Tell us about the Dionysus Ensemble.
The ensemble was born at the production of Eugene Onegin for Opera for All. We did it with single strings, single wind, a pair of horns and timps, following an advertisement in the Classical Music magazine. I emailed my CV as a player and I was also asked to fix the rest of the band for that production. After the show we were contacted by Hampstead Garden Opera and invited to play for them. We kept getting rung up, which was great. It snowballed from there.
Has the ensemble changed over the years?
Yes, it has. People’s availability changes, they go off to study, get jobs in different places and so on. We have a core of people who play every time and a whole list of freelancers. I have enough players on my lists to do the proper orchestration. It depends who is free and which combination of players is going to work. For example, Hampstead Garden Opera had a very small budget and a very small space, so we only had a bare minimum of players, but for Vox Lyrica we can have a much bigger orchestra, 20 or 30 players.
After Eugene Onegin we did The Magic Flute with Hampstead Garden Opera. Mozart is one of the few things that you can do really successfully on very small scoring. Other things work, or we make them work, like Madam Butterfly, but it’s not the ideal situation and the texture sounds thinner than on a normal orchestration because some harmonies are missing . Whereas Mozart just sounds quieter: everything is there, just one person instead of five or ten on the same line. It is quite interesting to do Puccini on a very small scale, with 12 players.
It must have been quite scary to play…
There was certainly no room to hide. But then it is a great experience for the players, because you really learn everything about the part. You are by yourself and you have to do everything all the time. I’m not saying you don’t have to do that in a section but you have to be more conscientious and more aware because there is no safety net. If you’re late or do a rhythm wrong, it’s a disaster.
You are also a soloist. All those scholarships sound very impressive!
Being a soloist isn’t something I want to do at all, actually. It’s all incidental. Playing in an orchestra is my passion. It’s why I wanted to learn an instrument in the first place. It’s what I love, what makes me come alive. That’s my focus. I do enjoy chamber music and solo recitals, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.
The Dionysus Ensemble seems to have found a niche.
We can do it on a small scale. We are the most reasonably priced band around. We play to a professional standard. It is the best of the two worlds: we are not going to bankrupt an opera company - and we are not going to let them down.
There is nobody else out there who has the same combination. You either get rubbish or have to pay a lot to get a very well established orchestra. It is amazingly expensive to produce an opera for companies with small theatres and therefore tiny audiences, I should imagine.
What are your plans?
We are in negotiations with Vox Lyrica about doing two Traviatas and one Elisir d’amore in March. We’ll do The Marriage of Figaro at Easter with Hampstead Garden Opera (HGO). We’ve just been taken on for Massenet’s Cinderella with Harrow Opera in June. Then we’ve got Traviata in November with HGO. And, of course, I am keeping an eye on my phone and my email, ready to hear from those who want us to come and play.
You also play in a string quartet.
Yes, the Bacchus Quartet. We play on cruise ships. We have just come back from the Caribbean. We were away for 33 days, which includes ten concerts: some Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Borodin, Dvorak, A Night at the Opera, A Folk and Traditional Music Night, A Film, TV and Broadway Night, something to enjoy for people who are not interested in classical music. We do two or three cruises a year, which is great fun.
What is your musical background?
My family have been taking me to the theatre, opera and concerts ever since I was little. They are all very intellectual. I’ve been brought up in a cult of reading, writing and going to see things. I guess I’m very lucky to have this kind of upbringing. There was so much going on in Birmingham. That’s why on my evening off I tend to go to the theatre (she laughs), but I love it! I go with a very good friend of mine, a French horn player, and we don’t talk about music at all.
How did you get interested in opera?
It was all very random, actually. My parents aren’t musicians but they both sing in church choirs and the university choir. They never trained or studied; they do it for the love of it. When I was growing up, we were always going to concerts, to see the Welsh National Opera. We lived in Birmingham and there were lots of opportunities there. Ever since I can remember I was been taken to see things. I have two sisters and all of us learned instruments. I guess I just got hooked and kept going, whereas my sisters didn’t.
I’ve always loved opera. Welsh National Opera are such a fantastic company; having them as one of my first opera experiences was great. I like them more than ENO, actually. I think they are consistently better.
What was the first opera you went to see?
It was The Love of Three Oranges. I must have been six. They gave the audience a scratch-and-sniff paper. As you went through the opera, you were told to scratch the orange and smell whether it was sweet or sour. That reflected where you were in the story. And when the story all went horribly wrong, you were told to scratch the orange, and that one smelled completely rotten. It is still so vivid in my memory… It got me hooked.
Twenty years later, here I am, running an opera orchestra. I love playing in opera and I love listening to opera.
|
Who are your favourite opera composers?
That’s a difficult question. From the point of view of playing, it would be Mozart overtures, followed by Puccini’s writing. Once Mozart’s finished with the overtures, the orchestral parts are incredibly boring. I mean, it’s wonderful music to listen to. But to play for three hours, every night, for two weeks…
Puccini’s wonderful. I’m biased because all his melodies go to the cello, all of his tunes, it’s great! (shelaughs) But there’s no need for anyone to feel hard done by - Puccini gives every instrument a chance to shine.
It would be great to do Wagner, but there’s no way you could reduce that. It would be a nightmare. I did an opera by Kaija Saariaho, L’amour de loin, this year in Lebanon, and it was absolutely fabulous.
There is so much more opera I need to find out about. This is why my work in Dionysus Ensemble is so great: it’s learning the repertoire. Orchestral players don’t know much about opera, unless they’re in an opera orchestra, but there are only about four proper opera orchestras in the UK. It’s a very closed world. Opera is not something you just do. Every orchestral player would have played Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven symphonies but very few have played opera. The Ensemble is a wonderful way to find out about a new world. I didn’t even know that Alcina existed, until we were booked to play for it (she laughs). And opera music is fabulous, even if sometimes singers take horrendous liberties with the timing …
What are your favourite operas?
I would say Mozart every day of the week – to watch. But it’s a nightmare to play, from the point of view of a cellist. The cello part is soooo boring, apart from the overture. But to watch, his writing is fantastic and the way he uses the voices is amazing. Well, ok, the plots are sometimes about a girl dressing as a boy to try to trick her loved one, but the music is fantastic. I think it even surpasses Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Verdi or Handel.
Do you prefer to play an opera once or a longer run ?
It depends how many shows there are in a run. For example, we can do two shows for Vox Lyrica, which are a month apart. That kind of thing is really interesting, fresh and new, and it makes you concentrate. Whereas with two weeks on the trot, half-way through the second week you think, “Oh, for Goodness’ sake, I know all of this!”
What would you change in the world of small opera companies?
Funding is an obvious one. It’s all very easy to look at musicians and say, “Ah, but you love it! You get so much enjoyment out of it!” Yes, but it equally is our job. Like everyone else, if we don’t get paid, we don’t eat, we can’t pay the rent,. Just because we love it - which is true - it’s still a business. I would change the fact that we have to fight for our rights. If I don’t do a good job as an orchestral manager, organising fees, I am shooting myself in the foot, because then as a player I will not get paid properly.
Audiences and publicity awareness. There is some fantastic opera going on, and it is not ENO or ROH, but still of a very high standard. People should go and support it. While for example Hampstead Garden Opera has a great local following, many others have near-empty halls.
What is your message for singers?
With someone like Puccini, who has so much of rubato and ritenuto, you should obviously accommodate that. But you must have some sense of a pulse. Somehow. Somewhere. Some singers don’t, which makes the orchestra’s life a bit tricky.
What do you do in your spare time, outside music?
Is there ever any time I don’t do music? (she laughs) I go to the theatre a lot. I’ve just seen three plays at the National: Pillars of the Community, The Coram Boy and Paul. They were all completely different but absolutely fantastic. I tour a lot and see a lot of different countries, which is a very nice perk of the job.
I joined a paint balling club. I love the game. And it sounds very cool! (she laughs) All that running around in fresh air and getting dirty, being three again. I also do Latin dancing; I got hooked when we started working on cruise ships.
I have a passion for James Bond. I’ve been collecting Ian Fleming’s books. Before you ask who my favourite Bond is, there is only one Bond: Sean Connery. Brosnan is OK but the new chap is blond, which is outrageously wrong. When I was small, the bonding between me and my dad was to watch Bond films and talk about car engines. When I lived in Russia, I went to the KGB museum and they had all the little gadgets like in James Bond film, absolutely fantastic!
At one of my first professional orchestral engagements, The English Philharmonic, we were doing a film night, James Bond medleys. I was sitting at the back of the section. I spotted a mistake in the melody and I pointed it out to my section principal. Although it was a bit cheeky to say, I insisted I knew my James Bond tunes,. He was surprised and asked the conductor. Of course I was right! (she laughs)
Also, I did a bit of training as a cook and I’ve worked in professional kitchen. At home, I normally cook a lot at a time and then freeze it, so I don’t have to live off ready meals all the time, which is what you do when you are a musician. I do a very good bacon and tomato risotto. And I’m very partial to anything that’s chocolate.
VIEW the Dionysus Ensemble page here.
|
