Hayley
Arrives
Hayley arrived over two hours late
for her sound check, it having taken over five hours
to drive up from London because of road works on
the M6. She was there barely two hours before the
performance. Then three hours of performance, interval,
change of clothes and essential courtesies to key
persons and a three-hour plus (hopefully no more)
return car journey. For anyone that is a very long
day. It was also hot and stuffy travelling up. The
HWI crowd there discussed this wondering why Hayley
hadn’t got a better equipped car, suddenly
realising that a car’s air-conditioning would
be no different in principle to that of an aircraft.
Hayley couldn't travel to a show in an air-conditioned
car, it would mess up her voice!
When she arrived I, as usual, was
looking everywhere but in the right place. The problem
with smoked glass windows is you cannot see in. Hayley
was sitting in the front of the car and apparently
waving enthusiastically with both hands at us as
the car approached, passed on sufficiently slowly
for us to realise Fiona and Ian were there too, also
waving. We followed, expectantly, as it meandered
round the grounds, suddenly passing a sign, ‘cast
and crew only’, where we left it to follow
its solo course, parking next to the portable loos
[washrooms].
Being in on a sound check was a
very interesting experience. Brought in by an assistant,
Hayley appraised the stage, where provision had been
made for them according to their usual format, doubtless
due to specific directions Hayley’s team had
given Gawsworth from the beginning. Then, once Hayley
had indicated all was physically well, sound cables
were finally positioned while Hayley had some quiet
discussion with Ian at the piano. Fiona sorted out
her microphone connection with her violin and checked
the paying out and re-bundling of her cable, so she
had the flexibility of movement she wanted in the
space she needed.
Hayley did one or two short voice
tests of light volume, requesting minor alterations
periodically as she heard the effect of changes she
requested, then she gave the sound team a half to
three-quarter force concert piece. Now it was Fiona’s
turn, then all three performers together. It was
obvious from the first this was going to be an incredible
evening. One knew, from the very first sound checks,
they were in the hands of an excellent sound team.
While Ian and Fiona discussed details
of their duet roles, Hayley was led behind the stage
to have a look at the ‘best’ side of
the house and doubtlessly have some of its history
explained to her.
The
Concert Starts
At this hour of the evening the
lights were only marginally effective and our host
needed his full voice to attract the audience’s
attention that the evening’s entertainment
was about to start. This was when he had advised
that 175 people had been waiting at the gates BEFORE
2:00pm, A whole five and-a-half hours before the
performance! It was not a question of them being
there for Hayley. They were there to get the best
possible seats for Hayley and to then enjoy their
after-noon picnic and the grounds at their leisure.
Many seats had been pre-allocated from the start.
This is why I think there is something of a ‘theatre
club’ for regulars and why it had been impossible
for Hayley to accept any signings—there simply
would have been too many making it too late a night
for both her and her driver—a safety aspect
that must come high on the list of hours worked.
Tim, the owner of Gawsworth Hall,
gave a concise biography of Hayley and then she came
on, to what was immediately obvious as the applause
of an audience that really wanted her. She told us
that while this event had been in her schedule for
a long tome it was only recently she had any idea
where Macclesfield was. She had been going further
north on another trip and suddenly saw the sign ‘Macclesfield’. ‘Ah,
so that’s where it is, I’ll remember
that now I know.’ She said.
She then introduced her first song
without saying its title. There was silence. Complete
silence. This was an audience about to prove, as
it did throughout the evening, that every single
one of the 1,150 people filling that stand was at
their most attentive. They settled quickly to total
silence as they realised Hayley was about to sing.
She waited for that total stillness,
as if herself making empathy with the whole world
around her. I don‘t think Ian cued her at all
with even a quiet opening note. It seemed as if she
went straight a cappella into the opening
phrase of Pokarekara Ana. Then Fiona and
Ian gently eased in underneath her, as she herself
added forte to the subsequent phrases and took the
song we know so well along its journey of rising
and falling phrases holding the world, as it seemed,
spellbound, in such a night as this.
‘In such a night as this,
when the sweet wind did kiss the trees and they did
make no noise, in such a night Troilus methinks mounted
the Troyan walls, and sighed his soul towards the
Grecian tents, where Cressid lay that night.’ (Merchant
of Venice Act V, Sc.1).
In such a night as this a thousand
people held themselves bonded as if but one person,
in awe and admiration for a young woman of flaxen
curls and delphinium blue eyes. She held them in
such enchantment tears pricked at the eyelids for
the beauty of the girl. The beauty of her voice,
the beauty of the garden and the night, before a
house whose walls had stood strongly against many
a tempest and much turmoil, a century or so before
Shakespeare had strut any stage. The beauty of each
succeeding moment, everyone in that audience relished,
fearing its mourning almost before the moment had
given birth. It is like that, with Hayley Westenra,
time flies so fast you are applauding the end of
her concert before you have fully comprehended that
it has begun. You savour it again and again in your
memory wondering if it was ever real but merely a
dream from which you do not wish to waken.
The dress she wore for this first
half was the one I had previously had great difficulty
in defining and the girls seemed as perplexed as
I, until a lady in the audience defined it as ‘aqua’,
as in ‘aquamarine’. I have to say it
is not my idea of aquamarine but Hayley later confirmed
in conversation with us that she was happy to call
it ‘aqua. ‘Oh gosh, you guys, so concerned
about the colour of my dress!’ ‘Well,
we like to try and get things right when we post
about you.’ She did confirm the crocheted ‘shawl’ was
the dark-blue I had thought and not black.
A
Little on Ian and Fiona
Fiona was wearing a ‘see-through’ long
dress of deep mid-green over which she wore a knee-length
dress of the same material, giving opacity above
the knee. Her hair seemed longer and exquisitely
fine, flowing luxuriantly about her as her head ducked
and weaved patterns around the demands of her bowing.
This was an extraordinary performance
across the board. It was superlative in every sense.
The quality of the sound was excellent but there
was something different about Fiona and Ian. In A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare gives
Bottom the line, ‘Comparisons be odorous’.
So, no comparisons then, but ever since I have been
attending Hayley concerts there has nearly always
been Ian. I have always respected Ian’s skill
as an accompanist. Often, regretfully, by his absence
when someone else has stood in.
The role of accompanist is a very
difficult one. Effectively, it entails playing second
fiddle with the skill of the first violinist but
often without the plaudits or status in an audience’s
eye that first violinist deserves. To be very good
at your own instrument but to hide that skill in
deference to the solo artiste is like the typographer
laying out a page in printing. That everything on
that page stands out in the correct sequence of importance
with an overall look that fits the whole is a skill
that should never be noticed, merely acknowledged
that ‘the whole looks right’. So it is
with the musical accompanist.
This evening, we had a change of
programme with not only Fiona showing her skills
as she usually does but Ian being an equal duettist
with her. I don’t know if it was my position,
gazing down on Ian’s hands so I could fully
see, not just envisage by sound, the bravura of his
playing. I can’t recall if they have played
this piece before, is new to us/me, or if Fiona has
enhanced Ian’s role from accompanist to duettist
in a new arrangement.
I ask the question, ‘Is this
indirectly to do with Hayley?’ To me, Ian has
seemed to play accompanist to Hayley and to Fiona.
We are well used to Fiona matching Hayley’s
uniqueness of voice with her own virtuoso skills
as a violinist so we have had a programme of two
superb soloists, each mistress of their own instrument,
each matching the other in competence and contrasting
styles with Ian as accompanist to each in turn.
This evening, in my view, we had
three soloists, performing as a trio in different
combinations. The difference between eighteen months
ago and tonight is Hayley. Eighteen months ago we
saw a young girl developing. Hayley is still developing
but as a maturing young woman who has experience
under her belt from which derives increasing confidence
and self-assurance. This enables both her accompanists
to truly ‘let rip’ in their own right.
This is what I feel happened this night. Rather than
risk taking anything away from Hayley, which earlier
might have been a possible danger, tonight it strengthened
Hayley. Tonight, Hayley was not just an artiste well
accompanied. This was a bravura performance from
three virtuosi. It was a performance throughout of
solid superlatives.
Back
to Hayley
The conclusion of Pokarekare
Ana engraved the hallmark of appreciation
the whole night stamped 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.
Fiona
and Ian Again
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.
After
the Interval
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
this 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 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 trio 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 singing 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.
A not unknown Hayley consideration
was to respond to a pre-show request. ‘Is there
anyone called ‘Hannah’ here?’ She
asked. Understandably, as it seemed to be a quite
young person, shyness delayed a response. ‘Is
that your mother sitting next to you?’ It was. ‘She
asked me to sing this song for you. It’s quite
appropriate, really, as is it is a lullaby a mother
sings to her child.
All too soon, Hayley then launched
into what, with great cries of disappointment, we
learned was to be her last song that night, Hine
e Hine. We, the audience, prevailed and after
much pressure of persistent applause, including some
feet stamping, she returned for the Schubert version
of Ave Maria.
Used to such events, but not for
some while, 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.’
After
the Show
Yet, for us HWI friends, a little
personal magic was still to come.
Whiling time under a spreading
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.
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.
The
Water Is Wide
Ave Maria
Prayer
Scarborough Fair
Amazing Grace
Mummers Dance
Bridal Ballad
Mists Of Islay
May It Be
In Trutina
Hine E Hine
Ave Maria (Encore)
Peter Such |