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Life is a Dream

27/3/2014

It was such a blast to have some of my most recent recordings for ABC Classic FM shared on the radio every day for a week, earlier this month. Weeks like this remind me of how I once could only dream of such things, and that we should never take for granted how far we've come.

The ABC is expanding into the Soundcloud format, and a representative met with Alan Hicks and I this month to ask our permission to include our recording for streaming on demand. We feel pretty honoured to be one of the first experimental offerings!

Here is the link to the Soundcloud file, "Das Leben ist ein Traum" (Life is a Dream), by Haydn.

Sweet dreams!

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Are you thinking what I'm thinking, B2?

11/2/2013

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Well I won't lie. Having the opportunity to sit out a chunk of the European winter because ABC Classic FM had asked me to do another recording in Sydney was a pretty awesome start to the year, and I grabbed it with both hands.

This time my piano partner-in-crime, Alan Hicks, and myself were wise to pitfalls that we fell prey to when we did our first recording for them back in 2010, oh yes!

This time, we did not allow ourselves to be unknowingly recorded during the sound check making stupid and dorky jokes.

This time, there was no awkward moment when Alan pointedly looked at my opaque water bottle (filled with coffee) as the kind sound engineers offered him coffee but noted that I "shouldn't be drinking coffee....and besides, we see you have your special juice there." Yes, special juice, that's it.

This time, we had already been rehearsing for a week in the unnatural positions that we'd last time been placed in for reasons of sound capture (me on the opposite side of the piano lid) so as not to be put off by the different wash of sound.

Yeah, we were all over it. Until we walked in and were placed in completely different positions with me a few metres from the piano, and the recording lights failed ("This never happens! I've been here 6 years and I've never seen this happen!"). But still, with the aid of lamps, our trusty page turner Jess, and some more special juice, we had a great, sometimes-tense-sometimes-hilarious session which - as you would expect from a trio of people with the collective street cred of Beatrix Potter - ended with us taking photos behind the life-size Banana in Pyjamas carnival cutouts in the ABC Centre foyer before retiring to the pub.

I would LOVE to post these photos here, but I don't think B1 would ever forgive me.

As other singers I know have also attested, it's an intense process trying to record nearly an hour's worth of music in a 3 hour session (inclusive of sound check [and light malfunctions]). Our lovely producer kept assuring us that, were it a CD rather than a broadcast, one would have 3 DAYS rather than 3 hours to assuage the perfectionist bug. As it is, it's more like a slightly-edited recording of a live performance, and in some ways because of my limited recording experience I'm more comfortable with that aesthetic for now anyway. Though I did somewhat despairingly admit to said lovely producer that I was having difficulty deciding which microphone set-up I preferred because "whenever I listen to myself I think it just sounds rubbish". He looked awkward, I realised my overshare was unhelpful no matter how sincere, and then we moved on.

On that topic, however, I had a lovely piece of wisdom by email this morning from the composer of one of the pieces Alan and I recorded: "Letters to the Front" by Stuart Greenbaum (with text by Ross Baglin). This piece is a favourite of mine; written in 1989 and then arranged for soprano and piano in 1997, the text is based upon real letters written by women in Melbourne to soldiers at the Front in the First World War. I have corresponded with Mr Greenbaum by email a few times on various points of interpretation, and as I know it is a piece that is special to him I was keen to do it justice. In the immediate aftermath, I did not feel I necessarily had.

"One's own work is always hard to see up close without being critical of detail." he wrote. "In time and with distance, I think we get closer to hearing it like other people hear it."

What a nice dude. ESPECIALLY seeing as he's never heard me and for all he knew, I could have mutilated it.

Still, all Art is a battle with insecurity and perfectionism, and having spent the last few months in the studio working on changing and refining technique I have felt that very keenly. When I return to Salzburg in a few weeks' time, I hope I can take these words of wisdom with me, dissect my experiences less and get back into the flow of some kind of Gesamtkunstkaren*.

Surely even the Bananas in Pyjamas had days when they wondered if they were doing it right?

*with apologies to Wagner.

[All photography accompanying this blog with thanks to and copyrighted by Jess Harper Photography]

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Life is a Dream

Are you thinking what I'm thinking, B2?

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