Elgar is like our musical godfather, says Welsh opera singer

OPERA singer Rebecca Afonwy-Jones discovered her passion for music as a child.

The mezzo-soprano, who is from Montgomeryshire in mid-Wales, had several mentors when she was growing up.

She says: “I went to primary school in Shropshire and I was, I suppose, an obviously musical child.

“There was an amazing headteacher in that school who was incredibly musical. I thought it was quite normal that your headteacher would write you songs or find you songs from Victorian parlour music and then put them into plays by Oscar Wilde.

“It was quite an extraordinary beginning in that sense but it was really good because it didn’t make me question things. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re doing The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde this morning’.”

Rebecca will join Henley Symphony Orchestra next Sunday to sing Sea Pictures by Edward Elgar, the Victorian composer best known for his orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations and Pomp and Circumstance Marches.

She says: “There are so many people who will be like, ‘Oh, I love Sea Pictures’ and there will be other people who won’t know who Elgar is. I love the idea of someone coming to this concert who maybe has never even heard of Elgar or heard these songs and we get to perform them. I’m not saying they need to have a transformative experience but, you know, maybe a child who plays a violin comes with a parent and finds this really inspiring because this is exactly what happened to me.

“I was probably 10 and had just gone to a new school. There was a sign-up board to go to see The Dream of Gerontius at Hereford Cathedral.

“Well, I didn’t really know anything about anything, but I thought I’d like to go. It was only for people in fifth and sixth form but after a bit of a struggle with my housemistress I was able to go.

“I went along and my feet didn’t touch the ground. For a 10-year-old to listen to Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius… that had such an impact on me.

“It would have been one of the first times I’d heard a live orchestra, the sound washing over me in the most extraordinary and immersive way. The concert was in a beautiful building with loads of musicians, so maybe there was something in that experience that made me think, ‘One day…’ I wasn’t thinking at age 10 that I wanted to be an opera singer necessarily but I ended up becoming a chorister with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and I sang in the semi-chorus with Richard Hickox conducting when I was really quite young.” Since then she has performed as the Angel in Gerontius “seven or eight times”.

Rebecca says: “That music has such resonance because I’ve been through it as a child and then I became a soloist. It’s quite unusual to have that journey if you aren’t born into a musical family.

“Elgar has a real place in our hearts and in our collective
consciousness. I think a lot of people know his music but don’t realise because they turn on the television on Remembrance Sunday and we’ve got Nimrod, the Enigma Variations, the last night of the Proms. It really resonates with people.

“I feel like he might be a sort of godfather, you know, a musical godfather, to a lot of people. It’s a comforting kind of music.”

Rebecca, who is married to fellow opera singer Julian Close (bass), studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland before joining Welsh National Opera.

She says: “The late Nicola Heywood-Thomas, who was the most amazing, absolutely fabulous arts journalist, did the arts programme on BBC Radio Wales and really championed young people.

“When I was an associate artist at Welsh National Opera she had me on the show and she’d managed to get hold of some audio footage which I had submitted when I did a competition in Wales.

“I had absolutely no idea that she’d got this footage and it’s a really good job that she did this off-air because when I heard it I thought, ‘Who’s that?’ and then I went, ‘Oh’ and said an expletive.

“This was in the chat before going back on air and she went, ‘Right, let’s get that all out of the way now because when I play this on the radio, you can’t do that’.

“She was a giantess in the creative world, so it was very inspiring.”

For Sea Pictures, Elgar set five pieces of poetry to music: Roden Noel’s Sea Slumber Song, his wife Caroline Alice Elgar’s In Haven (Capri), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sabbath Morning at Sea, Richard Garnett’s Where Corals Lie and Adam Lindsay Gordon’s The Swimmer.

Rebecca says: “Sea Pictures has real breadth and quite a large range, with changes in tempo and colour. The song by Alice Elgar is interesting and I have to say, because my husband’s surname is Close, I just really like singing, ‘Closely, let me hold thy hand’.”

The programme will also feature Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and Symphony No 2. Alexander Walker will be the guest conductor.

• Henley Symphony Orchestra’s spring concert is at the Hexagon in Queen Walk, Reading, on Sunday, March 17 at 7pm. Tickets cost £14, £18 or £22, students/under-16s half price. Call 07726 59261, email hsoboxoffice@gmail.com or visit henleysymphonyorchestra.co.uk