Val emailed me with an intriguing request: would I accompany her for some pre-concert entertainment at the Town Hall? It would give us a chance to talk up our work with singing and dementia, have some fun and by the way there'd be a small fee. Wild horses etc.
For me, she's the girl who leads community music-making, for which she chooses an appropriately populist repertoire; but her background is opera and tonight she went for the Marriage of Figaro, with some Mendelsohn to follow. Well, it was a classical concert so she felt she needed to be in keeping: other community musicians invited to the same pitch have just done their usual stuff. We dressed up for it, out came my dj and bow tie, Val had a posh frock on. The atmosphere at the Town Hall bar was relaxed rather than rapt, people listening with one ear but chatting away too, which was the way we wanted it: if they had been concentrating too hard they would have spotted all my wrong notes - I play a lot of popular stuff myself, but the discipline required for accompanying classical singing is something I've let slip and the last couple of days have seen me practising frenetically so as not to let Val down. In the event Val had a sort of flu-y bug and wasn't in terribly good voice, for which she beat herself up mercilessly. She was going to kick off with Puccini then bottled it: reckoned the high notes would have defeated her. I couldn't say she was brilliant because that wouldn't have fooled her, but by the standards that I sensed the concert-goers might have expected she was still pretty damn good, and I did my best to reassure her. They weren't paying to hear us so they should have been grateful, and many of them were. Apparently Val has a number of highly critical (and I suspect highly jealous) sisters who were always putting her down and she's internalised their jibes.
She gave me the chance to do a solo, and guess what: I went for Sondheim, the song I quoted back in February. No way could I do justice to that lyric and play the tricksy accompaniment at the same time (especially as I don't have proper piano reduction), so I scored it in midi, saved it to memory stick and plugged it into the back of the keyboard. Used a few other voices besides piano - vibes, strings, bit of synth: I'm familiar with the relevant software but was still surprised how quickly I got it finished. Now, I don't have Val's quality of voice but I can project a song OK and I got some applause that was a touch more than polite, and at least one little cheer. I was on cloud eight, with nine to follow.
In the interval Val was back in popular mode and I was vamping underneath her, occasionally soloing to give her voice a break and make sure we didn't dominate proceedings. Gershwin's Summertime, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Blue Moon. We were more relaxed now (that glass of wine helped). Val started to work the nearby tables, I was your lounge cabaret piano man and - bear in mind this was partly an awareness raiser for dementia - thinking of my dad who, fine organist though he was in his day, loved accompanying more than any other kind of music-making. Tonight I understood why. I'd had my moment of glory with the Sondheim, but the deeper pleasure lay in enabling a far better singer than I'll ever be to do her stuff, and wondering if Dad would have been proud of me. He would have played the Mozart properly, but he was never an improviser and so I guess he might. And that, folks, really IS as good as it gets.
As we went home Val was talking about doing it again some time. We might be starting our own double act. I wonder if she'd sing "The Little Things You Do Together" with me? or maybe even "Remember", from A Little Night Music - appropriate if a tad suggestive. Two great Sondheim duets. Joy of joys would be for me to accompany her in "The Miller's Son", also from Night Music, but it's a bit steamy and I don't know whether she's quite up to playing the trollop. What an astonishing song though: and in a way even appropriate, because it's about seizing the moment - you never know how short it might be. We live, according to the lyric, in the "meanwhile". Pwd's have no option, time is a complete muddle to them. Well, you can dream: and dreaming is what I should be doing right now, instead of writing this blog at some unearthly hour but this is fresh and I'm still high after the concert.
Off to see Dad tomorrow. That will bring me down to earth.
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