The adventures of Miss Despina

On Saturday (24 / 03) I will be taking part in a concert "Scenes from your favourite operas".

This is with City of Manchester Opera, a group of very good quality singers, many of whom have been professional or, like me, do their fair share of professional gigs whilst pursuing a different career. We’re still relatively unknown in the city, but the group has been together for about the last decade and has done some very good concerts - at the one extreme, Aida in the Royal Northern College of Music, and at the other, the Messiah in a pub. This summer will see the group doing concerts in some very high profile venues, however if I mentioned them here, I would be thrown off the comittee! (Suffice to say that I’m going to be flying back from Prague to be in at least one of them.)

Last summer, twenty of us went to London to sing in an English National Opera concert in the Coliseum. In deference to our reduced number, we sang the lesser-known Chorus of the Enchanted Islanders from Handel’s Alcina, and the opening chorus from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euredice. We had a great time socially, and have been given many compliments by Mary King of the ENO, audience members and fellow groups in the concert with us.

And I am really looking forward to the concert on Saturday! We will be singing choruses from Handel’s Semele, along with Handel solos, and I am so happy to be singing Lascia ch’io pianga. I’ll never be able to describe exactly what singing that aria does for me. We’re doing a lot of Mozart ensembles too, and then moving into the big Verdi and Wagner choruses in the second half. It will be a stunning concert, with a lot of individual input from all the members - that’s the beauty of having a relatively small company, all the singers get to shine in ensemble and solo pieces, so we see the variety of voices that makes up the company.

I’m finding the singing to be theraputic in the face of my uni workload, my other half’s impending hospital visit, and other things that are on my mind (which will not be mentioned here because as I have said, it is not that sort of blog)!

If you want to come and experience City of Manchester Opera, the concert will be in Bollington (near Macclesfield), at the Methodist Church. It begins at 7:30 and tickets are £8. If you would like to come, be in touch and I will give you directions, but I’m trying to find a decent internet map to post in the meantime.

As much as I would love to write that I’m now going to go and practise, the combination of the hour and my Verdi volume would lead to me being evicted before you could say "inquinamento acustico"!

Goodnight,

D. 

Coming up with categories for my posts made me think about what type of a blog this is likely to evolve into. Unless you lead a very sad life, or are related to me (which could very likely be one and the same thing, I suppose!) you don’t want to hear about my latest shoes / haircut / herbal tea fetish. So I won’t subject you to this. Or emotional rants - that’s why we invented diaries and anonymous blogs! For goodness sake.

I set up this blog for 4 worthy reasons:

1. To talk about and share things that are important to me.

2. To promote concerts and events I will be taking part in.

3. To communicate with my family and friends when I’m away in Prague this summer.

4. To discover more about things that interest me, by communicating with other bloggers.

You see, believe it or not, I used to have a boring life. I stayed in every night watching the TV. I hardly sang and I didn’t study, I was just wasting my time. And so this is what Miss Despina’s adventures are all about: me saying, Enough Is Enough! and creating for myself a varied, mind-broadening existence. Which I’m looking forward to blogging about, because being me can be quite good fun sometimes.