A Singer’s Life Pt33

The main reason I started writing these memoirs in March 2020 was the lockdown, imposed, correctly in my view, by the Government in the wake of the initial frightening advent of the Coronavirus, Covid-19, in Britain. The purpose of the Edinburgh Music Review, as founded by Hugh Kerr, was to be a medium for reviewing and featuring Scottish live performances in the absence of serious coverage by the mainstream newspapers. I myself, towards the end of a career spanning four decades, was finding more time at home and had started to review a few concerts for EMR. Lockdown brought a dramatic end to all live music, and now, writing in August 2020, I find myself using my spare time to continue looking back at my career and looking forward to the future. 

In the continuing absence of live music, I have been working on the release of a CD I recorded with Jan Waterfield in February, just before lockdown. I had heard of the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson over the years but had only known of his piano music. A series of fortuitous events, stimulated by an exhibition in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery of portraits by the excellent Victoria Crowe, led me to visit Ronald’s widow Marjorie in West Linton, south of Edinburgh. Her husband had sadly died in 2015, and I never met him, but she explained that he had written literally hundreds of songs, most of which were unknown to the general public. She gave me several books of songs, and I took them home for a look. As usual with songs, most had been written for higher voices than my own, but I discovered one cycle that had been written back in the 70s for my old mentor at Scottish Opera, Bill McCue (see previous articles), a setting of three poems by Hugh MacDiarmid from his early ‘Hymns to Lenin’. I found these tremendously exciting, art songs written in MacDiarmid’s special ‘synthetic Scots’ language, a mixture of multiple local dialects, words found in old dictionaries and invented words of his own. I sang them at the Portrait Gallery (their Scottish premiere) in 2018 with Jan, thanks to the support of Julie Lawson, senior Curator at the Gallery, and the success of that concert made me look for some more songs. I stumbled upon a wonderful cycle of songs to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, written by Ronald in the 70s, ‘Hills of Home’, which had been performed once by the baritone Ronald Morrison in Edinburgh, and never heard of since. I got them transposed down a tone to suit my voice, and Jan and I performed them in November 2019 along with the MacDiarmid settings, again in the Portrait Gallery.  

At this time, I determined that these fantastic songs should be heard by a wider public and decided to record them. I knew that an old university friend, Neil Price, was the husband of the Reverend Andrea Price, Minister of St Michael’s Church, Slateford, in Edinburgh, and that this could be a perfect venue to record the songs. It is a large Victorian church with a new piano and a lovely acoustic, and so, early in 2020, we adjourned there with my fantastic and well-respected sound engineer, Peter Haigh, proprietor of Pier House Studios in Edinburgh, and a veteran of many of my solo recitals in the Edinburgh Festival over the years, and proceeded to record the two Ronald Stevenson cycles, plus three beautiful songs by the mid-20th Century Scottish composer, Francis George Scott. I had sung a few Scott songs over the years but was delighted to find that he was a much more influential figure than I had thought. He had taught the young Christopher Grieve English at Langholm School in the Scottish Borders and discovered later in life that this schoolboy had developed into the famous poet with the pen name of Hugh MacDiarmid. Between them, Scott and MacDiarmid created many very fine songs and soon, Ronald and Marjorie Stevenson became friends of the poet too. It seemed appropriate that I include some Scott songs on my disc, and I chose two MacDiarmid settings (Reid E’en’ – a tuneful song describing the night once a year when, in legend, deer mysteriously mated, and ‘The Eemis Stane’, a magical sotto voce evocation, imagining the world as a wobbly standing stone) and a deeply nostalgic and evocative song about the retirement of a fisherman, probably in the Western Isles of Scotland, ‘The Old Fisherman’, set to a poem by George Campbell Hay. 

Sensing that the Coronavirus was about to cause world-wide disruption to most people’s lives, it seemed clear to me that, although there would be no time to record any more music, I didn’t have enough music to justify making a CD. What to do? I had performed the two Ronald Stevenson cycles in 2019 at the Portrait Gallery as part of a concert celebrating the 173rd Anniversary of the birth of R L Stevenson, and had included my transposed version of Ralph Vaughan Williams cycle ‘Songs of Travel’, written 10 years after RLS’s death, and using poetry he had written in Samoa recalling his youth and childhood in Edinburgh. This transposition had been made for me when I appeared at the Bamboo Organ Festival in the Philippines (see previous article), and I had been singing it for over 30 years in various concerts. I remembered that Peter Haigh had made an excellent recording of this cycle when I sang with the pianist Alan Jacques in the Canongate Kirk in  the Edinburgh Festival in 2003, and so we found the original master and added it to the 2020 recordings with Jan to make an entirely satisfactory 45 minute CD, which I have called ‘Songs of Stevenson’ and which is released on August 25th 2020 by Birnam CD, on my label BBS Records. It is available online by logging on to the Birnam CD website or going through Amazon UK, and I am immensely proud of it. My son-in-law, Sam Court, has created the design, my dear friend David Moncur has provided the CD notes, and the whole process has taught me how complicated it is to create just one CD, involving royalties, copyright, licenses and goodness knows what else. 

This is my first solo disc, although throughout my career, recording has played a large role. While still at Guildhall, I recorded Schubert’s great cycle ‘Winterreise’ with Jeremy Sams, a contemporary at college, who was on the accompanists’ course, and whose father was the eminent musicologist, Eric Sams. Between us we gave many concerts in the early 1980s. Jeremy is now world famous as a translator of operas and songs, as well as a most distinguished stage director (see previous article), but then we were just two young musicians who loved performing song recitals. We did Lieder recitals and French and Russian song concerts, and frequently found ourselves on BBC Radio 3, recording in Broadcasting House in Central London. When I was at Scottish Opera (see previous articles!), I was often asked to record song programmes -  I sang a group of German Lieder based on Scottish themes or characters, a Brahms recital, a Russian recital and a concert of German Lieder translated into English by a very keen fellow who was desperate to get his translations on radio. Little did we think that translating would become Jeremy’s major career, or we would have used his versions, sadly then still to be written! 

I continued to be involved in major BBC recording projects over the years, appearing at the BBC Proms a few times, and many concerts were recorded by European broadcasting companies. There were recordings of baroque music by Deutschland Radio Berlin, in Halle and Schloss Reinsberg, near Berlin, and many of my operas in France and Belgium were recorded and televised, although none of these were commercially released, and I was recorded several times with the Hilliard Ensemble, most notably by Radio 3 in King’s College, Cambridge, singing Christus in Arvo Pärt’s ‘Passio’. 

My first major commercial recording was of Monteverdi’s ‘Coronation of Poppea’ with Sir Richard Hickox, the beginning of a long association only ended by his tragic and untimely death. We also recorded Vaughan Williams’ Falstaff opera ‘Sir John in Love’ with its beautiful and deeply evocative ‘Greensleeves’ and I thoroughly enjoyed working with Richard whose almost boyish enthusiasm for the music was remarkable. I have mentioned already how I met the wonderful Trevor Pinnock, and I was lucky enough to make two major recordings with him on the DG Archiv label – Purcell’s ‘King Arthur’, ‘Dioclesian’ and ‘Timon of Athens’ by the same composer. I have a recording of Handel’s ‘Acis and Galatea’ recorded with Trevor and the English Concert from a German radio transmission from Halle. 

Also, with DG Archiv, I recorded Handel’s ‘Messiah’ with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre and with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort on Linn Records, I have recorded “St Matthew Passion” by Bach. 

From the BBC Proms, a CD was made of Ethel Smythe’s opera ‘The Wreckers’ where I appear for the only time with my teacher and mentor Tony Roden, and my performance as the Priest in Janacek’s opera ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ from the Bregenz Festival in Austria was made into a CD by Austrian Radio. In Halle, we made a studio CD of our cast in Handel’s ‘Tolomeo’ conducted by Howard Arman, which is rather excellent, with Axel Kohler, Jennifer Lane, Linda Perillo, Romelia Lichtenstein and myself performing extraordinary feats of coloratura, which are certainly beyond me now! 

In the early 90s, I was able to sing Theseus in Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO. We gave two concerts in the Barbican in London, and then recorded it in the same venue for Philips, to general acclaim. Some of Britain’s finest singers took part, including Gwynne Howell, Robert Lloyd, Ian Bostridge, John Mark Ainslie and Hilary Summers, and I was thrilled to be part of what proved to be quite a historic recording. 

My very first serious record was in fact just that, a record – made of vinyl. In the early 80s, and right on the cusp of the Compact Disc’s arrival on the world scene, the Guildhall School of Music made a record to celebrate the history of the City of London. Past and present students of the Guildhall assembled in the Barbican to record the original version of Vaughan Williams’ cantata ‘Serenade to Music’ to Shakespeare’s words from ‘A Merchant of Venice’, using 16 solo voices. Jill Gomez, Benjamin Luxon, Ian Partridge, Patricia Rozario, myself and many other excellent singers made a lovely recording of this glorious work, which I had first sung while still at school at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. Sadly, it was never made into a CD, but I still play the record on my record player and it still sounds splendid! 

Writing earlier about Jeremy Sams brought to mind a concert we gave in the early 80s. In those days, and it may still exist, there was a major singing competition organised by the Royal Overseas League. The main judge and figurehead of this competition was the legendary Dame Eva Turner, a protégée of Toscanini at La Scala, who had been at the premiere of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ and who later that same year sang the title role for the first time, and was judged by many to be the supreme interpreter of the ‘Ice Queen’. By this time, she was in her 90s, a tiny pocket battleship of a woman, who spoke English as if she were Italian but who had actually been born in Manchester. She also had been assigned the main soprano part in the original performance of ‘Serenade to Music’! Sadly, I was not awarded the first prize (that went to the mezzo Jean Rigby), but as a consolation (as well as a decent cheque), I was given a recital in a lovely old church in Holborn, London. This was obviously long before social media and instant publicity, so Jeremy and I turned up for this recital in front of a tiny audience. However, it was some audience. Along with my wife, Fran and a man and a guide dog, there was Eric Sams, the famous musicologist, Rodney Milnes (then the Editor of Opera Magazine and a Times critic) and Dame Eva Turner, the greatest Turandot of all time! 

I hope very much to follow up ‘Songs of Stevenson’ with a second CD next year, and plans are afoot to include some of Scotland’s finest singers on it. Watch this space. Meanwhile, please feel free to get in touch with Birnam CD in Dunkeld or Amazon UK to buy the present disc. I hope you like it.