She Shoots, She Scores!

Very very nice envelope in the post yesterday - season tickets for this years Cardiff Singer of the World. We're so excited.

We'd talked about going to this before, when Son No 1 was living in Cardiff, but he moved there, lived there and left it again in the space between competitions so we never got to it. However I never took myself off the official mailing list, and when I got the e-mail about booking being open for this year's competition we decided to try for tickets as  part of the ongoing Project 60.  It's a wee while since the closing date for applications and we hadn't heard anything so I was beginning to think we had been unsuccessful in the ballot for tickets. But we weren't.

 

Of course what we need to do now is hope that it's a good year for the singing. Because it has to be said that some years are better then others. We think the best ever was 1993 when the lady pictured, Denmark's Inger Dam Jensen, narrowly beat New Zealand's Paul Whelan to the trophy. We have the final of this on video, as we thoughtlessly had dinner guests on the night itself, and even now, when we rewatch we are divided; sometimes we think Paul woz robbed, other times we think the judges were right.

 

The OH is convinced that she won because of her dazzling frock, and I suppose that might have just edged it in her favour. They were certainly both excellent, and it was difficult to call it between them.

 

We've never seen I D-J live but amazingly enough did get to see PW perform a few years ago, right here in Orkney, when he was part of a concert staging in the Cathedral of Peter Maxwell Davies' opera Magnus, as part of the St Magnus Festival. Who would have thought?

 

So my fervent hope for this year is for some great baritones, a scattering of good tenors, some nicely toned sopranos and very few muddy mezzos. And of course some great repertoire.