Val says goodbye to her 'baby'

Some "baby," as Val Baulard describes the Langcliffe Singers, a group she founded in one of the smallest villages in the Yorkshire Dales and which spread like wildfire to suck in the musically inclined from the whole of Craven.

And now, Val has waved goodbye to her grown infant but, like any doting mother, she was fighting back the tears when I met her. "I have handed over my baby," she sniffed. "I am sure it will do well - but obviously, I am going to miss it for a very long time."

The choir, and its regular partner, Settle Orchestra, conducted by Val's husband, is one of those curious Craven phenomena that stun offcumdens in their ambition and breadth.

I admit that I do not know the exact population of Langcliffe, but I would bet that it is not 130, the number of singers and musicians Val and her husband Howard Rogerson gathered together to stage Mozart's Magic Flute, my favourite opera.

It's the sort of production that one would expect to see at Covent Garden or La Scala in Milan. Yet when programmes like it were organised by Val, her main problem was to find a building big enough.

"When you've got 130 performers, you've got to have a very big place - or the audience is going to be very, very small," she chuckled. "Here in Craven, we are limited to Settle High School, the Giggleswick School chapel or Christ Church in Skipton.

"These are very nice venues - but it would be lovely to have a really big community centre where we could really let ourselves go." The mind boggles. One wonders if the Albert Hall would have been big enough.

Musicians, like actors (and even some journalists, I suppose) have reputations for leading somewhat Bohemian lives. With a background like hers, Val Baulard could barely escape such a fate.

Her name is French because her Huguenot grandfather fled from French persecution of Protestants and, somewhat bizarrely, set up a prosperous garage business in the North East - "I'm a Geordie by birth," says Val.

Her parents' marriage was none-too-happy and, as an eight-year-old girl, Val found herself moved from the big city to a lonely farmhouse with no electricity or running water on the fells near Garsdale.

It was an attempt by her parents to patch up their relationship, but it failed. Her mother moved as a lone-parent to Kendal where Val won a scholarship to the local high school. There, a talented music teacher recognised her beautiful contralto voice and set her on the first rung of what was to be a distinguished career.

She developed two passions - singing and sport - and went off to teacher training college in Derby to be a PE teacher. Unhappily - or happily as it turned out - her diminutive size prevented her from becoming a full-time PE instructor - "You had to be 5ft 3ins to do that - and I didn't reach the tape."

She had to learn two disciplines, so she chose PE and music, and ended up teaching in very rough London schools and singing as a hobby until she came to the attention of a world-famous voice trainer, Helene Isepp, who numbered among her pupils divas like Janet Baker.

"Helene said I was worth training, but I would have to give up my part-time PE teaching," Val recalls from her home in Giggleswick.

"Shouting at girls on a hockey pitch on a wet, cold winter's day is not exactly what would call good voice training," she laughs. "But Helene's fees were very expensive and I said I could not afford her if I gave up teaching. So she taught me for free."

That was the magic entre into the world of classical music. She was to appear in 13 countries and leading venues like Glyndebourne, singing with just a piano accompanist or as the contralto soloist with large choirs performing oratories by Handel, Mozart and Verdi.

In 10 years "on the road" she also met clarinettist Howard Rogerson and that, for the Dales at least, was another stroke of luck. Howard was one of the founder members of Opera North and he moved to Leeds in 1979.

He persuaded Val to join him and, for a while, they both had houses in the city. When they married in 1980, they sold one of them and, with the money, they bought a weekend cottage in Langcliffe.

"I have always like teaching," says Val. "I suppose Howard and I cut a pretty strange figure as opera performers, but some of the local women got interested.

"So we started the Langcliffe Singers with 10 ladies and a boy as a sort of weekend get-together. It was for fun more than anything else. But I have always found that if you can teach people the meaning behind music - in a light-hearted, fun sort of way - they come to love it even more.

"That must work, I suppose, because we grew to have some 80 members who came to sing with us from all over the Dales."

Val will not discuss the huge contribution she and husband Howard have made to music in Craven - "I did it to enjoy myself, not to make a contribution." But the Langcliffe Singers live on under the new leadership of Tricia Rees-Jones and very welcome she is too.

I usually do my best to avoid banal clichs but here is one I just cannot resist because it fits like a glove: the hills really are alive to the sound of music, thanks to Val Baulard.