorbed by the listener. Gavin provides no texts or translations, so the final element in the process is the audience members creating their own meanings inside their own heads. That’s just as it should be.

Being Dufay

We’re hoping to have a film of the complete Perth Festival performance, but at the moment we have a YouTube clip of live audio with a video montage to give an idea of what Mick Lynch’s films look like. Lisbon was another wonderful gig, very efficiently organised by Pedro Santos.   There’s an interview with Nuno Galopim and a review by him in DN Artes.  I also heard some interesting singers at the workshop organised by Paulo Lourenco at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa in their stunning new building.

The Sound and the Fury

…have a review in Gramophone for our ‘intimate and uncomfortable portrait’ of Gombert!

The next S&F event will be a recording session in Kloster Mauerbach followed by a concert in the church on July 9th. We hope to record Caron clemens et bengigna, jesus autem transiens, and sanguis sanctorum masses and the Ockeghem Missae mi mi and ecce ancilla domini

Josquin Desprez: Transfer in Mysteria

This new project, to be recorded by ECM later this year, has now expanded to 2 singers and 2 vihuelas. I’m hoping it will encourage promoters and audiences to think more creatively about 15th and 16th century polyphony: it wasn’t all a cappella - and our version is one of the many alternative ways that this music might have been performed. The line-up is Anna Maria Friman & me (singers) with Ariel Abramovich and Lee Santana (vihuelas). This should be a great combination of voices & instruments to explore the further reaches of renaissance sacred music in due course.

Forsaking Authenticity…

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s Wall Street Journal article was based in part on an interview with me during which I touched on Duke Ellington, sheet music and the dodginess of written sources.

DIARY

APRIL 20 Being Dufay Chicago Early Music Festival

next performance at the Dancity Festival Foligno (Italy) June 26

APRIL 27 – MAY 21   19th Century Italian Opera Project (University of York)

MAY 5 L’Auditori (Barcelona): Musical Banquet (with Ariel Abramovich lute)

MAY 7 Castellón: Musical Banquet (with Ariel Abramovich lute)

MAY 6-9 Castellón: lute song workshops (with Ariel Abramovich lute)

MAY 27 Words & Music: Gavin Bryars & Blake Morrison (Howard Assembly Room, Leeds)

THE RESPONSES to the tenor book will continue next time. Happy Easter all.