My new life...

In the Austrian Alps, between Innsbruck and Mellau (August 2025)

Well my plans for making more posts along the lines of those I've shared since starting in 2020 haven't quite worked out. I have an idea, but it first might help to explain some big changes which have taken place in my life.

In late 2018 I was asked to take over, at a couple of months' notice, the role of tour leader for a music lovers' tour to New York. The company running the tour, Hayllar Music Tours, is based in Sydney and had originally engaged Richard Gill to lead the tour. Sadly, Richard was in his final illness at the time and clearly unable to go ahead with the task of giving talks to the tour group and acting as a musical reference person.

The tour was a wonderful experience. We saw operas at the Met, a performance of Hamilton, a new play featuring Daniel Radcliffe, visited galleries and museums, undertook walking tours and so much more. The sad moment came when Richard died while we were in New York, a loss I took very hard considering the huge role he had played in my life and the opportunities he had given me in my student years.

The tour company liked my work enough to offer me more tour leading in 2020 but the pandemic meant that none of those events took place. Still, from 2021 onwards, I have undertaken many tours for HMT, both internationally and within Australia and it's work I absolutely love. While I'm designated tour "leader" there is also on each tour a tour manager. The tour manager does the work I'd be hopeless at doing: looking after hotels, transport, tickets, restaurants, complaints... I give talks to the group on the performances we're attending, and then I get to travel with the group as a sort of music resource person. Such a privilege.

By early 2024 it had become clear to me - in my mid-60s - that this was the direction my life was going in, and in which I wanted it to go, and that conducting was now something I no longer wanted to pursue. To be honest I had always felt like a fish out of water when I conducted but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that by early last year I was ready to put the baton down permanently.

It transpired that I had been invited conduct three large-scale performances of Handel's Messiah for the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in the Sydney Opera House in December 2024 and I decided there couldn't be a better way to end my conducting career. I was given a lovely send off and had a wonderful time conducting those sell-out performances of which I am and always will be very proud. Nine months on I absolutely do not regret this decision.

In 2024 I had eight tours to lead for HMT: five in Australia and three in Europe. This year I have ten: five and five. Writing the talks for these tours uses the part of my brain which Keys To Music used to use, and I'm learning things all the time.

Connected with all this is my active participation on Facebook. I know Facebook has its problems and it's definitely not the force for good it might once have been, but I do delight in writing up my tour experiences there, and there are many people who seem to enjoy what I write.

To that end I've decided that I might, until such time as I feel able to go back to writing posts here based on my old radio scripts, share the Facebook content on here as well. I am witnessing some of the greatest performances imaginable on these tours, things that I would never otherwise be able to experience, and so I plan to share them here as well as on Facebook. I hope they're of interest.

I'm going to start with the first international tour I led this year, which was to Amsterdam in May. There we attended the Concertbebouw's 2025 Mahler Festival. After that it will be the Aix en Provence Festival in July, followed by two Austrian festivals attended last month: the Salzburg Festival and the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade. I'm having a break in Munich as I write this, before I head to Bucharest next week to lead a tour which takes in part of the George Enescu Festival. You'll see immediately the quality of the events I've been able to experience!

Let's see how this goes.