St John’s Smith Square
5th March 2008
When I first started going to recitals all the girls looked really posh, they all had their hair up and their dresses didn’t show you very much and they looked great and sexy and everything but I prefer the new way better. Now they have their hair loose in a just got out of bed sort of style, kind of messy but so it looks really good. I bet you anything they spent hours on making it look like that. I reckon it’s a bit stupid spending hours on making their hair like that when they could just get out of bed before the performance which would save a lot of time and I’m more than happy to keep any female singer company in bed to help them in the name of art.
And Ailish Tynan phwoar! More and more girls seem to be wearing red dresses and the necklines are just getting lower and lower, if they keep on like this they’ll start getting arrested for indecent exposure soon! The more chest is on display the more you can see the physical signs of them singing which is really interesting to me as a music crit obviously.
Another thing I’ve noticed about recitals like this, ones which are half songs and half opera is that the opera always comes first. So that’s kind of an exciting first half them you calm down after the interval, then you usually get to do a fast encore and then a slow encore and that’s it. But what Ailish did is she put the songs first then the opera so it kind of started small and got more and more dramatic as she went on and I think I actually like this way better. If you’re going to an opera or a concert it might start off with a big loud piece or it might not but what you do expect is for the end to be really dramatic and for kind of the last quarter to kind of be leading up to this big moment. And I think that even though songs can be really involving and stuff I think in a place like St John’s Smith Square anyway which is much bigger and more echoey than somewhere like the Wigmore Hall or something the songs are really cool and everything but it’s the opera bits that really get your attention.
This concert was quite unusual because the opera songs were all just accompanied by Iain Burnside on the piano (or The Great Scottish Pianist Iain Burnside as some people call him) but the opening songs were with not quite an orchestra but there was a violin and a cello, Jack Liebeck and Sally Pendlebury. The first section was kind of my least favourite part because it was Shostakovich and even though there’s some Shostakovich that’s really cool the Aleksandr Blok romances are quite difficult to get into. I reckon maybe Ailish should have done them second because you do kind of need something easy to start off with, easy for the audience I mean. She sang it really well and she’s well good at Russian, I don’t know if she speaks it but she seems like totally okay with it. When Ailish sings in German she’s still got a bit of an Irish accent which is well hot when she’s doing comedy like Papagena and Marzelline but for stuff like the Shostakovich you don’t want her to distract you so much with how sexy she is. The violin and the cello were good but it’s such weird music it seemed like they were playing a totally different song most of the time.
Next Ailish sang some songs by Canteloube, I got a bit confused because she announced she wasn’t singing them all but the acoustics are a bit crap in St John’s Smith Square so I couldn’t hear everything she said. It sounded like she was missing out some songs because she couldn’t sing them but I reckon she can sing anything. Then she said something about Iain Burnside being shocked that someone as meek and formal as Ailish could enjoy singing naughty songs, that was funny, she’s so not meek and formal, she did an interview once where she said she thinks rugby players are hot, shame I don’t play rugby anymore. The songs were in a weird language, I kind of looked at it and I thought it was French but then I read it and I was like how come I can’t understand any of it, I only did my GCSEs like last year but it wasn’t in French it was in a dialect thing called Auvegnat which is older than French and more like Latin with some Celtic words so that’s why I couldn’t understand any of the words but it was kind of like I did understand some of what Ailish was singing because she’s just a brilliant actress, you could tell some of what was going on from how she was singing it.
After the interval Ailish sang some Irish folk songs by Herbert Hughes, I don’t know if she was kind of brought up on them or anything but it seemed like she really liked the songs and like she knew them so well she could probably sing them backwards. Some of them had weird Irish words that would probably sound well stupid if I sang them but with Ailish it was like every word meant something.
After that it was time for the opera. The first time I saw Ailish was when she was Papagena at the ROH and I thought she was a really brilliant opera singer as well as being really hot. But then I saw her in a couple of things for WNO and it was like she wasn’t as good, she should have been a brilliant Susanna and okay it was a crap production but to be honest if you want to be in Figaro you’ve kind of got to get used to crap productions because that’s just how most of them are. Then I didn’t see Ailish again for ages after that, not till she did Marzelline and do you know what I reckon happened, I reckon she won this BBC Singer of the World Song Prize award and then everyone wanted to hear her sing like all over the place and because she was only a young singer it just all got a bit much for her, most experienced singers know their limits so they’ll only do a certain number of productions per year but Ailish was kind of thrown into starring roles and recitals all over the place, I think she said she learned like 30 new songs in a month, no-one can do that. But now things have calmed down for her a bit she’s got more time to put into her performances and it’s like she’s got so much to put in. All the opera she sang at this concert was brilliant, maybe not all of it was totally right for her voice but at the same time they were just the right songs for her as a person if you get what I mean.
The first thing she sang was The Sun Whose Rays from The Mikado which I had just heard Sarah Tynan (no relation I don’t think but they look like they’re like twins) sing for the ENO. Ailish has got quite a big lyrical voice really, with G&S you usually want someone lighter like Sarah but Ailish totally got the character. Yum-Yum is a really hard role and most singers sound like a bitch when they try to sing this aria but Ailish wasn’t like that at all. It was the same with the aria from HMS Pinafore, I can’t remmeber which aria she did because they printed the wrong one in the programme but it was good because with G&S you have to play the roles in just the right way or it’s a load of crap. Ailish knew like just how to do the humour and not many people can do that really.
The next song was more Ailish’s sort of thing vocally, lots of people think she’s a soubrette soprano, sort of a Susanna type but I reckon she’s more like the Countess vocally and she can do the serious stuff too. Che bel sogno di Doretta from La rondine is kind of light Puccini but it’s got some really slushy stuff in it which was annoying in a way because that’s just not my sort of thing and because it’s one of those annoying arias that every soprano sings, it’s like the female version of Nessun dorma but it wasn’t so bad when Ailish sang it because it was like a bit different from all the others, she did it with a bit of individuality if you get what I mean. Then she finished off with some Donizetti, Quel guardo il cavaliere from Don Pasquale and in a way she totally shouldn’t have been singing that song because it’s for a high coloratura soprano and Ailish isn’t one of those but it was just the best performance of it like ever because I didn’t get bored in the middle. She was too funny, she had too much personality for me to get bored, it was like she was playing the character not just showing off how fast and how high she could sing. So I wasn’t so bothered when the runs were obviously like not easy for her, it wasn’t like she sounded bad, actually it sounded better than all the sopranos who do the most complicated things they can then end up shrieking, I’d rather hear someone who’s being a bit careful and not trying to do impossible stuff.
Ailish only did one encore but it was a long one. It was a song about a singer who everyone thinks is brilliant but in the song she tells everyone that actually she isn’t that great because she’s tone deaf and she can’t tell a G from an F and it’s only the accompanist that makes it seem like she’s singing in tune. It was like hysterical and Ailish performed it all really well. Singing out of tune is harder than singing in tune most of the time especially in a song like this where you have to be like a semitone out. Barry says it’s by these people called Flanders and Swan who wrote loads of songs like that like the Mozart Horn Concerto song. And there was one bit where Ailish was singing about how she didn’t care if Covent Garden never cast her anymore which Barry says is more or less what the song says but it was like she was having a pop at them but she totally got away with it because seriously listening to her it’s like Covent Garden are totally mad not to cast her in stuff, okay she did the Woodbird in Gotterdammerung this season but that’s like a tiny role and she’s not doing like anything next season, I think they should revive La rondine and Don Pasquale for a start. And then she could sing stuff like Fiordiligi and Donna Elvira and Elettra in Idomeneo, she’d be well funny but they need a new Cosi because the one they’ve got is sh**.
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