Welcome to the blog!

One may as well begin with some autobiography...

I wasn't brought up on opera or classical music; I was a Motown child. But I remember classical music being played as I went in to school assemblies and from there learnt the names of Beethoven, Vivaldi and Holst.

I always liked the sound that an orchestra made and thought I might be responsive to opera. But the problem was always where to start. Who was who and what was what? Hopefully, this blog will help answer some of those questions for you.

The big breakthrough came in 1990, when The Three Tenors (Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti) gave a concert in Rome. From the concert, two arias by Puccini from his opera Tosca stood out. There was the way in. I received a video of Tosca as a Christmas present, then moved on to other Puccini operas, borrowing recordings from the library and reading the inlays for further information and guidance.