Episode 7 Part 2 of The Voice Detective Show with Garth McLean

Garth McLean, is a Canadian actor, author, and a dedicated practitioner and highly respected Senior teacher of Iyengar yoga living in Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Garth’s acting credits include the Hollywood films Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Prototype, Rockin’ Road Trip and Chicago Hope.
Having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1996, Garth manages his condition and his hectic acting and yoga teaching schedule with a daily practice of Iyengar Yoga as presented by the late Yoga master, Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar.
Garth is a leading light in the world Iyengar community and the Iyengar family in Pune, India where since 2000, he returns annually to study and deepen his practice. He learned yoga directly from both the late B.K.S. Iyengar himself, and his eldest daughter Geeta.
As a teacher of yoga, he is a senior level Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher “CIYT” (Level 3 – Intermediate Sr III), a Certified Yoga Therapist and Approved Professional Development Provider with the International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT), and a Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT 500) and Continuing Education Provider (YACEP) with yoga alliance.
In 2019, Garth was honoured to serve as the headline Iyengar Yoga teacher at the World Yoga Festival. In addition to this, that same year, he was a presenter and plenary speaker at the International Association of Yoga Therapists Symposium of Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR).
Garth has served as a guest teacher at the France Iyengar Yoga Teachers’ Convention (2009), the Spain Iyengar Yoga Teachers’ Convention (2011), and more recently is a co presenter at the European Congress of Rehabilitation and Medicine in Slovenia (April 2024).
He teaches yoga intensives locally and globally. In addition to regular intensives, he offers workshops on the positive effect of yoga on multiple sclerosis and other neurological conditions. He regularly offers workshops in Europe, the UK, and South America. He has also taught in Australia, Russia Federation and Tunisia.
He is a co-founder and current board faculty member of the Iyengar Yoga Therapeutics group, a non-profit organisation based in Los Angeles whose mission is to helping people manage diseases and conditions through the therapeutic applications of yoga. Garth serves on the advisory board and is a faculty member of AnuYoga, a non-profit organisation (Tel Aviv), that facilitates the integration of Iyengar Yoga as a therapeutic intervention for patient rehabilitative care in hospitals and the medical field.
He has published Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis, A Practical Guide for People with Multiple Sclerosis and Yoga Teachers, (Singing Dragon Books, London 2020).
In last month’s Episode 7 Part One ‘Iyengar Yoga for (Dis)Abilities’, Garth tells Gyaan about his journey with Multiple Sclerosis and how Iyengar Yoga has helped him keep his condition in remission…
In this month’s Episode 7 Part Two, ‘Garth McLean’s Acting Journey Insights’, Garth will talk about his experience in acting and performing. His experience as a student of acting included working with Sanford Meisner in New York at his Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. More recently, he has written and performed a one-person show entitled, Looking For Lightning, about his journey which he performed live at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). More about Looking for Lightning can be found at www.lookingforlightning.com

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HN004 Leonardo da Vinci, his musicianship and the Mona Lisa

We know that Leonardo da Vinci was raised and trained in Florence, within the beating heart of the Renaissance. We also think of him as the painter of the Mona Lisa and as an outstanding researcher into the wonders of nature. He was active for many years at the court of the Dukes of Milan where he painted his famous Last Supper.

But, how many of us are aware that, according to his early biographer, Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci was initially summoned to Milan due to his reputation as a musician? I quote from A.B. Hinds translation, of Vasari’s lives, ‘On the death of Giovan. Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, and the accession of Ludovico Sforza in the same year, 1493, Lionardo was invited to Milan to play the lyre, in which that prince greatly delighted. Lionardo took his own instrument, made by himself in silver, and shaped like a horse’s head, a curious and novel idea to render the harmonies more loud and sonorous, so that he surpassed all the musicians who had assembled there.’

The relation between Leonardo and music doesn’t stop here though. He wrote many notes in his research and pondering on the nature of sound, and about music and the production of sounds. But as a final interesting fact, and again from Vasari, whilst painting the Mona Lisa, ‘he engaged people to play and sing, and jesters to keep her merry, and remove that melancholy which painting usually gives to portraits.’

JENNY LIND, SOPRANO, OCTOBER 6TH, 1820

Jenny Lind 1820

Coined the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, Jenny Lind was born in Stockholm in 1820. Her exceptional voice was noticed at age ten, and as even as a young girl she was enrolled in the Royal Opera School in Stockholm. In 1838 she made her debut at Agathe in Der Freischütz. Early demands and success overtaxed her voice and this led her to travel to Paris to seek consultation and tutelage from Manuel García the younger, who immediately prescribed some time of vocal rest before taking her on as a student. In 1842 upon returning to Stockholm her much improved voice was apparent when she appeared in the title role of Norma.

When touring Denmark, in 1843, she met the writer Hans Christian Andersen who fell in love with her. The two became good friends but his romantic feelings were not reciprocated. She is believed to have inspired three of his fairy tales: “Beneath the Pillar”, “The Angel” and “The Nightingale” and possibly the “Snow Queen”, after what was perceived as an icy rejection from Lind. He wrote, “No book or personality whatever has exerted a more ennobling influence on me, as a poet, than Jenny Lind. For me she opened the sanctuary of art.”
Among her early admirers were Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and, most importantly for her, Felix Mendelssohn. The pianist and composer, Ignaz Moscheles wrote: “Jenny Lind has fairly enchanted me… her song with two concertante flutes is perhaps the most incredible feat in the way of bravura singing that can possibly be heard”.
The character of Vielka, from Meyerbeer’s Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (The Camp of Silesia) 1844, was a role specifically written for Lind but not premiered by her. Nevertheless the Gypsy Song from the opera became one of the arias most associated with Lind, and she was called on to sing it wherever she performed in concert. Her operatic repertoire included the title roles in Lucia di Lammermoor, Maria di Rohan, Norma, La sonnambula and La vestale as well as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Adina in L’elisir d’amore and Alice in Robert le diable.
Mendelssohn who was greatly enamoured with Lind wrote the soprano part of the Oratorio Elijah with her voice in mind, apparently giving great attention to the tessitura of the aria around the note F-sharp (F#5), which was a note in her range that Mendelssohn supposedly found irresistibly charming. Devastated by Mendelssohn’s early death, Lind felt unable to perform the piece at its premiere.
Her fame had spread and when she arrived in England, she took the English audiences by storm. Queen Victoria herself attended all sixteen of Lind’s premiere performances.
Of her performances at Her Majesty’s in London it was written by the reviewer in The Sun, on 5 May 1847, ‘So highly had Jenny Lind’s musical powers been praised, that we went almost prepared to be disappointed. We expected to find her a second Sontag from the descriptions we had read, but we certainly were not prepared to find, as we did find, the beautiful tones of a Sontag, united to the powers of a Grisi, the compass of a Malibran, the more than flexibility of a Persiani, and the correctness of intonation of the most perfect of musical instruments. It is impossible by language to convey any idea of what the voice of Jenny Lind really is, because it is so surpassingly beautiful – so superior to any other voice, uniting, as it does, the perfection of all voices, that there is no standard to which it can be compared. It is, in fact, itself the standard, as being the nearest approach to perfection of any voice ever heard, and hence the difficulty, nay, the absolute impossibility of doing justice by description to the powers of Jenny Lind. Truly has she been called the nightingale, for she possesses in the utmost perfection the “jug” note of the bird, and also that marvellous power of throwing, as it were, the warble into the distance – now dying away, and now swelling again, even as an organ does – a power possessed by no other human voice that we have ever heard.’
In 1849 after performing at two successful seasons at Her Majesty’s in London and an extensive tour of Great Britain she gave her final performance at Her Majesty’s and from the retired from the opera stage.

A next chapter was to open with a collaboration in America with the entrepreneur and showman B.T. Barnum of ‘Barnum and Bailey’s Circus’. Before her arrival, Barnum had managed to whip up a fever by an immense publicity campaign, which resulted in what was known in the press as, Lindomania. The eight months of concert tours were a huge success, and by the end of the New York engagement, the Lind concerts had generated some $87,055.89, which would be over three million dollars in today’s money. The total receipts for the concerts amounted to $712,161.43, being in 2020 the equivalent of $24.5 million.
Lind commanded a guaranteed fee $1,000.00 per performance. Later, as a result of Lind tiring of Barnum’s relentless promotion, she invoked a clause in her contract to terminate the agreement and continued to tour under her own management.

Her devotion and generosity to charitable causes remained a key aspect of her career and greatly enhanced her international popularity, even among the unmusical, as she chose to give most of it away to charities she loved—primarily music scholarships and private schools. Some of the recipients were in the United States and the rest were mostly in England and Sweden.

During the American tour she met her husband, pianist and conductor, Otto Goldschmidt. In 1852 they returned to Europe where they initially lived in Dresden Germany. It was in Dresden that her first child was born. Later, in England, two other children were born to Jenny and Otto. She refused requests to return to the opera stage but continued to give concerts.

The critic H. F. Chorley, who admired Lind, described her voice as having “two octaves in compass – from D to D – having a higher possible note or two, available on rare occasions; and that the lower half of the register and the upper one were of two distinct qualities. The former was not strong – veiled, if not husky; and apt to be out of tune. The latter was rich, brilliant and powerful – finest in its highest portions.”
In 1883, at the request of the Prince of Wales, “she accepted the post of first Professor of Singing in the Royal College of Music”.

She believed in an all-round musical training for her pupils, insisting that, in addition to their vocal studies, they were instructed in solfège, piano, harmony, diction, deportment and at least one foreign language.
Among the numerous recognitions of her remarkable career and vocal art still visible more than 130 years since she died in 1887; there are streets named for Jenny Lind in a dozen or more American cities – but two towns bear her name as well: Jenny Lind, Arkansas and Jenny Lind, California! Her name is honoured at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and her image adorned the Swedish 50-krona banknote. Another interesting fact is an Australian schooner was named Jenny Lind in her honour. In 1857, it was wrecked in a creek on the Queensland coast; the creek was accordingly named Jenny Lind Creek.

Episode 7 Part 1 of The Voice Detective Show with Garth McLean

Garth McLean, is a Canadian actor, author, and a dedicated practitioner and highly respected teacher of yoga living in Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Blessed in his own words with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1996, and having navigated many of the the symptoms associated with the condition, Garth manages his course of MS and a hectic schedule with a daily practice of Iyengar Yoga as presented by Yoga master, Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar.
Garth is a leading light in the world Iyengar community and the Iyengar family in Pune, India where since 2000, he returns annually to study and deepen his practice. He learned yoga directly from both B.K.S. Iyengar himself, and his eldest daughter Geeta.
As a teacher of yoga, he is a senior level Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher “CIYT” (Level 3 – Intermediate Sr III), a Certified Yoga Therapist and Approved Professional Development Provider with the International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT), and a Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT 500) and Continuing Education Provider (YACEP) with yoga alliance.
In 2019, Garth was honoured to serve as the headline Iyengar Yoga teacher at the World Yoga Festival. In addition to this, that same year, he was a presenter and plenary speaker at the International Association of Yoga Therapists Symposium of Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR).
Garth has served as a guest teacher at the France Iyengar Yoga Teachers’ Convention (2009), the Spain Iyengar Yoga Teachers’ Convention (2011), and more recently is a co presenter at the European Congress of Rehabilitation and Medicine in Slovenia (April 2024).
He teaches yoga intensives locally and globally. In addition to regular intensives, he offers workshops on the positive effect of yoga on multiple sclerosis and other neurological conditions. He regularly offers workshops in Europe, the UK, and South America. He has also taught in Australia, Russia Federation and Tunisia.
He is a co-founder and current board faculty member of the Iyengar Yoga Therapeutics group, a non-profit organisation based in Los Angeles whose mission is to helping people manage diseases and conditions through the therapeutic applications of yoga. Garth serves on the advisory board and is a faculty member of AnuYoga, a non-profit organisation (Tel Aviv), that facilitates the integration of Iyengar Yoga as a therapeutic intervention for patient rehabilitative care in hospitals and the medical field.
He has published Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis, A Practical Guide for People with Multiple Sclerosis and Yoga Teachers, (Singing Dragon Books, London 2020).
In this month’s Episode 7 Part One ‘Iyengar Yoga for (Dis)Abilities’, Garth tells Gyaan about his journey with Multiple Sclerosis and how Iyengar Yoga has helped him keep his condition in remission…
In next month’s Episode 7 Part Two, ‘Garth McLean’s Journey as an Actor’, Garth will talk about his experience in acting and performing. His experience as a student of acting included working with Sanford Meisner in New York. More recently, he has written and performed a one-person show entitled, Looking For Lightning, about his journey which he performed live at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018).

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HN003 Franz Kafka’s ‘Unmusicality’

The German language author Franz Kafka wrote very little about music. In fact, he even claimed in a diary entry on the 13 December 1911 that, ‘The essence of my unmusicalness consists in my inability to enjoy music connectedly, it only now and then has an effect on me, and how seldom it is a musical one…’ Nevertheless, we know never to read a book by its cover. Later in 1912, whilst in Weimar, he noted, ‘Carmen garden concert. Completely under its spell.’ So when someone claims to be unmusical, its not a statement of fact. Like all human beings, we are susceptible to music. Indeed Kafka was an acute observer of feelings and his rare diary entries of opera performances display in no uncertain terms that he did respond strongly to music, dance and singing.

ETTORE BASTIANINI, BARITONE, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1922

ETTORE BASTIANINI
24 September 2022

Today we celebrate the baritone’s baritone, the great Ettore Bastianini, born in Siena, Italy. His voice was first recognised and trained by Fathima and Anselmo Ammanati as a bass. It was when touring Egypt with another great baritone Gino Bechi and the soprano Maria Caniglia in the early 1950s, that one day Gino Bechi leaned over and whispered, ‘You’re really a baritone, you know. I’m a fool to say so as I don’t need more competition, but it’s true.’ As a bass, he had possessed a delightful timbre, but it was limited in volume and in the bass register soft and weak, he had trouble reaching the lowest notes, and, in Rigoletto, relied on choristers to supply the last “Fa” in Sparafucile’s aria.

Well before this, as a bass, he had won the sixth National singing competition at the Teatro Communale in Florence which brought with it an accompanying scholarship. But due to the war, it was a bad time in 1942 for artistic achievments, and he was drafted into the Airforce and unable to claim his prize. In 1945 he made his debut as Colline in La Bohěme at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna.

In 1946 he was able to finally able to take advantage of his scholarship to study with Maestro Flamino and his wife, singer Dina Manucci Contina at the Teatro Communale.

Until 1950 he sang successfully as a bass, but it was after his coach/teacher Luciano Betterini encouraged him to explore his baritone range, that he took time off from the stage to delve into this new voice category. Being very determined, competitive and diligent, it wasn’t long after making his debut as a baritone as Giorgio Germont in Sienna, that he was singing opposite Maria Callas as Enrico Ashton in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatro Communale and by 1953 he was making his Metropolitan debut as Giorgio Germant in La Traviata.

By 1954 he was singing opposite Renata Tebaldi and Giuseppe di Stefano in Eugene Onegin at La Scala.

Recording contracts with Decca ensued leaving opera lovers with a catalogue of some of the most iconic recordings of the post war era with an array of contemporary artists of equal fame, calibre and legend.

Reading of his work load, performances and yo-yo travelling from America to Europe and back again, is a dizzying experience. He ultimately succumbed to throat cancer in 1967 which was first diagnosed in1962. However, he refused to let this prevent him from singing in his last years on the stage, despite undergoing many rounds of radiotherapy.

His esteemed colleagues now have the final word.

‘Mario Del Monaco knew him as a great and dear colleague, the dearest and the best he had in his career: “E, con infinita nostalgia, Ettore Bastianini, una delle piu belle voci di baritono di questa scorcio di secolo, un raro esempio di dizione e di belcantismo espressi con una voce di eccezionale bellezza.” (“One of the most beautiful voices from this part of the century, a rare example of diction and belcantismo expressed with a voice of extraordinary beauty.”)

Carlo Bergonzi remembered him so: “A natural beauty of voice, evenness of timbre, elegance of phrasing and gesture, soundness of diction and expression, a sure technique and, not least, a deep seriousness and professional discipline: these were the fundamental characteristics of Ettore Bastianini, which made him a great baritone – perhaps the last real Verdian baritone .

RICHARD TUCKER, TENOR, AUGUST 15TH, 1913

On this day in 1913, the tenor, Richard Tucker, was born in Brooklyn, New York. His career was intimately linked to the city of his birth. It was at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in a career that spanned over three decades, that he made an unforgettable mark in operatic history.

The esteem of his colleagues was such, that when Tucker suddenly died after collapsing in his hotel room, baritone, Robert Merrill, who was touring with him at the time, said quite simply, ‘He was the greatest tenor in the world,’

Only two other star singers in the company’s 90‐year history—Giovanni Martinelli, the tenor, and Antonio Scotti, the baritone—lasted longer in the cruelly competitive Metropolitan arena, Martinelli for 32 seasons and Scotti for 34.
Mr. Tucker’s operatic career was, in a sense, a felicitous result of his marriage to Sara Perelmuth. Sara was the sister of Jan Peerce, already a well‐known tenor. The Peremuth family did not consider the young salesman a great catch for their daughter, but soon, Richard found himself in a friendly rivalry with his borther‐in‐law. He decided that he too could become a famous singer, and began, taking voice lessons from the Wagnerian tenor Paul Althouse. Althouse, impressed with his student’s determination recalled that, ‘Tucker just came for his lesson, took off his hat, sang, put on his hat again and went’.

He made his debut as Alfredo in La Traviata in the Salmaggi Opera New York in 1943. He received the prestigious invitation to sing Radames in a recorded broadcast with Arturo Toscanini conducting in 1947 and he sang Enzo opposite the much written about debut of Maria Callas in the Verona Arena in La Gioconda.
He later appeared in Covent Garden, Vienna, La Scala and Florence.

Luciano Pavarotti, himself one of the Met’s leading tenors, said from Milan: “Richard Tucker was one of my gods. In my life… he has always been that great voice to use as an inspiration. I, as well as the world, mourn the death of this magnificent tenor.”

The soprano Joan Sutherland and her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge, said in London: “One of the phenomenal voices of this century. It was always more and more amazing how fresh and young his voice sounded. The world of music will miss him very much.”

Richard Tucker was aware that his acting skills may not have matched his vocal ability. When Rudolf Bing arrived at the Met as general manager in 1950, however, Mr. Tucker wryly complained that his voice was no longer considered enough. “Being an opera star,” he said, “isn’t what it used to be. With Mr. Johnson, he wanted you to act, but with Mr. Bing you hafta act.”

Nevertheless, such was the power and beauty of his singing, that he was compared by critics with greats such as Caruso and Mario Lanza. The magnificent voice was well recorded and quoting The Grove Book of Opera Singers, ‘…he had few peers in the projection of Italianate passions, or in fervour, ease, evenness and vocal security.’

His funeral was held on January 10 on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, the only singer ever to be so honoured.
The memory and achievements of Richard Tucker are kept alive by the Richard Tucker Music Foundation.

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