I should have known not to rush my Bromley Festival application, and I had the deadline in my diary months ago but of course it was a last-minute rush as everything seems to be these days.

Everything has come at once and I had virtually no time to practise after I put the application in. I didn’t hear much from the organisers after I submitted my intended programme but on the day I was relieved to see that I was the only singer competing in the two classes I entered, and only three other people there. I was a dead cert to win the cup for the recital class, and in with a good chance of winning the rose bowl for best performance, that I won in 2017.

So I got up and improvised an introduction to my little recital, incorporating the fact that it was the day after International Women’s Day and that the recital’s theme is about love from a woman’s point of view. It consisted of three songs: Handel’s Mio Caro Bene; Walton’s I was a Constant, Faithful Wife and Dring’s Through the Centuries, all of which I have been preparing for my LTCL exam some time in the future.

I thought my nerves weren’t too bad on this occasion, part of the reason for putting myself through this exercise, but my Handel backing track incorporates the introduction a second time from the Da Capo, and this threw me a bit so I got lost and had to re-start, which was a good decision for me but in general never a good idea. You generally have to carry on as if the bottom hasn’t just fallen out of your world. The rest of this went well, though, apart from a couple of minor word fluffs, and the adjudicator seemed reasonably impressed, making some good points about singing what the composer had actually written. Then “But there is a syllabus problem.” Apparently the only line of small print that I had failed to read, or forgotten about, was that the recital should not include songs from opera or oratorios. And I’d just sung Popova’s Aria from The Bear and disqualified myself. Oddly, the people who had accepted my submitted programme all those weeks before had not picked up this error, but I’m not blaming them. The responsibility lies with me, of course. So I not only failed to win the dead cert cup, but put myself out of the running for the Rose Bowl too. How embarrassed was I! The moral of the story: never skim over the small print.

So by the time I sang Debussy’s C’est l’extase langoureuse, I was a little distracted and took a big breath in the middle of the first phrase. Facepalm! It’s a murmured, overtly sexual piece, but you have to be careful not to undersing it, which is, of course, what I then did. Oh well.

Action points: Try and find or obtain a backing track without a second introduction for the Handel; revise ALL the little ornaments and twiddles for the Walton, and the accuracy of the rhythms in the Dring. Ensure proper breath support for the Debussy at all times. Honestly.