A Singer’s Life Pt15

My Baroque Period

All singers have periods in their careers when either work drops off or you change direction.  I have had two experiences of this phenomenon, once in the mid-90s when, after multiple roles at ENO in London, the wind changed, and I started to sing almost exclusively abroad. The other occurred when, after a short hiatus between Scottish Opera and freelance singing in London, I suddenly became part of the extraordinary explosion of baroque music all over Europe. 

I had discovered authentic performance of this music (roughly late 16th Century to mid-18th Century) when a student at St Andrews University in Scotland. The University is the third oldest in the UK, having been founded in 1413, and is obviously steeped in history. With its ruined cathedral, ruined castle, and old mediaeval streets, it was the perfect place to reflect on the music of the past. Exactly at this time, mainly in England, but also across Europe, musicians and musicologists began to strip away the layers of heavy Romanticism which had started in the 19th Century, and we saw performances of baroque music with enormous choirs, heavy string vibrato and powerful wind instruments. Pioneers like David Munro, Trevor Pinnock, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and John Eliot Gardiner had discovered that this finely crafted music was wallowing in over-lush orchestration and operatic voices. They pared it down to its essentials, examined old instruments and manuscripts and found that gut strings, unvalved brass instruments and, most important, limited vibrato (the name given to a rapid, slight variation in pitch in singing and playing, giving a richer, more mellow sound) were used in this period, and produced a cleaner and brighter sound. It transformed performance practice and there began an extraordinary period of authentic instrument making and player training, resulting in a myriad of new recordings and the emergence of a new breed of singer. 

I had been stimulated early on by some of these recordings and was further excited by a performance at the Edinburgh Festival in the early 70s in St Mary’s Cathedral of Cavalieri’s ‘Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo’, widely acknowledged as one of the first known ‘operas’. However, even as late as 1984, we were still singing mainstream baroque opera as if the new movement had never occurred. I remember a series of performances of Cavalli’s ‘L’Egisto’ at Scottish Opera in a beautiful, but unbelievably lush orchestration by Raymond Leppard. Much of the impetus for the new style, particularly in singing, came from the English cathedral tradition and the great chapels of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. I assumed it did not apply to me! Indeed, after the amazing experience of working with Galina Vishnevskaya at Aldeburgh (see Part 13), I imagined I was going to be the new British wunderkind, singing Russian music all over the world. Indeed, in a review of a concert of music by Mussorgsky I gave in the Wigmore Hall in the late 80s, the critic announced that I was to be the next British Boris Godunov! Unfortunately for me, in 1989, the Iron Curtain was fully lowered, and the theatres and concert halls of Western Europe were suddenly filled by real Russians, singing for a fraction of the fees that we could command. End of dream! 

However, as one door closes, another opens. I had taken part in a production and recording with Richard Hickox in London of Monteverdi’s fabulous opera ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’ (written in 1642), using a new edition stripped of all romantic frippery and focusing on the singing. It was marvellous and starred great singers like Arleen Auger, Della Jones, James Bowman and Gregory Reinhart. I sang various small parts, including a virtuosic, florid Mercury, and came to the attention of one or two agents and promoters. I joined Magenta Music, at that time the major specialist agency for Baroque music, and got a couple of gigs, but had no idea what was coming. During a tour of Wagner’s Ring in 1991, singing Fafner and Hagen, seriously un-baroque music, I received a call from Magenta, asking me to go to Trevor Pinnock’s house in north London. I had been singing Wagner the night before in the north of England, and when I arrived, somewhat breathless, at Trevor’s place, I had to apologise that I had just driven 300 miles and had been singing Wagner, but that I would have a go at singing him some Handel. He seemed pleased and said he would be in touch, and I wandered home assuming that that would be the end of my baroque experiment. Several weeks passed, and I gave it no more thought, especially as I was singing Monterone in the famous Jonathan Miller ‘Rigoletto’ at ENO. However, my agent rang me up, to say that Trevor was delighted with my singing and wanted me to sing the bass solos in performances and a Deutsche Gramophon recording of Purcell’s “King Arthur” and sing the role of Polyphemus in Handel’s ‘Acis and Galatea’ in the prestigious Salzburg Festival. Gosh!! 

I discovered subsequently that Trevor liked using heavier voices for his bass singers, and that he would be recording ‘Acis’ later that year with John Tomlinson (yes, him again), but that John would be unavailable for Salzburg as he was singing Wotan in Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival. Enter BBS. 

Salzburg was amazing, Trevor and the English Concert were unbelievable and singing with Barbara Bonney (a serious superstar) was a delight. Imagine my total joy to find that the young Scottish tenor Jamie MacDougall was engaged both to sing Acis and to be one of the tenors in ‘King Arthur’. Hail Caledonia indeed! The Purcell recording was a great success, and led on to appearances at the BBC Proms, tours to Berlin and Buenos Aires and further DG recordings and tours to Barcelona, Halle and Helsinki. Perhaps it was Fate that I had been singing Wagner just before I auditioned for Trevor. As I have said before, he is one of the finest musicians I have ever been privileged to work with – a wonderful harpsichordist and director, and a nice man. He took me (and Jamie) to Ottawa when he was director of the National Arts Centre there, where I sang Polyphemus again and the arias in Bach St Matthew Passion, and so also began my love affair with Canada and Canadian singers. One of the joys of working with Trevor was that he often engaged the outstanding baroque soprano Nancy Argenta, and we sang in many performances together over the years. In my opinion, and this is purely subjective, I know, Nancy is the finest baroque soprano ever, and I have been lucky to be her friend and colleague. She stopped singing and retired to teach in Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island, where we met up again when I sang with Pacific Opera Victoria. Her partner Ingrid and she both teach at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and our world came full circle this year as I was able to coach one of Ingrid’s pupils in February at St Andrews University where I am Honorary Professor of Singing. One of my last concerts with Trevor was also with Nancy and the excellent mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers, singing two outstanding performances of Bach’s B Minor Mass in Cremona and Turin. 

As a result of all this activity with Trevor, I became known on the Baroque circuit, and being an outsider to the English cathedral tradition, I found myself working with singers who were both great musicians but also clever and interesting people, who were themselves intrigued to work with someone from the world of opera. The combination was very stimulating, working at the very peak of performance. Audiences were fascinated by this style and came in droves to the concerts. Soon I was singing Handel in his hometown of Halle in eastern Germany and working with fine ensembles all over Europe. I was engaged to sing in a fabulous production of Cavalli’s ‘La Calisto’ in Lyon and Montpellier with the marvellously eccentric Belgian, Rene Jacobs. He had been a famous countertenor and changed course to conduct baroque operas and concerts. In contrast to the conductors I wrote about in Part 14, his technique was unusual to say the least, but he is a fantastic musician and communicator and the performances were superb. 

I first met the French Baroque expert Marc Minkowski at a rehearsal for performances of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ after an audition to his partner which was then relayed to Marc before I was booked for the concerts! Bizarre, but fortuitous, as we played concerts in Paris and Grenoble with his orchestra ‘Les Musiciens du Louvre’ and went on to record Messiah with Deutsche Gramophon. Being a French bassoonist, Marc was not steeped in the Messiah tradition in Britain, where every choral society does their performance almost annually. Consequently, he had no real acquaintance with the years of heavy almost Brahms-like English Messiahs here and played it as if hearing it for the first time. It was exhilarating, and jolly fast. In fact, my recording of the famous aria ‘Why do the Nations so furiously rage?’ is easily the fastest available! We seemed to get on pretty well, and he engaged me for productions of ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’ in Lyon and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. This latter was particularly remarkable. I mentioned in Part 14 that I had sung in a tremendous, starry production of Figaro in Brussels with Antonio Pappano, and, not long afterwards, I was singing Dr Bartolo again in another impossibly starry production, by Sir Richard Eyre, conducted by Marc, with the delectable Veronique Gens, Laurent Naouri, Camilla Tilling and the future and present wife of Simon Rattle, Magdalena Kozena. Working with one of the finest British stage and film directors and the thrilling Marc Minkowski was one of the highlights of my career. 

As my voice darkened over the years and I started singing heavier roles by Strauss, Wagner and Verdi, my ability to sing fast coloratura was diminished, but I have tried to keep my baroque profile above the horizon to a certain extent. In many ways, my return to live in Edinburgh in 1997, ostensibly because I was singing more abroad and less in Britain (and also to make sure my children became proper Scots and not Londoners!), allowed me to sing a bit more baroque, as Ludus Baroque and The Dunedin Consort were beginning to establish themselves in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I had known Susan Hamilton, the Scottish soprano who set up Dunedin with Ben Parry, through concerts in Europe in the 90s, and I was delighted to be asked to sing with them, firstly in Messiah and then in a Linn recording of Bach’s Matthew Passion., conducted by the fantastic John Butt. 

Any article about Baroque music would not be complete without a mention for my dear friend and colleague from the Hilliard Ensemble, Rogers Covey-Crump. Apart from having the most wonderful name in classical music and being the only person I have ever heard of called Rogers and  whose name has given rise to some of the best misprints (I cite Rogers Covey (Crump-Tenor) and Rogers Covey-Crunt), he has been a doyen of early music singing for over four decades, and must be, probably, the most recorded tenor in recording history, possessed of a mellifluous light voice, perfect for ensemble and solo singing alike. 

Next time, weird juxtapositions?!