Tales of High Society and Historic Concert Venues, an Occasional Blog
I was watching some costume drama on TV recently, when I was reminded of a couple of extraordinary concerts I sang in at stately homes many years ago, and I got to thinking about some of the other amazing places I have found myself performing in, places which one would not expect to be in, other than as a wide-eyed tourist. One of the perks of being a singer is that one’s audiences are often well-heeled and members of the great and good, and it sometimes comes about that these people will use their wealth and influence to entertain their friends and colleagues in their homes and other places of historic interest. If one can see past the performing monkey aspect of this transaction, it can be quite fun to discover how the other 1% live, and how different they can be in a homely setting. I thought it might be interesting to write about one or two concerts I have given in places which one would not normally see, and which are not open to the public under normal circumstances.
The first event occurred before I was a professional singer at all. In my last year at school, in 1973 a few of us were sent up to Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, the home of Lord and Lady Aberdeen, to take part in a performance of Rossini’s ‘William Tell’. David Gordon, 4th Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, and his wife June Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, had lived at Haddo, 20 miles north of Aberdeen, since 1939. She was a conductor and pianist, and had set up the Haddo House Choral and Operatic Society in 1945. By 1973, it was a highly successful enterprise, local in organisation but international in ambition, and Lady Aberdeen used her influence to bring important musicians to this far-flung outpost of culture. Our new head of music at George Watson’s, Patrick Criswell, had known Lady Aberdeen in the past, and had agreed to send half a dozen keen pupils up to Haddo to bolster the chorus in the opera, and so my only ever experience as a member an operatic chorus occurred on that visit. Professional soloists and a professional orchestra played Rossini’s monumental tale of Switzerland’s struggle for independence in a cosy theatre in the grounds of Haddo House. I remember nothing of the production (although I do recall the tenor struggling with the famous aria of Arnold with its several high Cs), but we stayed in the library of the house, sleeping on the floor, joining the family for meals in their modern apartment at the end of a long corridor. We had to pass the chapel en route to the kitchen, and one evening we heard the chapel organ playing. Now, the Aberdeens had been telling us of the numerous ghosts for which Haddo was famous, including headless nuns and manacled prisoners, and of course, the phantom organist of the chapel. All jolly good fun. So, when we peered into the chapel to see who was playing the organ, and found the room enveloped in darkness but the organ playing Bach, we ran perhaps faster than we had ever run before through the long corridors to the kitchen, arriving white-faced and panting to tell of our experience. Nothing could persuade us to go back, but Lady Aberdeen, curious to see whether there was any real evidence of spirit visitations, took our teacher and a trusty retainer to have a look, and found one of our number, a precocious chap called Alasdair Jamieson, who was studying music at school, sitting at the organ with only the organ light on, and hidden from view behind a dark curtain screen, thus giving the impression of a dark room. I was sort of pleased to find out that there was a rational explanation, but also slightly sorry not to have been haunted. Despite the clarification, we always went along that corridor in groups of at least three after that! It was a wonderful experience to live for a few days in a huge country house, and we were made most welcome by the Aberdeens. Lord Aberdeen had only another year to live, but he was an absolutely typical old buffer, a tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, whisky-drinking laird, with a voice and an accent straight from Central Casting for any number of old films set in country houses.
A few years later, in the early 1980s, when I was a company soloist at Scottish Opera, I performed in a recital with Joan Busby, Paul Hamburger (yes, really) and Roger Savage, entitled ‘Now the hungry Lion Roars’. It was a witty and clever recital of words and music on the theme of Animals, Birds and Fish, which was first heard in the Queen’s Hall at the Edinburgh Festival. The title is a quote from ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the operatic version of which, by Benjamin Britten, was to play an enormous part in my career, including the magnificent Philips recording with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO. The programme proved very successful, and we toured it all over Britain, including an evening at Glamis Castle, the ancestral home of the late Queen Mother, north of Dundee. The Castle has been the home of the Lyon family since the 14th century, and so it was appropriate that we took ‘The Hungry Lion’ to the home of the Lyons! The Queen Mother wasn’t there that night, but it was an occasion for the local aristocracy to put on their finest glad rags and be entertained by our little troupe. At least we were spared the rude comments that Duke Theseus and his noble friends mutter when listening to the Mechanicals’ play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in MND, and indeed we were listened to with rapt silence followed by loud applause. We played in the banqueting hall of the Castle, and the whole experience was most satisfactory. I believe they even paid us. The castle is now in the hands of the National Trust for Scotland, although the family still live there for some of the year, but the present Earl of Strathmore, Simon Bowes-Lyon, has recently spent five months in prison for assaulting a young woman in the castle, as well as speeding and Covid restriction-breaking convictions. Fortunately for us, he hadn’t been born when we sang in Glamis!
On a happier note, a few years later, in the early 1990s, I was invited, with other members of Midsummer Opera (no connection to Midsummer Night’s Dream), to perform an evening of operatic highlights at the magnificent Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Devonshire (many miles from Devon!), where we were welcomed by Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, and his wife, Deborah, née Mitford (one of the famous/notorious Mitford sisters). I had read a bit about the six Mitfords, society girls of the 1930s, two of whom were fascists and friends of Hitler and one of whom eloped with a Communist. Two were successful writers, and Deborah, my Mitford, as it were, became involved with her husband in the newly formed Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s. She was also the public face of Chatsworth, opening up this great house and estate to the hoi polloi, founding the hugely profitable Farm Shop, and starting a trend that would serve large estates very well in the last forty years.
It was a great treat to be able, like at Haddo and Glamis, to see a stately home, not as a tourist but as a sort of guest. I know we were a bit like tradesmen, but still, we were able to chat to the Devonshires and were treated well. We performed in the area around and on the great staircase of this magnificent house, in the famous painted hall, with murals painted in 1694 by Louis Laguerre. The acoustic was excellent, and we were able to entertain the assembled toffs with lovely operatic pops. I have no memory of the concert, but think we may have been accommodated in one of the estate buildings or a nearby hostelry. Certainly, we didn’t sleep in the library, and no ghosts were sighted! I do remember the rest of that weekend, as I was booked to sing a ‘Messiah’ in Tewkesbury the next day (Sunday), and drove down to discover that the local choral society conductor was insisting we sang ‘Messiah’ complete, with no cuts, and repeats in all the da capo arias. Having sung a gala concert 200 miles away the previous night, I had warned the conductor in advance that I might not be up to three and a half hours of Handel, and that I would tell him on the day if I was too tired. Indeed, I was completely knackered, to use a technical term, and arrived in Tewkesbury at the famous abbey at one o’clock for the rehearsal. Sadly, the conductor was a fellow who would have got on well with Diana and Unity Mitford, the friends of Hitler, and he went on a little Hitlerian rant about the impossibility of cutting even a tiny bar of Handel’s marvellous work, and how this would ruin his concept and how selfish I was to imagine I could interfere with his grand design, and how I would never work in Tewkesbury again!
His tirade made me so angry that I decided that I would sing every note as if my life depended on it, and he would see what happened when a Scotsman was insulted by a petty tyrant. Friends who came to the concert informed me that they had never heard me sing better, and that it had been the ‘Messiah’ of their dreams, and so, inadvertently perhaps, his ranting had achieved something good. I must say that, after 87 top Ds and 28 top Es in the full ‘The Trumpet shall Sound’, at modern pitch, even Handel himself would have been exhausted but happy. I remember sinking many a pint of excellent West Country beer afterwards!
Next up, historic venues.
