A series of webinars relating to topics of vocal interest.

The most recent, in September 2020, was a conversation about vocal health, COVID-19, and the future of performing, with Sheila Barnes and Declan Costello with Q & A.

Declan Costello is a highly experienced consultant laryngologist with extensive expertise in treating all aspects of voice disorders. As a singer himself, he has a particular interest in treating vocal problems in performers. Costello has been co-leading UK research into the aerosols produced by singing and their role in the transmission of COVID-19.

In 2007 I was asked to give a talk to the composers’ workshop at Aldeburgh (which has become the Jerwood Opera Writing programme), and did that for 2 years running, with great pleasure. I had not thought before about how important it was to tell composers things that they would automatically know about a musical instrument, but not necessarily know about the human voice.

Years later, in 2018, I was pleased to be able to offer my help to one individual composer, the First Composer Laureate of the Netherlands, who happened to be my neighbour in Le Marche in Italy. As he was working on a “capo lavoro”, an opera about the famous Italian heiress Luisa Casati Stampa del Soncino, and heard that I was in the neighbourhood, he asked me to have a listen to a few vocal lines. One conversation led to my working with Willem on creating for him an awareness of how the voices which he was already writing for so marvellously could be helped by little changes in the way the text was set for example, splitting a word into two notes in order to put the consonant cluster on a lower pitch and allow a soaring vocalised vowel to go to a high note…this sort of advice which came very easily to my mind I was delighted to find to be useful to Willem. He as a result of our work together invited me to give a talk to the composition department of Amsterdam Conservatory, which I did on two occasions, and we are looking for further opportunities to collaborate.

Teaching as I do many choral singers as well as soloists, it has been my pleasure to be able to offer collaboration to choral conductors and choirs seeking specialist practical advice not only on aspects of sound quality but also on how to sing coloratura, trills, trillos and other ornamentation. I have worked with two choirs in the Netherlands and in Perugia with the choir "L'Accademia degli Unisoni", the chorus for our production of Dido and Aeneas with the Musica Insieme Panicale Festival in 2012. In 2017 I was engaged as Vocal Consultant to the Holst Singers for a London performance of Mozart Cminor Mass, conducted by David Bates.

I found my way into a career as a professional singer because of my passion for words set to music, and perhaps its ideal antique expression can be found in the principles of Giulio Caccini, who composed in 1602 Le Nuove Musiche and wrote a famous preface setting out the rules for singing the new music. "Un certo nobile sprezzatura", or a certain noble negligence, meaning not slavishly following the rhythm but allowing the accentuation of the word to determine where a sound is placed in the bar.

Combining these principles with my other passion, that for the Italian language, I founded in 2013 a new early music group based on, and called, “Sprezzatura”. Mining the riches of the late 16th-early & 17th century Italian canzonette repertoire, I found for the group a unique 3-voice repertory. Sprezzatura’s debut concert took place at St. Peter's Church, Westleton, in Suffolk, and the group have made a demo recording at the Alamire Foundation (Leuven, Belgium) Centre for Polyphony.