Lesley Garrett CBE headlined the 2009 Harrogate International Festival. She spoke to Ann Chadwick about her passion for music and why Yorkshire beats strongly in her heart…

Lesley Garrett kicks off the 2009 Harrogate International Festival

Lesley is a whirlwind of energy and passion. Currently starring in the musical Carousel in the role of Nettie, she wanted to make time to speak to the Harrogate International Festival - an event very close to her heart.
“I’ve been many times but not for a little while now so it will be lovely to reacquaint myself with Harrogate because its such a special place,” she says without pausing for breath, “and especially the Festival, which is just one of the major festivals in the country and it’s been built up wonderfully.”
Lesley made her debut at the Festival 29 years ago and has returned to the town on numerous occasions.
“I was lucky enough a few years ago to be Performer in Residence at the Festival which I enjoyed very much. I performed three contrasting recitals on three consecutive weekends, which was very demanding; it required me to find three completely different programmes, three different ranges of singing.”

This year Lesley will be performing in the magnificently refurbished Royal Hall.
“I haven’t performed there before,” only because, she adds, it was closed for its refurbishment. “I’m so excited- I will have just about performed everywhere in Harrogate after that,” she laughs.

“The very first time I ever performed at the Harrogate Festival was when I was a student and they had a young singers’ recital programme which was to give new singers, as I was then, experience at a high level of recital giving. And I gave a recital - my first ever recital - at the Swan Hotel and it was patchy let’s say,” she laughs, “that would be a kind way of putting it - there were songs I wasn’t sure I did justice to - but it was nonetheless a fantastic opportunity for me and a great learning experience. So I asked if I might have permission when I was asked to come back to bring a young singer with me, partly to continue that wonderful tradition. I think it is an important part of the work of festivals, and a very important part of the work of the Harrogate Festival, to encourage the artists of tomorrow. And also because it would give me the opportunity to sing some duets for the public which I don’t get the chance to do that very often. I wanted to present a more varied programme, so I’m very excited about that.”

To detail Lesley’s achievements to date makes the head spin - eleven solo CDs, countless awards - she has sung everywhere from Naples to New York, Australia to South Korea.

Lesley is joined by rising star, Dominic Kraemer

“I don’t feel driven, I just feel as if I’m enjoying every second of my life. I think it’s a passion to communicate: it’s a powerful urgency - a powerful sense that I need to put before the public the music I believe in, and love and feel passionate about. I feel strongly that it’s so important to society to have music available of all kinds. You know you only have to travel on the bus today and every young person will have a iPod and earphones, people of every age have to listen to a piece of music at least once a day just to feel right about themselves.
“There is something extremely important about the live experience because however important recordings are, the listener can never get the true connection with the performer which is possible during a live performance because the audience is part of the creation of the music. Every performance I give is different because every audience I perform to is different. So there’s a great exchange of feeling that goes on in a performance, I feel always when I perform that the audience is drawing out of me what that audience needs, and every audience’s needs are different.”

And Yorkshire audiences have a distinctive place in her soul. For the first time in the interview, Lesley slows down when I ask if Yorkshire is still a place close to her heart.
“Very much so, very much so, it’s my roots,” she says with feeling. Lesley is married to a GP, and they have two teenage children. They stay in the North most weekends. “It’s where I go to revive myself. It’s where I go to breathe. There’s something about taking in a lungful of Yorkshire air that’s different to anywhere else in the world: I breathe in my heritage, I breathe in my family, I breathe in the history, the great history that is Yorkshire. It’s such an extraordinary county and so varied, and so special. And it will always have a vital place in my heart. All my family still live in Yorkshire, I have a home in Yorkshire, and I always will have. So yes, it is extremely important to me to sing regularly in my home county. And yes it always will be. It’s also the most nerve wracking because it’s the place I love most. The more one cares about a place and the people in that place, the more important it is to do well.”

The Doncaster Diva wows the audience

It’s remarkable that she is so grounded considering her glitzy career. Born and bred in Doncaster, she has taken on the wide world with gusto, carrying her roots and Yorkshire identity with her to far flung places and to show biz faces.
“I’ve always valued my history, my personal history, my roots. That hasn’t stopped me experiencing a very diverse life. And it’s because of the solid start I received at home - solid in every way - solid in the sense I was much loved and encouraged and valued, and I still am. And I think if you are safe in that knowledge then you can do anything really. And also my parents were the most wonderful example to me because they both were determined to ‘better themselves’, which is the expression that was often used in my childhood. Both my parents, who worked on the railways, decided to become school teachers and in the case of my father ultimately he became a headmaster. And they had great ambition and had to work extremely hard to realise that ambition. That was a wonderful example to me and made me think, yes I can become an opera singer, my father’s just become a headmaster, my mother became head of music in a middle school, and she worked in a ticket office when I was a child. And there’s nothing wrong with working in a ticket office at all, or being a signal man as my dad was, they were good jobs, and they took an enormous risk giving them up to bring three children up on a grant.”

Lesley celebrates the start of the Festival with sponsors Deloitte

Being passionate and living the music is the root of her success.
“You’ll find that people who have enormous success are very hard working and you can’t switch that off. Once that motor is running then move out of the way,” she laughs, “I’m coming through! And that motor is running most of the time. I think I’m lucky, I was born with enormous energy and I love a lot of what I do. Just a sense that this is what I’m here for, I’m here to make this music available to people and make it as wonderful as it can be. I think I’ve always had a very strongly held conviction that I’m here to serve the music. I think that’s what distinguishes a classical singer from a pop singer - I don’t matter - the only thing that matters is the music. And the music will continue after me, and it’s my job to hand it on and I feel a very strong sense of duty in that way.”
It’s hard not to resist the whirlwind of passion. And her performance at this year’s Festival is set to be electrifying.

“I’m so thrilled the Festival is still growing and developing and being supported by the local community,” Lesley said. “And I would just like to take the opportunity to thank the people of Harrogate who have asked me to come back again after 29 years. 1980, when I first performed at the Harrogate Festival marked the first year of my professional life. I sang in the summer of 1980 just as I was leaving the National Opera Studio, that was my first recital. And then in October of that year I sang my first major role in the Wexford Festival and everything blossomed from those two events, so I’ve everything to thank the Harrogate Festival for. And I’m thrilled to be back there in my 29th year, and I hope I can visit in my 30th year and have a party! But I would just love to take the opportunity to thank the people of Harrogate for their stalwart support, for being there for me all these years and still wanting to hear me sing, it’s the biggest compliment a singer can possibly have, and I’m incredibly grateful and humbled by it.”

Clare Teal on stage at the Royal Hall

Growing up 15 minutes away from Harrogate in a village near Skipton, Clare Teal used to visit the “posh town with the posh tea room” as a child. Now she’s one of the headline acts appearing at the prestigious Harrogate International Festival. Trying to pin Clare Teal down isn’t easy. After she had returned from a week in Paris, we spoke to Clare in her car (her partner Muddy Field was driving) on her way to record a radio show with Pop Idol’s Michelle McManus. A few days later she will be interviewing Diana Krall for Radio 2.

As a child, Clare developed a fascination for jazz listening to her grandmother’s records. She grew up to present BBC Radio 2’s Big Band Special, Friday Night Is Music Night plus a host of other specialist music documentaries for radio and TV and to count the likes of Sir Michael Parkinson as a fan. Clare ‘accidentally’ turned to singing whilst studying for her music degree at Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

After leaving college like a lot of aspiring musicians she got a full time job. “My success didn’t happen over night. Nobody in the industry realised I was working 9 to 5 in advertising sales, then doing gigs at night. I suppose I was driven, I was determined, you have to be. And working in sales was incredibly useful to me. It was hard work but it taught me how to talk about money and business in general and also more importantly to handle rejection.”

Something that pays for a musician - Clare famously landed a multi-million pound contract with Sony records - virtually unheard of for a British jazz musician outside the Radio 1 demographic. It’s all quite remarkable considering she discovered her voice by serendipity. “It was when I was studying music; I had completely forgotten about an important clarinet exam and had 20 minutes to do something…anything, so formed the world’s worst piano trio and as my piano playing is less than impressive I had to sing to hold it all together. Thankfully nobody walked out covering their ears and I realised for the first time in my life that I could sing in front of people without going to pieces.” She had always loved jazz, but the fantastic response from her teachers was the turning point to focus her passion on singing.

Clare’s business sense meant she knew her worth - she sang with jazz bands but always demanded to be paid - she never gigged for free. It was after coming second in a national contest to find the next Billie Holiday that she got her big break.

By her second album, Orsino’s Songs, Sir Michael Parkinson became a fan, playing it frequently on his radio show and inviting her to perform on his TV chat show in 2003. In 2005 and in 2006 she was British jazz vocalist of the year. The Times dubbed her ‘Britain’s most successful female jazz singer’. And Parkinson gushed she was, “Wonderful. Worth raving about.”

The gig included a unique version of 'On Ilkley Moor Ba Tat'

“Michael has been hugely supportive of me, and he’s done a great deal in supporting up and coming talent and musicians. I was very lucky to have his backing and support; he’s a great music lover. I do still see him - we go for tea now and then and yes I guess that I can count him as a friend. We’re actually performing together at the Glasgow Jazz Festival in June.”

What, he’s singing? “No,” she laughs, “thank God! He’s presenting.”

Clare has performed with many jazz legends including John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, and counts Ella Fitzgerald as her all time hero as well as her ultimate influence - Cole Porter - to whom her own writing has been compared.

On her third album, The Road Less Travelled, she was working with the music producer Tony Platt - of Rolling Stones and Bob Marley fame - and sang a duet with fellow jazz star, Jamie Cullum, an old friend of Clare’s. Is she going to the wedding? (Sophie Dahl confirmed her engagement to Cullum recently on the Jonathon Ross show.) “We’ve not got an invite yet! But I’m thrilled for him, he’s such a talent.”

It seems to be part of the make-up of hugely successful musicians and personalities like Clare - to be incredibly driven and hard working. There’s some real Yorkshire grit at work. “And I have a hugely supportive partner, which makes a big difference.” Clare added. She lives with her partner Muddy in Bath. Clare met Muddy at a charity event and they have lived, worked and toured together for a decade. Her personal and working life are intertwined - which might explain the good vibrations Clare Teal puts out in person, as well as on stage; her work is her passion, and unlike some artists she hasn’t had to make compromises in her relationship. The fact the pair met at a charity event says a lot about Clare’s spirit. When she found out Yorkshire Cancer Research were supporting her event at this year’s Festival, she was genuinely thrilled: “That’s fantastic! It really is. I think during the credit crunch too its crucial charities and communities work together and support each other, so for such a great Festival like Harrogate to work with this massively important charity is amazing. It’s an awful truth but cancer will affect us directly or someone we know at some point in our lives. It really means a lot that it’s a charity like that supporting the show.”

Clair Chadwick, Head of Marketing and Fundraising for Yorkshire Cancer Research said they were delighted to be supporting a number of events at this year’s Harrogate International Festival: “In particular, Yorkshire artist Clare Teal has resonance because she’s Yorkshire born and bred,” Miss Chadwick said. “All proceeds from this partnership will enable us to continue to fund world renowned research into the causes and cures of cancer at universities and their associated teaching hospitals across Yorkshire”.

Clare with event supporters, Yorkshire Cancer Research

Would Britain’s most famous jazz singer ever move home to Yorkshire? “Work commitments keep me in Bath and I’m very settled there now, I need to be close to London.” But Yorkshire still has a huge place in her heart. Her roots, like many Yorkshire successes, gave her a strong work ethic. Combined with her passion for music, her relentless drive has catapulted her to success while keeping her northern feet firmly on the ground. Teal has famously said in the past: “It’s very levelling because you’re never not from Yorkshire.”

Her sense of humour that resonates on radio and stage has been compared to the quintessential northern comic, Victoria Wood. Humour, Clare said, is crucial to her - it has helped her career and professional life. “I love what I do and I find a lot of things funny - I think it’s only right that the audience should be in on the joke,” she laughed. Her 2008 album is aptly called Get Happy. The Guardian music critic John Fordham put Teal’s appeal down to the fact she still retains that ‘enduring devotion to swing’ and a rosy romantic approach that she demonstrated as a child, dreaming about being Ginger Rogers in the arms of Fred Astaire whirling down the aisles of Keighley shopping centre.

Teal has an infectious upbeat love of music, and it seems, of life. It seems fitting that the one song that she said she’d pass on to her kids as one of the most influential in her life is not a Fitzgerald track or even Cole Porter melody, but Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys: “My biggest influences? Oh Cole Porter absolutely - but I think the one song that stops me in my tracks every time is ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys. Bryan Wilson’s pocket symphony is one of the most inspiring, innovative joyous demonstrations of all that is good about music.”