WELCOME to you – and hello again, SINGING LIFE!
It’s certainly a new landscape in 2023, with the double-whammy of Brexit AND the Covid pandemic having had enormous impact on musicians’ lives over the past few years.
During the hiatus, I had plenty of time to reflect on my professional singing. Quite apart from live performances as a soloist and in ensembles in many different parts of the world, I’ve sung on the soundtracks of more than 120 movies and the albums of dozens of artists. Plenty of variety and diversity, that’s for sure. Yet it’s an oddly anonymous process – you give of your best on a big project, then quietly move on and do the next. So it did feel good actually to quantify and acknowledge the work done.
It felt even BETTER to get back on stage in autumn 2021, singing in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, London’s Royal Festival Hall and the Paris Philharmonie. Real, in-person, onstage performances, with fabulous living, breathing audiences! Very moving. Anyway, if you’d like to see and hear something right here, right now, here’s a short film by the Guardian (which features my performance of ‘Stay Awake’ from Mary Poppins), some songs by Ben Dawson, and some clips from one of the Julie Andrews concerts I did with Benjamin Pope and Sinfonia Lahti. And if you’d like to have a listen to some snippets from my mellow album gentle rain, please go right ahead. Happy listening!