Blog post#44 ChoirKate - Part 4

A rather grubby looking dawn on January 1st 1999 found me on Woy Woy beach with my friend Lindy Hume.
We braved that unprepossessing morning with croissant and champagne, Lindy raising her glass to toast the New Year with Love, Art, Wisdom and Adventure. I reluctantly clinked glasses with her, for I was still in no mood for any kind of optimism. To me it was another dawn without Stace; each day taking me further away from him and the gift of our wonderful life together.
I mentioned that I started fiddling with arrangements pretty much as soon as I hit Melbourne in ‘85, however as January ‘99 unfolded something very extraordinary happened.
I was walking Charlie down at Merri Creek when a sweet melody came to me,

“I am the Angel of Love,
May your heart be warmed by my spirit,
I am the Angel of Love,
May your heart be whole.”
...........I know!
It sends shivers down my spine to recall it.

And I went home to find that the Angels of Art, Wisdom and Adventure were swift to pop by as I scrambled to scribble them all onto manuscript.
I do not know how I wove them into the intricate  counterpoint. This was long before Sibelius software was beneath my fingertips so I was following mere instinct as this, my first original KateSong, spilled out. It wasn’t until that heart stopping moment back at MacRob with my Chamber Voices that I had any inkling that it would work.
I remember writing the Angels onto bits of paper and getting the girls to pick them out of a hat to determine the voice parts.
It was way too complex a piece to fall neatly into place, but even so, once I heard those beautiful young voices singing each of those Angels’ melodies; stumbling though they were to work out the entries and hold onto their part; I knew something pretty unique had happened…..

We had already been working towards a tour with Mary’s Chamber Strings so, realising that LAWA needed to be a recessional item, I crafted the accompanying harmonies for her girls to sing so every concert ended with the collective company receding into a distant world. So enchanting! *

The tour was Mary’s brainchild of course. That baby was difficult to resist as we teased out the details. Amazingly, it all started one night when we were away together, chatter-natter; fantasising about the idea of taking our Mac.Robbies to the West Country of England, our own youthful stomping ground.
What a glorious thing it would be to have them perform in the arching cathedrals, beneath crags of ancient ruins, humble parish churches and the like; which were such a huge part of our own young lives.
We even timetabled it from the start in Bristol to the the finish in London, St Paul’s Cathedral no less and a host of treasures in between.
Dream big! Why not?

Every single thing we chose to do actually happened AND on the day we had nutted out in the wee small hours of that night.
This was before email of course, so it was an extraordinary feat and again down to Mary’s tenacity and enthusiasm.

The other thing that occurred in the early part of ‘99 was my application to the Australian Elizabethan Trust for an overseas study grant. Again, Mary’s idea, following the hunch that her sad sack friend needed to get out of town if she was ever going to turn her life around.
I was the inaugural recipient of that grant and so it was that the UK tour would be my swan-song from MacRob and indeed that era of my life.

This period from that dull January morning of ‘99, was to herald all that was to come not just for Mac.Rob but all the years since. 25 all up by the end of this year when I will be saying good bye to some of the most extraordinary moments of my life.
Some of those moments have been very up there and out there, very public; scary and amazing.

But there is no question that our Songs From Heaven and Earth UK tour was an astonishing achievement for those young women and one which Mary and I hold high above much that had happened before or since. We remain humbly grateful to them for once more going with the flow, working so hard towards getting on that plane, their parents, our colleagues, our loved ones.
For giving us and each other and that little pocket of England their all, from start to finish.

Our poignant last ever performance in St Paul’s Cathedral wafted into the annals of memory as those beautiful girls recessed into the transepts singing LAWA as they went……..

This live performance was recorded at Stourton parish church in Wiltshire.
https://youtu.be/0f_com5Jkoc?si=DszTxuq5msP4_jLA

Mary enlisted her friend Fiona McVey and Keith Upton of BBC Bristol to make the historic recording of Songs From Heaven And Earth, which closed with LAWA of course.
Mary was the producer of this wonderful memento of that very special time.

The opening soloist was Annie Hildebrand and the last remaining solo voice is Isabel Hertaeg with the Mac.Robertson Chamber Voices and Mac.Robertson Chamber Strings.

*did you know that “to enchant” means “to surround with song.”
And that’s precisely what those girls managed to do every single time!

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