Every theatre has a green room — a place to relax, connect, and be yourself before the show. This is mine. I'll be writing about singing, performance, wellbeing, and life behind the scenes. I hope you'll enjoy it.
It is never too late to start singing. Every so often someone catches me after a rehearsal and tells me, rather quietly, that they have always wanted to sing. It is usually followed by a nervous laugh and a confession that they were told at school to mouth the words, or that they are surely too old to begin now. I would like to say here what I say to them: you are not too late, and you are very welcome.
Pull up a chair in the bar after a Canto Mundial rehearsal, and you will hear English spoken in a remarkable range of accents. Canto Mundial brings together singers from seven nations. Each arrived on the Costa Blanca by a different road, at a different time, for reasons as varied as the people themselves. Many of them would never have crossed paths in the ordinary run of life. A choir changed that, quietly, one rehearsal at a time.
Rehearsals for Voices in Rhapsody are well underway, and I find myself doing what I always do at this point in a concert cycle: standing at the front of the room watching something that six weeks ago existed only on a spreadsheet gradually become a real, living programme.
Every September, the atmosphere along the Costa Blanca shifts. The beach towels are folded away, and the visitors have gone home. People start looking for a routine again, and a surprising number of them decide that routine should include singing.
There's a particular quality to the light along the Costa Blanca in late August. It softens a little earlier in the evening, and the cicadas seem to know something we don't quite want to admit yet: summer is winding down.
There is a moment near the end of every concert I direct when I stop conducting and just listen. The final chord is still hanging in the air, and I watch the faces in front of me instead of the ones behind. What I see is never polish. It is joy, relief, pride, sometimes tears. That moment is the reason I have spent twenty years of my life doing this work on the Costa Blanca, and it is the reason I want to talk today about something I believe deeply: amateur performers are not the understudy to professional music. They are its heart.
People often picture a musical director standing in front of a choir, arms raised, guiding the sound like a director in a film. That image is real enough. It is also a tiny fraction of the job.
