Happy New Year to everyone who looks at my website! I can’t believe we’re in 2008 already; it seems like yesterday that we were worrying about the probable effects on computers of changing from 1999 to 2000. Heigh ho…

2007 ended with happy concerts in Dublin, Petworth, Bath and Cheltenham and a very merry evening at Lord’s, a holiday in Bermuda, a few days in Paris, and just before Christmas an unusual recital at La Monnaie in Brussels. It was unusual in that it was staged by the wonderful Laurent Pelly, in between triumphs at Covent Garden, Paris, Lyon and shortly Toulouse! Jason Carr accompanied me and wrote one of the songs I sang, and Olivier Sferlazza danced and mimed and was generally an extraordinary presence on stage. I sang lots of songs I’ve never sung before, and even managed to get some of them right….and others spectacularly wrong….but I had the ‘flu, which took away some of the pure pleasure the evening should have been. Laurent was full of ideas as ever, and invented a fascinating show which seemed to please the pre-Christmas audience in Brussels, and I hope very much that we may repeat it somewhere before I forget all those new songs!

2008 is full of exciting things including two trips to America, ‘Les Illuminations’ in Zurich, recitals at the Wigmore Hall, in Belfast, Paris, Lyon, New York, Schwarzenberg and the Canary Islands, and two concerts in London with my beloved Bernard Haitink, who gave me my first chance at Glyndebourne more than thirty years ago!  FL