The Music

Music for the Highveld

Cleveland Williams' Recital

...at the Guildford United Reformed Church on the 9 November

Some personal thoughts on an amazing event by Iain Cameron

Last Saturday Cleveland Williams, a baritone from the Bahamas, performed a programme of songs at the Guildford URC Music Society accompanied by Steve Higgins at the piano.

The proceeds of the concert will go to support the Highveld.

The material ranged from Schubert Lieder to Broadway Songs.

Iain Cameron

This recital was the follow-up to the original one he gave at Holy Trinity Guildford about two years ago which prompted me to think of some equivalent activity that I could undertake to raise money for AIDS/HIV work in the Highveld Region of South Africa.

I have been working on this project for a few months together with Peter Chatterton who designed this site, Jean Burge the Treasurer and Gillian Lloyd who is the Musical Director at URC and so I felt a lot was at stake especially as the first recital had been very effective at raising both money and awareness.

Samples

(in Windows Media - wma - format)

De Vienni Alla Finesta - Don Giovanni (Mozart)

HiFi LoFi

Guess?

HiFi LoFi

Some Enchanted Evening (R Rogers)

HiFi LoFi

Cleveland Williams

Guildford is full of music-making at a pretty high standard and so one has to work very hard to get an audience for any event.

I won't review the first part of the programme from a musical point of view - I checked with some members of the audience who have a professional involvement with singing in that tradition - and they were very pleased with what they heard.

The parts of the programme that I am most familiar with are the spirituals and the Broadway Songs and I found both amazingly powerful. Cleveland brings the intensity and commitment to the spirituals that you might expect but it is still an astonishing experience to be in the same space as his delivery and to have one's attention so closely focused on his performance second by second.

Broadway music isn't usually treated in the same way but in Some Enchanted Evening Cleveland was able to take something which orginated with a master songwriting team and which has been dulled by repetition and cynicism and reinjected the original emotional wonder to the piece.

I was keen that we capture as much of the performance as possible. I invited the photographer Derek Ridgers (who is best known for his work with rock stars, clubbers and punk music) to take some stills of the performance and Peter videoed the performance. The aim is to use this material on this site and elsewhere to attract attention to this project. Peter also got a Minidisc recording and a back-up analog on a small professional SONY machine. I really want to get a short CD out of these recordings which we can market in the runup to Christmas - say 5 songs for £5.

Steve Higgins & Cleveland Williams

An important part of this project is using the technology to raise awareness of the real situation is - both the problems but also the work that is being done to tackle the problems and how people in other parts of the world can help. So, Peter prepared some stills and video material featuring Grace Sibeko who runs the Kwase-Kwaza project. The stills showed Grace visiting Guildford and meeting people here together with Lynn Coull in the Summer - and also the event they went back to organise and support - the visit to KK by Michael Parkinson and a BBC film crew. The sequence of stills was projected while Cleveland was performing.

Steve Higgins & Cleveland Williams

In the interval we showed a digital video from the BBC footage including some of the Parkinson interview with Mandela, Parkinson asking Grace about the incidence of HIV in the KK children and Parkinson and Grace talking to a woman with not long to live who was worried about how her children would survive. Obviously this is powerful stuff and I could see that it made an impact.

The other important point is that the recital was a test of the idea that it makes sense to combine committed artists with hi-tec but relatively low cost communications to get the message across. I was really pleased with the way that worked - the next step is to review the material that we have collected and work out how we can build on that resource.

The profit from the concert was £550 but I hope we can double this with sales of the CD.

I also have some CD sales from Plundafonix and Serious Music to put in - so I will be giving the Holy Trinity an immediate cheque for £700 to send to Lynn in the next week or so.

Pre-concert discussions