A Singer’s life Pt10
When Fran and I moved to London in 1978, we needed somewhere to live. We stayed with friends for the first week, and then found a boarding house in Streatham Hill in South London. We had recently got engaged and pitched up at the address we had found only to find that the Irish landlady was on holiday. The nice assistant said we were very welcome to move in, and we could finalise details on Mrs O’ Flaherty’s return. We transferred our meagre possessions and started our new careers. Fran was working in the City with an accounting firm and I was starting at the Guildhall School of Music, newly re-established in the half-completed Barbican. When I say half completed, I mean that they were still building the huge complex at the time. There was no Concert Hall and no Theatre, but lots of luxury skyscrapers, a music college and a private girls’ school, built next to the ruined and bombed area beside the old London Wall. Walkways were on various levels, and often would simply peter out into a brick wall, resulting in a return walk to one’s original starting point. Since there were no mobile phones, people were often late for meetings or rehearsals, lost in this modern maze!
When Mrs O’Shaughnessy (I’m using generic Irish names here, because I can’t remember the real one!) returned from the Emerald Isle, she sternly said right away; “Well, you’ll be married then?” to which we replied that we were engaged and planned to marry the next year. “You’ll have to leave then”, we were told and that was the end of that. Cue astonishment of enlightened Scottish couple! One has to remember that this was still in or very near the time when landladies put notices on properties saying “No blacks, tinkers or dogs”. We had to find somewhere else, and duly ended up in an attic room belonging to a very nice Indian family in Wimbledon. Coming home from the City every day, climbing the many stairs to our garret past the enticing aromas of curry, and then staring at our tiny cooker with one ring and no oven, we realised that the streets of London were not in any way paved with gold!
A few weeks later, a chance conversation with one of my fellow students at Guildhall, a smart Oxford graduate tenor, led to his invitation to join him in his jolly commune in Battersea, where a rich schoolfriend was converting a beautiful Victorian house a stone’s throw from Battersea Park. As the conversion proceeded, more rooms became available, and John told us that a nice airy room on the second floor at the corner of the house was up for grabs. Since it was still a partial construction site, and rather dusty, the rent was minimal, and so we moved into what now must be a multi-million-pound luxury pad!
The reason I have rambled on here about the early days is to show how our lives changed beyond measure after relocating from 1970s mono-cultural Scotland to the rapidly developing metropolitan entity that London was changing into. It was possible, however, to live reasonably well there at that time. Restaurants were sprouting up everywhere and looking for customers beyond the traditional upper classes. We went to the first ever Pizza Express, established in an old dairy near the British Museum and found lots of quirky places in Battersea and across the river in Chelsea. In those days, Battersea was known by its newer, posher inhabitants as South Chelsea, and we often popped over to the real thing, to such exciting places as Asterix (a Creperie) and the Bistro Vino in South Kensington. In Battersea itself, we often went to a marvellous place called Frogs’ Legs which had no menu but a couple of drama students who reeled off what was available with the proviso that they would say it only once! You were never quite sure what you were going to eat, but it was always good!
Cultural life was unbelievable. The South Bank was a powerhouse, and concerts in the Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls were many and various. We saw scores of wonderful concerts there, with the best artists and orchestras in the world. Having been used to a few concerts with the Scottish National Orchestra and the three-week extravaganza of the Edinburgh Festival as the summit of our cultural experiences, this was like Utopia. I remember a series of Beethoven symphonies with the LSO which was mind-boggling, and Bruckner and Mahler performances of overwhelming excellence. One standout was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with Jessye Norman and Jon Vickers, conducted by Colin Davis. Spell-binding!
During this period, Colin Davis was the Musical Director at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and what an era that was! It was expensive to buy seats there, even then, but you could always get a seat in the Upper Slips, right under the roof for less than £5. They even had spaces to stand and follow a music score with a stand and a little light. It was perfect for impecunious students like us. The nearer to the proscenium arch you sat, the less you saw, but the sound was always wonderful and what singers we heard!
Tristan and Isolde with Jon Vickers and Berit Lindholm, Lohengrin with Rene Kollo, La Sonnambula with Joan Sutherland and Alfredo Kraus, Don Carlo with Boris Christoff, Peter Grimes with Vickers, Billy Budd with Tom Allen, Richard Lewis and Geraint Evans, Otello with Domingo and Margaret Price, Don Pasquale with Evans and Allen, and Parsifal with, I think, Robert Lloyd as Gurnemanz . As a young fledgling bass, it was an enormous privilege to hear the wonderful British basses Gwynne Howell, Robert Lloyd and a young John Tomlinson, as well as the fabulous Boris Christoff, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Kurt Moll and Martti Talvela.
Little did I know that only a couple of decades later, I would be able to sing in that marvellous theatre myself. I made my debut in the role of Luther in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, with Rolando Villazon as Hoffmann and Willard White as the baddies, with Richard Hickox conducting. Richard was a great supporter of British music and singers and championed me for many years, for which I was most grateful. His early death was a tragedy for his family and friends, and British music in general. After this debut, I was often engaged as an understudy at Covent Garden, a job I was not interested in doing elsewhere, but was happy to accept there, particularly as it coincided with the later phase of my career. It pays well, you are involved at the highest level, you are treated in exactly the same way as the big stars and you work in the best environment in the world. I have since then managed to sing the role of Simone in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Folz in Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nürenberg and have enjoyed every minute of it.
In addition, I was able to work myself with Colin Davis in the 90s, by which time he had become Sir Colin. He was the most marvellous conductor and I was enormously lucky to be engaged by him for a few years. I first met him when I was cast as the Ghost of Hector in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, in a concert performance with the LSO. This is a small but crucial role in the first part of the opera, when Hector’s Ghost appears to Aeneas to warn him to get away to Italy as soon as possible. Colin was a great champion of Berlioz and his first recording of the Trojans still stands as the recommended recording. I was delighted to appear with two of those starry basses of my youth in Gwynne Howell (who by this time I had got to know quite well) and Robert Lloyd, and we all worked together again a couple of years later when I sang Theseus in a concert and Philips recording of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My last appearance with Sir Colin was in the world famous La Scala, Milan where I again sang the Ghost of Hector (or as it said in the programme, Lo Spettro di Ettore). Bizarrely, we were both making our debuts at La Scala, Colin at 70 and me at 40!
The only other places I have worked as an understudy, also in my 50s and 60s, were in the United States. I spent a fantastic summer in Seattle, understudying roles in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and twice was on the Roster at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, understudying the roles of La Roche in Strauss’ Capriccio and Baron Ochs in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, enormous roles both. I often remind my friends that I have yet to make my debut in the USA but have been paid thousands of dollars NOT to sing in the USA! Thankfully, Canada has been more generous, allowing me to appear on stages in Ottawa and Victoria. Indeed it was on Vancouver Island with Pacific Opera Victoria that I sang La Roche in Capriccio, with the gorgeous Erin Wall as the Countess. A representative of the Met in New York came to hear Erin and it was my good fortune that they liked my La Roche as well, and instantly booked me to understudy the role at the Lincoln Center. Having done well in Capriccio, the lovely Timothy Vernon, MD of POV invited me back to sing Verdi’s Falstaff and Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It all seems a long way from the Upper Slips at Covent Garden in the late 70s and early 80s.
