A Trinidadian, Jill Gomez, was nominated for an award at last Wednesday night's 42nd annual Grammy Awards Ceremonies in California.
The nomination was made in Category 88 for the "Best Opera Recording, Award to the Conductor, Album Producer(s) and Principal Soloists." Gomez was one of the principal soloists in Thomas Ades "Powder Her Face," described by Classic CD critic, Andy Hamilton as "a saucy new opera on the Duchess of Argyll."
When the envelope bearing the good news arrived at her home in England, Gomez says "I nearly threw away the Grammy Awards envelope, thinking it was junk mail. What stopped me was they addressed it to me c/o Patrick (her husband) but I still thought it was a bit of marketing."
It took the dramatic soprano quite a few moments "to take on board what they were saying...... first time a recording I'm on has ever been put up for a Grammy! I've had many a British or European prize but never such an international one, the top in the business" wrote Gomez to her sister, Wendy, who lives between Trinidad and England.
Gomez was virtually born in the bush, on a sugar estate in what was then British Guiana, where her father, Albert Gomez, worked. At age three weeks she was brought to Trinidad by her parents where she grew up with her younger sister on Victoria Avenue, attending first Miss Boucaud's private school on Cipriani Boulevard before moving to St Joseph's Convent. At age thirteen the two sisters were sent to St Maur's Convent, a boarding school in Weybridge, Surrey.
Having come from a mother who was a talented actress, both Jill and Wendy found themselves on stage as Peaseblossom and Cobweb when their mother, Wendy Price, played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Botanical Gardens .
It was at St Joseph Convent that Jill met the person who was to have the most important influence on her life, Mother Helen de Verteuil, only five feet tall, but a force to be reckoned with. Not only did Mother Helen make Jill study the piano and join the school choir, but insisted that she enter every possible class in the 1954 Music Festival and positively willed her to win everything, which Jill did.
Wendy's earliest memories of her elder sister are that "Jill wanted to be a ballet dancer, she admired Margot Fonteyn and Beryl Grey, then she started to admire Kathryn Grayson. My mother took her to Mr Northcote, who used to ajudicate the Music Festival, to find out whether it was worth pursuing a singing career and at what age it should be done. He said it was definitely worth pursuing but not until age 16 or 17, as the voice is still sorting itself out before that time, and you can spoil it if you started training too early."
"Jill from that moment onwards wanted to sing. My sister has a stunning voice, and amazing technical mastery and as a result she is used by modern writers to interpret new work. She worked very hard on this recording for which she has been nominated making sure it was spot on."
Jill Gomez may not have won the Grammy Awards on Wednesday night as that category was won by Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress, but says her proud sister Wendy " she can be considered a winner through her very nomination.
"Powder Her Face" composed by Ades at age 24 in 1995 and billed by BBC Radio 3 as 'the opera event of the decade' is a dark, lurid and often blackly comic tale, based around the life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, a "heroine" with whom one has little sympathy. Though none of the characters is especially attractive, Cole Porter celebrated her in his song "You're the Top", and a sensational divorce case in 1963 with a summing-up by the judge which focussed on her sexual peccadilloes, kept the Duchess in the public eye. She was evicted, heavily in debt, from her suite at the Dorchester Hotel, and died in 1993 in a nursing home.
Gomez created the role of the Duchess for Almeida Opera in the world premiere of Powder Her Face, which premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 1995 and has since been produced by Almeida at several venues in the United States, Germany and Australia.
Voted one of the top five new releases by Classic CD in October 1998, Hamilton commented: "It is a virtuoso performance by Jill Gomez as the Duchess." And rated one of the records of the year, The Sunday Telegraph in December '98 stated: "Jill Gomez has done nothing better than her tragi-comic portrayal of the oversexed Duchess."
Gomez, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music in London, last performed in Trinidad at Queen's Hall in 1992, where she was accompanied by fellow Royal Academy student, Lindy Ann Bodden-Ritch.
When she is not travelling the world, Gomez and her husband live in a 400 year old thatched cottage at Highgate in North London, where she retires to recharge her batteries and do a bit of gardening.