A new beginning

Six years, eleven months, two weeks and one day ago, I made my blogging début, babbling about opera – my relatively newfound love – to what I assumed was an audience of five at best, zero at worst.

With time, the venture grew, and I found both a voice and a readership: first in New Zealand, where I'd begun, and in Sydney, where I moved back in 2006. That blog, as at least some of you will already know, goes by the mildly pretentious (hey, I was 19 when I named it) title of Prima la musica, and while regular readers of said blog will know I've neglected it somewhat of late, it nevertheless remains, for the time being, a going concern.

But Limelight, having already let me loose upon its printed pages, has now kindly offered me my own little sliver of its new-and-shiny online presence, too – an offer too providential to refuse. One of the reasons for the aforementioned blog-neglect has been a drastic (positive!) change in my own circumstances. In brief: as of 2011, I've left Sydney for life on the road with the Heldentenor in my life. A big change, as you can imagine, and one full of possibilities for opera fanaticism – which is, after all, what I do best. But it has also shut off a possibility or two; in particular, it means I can't function as a critic any more, either on my own blog or in the publications (New Zealand Opera News and The Opera Critic) for whom I've been writing.

And yet there's still plenty for me to write about – indeed, more than ever, as I discover the joys (and travails!) of this travelling operatic life, and find myself in cities whose classical music and opera calendars are full to the point of indecency. Nor do I intend to lose touch completely with what's happening back in Australia. So it's my hope and plan to blog here about all this and more.

How this new blog and my dear devoted old one will interact and/or differ, I'm not yet entirely sure. I've learnt from experience that blogs tend to shape themselves over time. My feeling right now is that this new blog will tend towards shorter (and perhaps more frequent) posts than have been typical for Prima la musica. Maybe a bit newsier, too. Beyond that, I wouldn't like to predict.

Well. I hope that suffices as an initial manifesto of sorts. I'm writing to you from a hotel room in Salzburg, as it happens – not exactly an inappropriate city to be turning one's thoughts to matters musical. It's a very pretty place, even in the cold and wet, and not nearly as overloaded with Mozart tat as I expected. It's been a quick trip: we arrived on Thursday and return to London (where we'll remain until mid-March) tomorrow afternoon, right after the morning concert which brought us here. Not so quick we haven't managed at least a bit of sight-seeing, however; but that, I think, is worth a post of its own. So, as it's nearly midnight here in Von Trapp-land, I'll bid you a fond Gute Nacht – and a hearty danke schön for helping me to usher this brand new little blog into the world. I think it's going to be fun.

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