ALEXANDER ANDERSON-HALL

TENOR

"Anthony (Alexander Anderson-Hall) got thoroughly under the skin of his role and his fine singing voice and pace of delivery ensured that this production never lost it's momentum". The Sondheim Review International report. (Sweeney Todd)

"Actors in opera are usually cast because they can sing, rather than because they fit the part in any other way. The four here - especially Yvonne Patrick and Alexander Anderson-Hall as Fiordiligi and Ferrando - act and sing their parts beautifully, with utter conviction. " (Cosi fan Tutte, Swansea City Opera. Evening Star, Ipswich, March 18, 2005)

Newsletter 2006-2007

Hi there!!!

Forgive me readers, I confess, it has been a while since my last newsletter update.
I hope to find you all, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, well and happy.

2004: A year in brief, with highlights…

I’m afraid in order to catch up with all the news, I will have to backtrack and take you as far back as spring 2004. If I remember the last newsletter mentioned Garden Opera’s summer tour of Carmen and in the wake of its UK success followed in March 2004 with “Carmen goes to Kenya” in which the company, including a very excited me and a fabulous Spanish flamenco troupe, was flown out to East Africa to begin a two week tour performing and sightseeing some of the most magnificent landscape I have ever seen.

“It’s a tough job”…

This was my first trip to Africa, my first safari and I instantly fell under its exotic and haunting charms. We arrived in Nairobi, where we spent a few days adjusting to the climate and altitude - 1675m (5496ft). March in Africa is remotely different to March in Lincoln. We travelled in ostentatious style; busses, jeeps, rigs and tractors. Kenya doesn’t really do roads. The performances took place in some of the most diverse, remote, weird and wonderful locations one could imagine. Drying up in the heat surrounded by the 20 million year old escarpments of the Great Rift Valley at Hells Gate – Lake Naivahsa, or taking to the sombre shade of the ecclesiastical Stahare School for Boys in Nairobi, to basking in the tropical haven on the white, sandy shores under the protection of the 16th century stronghold Fort Jesus – Mombasa, finally coming to rest, reflecting in the inspiring shade of majestic Mt. Kenya at Mt. Kenya Safari club - Nanyuki. The rewards for this type of labour were heavily and generously repaid. The excellent company of enthusiastic colleagues, luxury Hotel accommodation and tropical weather, mixed with the overwhelming richness of the African wildlife and the shanty mayhem of African life in the towns and villages along our tour route, is an experience I will never forget. The tour in connection with the Kijani International Festival, helped to raise 1,7770,00 Kenyan Shillings for HIV/Aids projects and conservation...
For more information and photos of this tour visit www.gardenopera.co.uk

Opera Galleria celebrated an official opening in the spring of 2004 with the launch of our website www.operagalleria.net followed swiftly by a premiere performance of “The Legend of Tantuna” a poignant folk-tale based on a short story I wrote, after baritone colleague, James McOran-Campbell and I returned from a very inspired two month trip to Australia and New Zealand. The premiere was received to critical acclaim by “an enthusiastic audience” as part of the Bucklebury Festival, Berkshire.
For more information and photographs visit www.operagalleria.net

As a result of our extremely successful Project Phoenix in which James and I embarked on an extensive study period, we were offered the opportunity to record our programme and produce a professional C.D. Early in the 2004 the final edits were made and courtesy of the prestigious Champs Hill recording studio, Opera Galleria: Songs of the Phoenix, Songs and Arias for Tenor and Baritone was produced as a demo CD.
For more information and photographs visit www.operagalleria.net

Other achievements highlighting this busy year included a return to Garden Opera to sing Don Ottavio in their summer and winter tour of Don Giovanni and the premiere of a new opera by Keith Burstein Manifest Destiny, in which I played Daniel, a blind opera librettist in a controversial terrorist love story.
This year I was also thrilled to make my debut as Tamino, Ferrando, Count Almaviva, Nadir and Don Ramiro. These are challenging and exciting roles which literally had me touring all over the country with Scooby, our 1978 VW camper-van. Particularly memorable were the intimate Purcell Rooms, the haunting Fountains Abbey and the incredible Minack Theatre (Magic Flute) in Cornwall, built into the Cliffside by horticulturalist Rowena Cade. It was full moon and as the Queen of the Night sang her first aria, the high moon reflected on the glassy waters of the open sea behind us engraved itself forever as one of my all time great memories of theatre.

“It’s a dog’s life”… No, not me! You remember my beautiful Cocker Spaniel, Skye?
While I was on my travels, Skye went to the breeders and became a mother to a litter of seven gorgeous puppies. She is well and we are very happily reunited.

Et finalement! Despite the touring, producing and designing a new show and studying and performing 6 new roles, I was able to get away and the year came to a perfect end “en France” where, after a year-long search, we finally found and bought our “maison rurale”…

2005: In and Out of Africa…

This year began with continued performances of Don Giovanni and La Cenerentola and a bad cold. I was able to keep my promise to return to East Africa when once again, in the spring, I was invited along with Garden Opera to re-visit Kenya, for an extended tour including Naivasha Yacht Club, Hell’s Gate National Park, Mt. Kenya Safari Club, The Arboretum, Nairobi and Fort Jesus. Our accommodation this time was an exciting blend of hotels, chalets, lodges and canvas house tents with showers that were fed by someone pouring hot water into a canvas bag while you bathed underneath it and at night we would sit around a giant fire pit, taking in the aromas of the air, watching the crowded diamond stars in the firelight…
After a day’s game drive on probably the most famous game reserves we checked into the Masai Mara Safari Club. Another night we went without sleep in the hope of spotting the Big Five at The Ark – Aberdare Country Club. The wildlife was incredible, it was a sublime evening.
For more information and photos of this tour visit www.gardenopera.co.uk

On the Road, again… Touring was made easy again this summer with the help of Scooby our veteran VW Camper-van, and when we haven’t been roaming around, singing for our supper, we’ve been tinkering with Scooby or driving off into the sunset to spend the night with the stars under the pop-up roof…
This was a busy and very successful time throughout the year for us at Opera Galleria too with lots of concerts, galas and our first tour taking “The Legend of Tantuna” to music clubs in North Wales.
I continued an extensive tour of the UK with Cosi fan tutte and The Barber of Seville and after re-joining Garden Opera for the third consecutive year as Don Ramiro in their wacky production of La Cenerentola, resurrected the long time dead Carmen (and Zuniga) to sing of life in Seville in English, to English audiences, in Jimmena, Southern Spain. Olè! How’s that for multi-tasking?

Mother’s Pride. Yes! She’s been at it again. Skye had another gorgeous litter of seven.

Vive la France!
Throughout the year we have seized any opportunity to retreat to our rustic idyll and gradually restore it from a crumbling shell into a “home from home”. We have certainly learned and earned new skills from plastering, stripping, building, demolishing, glazing, tiling, plumbing, re-wiring, re-cycling and exterminating. The only calamity, apart from minor amputations and lacerations, was a trip to casualty to have an oak splinter removed from my eye… This said we could corner the market with a series of books on renovating an old French farm house, what not to do with hardboard (fibre-dure) and what to do when the neighbour’s chicken eats all your grass seed…

This Christmas we spent surrounded with garlands of holly and mistletoe, feasted on fine wines and home-cooked foods, had long walks in the snow and frost, thawed out before splendid log fires, made gallons of soup and played darts and chess, as usual, home from home.

2006: Saints and Sinners:

After spending two months working at our house in France, we took advantage of the winter landscape and headed off to the Auvergne for a final week ski-ing in the wonderfully peaceful ski resort Chastreix Sancy opposite Mont D’Or. Fortunately, we had taken ski chains for the ascent and the remnants of our Christmas larder, as when we arrived in mid evening there had been fresh snowfall and the resort, but for a selected few was almost deserted. We had an amazing week.
I returned to the UK to spend 6 weeks in Edinburgh. At short notice I was invited to join Edinburgh Grand Opera in their 50th Anniversary celebrations with the Scottish premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s fabulously dramatic The Saint of Bleecker Street. I had four weeks to study the role Michele and the score, but only five days to look at it before I joined the rehearsals. It was a challenge, but I am thrilled to have returned to sing with EGO again.
On my night off I leapt into a Pierrot costume and ended up in court as The Defendant in Gilbert & Sullivan’s One Act farce Trial by Jury at a charity bash in the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. It was a great giggle and everything was done in 24 hours. I nearly missed my opening entry…

“Romancing the Stone”.
I knew reading all the Harry Potter books would stand me in good stead one day! And so, Mozart’s collaboration with his contemporaries including Herr Schikeneder created Der stein der Weisen (The Philosophers’ Stone) and for “Astromonte”, the role I was understudying, I used Professor Dumbledore as my inspiration.

Putting the stone aside (for later use), Opera Galleria created yet another gem of magical proportions with “Hollywood Legends”; a tribute to Katherine Grayson, Gordon McRae and Mario Lanza. We were joined by guest soprano Elizabeth Woods and compère Dean Powell. It was a star-studded evening of glitz and glamour and the audience went home singing all the wrong words to the song “You’ll never walk alone”…

Tiler on the roof.
Back in France, the house underwent major transformation with a new roof. This was a colossal undertaking and, suffice to say, M. Pingaud and his colleague M. Delauney worked through some of the worst conditions in French weather to render us fully topped. The work took three weeks and is now the admiration of the locality. Deservedly so!
We spent two weeks there in the summer working on the garden and terrace when the hedgerows were loaded with berries. We made 21 pots of jam and masses of plate pies…

“Boys of summer”
It wouldn’t be summer without Garden Opera, and so I joined the team this year alongside G.O. newcomer and colleague James McOran-Campbell in a cricket-themed production of Cosi fan tutte, James and I taking the roles of love gamblers Ferrando and Guglielmo. Oscar Wilde once wisely instructed: “Try everything once, everything except incest and Morris dancing…” Have a look at the photos!
www.gardenopera.co.uk or click back to the “Gallery Page”

“Scooby, where are you?”
We have toured the length and breadth of the country with Scooby, in one summer alone we covered 15000kms together. Three years ago we found Scooby in a bad state in a suburb of Kent. He was being used as a tool store-cum-changing room for a rugby player. He was a 28 year old gun carrier in the Belgian Army, de-mobbed and transported to the UK in 1982, (not the rugby player, Scooby). We shared many days and nights in all kinds of weather and spent quality time restoring him to the handsome cab he is today. However, “nothing lasts forever” and “all good things come to an end”. We had come to the end of our journey with Scooby and he now lives down near Basingstoke with his new family. If you see him, give him a wave.

Up to date:
“The Legend of Tantuna” Has another outing on 3rd November at The Byre Theatre, St. Andrews - 8pm and we are planning to record a C.D. early next year. Watch this space!!!
And finally, “Attend the Tale!” 8th -11th November I will be singing Anthony in Sweeney Todd with Kennet Opera at the Corn Exchange, Newbury. Come along, if you dare! “I guarantee the closest shave you will ever get”.

Looking Forward to 2007.
The beginning of the year opens with a little magic when I will be playing a Prince William style Tamino in a new production of the Magic Flute in Gloucestershire, followed swiftly by my fifth season with Garden Opera alongside James McOran-Campbell again, this time as Rodolfo and Marcello in La Bohème. I shall also be re-visiting Seville again as Count Almaviva (Barber of Seville), so do visit the diary page if you wish to catch me in action.

Well, I’m really glad I had the chance to catch up with you and I hope our paths may cross sometime soon. We’re off to France again for Christmas and the New Year, so I’ll sign off for now by wishing you the very best of Festive Greetings and a truly Happy 2007.