<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    A COUNTERTENOR VIRTUOSO

Blaze and his friend and accompanist, Elizabeth Kenny ('we met when I was still a student at Magdalen, and did some concerts together in Oxford. Over that time we've built up a huge stack of unusual repertoire'), have become exponents of quite varied repertoire, including secular songwriters including Campion and relatively unknown Jacobeans (recorded on English Lute Songs, Hyperion CDA 67126 [listen]).

'I can't claim much credit there', says Blaze : 'It's Liz who does most of the discovering!' The person who originally switched him on to such rewarding repertoire was, he says, the late Robert Spencer, one of his teachers at the Royal College of Music in London. 'As a postgraduate I was in his Early English Song class at a time when people tended to think of that as not what they were necessarily interested in, and a couple of times I was literally the only student who turned up. And you can imagine someone else saying, well, let's forget it, and go through what you've brought along next week. But Bob used to take me down to the library and we'd go through, literally pore over, stuff that he'd done through his immense career, and he'd suddenly say, "you know, you should sing this" or "you should try that." Liz was a pupil of his too, and she always does exactly the same. She turns up for our sessions and says "We should do some of those dramatic songs by Lawes and [Nicholas] Lanier", and I'm, like "Oh, great, that's fantastic", and then she's off to the British Library to dig out a couple of manuscripts. And that's wonderful for me.'

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