Castletown’s global soprano
THE prominent international soprano, Dorothee Jansen, will present four concerts in the island early next month while staying in her Castletown home.
As well as having a Manx home, the German singer and her Kiwi husband Haydn Rawstron spend a lot of their time on tour and in New Zealand.
Born in Bonn, she studied singing in Cologne and Freiburg. Her professional, operatic career began at the Freiburg Opera House. She became a member, first of the Cologne Opera Studio and then of the Cologne Opera itself. Her freelance career has taken her worldwide, as an opera singer, concert singer and as an acclaimed Lieder singer, especially in the Schubert repertoire. Among the highlights of her career are appearances at four Bayreuth Festivals, The Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Grand Theatre de Geneve, and Truelove in productions in Lausanne and Paris. And as an oratorio and concert singer, she has performed with the Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique of Radio France, the Iceland Symphony, Queensland Symphony and Christchurch Symphony in venues including Westminster Abbey.
While back in the island this summer she will present a night of Italian music in the Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin, on September 10 (8pm, tickets £10 – call 832662), plus three concerts of Hayden’s Nine German Arias.
The first aria concert takes place on September 3 in St Paul’s Church, Ramsey (7.45pm, tickets £12.50 on the door) and will benefit the Ramsey Music Society, the second will be held in St German’s Cathedral in Peel on September 6 (7.30pm, tickets £8 on the door) in aid of the new cathedral choral foundation, and the final concert, which is for the pupils, staff and parents of King William’s, The Buchan and Castle Rushen High School, takes place at the King William’s College chapel in Castletown on September 13 (8pm, tickets also for the public £10 on the door). It is probably the first time the Nine German Arias have been performed in the island.
Hayden explained: ‘The programme that Dorothee will sing in Port Erin is a programme of arias in Italian, mostly from Italian opera, and tracing the development of lyric music over three centuries, from Caccini to Puccini.’
‘But,’ he explained, ‘the programme for the other three concerts is completely different. In these three concerts, she sings the exquisite Nine German Arias – the nine ‘Enlightenment’ arias to early German enlightenment texts by B.H. Brockes. These intimate masterpieces have almost certainly never before been presented before on the Isle of Man.’
In all the concerts, Haydn will join his wife on stage. He plays piano or electronic harpsichord as well as offering narration to put the arias in their historical context.
The couple have lived intermittently in the island for 12 years. Haydn explained: ‘The nature of Dorothee’s international career, and the fact that I am a New Zealander, mean that we spend less time on the Isle than we wish to.
‘However, we are here this time for six weeks, and part of that is for the preparation of these concerts, the first we have given on the isle.’
He added: ‘In preparing the concerts, we are much indebted to the islanders both for their considerable help, and for the provision of several excellent accompanying instrumentalists for both programmes. Each aria in both progammes has an accompaniment formed from different instruments including keyboard and cello, plus either a violin, flute, clarinet, or oboe. These excellent players are musicians living and working here on the isle.’