There is a moment, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after the curtain call, when the adrenaline begins to subside, and something else rushes in to take its place. It is not quite calm. It is not quite exhaustion. It is something more interesting than either of those things.
If you have ever performed, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you have sat in an audience and felt that reluctance to leave, that sense that walking back out into the ordinary world would be a small loss, then I think you know it too, in your own way.
This spring has given me rather a lot of time to think about it.
We have had a busy few months. TheatreSong Collective's Curtain Up! was a joyful evening of musical theatre, full of colour and character. Then Canto Mundial brought us Silver Screen, a journey through the music of film that turned out to be rather more moving than anyone had quite expected. And most recently, Cantãmus gave us 'Tis The Month of Maying.
Three groups, three different programmes, three different audiences. And yet the feeling in the room afterwards was, each time, remarkably similar.
"The music does not stop when the singing does. It continues in the room, in the people, in the silence."
For the singers
Performing is an act of considerable vulnerability. You stand up, you open your mouth, and you offer something of yourself to a room full of people. And then, if everything goes as it should, something happens that is difficult to put into words.
The voice that comes out is not quite the one you heard in rehearsal. The ensemble lifts. You hear the person beside you, and they hear you, and for a phrase, sometimes for a whole song, you are genuinely together in a way that practice alone cannot manufacture.
And then it is over. You are standing in the green room, still in your concert dress, talking a little too fast and finding things funnier than they probably are, and your hands haven't quite stopped trembling.
That is the performer's high. It is real, and it is physiological, the dopamine clearing your system, the cortisol fading. But it is also something more than biology. It is the specific joy of having done something hard, in company, and felt it land.
After 'Tis The Month of Maying, I watched the Cantãmus singers find each other across the room and hold onto the evening just a little longer. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave. I think that tells you everything.
For the director
My experience is slightly different, and I want to be honest about that.
During a performance, I am never quite fully present in the way the singers are. I am listening, watching, willing things into place. There is a part of me that never stops conducting, the part that notices the soprano who came in slightly early, or the moment a phrase blossomed in a way it never did in rehearsal and made my breath catch.
The high, for me, comes later. It comes when the hall is quiet and I am replaying everything in my head and thinking: yes, that was what we were working towards.
There is a particular pleasure in hearing what the audience experienced. The woman who said the Cantãmus concert was the most beautiful thing she had heard in years. The couple at Silver Screen who told me they had held hands through the entire second half. The gentleman, after Curtain Up!, who simply said, "Thank you."
Those moments go into a place I carry with me. They are the reason for all of it.
For the audience
I have been thinking about what live performance gives an audience that a recording cannot.
It is something about being in a room with other people, all of you moved by the same phrase, all of you part of an experience that is happening once and will not happen in quite this way again. There is a kind of permission in a concert hall, permission to feel things, to be still, to let something affect you.
I see it in faces. The slight reddening around the eyes during a quiet ballad. The involuntary smile at a joyful chorus. The stillness that falls over a room when something genuinely good is happening.
And I see it afterwards, in the way people linger and turn to strangers they have never met and say things like "wasn't that wonderful?" as if keeping it to themselves would be insufficient.
Live music creates a bond between people who have never spoken. That seems to me rather remarkable.
The morning after
By the following day, the high has softened into something quieter. A warmth that sits just below the surface.
I always find the day after a concert a little strange. The diary is suddenly clear. The urgency is gone. And then a message arrives, or a photograph surfaces, and the whole thing comes back, and I find myself thinking: we did that. It was real, and it was good, and it mattered to people.
That thought is, in the end, what keeps you going. It is what has me already thinking about October.
What's coming next
In October, Gillian Hodges and I take to the stage together as Take Two for an evening called Anything You Can Do! It is an intimate concert at the Javea Players Studio on Saturday, 3rd October, and we are putting everything into it.
The Christmas season is also taking shape, and there are some other projects in early conversation that I hope to share with you before too long.
But for now, I am still sitting with this spring. Still grateful for it. The audiences who came, the singers who gave so much, the moments that landed in ways you cannot plan for.
Thank you for being part of it. You bring something to a concert that the performers cannot create alone. Without you, it is only rehearsal.
