First blog post
Saturday, September 9th, 2006Well, here I am, back in Germany after a two year break. After I finished my my last stint here I swore I would never go back, especially since the birth of our daughter, Melissa. So what has changed? (Apart from the obvious appeal of being allowed to sleep beyond 5.30 on a regular basis)
One of the reasons I went to Germany in the first place, apart from building up my repertoire, was because the opera world in Britain was getting smaller and smaller. I thought broadening my horizons would be a good thing. However, I came back to England a virtual unknown. People in England tend to assume that if they haven’t seen your name there for a while, you must have given up. I also had to deal with the fact that, owing to the hugely diverse repertoire that I had been doing simultaneously, and a bad case of what turned out to be acid reflux, which was regularly robbing me of my voice and my confidence, I probably wasn’t singing that well.
I’ve been very blessed over the past few months to have found some really fabulous people to help guide me back to the right path. Most notably my wife, Audrey, and David Maxwell-Anderson, my singing teacher. Although I’m not yet as good as we believe I can be, I’m certainly a lot nearer than I have ever been before. I took my first tentative steps back on stage with a small tour of the Pearl Fishers, which is never an easy role, but turned out to be fun, and now here I am, actually having fun on stage again in a small theatre in Coburg, where the pressure is off and I can just learn to enjoy being on stage again. That’s what I’m here for. I will only be here for a few months but I hope it will be a period which will help me to get to where I should be. Sometimes one needs to take a step back to go forwards again.
Finally, just a word about my blogs. It won’t always be about me or necessarily about singing. I hope that people will visit my site on a regular basis, either to catch up on what I’m up to or just to check out what I’m babbling about this time.
See you soon!