“What’s the Connection?” many of you may be asking.  Well, we can start the story in July 1977, when a young and enthusiastic Canadian pianist was paying his first visit to the summer school of music that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears had founded in connection with their flourishing Aldeburgh Festival.  The young musician thought he had arrived as an observer to sit in on masterclasses.  Instead, he found himself filling a last minute vacancy as an accompanist - and, in the process, Bruce Ubukata met another staff pianist, Stephen Ralls.  The rest, as they say, is history.  

As a student, in love with poetry and the art of recital, I never attended a master class session that offered a complete work-up on every aspect of what the French Art Song (or mélodie) repertoire is made. At last, and in full activity as a singer, I decided that I would, as soon as possible, found an Academy which would fulfill what I was looking for: The Académie Francis Poulenc in Tours, now 15 years old, is trying to achieve exactly that.

I have written the imposed songs for vocal competitions twice – first, for the Montreal International Music Competition in 2005, and later for the Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition in 2008. In both cases, the most difficult thing I found was to try to write challenging but idiomatic music for all vocal types at once, that would show off the strengths (and expose any weaknesses) of many different singers. This was truly daunting – of course different transpositions are made for the various voice types but as we know there is more difference between singers than just their available range of notes.

I spent the first 35 years of my life practicing – of course I found time for wine and food and traveling, but there was certainly no time for any significant exercise.  I had brief flings with ill-fated aerobics and dance classes in my Undergrad and Grad degrees, but they always ended up in some sort of disaster.  I got through the countless hours of practicing during my DMA in Collaborative Piano without any real exercise, and, sore and fairly tight, started a year in the training program at Minnesota Opera.

Art Song, did I choose it? – or was I chosen by it. Well, I think the latter. No wonder, knowing that my dear Mother sang to me from the moment I was born. Soon we sang together and she was such a proud mother that to her it was obvious that I should sing the highest part! Her beautiful voice kept vibrating in me all my life, unconsciously I think.

Thirty-five years ago, four singers and I came together to present concerts under the banner of The Songmakers’ Almanac. ‘Makers’ of songs were taken to be composers and their poets, and further down the production line, singers and their pianists. The leaflet advertising the first series promised “a song-anthology come-to-life, a flexible singing repertory group which aims to celebrate anniversaries, outstanding events, and special subjects in unusual programmes which will depart from the long-established song-recital format.” Gerald Moore, Eric Sams and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau were patrons. Felicity Lott and Richard Jackson, soprano and baritone of the new group, gave the inaugural recital, Our Pleasant Vices, at the Purcell Room, South Bank, on 4 October 1976. 

The world of so-called classical music is confronted constantly with questions of perception and realities. Often those perceptions become reality or at least become as important as reality. One of the most persistent perceptions is that the art of the vocal recital is dying. I have heard this asserted for the last fourteen years while I have been running a vocal recital series in Montréal, Québec. In those fourteen years we presented well over seventy vocal recitals and concerts. Many featured world-renowned artists while others presented a generation of emerging Canadian and foreign singers, many making their recital debuts in Canada.

Being now older than dirt, I can look back at the circuitous road leading to the scholarly life I now enjoy and either shake my head or laugh. After a stint in a Houston high school where I did not do well in science (my mother’s preference), I became a shy undergraduate majoring in piano performance. But my Godzilla-sized Stage Fright That Ate Tokyo impelled the recognition early on that I would need to find another way to remain in music.