A Singer’s Life Pt14

After two articles about famous singers I have worked with, I thought it might be interesting to write about some of the amazing conductors I have known. There is sometimes a theory that a conductor is a self-indulgent figure at the head of an orchestra who would be able to play perfectly well without him/her. While it is true that a smallish chamber orchestra can play quite efficiently using their leader as controller, and listening to each other carefully, there needs to be someone taking artistic decisions, both in tempo and in feeling, to produce truly fine music.

There also is quite a contrast between the directors and the listeners among conductors, which, as a singer, it is necessary to know early on in the process. I shall try to make this clearer as we go along.

You will also note a huge discrepancy in the sex of the conductors I will write about. There are very few women, and none at the highest level. This is symptomatic of society of course, and fortunately is changing quite quickly now. However, writing about my experiences of the last 40 years, female conductors are almost invisible. This was because until the last 25 years or so, orchestras were exclusively made up of men. Indeed, for many years until quite recently, the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra were female-free areas. This obviously made the engagement of women conductors more difficult, as the players would not accept it and indeed behaved appallingly if it were even suggested. Society has changed radically over the last 40 years in all categories of life to overcome millennia of clear bias against women, but actually, for us as singers, there is no problem, as all operas have male and female characters which for several hundred years have seen women as equal partners on stage. Not however at the conductor’s podium!

My first experience of a world class conductor was here in Scotland with the huge personality that was Sir Alexander Gibson. He had co-founded Scottish Opera in 1962 with my old music teacher Richard Telfer and the impresario Peter Hemmings, soon after founding the Scottish National Orchestra, and towered above the early years of the company. He had learned his trade in Salzburg and Siena, had been assistant conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the early 50s and in 1957 took over as Musical Director of Sadler’s Wells in London at the age of 31. When I first met him in 1982 as a young bass at Scottish Opera, his dominance was total. He very cleverly excluded himself from most of the administrative affairs of the company, but always conducted the most important shows.

My first opera was Puccini’s ‘Manon Lescaut’ in which I sang the small but significant part of the Sergeant of Archers. Fortunately, my skills with bow and arrow were not tested, but I had to read out the names of the women condemned to transportation to America from France in a long, complicated ensemble piece. ‘SirAlec’, as everyone called him, was notably kind and helpful to me and put me at my ease. It helped enormously that he was very obviously Scottish (born in Motherwell) and his lack of pretension was refreshing to me, especially having spent the previous few years in the cultural hothouse of London.

Over the next three years, I sang in many productions conducted by Alex, and they were all memorable. His easy manner and lack of pretension disguised a magnificent musical brain, and his interpretations of Wagner, Elgar, Puccini, Beethoven and Sibelius were legendary. His beat however was also legendary as almost non-existent, and he was hard to follow. It took me a while to work out how to deal with this, and several foreign guest singers never learned! Nevertheless, excellent advice from distinguished company stalwarts like Bill McCue, Linda Ormiston, Claire Livingstone and Alan Watt helped me understand his system to a certain extent. On one occasion in Fidelio rehearsals, frustrated at my inability to work out where his beat was, I asked him, trepidatiously, whether he could help by being clearer. It was rather like Oliver Twist asking for ‘more please’, as a silence descended on the room. However, Alex looked up and said “Dinnae worry about my beat, son. You just sing the ****ing thing, and I’ll follow you!” So I did, and all was well. It transpired that SirAlec was a following conductor with singers, provided he agreed with where you were going! It was a revelation, and actually a back-handed compliment to a young singer. Alex is much missed at Scottish Opera and his early death was a disaster for the company, and for opera in Scotland.

Another listening conductor is the present Musical Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Antonio Pappano. I first met Tony, as he is known, at the Monnaie Theatre in Brussels, where he was Music Director from 1992 -2002. He conducted me in a great production of the ‘Marriage of Figaro’, directed by Christof Loy, and with a stunning cast including Soile Isokoski, Leontina Vaduva, Peter Mattei and Lucio Gallo. I sang Doctor Bartolo and was initially slightly overawed by the starry nature of the venture, especially as my ‘audition’ involved flying to Stuttgart to have lunch with Christof and a chat. No singing! Anyway, Tony was helpful and encouraging and made sure I was well prepared for the performances by meticulous rehearsal in advance. That is the trick with listening conductors. The singer knows what he wants beforehand, and therefore is able to sing without watching like a hawk onstage. I noticed this again a couple of years ago when I was at Covent Garden singing one of the Masters in Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’. At one of the stage and orchestra rehearsals, the singer who was singing the major role of Pogner fell ill, and I turned up that day to be told, as I was the understudy, that I should go to the side of the stage where I would find a music stand and sing the whole of Act 1 from there, My understudy would deputise for me and one of the production staff would walk through the role I was covering. It is quite a big part and I had not had any rehearsal with Tony, but it went pretty well, and I managed to cope with the maestro’s technique. Afterwards, he was very sweet and said that he was sorry he could not follow me more, as he was aware that we hadn’t worked together on the role. A very humble reaction from a fine conductor.

My final example of a listening (or following) conductor was the splendid Swiss, Armin Jordan. His son Philippe has become quite a famous conductor in his own right, but this was with the original. I was engaged to sing in ‘Manon Lescaut’ again, although this time as the main bass character Geronte di Ravoir, firstly in Nancy in Lorraine and then at the Grand Theatre, Geneva. By this time, Monsieur Jordan was in his 70s and had obviously lived life to the full, judging by the brandy fumes and cigarette smoke coming from his dressing room. Our first musical rehearsal with him in Nancy was memorable. He may have spoken English, but I never heard him use it and his French was with the wonderful Suisse Romande accent of the Geneva area, which was also refreshingly slow! He stood up slowly in front of the cast and said “Messieurs, Dames. Cet opera est tres difficile mais avec moi, tout est clair. Vous chantez, et je vous suis. Merci, en avant!” In other words, much the same as SirAlec, that we would do the singing and he would make sure the orchestra were with us. It is simple and perfect, but it needs a fabulous amount of skill on the conductor’s part to make it work, and it also needs a personality strong enough to seem not to be in charge!

The other sort of conductor is the directing maestro. This requires similar expertise, but a different temperament and technique. It does not need a bullying personality, although it can lead to that in less gifted men, but it does require skill with the baton and utter command of the tempi and complexities of the music.

The finest examples of this style with whom I have worked are Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Colin Davis. I first met Simon at Scottish Opera, when he was conducting Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’, a notoriously tricky ‘modern’ opera. I was understudying Willard White as the Doctor and was terrified at the thought of singing this difficult music. Fortunately, Willard is rarely ill, and I didn’t have to go on, and, living in Glasgow at the time, Fran and I were able to socialise with Simon and his then wife, who was also singing the main soprano role in the opera. Since I was new to the business, it seemed perfectly natural to lounge in the jacuzzi at the Holiday Inn with one of the world’s great conductors and I hope it helped me get an engagement several years later at the Festival Hall in London singing in Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ with Simon, one of my favourite concerts. Not long afterwards, I found myself singing in Schoenberg’s ‘Gurrelieder’ in Symphony Hall, Birmingham with Simon and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, alongside my good friend Ian Caley and my fellow student from the Schwarzkopf Masterclasses, Christine Cairns. It was also one of the final performances of the great Rita Hunter and John Mitchison, so I was doubly lucky. Simon is renowned now as a conductor, having headed the Berlin Philharmonic and now taking over the London Symphony Orchestra, and it was apparent from an early age that he was destined for greatness. Not only does he possess a fabulous stick technique that makes him easy to follow, but he also has an innate ability to mould the sound of an orchestra and to direct his singers where he wants them to go. He does not suffer fools gladly, but if you are well prepared, he is lovely to sing with.

The paragon of stick technique I have worked with was the great Colin Davis. I wrote about Colin in Part 10 of this series but didn’t mention his virtuosic conducting. It was as if his baton were an extension of his arm, and he could seemingly do anything with that small stick. Actually, he used quite a long baton and I am sure that helped his control. He was a famous interpreter of the music of Hector Berlioz, and the mercurial quality of that composer seemed to fit his abilities to a T. I remember not long after I had sung the Ghost of Hector in ‘Les Troyens’ with him the first time in the Barbican in London, I tuned into a broadcast from the Met in New York of the same work, conducted by an illustrious American maestro. It sounded like Rossini or Donizetti – there was not a trace of that wonderful elan that Colin could conjure up in Berlioz. I was lucky to have known him.

In the next article, I shall write about some of the masters of Baroque music I have worked with!