Dame Felicity Lott (and Elizabeth Mandeno) at Rannoch

I'm just home from a stunning evening of beauty and wit.
Dame Felicity Lott and husband Gabriel Woolf regaled us with a selection of love songs: childish, lyrical, comic, witty and cynical, with a smattering of poems and witticisms in between. For the last song, the trio from the end of  Der Rosenkavalier, Dame Felicity was joined by Sarah Court, beautiful mezzo soprano, and Elizabeth Mandeno, soprano, ravishingly beautiful in white and gold, with voice to more than match, all three singing on the mezzanine above us.

Dame Felicity was as gracious and warm and alive as she was in the film of La Belle Hélène which so captivated me, at Mum's "Greek Odyssey" end of year treat film a year ago - she played the most beautiful woman in the world when pushing 60 and surrounded by deliciously beautiful young parisienne actors, and utterly pulled it off. I was struck then by how thoroughly sexy and beautiful she was, and how she seemed utterly at ease with herself - "bien dans sa peau", as we say in French. Yet throughout the evening (there was a Q&A after the singing) she several times referred to her "complexes" and lack of confidence, and how being chosen by the great conductor Karlos Kleiber (spelt phonetically, sorry, hope it's close to right) to sing an opera gave her confidence - "if I'm good enough for him ..." she thought. Not a trace of a hint of any lack of confidence (or indeed ability - her very-high pianissimos were amazing) in her performance tonight - yet she told me afterwards that she was sick with nerves before going on tonight. It never goes away, huh?

Left me topped up with delight and Art and Song and the sense of a wider world.