VIEW PROFILE: Hilary Kenway

The highs and lows of life as an opera star

THIS week PAUL CROMPTON talks to The Beaminster Singers’ musical director HILARY KENWAY about the highs and lows of being an internationally renowed opera singer and her life teaching others to sing,

“YOU become so self-fascinated; you become a monster,” said Hillary Kenway of her life as an internationally renowned Opera singer.

Sat on endless flights, getting screamed at by “extremely” camp Italians and forcing herself to become an egocentric, were just segments in the first part of the Soprano’s life.

The second, less glamorous for sure, but no-less fulfilling, saw her move back to Beaminster via London and Yeovil where she had forged a career as an English teacher, to amalgamate both careers and become a vocal coach and Musical Director of Beaminster Singers.

“We’ve done so well in the last five years we are now the preferred choir in Milton Abbey for weddings,” Hilary said. “We sung there once and now we keep going back over there. And it’s not even in our area. I’m very proud of the choir and what they have achieved.”

The Singers, or Community Coral Society, come together once a week to rehearse for a number of big concerts with a professional orchestra each year.

Founded in 1997 so people could get together and sing big oratorios (Messiah, Elegy and the big requiems) they also tackle lighter material like operas and choruses.

Based in St Mary’s Church, people hoping to join the community group don’t have to pass an audition or interview to get in. In fact in the five years Hillary has been director there has only been one person who had to leave because they could not stay in tune.

Hillary’s stint at the Singers started when they found themselves short of a MD and knew she would have some time on her hands and was more than capable of doing it.

Brought up in Beaminster, she attended the old Alfred Cole Fox School. Although she admits to not winning any singing prizes – something she would more than make up for later– she did, however, receive certificates for annunciation and piano.

“That was a fantastic musical school at the time. For a comprehensive it was very musical school and I did three full-scale operas there before I left at 18-years-old. I’d already sung two major leads, Gluck’s “Orpheus” then Dido “Aeneas”; we were so lucky to put them on. It was amazing,” she said.

After school the multi-lingual –she speaks French, German and Italian - Hilary went to Birmingham University to read for an English and French degree, something which would later prove to be come in useful. However, whilst Hilary had her head in the books she continued to be “very, very involved” with the musical department.

Hillary said: “It was the first time they brought in the Handel Opera and the professor in the department of music was a Handel specialist and so I always sung in the chorus in the three years I was there.”

Then after graduating she joined the Royal College of Music for three years, where she performed total vocal music in small choir groups and learnt to become a soloist.

“It’s a very different skill,” she said. “Vocal projection is much, much bigger, you have to be able to project dramatically the voice as lead and gain more control, it’s much more skilful.

“In fact to be a soloist is not always the best thing to have in a choir. A choir which has a blatant soloist is not exactly a complimentary thing, it’s a different skill, you have to think much more egocentric as a soloist.”

Next the itinerant “Queen of the Night” or Coloratura - a type of operatic soprano who specializes in music distinguished by agile runs and leaps – found herself in Indianapolis courtesy of her then husband, who later fled America with Hilary as he draft dodged the call up for the Vietnam war.

The pair moved back to London, where her ex-husband worked in Selfridges’ tie department before gaining his music card. He moved to Birmingham to become a timpanist and Hilary took tentative steps into her first career, as a member of the BBC Singers, on her 27th birthday: August 1st, 1971.

Hilary said it was strange walking into the “ bowels of Broadcasting House” on her first day at the BBC because everybody else was happy and had been doing it for years. In her first week she learnt quickly and was just “given the music and got on with it”.

“It was actually quite challenging,” she said. “Because you know there are only 28 of us, we were a concert group in those days and had to sing the daily service. You had to be there to sing in the morning, but you only got a half hour rehearsal. We would maybe go for a coffee then head to All Saints Church next door and there you would be, stuck singing a song you’d only just rehearsed.”

It was during her two years there that she met many of the great conductors of the day. Conductors who have since become knights of the realm such as Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Colin Davis along with acclaimed French conductor Pierre Boulez.

But, as she points out, “It was really a brilliant training for a vocal career”. But after working five and six day weeks, which “felt like a life-time”, Hilary took her training and became a freelance singer. In the following years she performed as many oratorio recitals as she could, before entering international competitions.

However, competitions turned out to be just another learning curve.

“The first Mozart competition I entered I was there, I’d done the song in the finals and then the judges went off to debate,” she recalled with a grin.

“They came back to say what had happened and who had done what, when an extremely camp Italian judge came tearing out of the curtains towards me and said I had hadn’t won because I hadn’t sung enough Mozart. He was furious.”

Lessons learned the hard way, Hilary re-entered the next year with the right amount of Mozart and duly won.

But despite success Hilary found the life of a soloist dislikeable. A hatred of planes and the stress of having to be “egocentric”, and not being able to eat and drink when she wanted to, made the svelte soprano with her hair in a bun, realise she just wasn’t built to stay at the top of her career for long.

So, in her mid 30s, she moved onto her second career as a teacher, utilising the English degree gained years before at Birmingham University.

In London, newly single, needing to pay the mortgage and run a car, she continued into her second career, finally becoming head of English at a nautical school, all bell bottoms and sailors hats. All the time she kept her voice in tune by doing recitals, singing oratorios, but shunning her operatic past.

Then the draw of the West Country proved to much and she moved back. Taking a head of English post at Westfield Community School, Yeovil. But competition was still in her bones and she became the runner-up in the regional heats of the National Teaching Awards.

And so, now aged 65, Hilary has finally managed to blend her two careers into one; teaching singing to everyone from 15 to 78-year-olds, something she finds both fascinating and stimulating.

“I think to watch people progress and sing things they didn’t possibly think they could sing. To say ‘yes you can develop your voice’ and through their voice see them gain confidence, and to watch them progress is fascinating,” she said.

“It’s a completely different satisfaction, teaching from singing. If singing yourself, you take a piece of music, that someone else composed, to an audience and give them a worthwhile experience that they enjoy. If you are teaching you enable someone to realise an ambition perhaps or help them gain a new skill.”

People will have the chance to hear Hillary perform at Beaminster Charter Fair Concert on May 1st and May 8th in Bungay, Suffolk singing Dido.

The Beaminster Singers will be performing J.S. Bach’s stunning oratorio St John’s Passion on March 27th with soloists Martin Hindmarsh and Timothy Dickinson, and a professional orchestra led by Louise Bevan.

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