When singer Ali McGregor was newly graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music, she landed her first professional role in a production of The Silver Lake in the East End of London.
She couldn’t have known it then, but the 1998 reopening of Wilton’s Music Hall with The Silver Lake – an English-language adaptation of Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee – uncannily pointed to the shape of her future career.
John Wilton opened his music hall in 1850 to offer East Enders the quality and variety of entertainment on show in the more genteel West End. McGregor learned that singers from Covent Garden, after the curtain came down at the opera, would hoof it to the East End and keep the party going.
‘They’d take off their outer clothes and – in their corsets and petticoats – would go to the East End and sing in the music halls,’ she says. ‘I just thought that was fabulous.’
Gadding about London in one’s underwear may or may not help one’s career prospects these days. But McGregor loves the story about those singers of yesteryear because it shows how versatile an artist often must be if she is to make a living.
From starting out as a young artist with Opera Australia, McGregor has put together a career as an opera singer, cabaret chanteuse, festival director and more – including a stunning turn as the ‘Peruvian songbird’, Yma Sumac, in which she deploys her otherworldly ‘whistle tone’.
This May she makes her debut with Musica Viva Australia in a slightly unexpected pairing with the Signum Saxophone Quartet.
‘No, a saxophone quartet was not on my bingo card,’ she says.
‘But the Signum Saxophone Quartet belong to that world I love – that in-between world of classical and jazz, music theatre and popular music. So it was a pretty easy yes for me.’
The concert makes a tour of music from the 1920s to the 1940s, taking in European art music, folk song, Broadway and Hollywood, while circling around the notion of home.
It also honours artists who fled persecution in Europe and made new lives in the US, including Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Hanns Eisler, whose Hollywood Songbook gives the concert its title. The arrangements for saxophone quartet were made especially for this concert by Izidor Leitinger.
Weill is represented by numbers from two of his Broadway musicals – Lady in the Dark, and One Touch of Venus – which McGregor regards as being unjustly neglected.
‘After doing Der Silbersee in London, I started exploring Kurt Weill’s musicals,’ she says. ‘They are some of the best American musicals from that golden age – they’re extraordinary – but I don’t feel they have the love and longevity of other musicals from that era. I think they were maybe too sophisticated in the writing, and maybe they did sit between genres a little bit.’
One of McGregor’s selections is the traditional song ‘I’m a Poor Wayfaring Stranger’. On her weekends and holidays, McGregor would work at the boutique hotel her parents ran in Melbourne’s South Yarra. The music on the in-house sound system included an album with this song – played on a zither or autoharp, and without the words.
‘I would be sitting in the hotel, working late at night, and that music would be playing,’ she says. ‘I sort of knew instinctively that it’s a song about searching for home, even though I hadn’t heard the lyrics for it…
‘It just has a sense of a timeless, cultureless song, and has that sense of looking for home. I want it to have this universal feeling of searching for home.’
McGregor is married to comedian Adam Hills, with whom she has two children. Where does she call home?
‘Melbourne is very much home for me, but I’ve had a lot of different homes,’ she says.
‘London has become a secondary home for us, and we now have a place at the beach, on the Bellarine Peninsula. My parents had a place there when I was growing up – so that feels like home to me as well.’
McGregor’s outing with the Signum Saxophone Quartet also takes in music by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen – composer of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ with lyricist Yip Harburg. McGregor has sung the Judy Garland standard at funerals and other places – but how to bring freshness of voice to such a well-loved song?
‘It’s a song about hope, about there being a brighter place than now,’ she says. ‘We never know what’s over the rainbow, we can only hope that there are bluebirds – because without hope, why even go on?
‘When I do popular songs, I strip them back and try to present them in a new way – because I love the nostalgia hit you get when you recognise what song it is. But I also love it when people can listen to it afresh. And it’s hard with a song as well-known as that.’
McGregor has learned across her career that versatility and a preparedness to try new things is stimulating as an artist and a satisfying way to make a living. She loves mixing up artistic genres: in her show Opera Burlesque she teamed up with singers Dimity Shepherd and Antoinette Halloran; her ‘opera-cabaret’ Lorelei was presented by Victorian Opera and Opera Queensland. She has been artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and formed a collective, FLUXUS, to develop new work for the opera stage. Most recently, she has brought back her Late-Nite Variety-Nite Night for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Her collaboration with Signum Saxophone Quartet in Hollywood Songbook is but the latest evolution of her artistry and adventurous spirit.
‘I’ve always had a can-do attitude,’ she says. ‘When work wasn’t there, I thought, “I’ll make my own work” – and that was the best thing that ever happened for me.
‘As any artist in Australia will know, it’s rare to have a job handed to you – you have to go out there and find work, and make work for yourself. It was a gift in disguise.’