On the job of opera prompting (the person who squeezes into a box underneath the stage to give cues), she writes: “When I conducted a group of primary schoolchildren who had never sung with an orchestra before, it felt incredibly like prompting some of the most famous singers in the world.” That process allows for plenty of amusing anecdotes. She offers insights into music-making and from these emerge a theme of harmony: how a group of expert individuals work together to create something brilliant.
Farnham, whose formidable credits include the Royal Opera House and the Royal Ballet, describes just how one conducts in accessible, engaging language. Her book, part memoir and part study of the craft, pins it down. The result is a reminder of motherhood’s tyrannous altruism, both selfless and dictatorial, and of how nature’s changing constants – the moon, sea and seasons – can re-root us even during the hardest emotional storms.īy India Bourke In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor by Alice FarnhamĬonducting, Alice Farnham writes, is an “elusive art”. Her daughters are her main protagonists, but the writing itself, done in stolen candlelit hours over the course of a year, also becomes an act of self-care that enables Giles to nurture her children’s sense of self without losing her own.īattles with illness, finances, bureaucracy and a broken heart all threaten to undo their tight-knit family unit, which seems as fragile as it is bold – but an insistence on making time for sensory, immersive experiences (from sea-swimming to singing) creates tides that pull them repeatedly back together. This sea-swept memoir from the winner of BBC Countryfile magazine’s 2021 New Nature Writer of the Year award documents Giles’ life as a single mother with four young girls: the Mermaid, the Whirlwind, the Caulbearer and the Littlest One. If Little Women had been written from the perspective of Marmee March – and Marmee was undergoing a divorce in the 21st-century Northumberland countryside – then it might have read a lot like Caro Giles’ Twelve Moons. Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky by Caro Giles
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