A Singer’s Life Pt6
It’s not all about Opera!
Today, I thought it might be interesting to highlight another aspect of being a professional singer – i.e. concert performances. One always hears people speak about opera singers, even Katherine Jenkins (who, by the way, has never sung in an opera in her life!), as if that was all we do. For many singers, it is only opera, but I and many colleagues also sing in sacred choral works as soloist (oratorio) and give solo recitals, usually accompanied by piano. Some of us work with small ensembles or chamber groups, depending on the style of music and also the size of our voices. I have been reviewing parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in the Review section of this site, and I remarked on the physical size and also vocal size of, particularly, Wagner singers.
I have always loved to vary my repertoire, and ever since, I suppose, university days and certainly my time at Guildhall, I have sung oratorios and recitals, as well as opera. Most of my income is from opera, but oratorios can be very useful financially, as opera contracts tend to last a minimum of 4-5 weeks and can last several months, and oratorios usually rehearse and perform in one day (only in Britain though. Those Continentals cannot believe that we try to put a complex concert on in a day!). Recitals are harder to finance. I nearly always have to promote my recitals personally, and then split the receipts with my accompanist. Often famous singers are contracted to sing recitals for a big fee when the only reason they are booked is because they are famous. Frequently, they are not very good, but people like to hear great voices, whether in the right repertoire or not.
We were very lucky at the Guildhall, and in the summer at the Britten-Pears School at Snape, to work on song repertoire with amazing teachers and star singers of the past. At Guildhall, I learned basically how to sing in French from Robin Bowman, who had studied with Pierre Bernac, who had spent much of his life with Francis Poulenc and found out the mysteries of the German Lied from Walther Gruner, Paul Hamburger and Benjamin Luxon. These great teachers spurred me on to learn more with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Hans Hotter and in the Russian repertoire with Galina Vishnevskaya. I was amazingly lucky to work with these truly exceptional artists, and also spent time at Snape with Sir Peter Pears, for whom Britten wrote almost all his tenor music, along with Nancy Evans (who, with Kathleen Ferrier, created the role of Lucretia in the Rape of Lucretia and, alone, the role of Nancy in Albert Herring) and her husband Eric Crozier (co-author of the libretto of Billy Budd, and librettist of Albert Herring and Let’s make an Opera, and a famous director of plays and operas).
When I was starting my operatic career, after the excitement of Venice and Rome (see Part 2), I was offered a contract with Scottish Opera as a company solo artist. This was tremendously exciting for a young singer (I was 26), as it gave me an opportunity to learn my skills in an environment I had grown up with, and with the company through which I had formed my early love for opera. It was also the only time in my career when I was paid a salary, with a pension! This contract lasted three years (1982-85) and gave me a chance to learn roles, understudy larger roles and learn from seasoned Scottish professionals like Bill McCue, Alan Watt, Pat Hay, Linda Ormiston and Claire Livingstone and acclaimed guest artists like Ian Caley, Norman Bailey, Alberto Remedios and Sergei Leiferkus. Great conductors like Sir Alexander Gibson, Norman del Mar and Roderick Brydon helped me understand what it takes to be an opera singer.
During this period, and to get back to the theme of today’s article, I was able to sing all over Britain in oratorios and recitals. Living in Glasgow, and now with a car (a lovely black Volvo) that other singers were not ashamed to be in, unlike the previous Hillman Hunter and Morris Marina, I was able to zip off at weekends, if free from the Opera, to sing concerts as a bass soloist.
One of the most exciting projects of that time was as one of the earliest members of the Scottish Early Music Consort. It had started as a vehicle for one of my lecturers at St Andrews and a couple of academics in Glasgow, who could see that the huge pre-Mozart repertoire was open for exploiting. At this time, most contemporary Classical music was atonal (Minimalism was about to erupt) and deeply unappealing to mainstream audiences, so the SEMC had an open goal. People were beginning to experience the Baroque revival, as Monteverdi, Cavalli and even Bach, Handel and Purcell were being played on original instruments with vibrato-less strings and non -valved brass. David Munro’s Early Music Consort in England had been seen as revolutionary and Trevor Pinnock’s English Concert, founded in 1972, was revealing the wonders of Baroque music to an eager audience. Warwick Edwards had taken over the SEMC and with his wife, set about awakening the ears of the Scottish public to a whole new world. Setting up a concert series in the Henry Wood Hall in Glasgow, where the Scottish National orchestra rehearsed, and touring Scotland, they built up an amazing following with sell out concerts and great critical acclaim.
We appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and even toured to Warsaw in Poland. I remember having great fun singing medieval troubadour songs and bawdy German ballads.
I continued to sing oratorios while at Scottish Opera and remember a Messiah in Ayr with only woodwind accompaniment (a weird experience), a St Matthew Passion in Edinburgh with the wonderfully named Herrick Bunney (long time organist at St Giles) as conductor and a Messiah in Tewkesbury Cathedral. This last was memorable, as, the night before, I had taken part in an opera gala at Chatsworth House for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (she the famous Deborah Mitford, as was!). What a glamorous evening that was!
The next day, I drove from Derbyshire to Tewkesbury for the afternoon rehearsal and evening performance of Handel’s Messiah. The conductor had told me in advance that he wanted to perform the oratorio complete, without the usual cuts of solos and choruses. Now the Messiah is quite long with the cuts and becomes mammoth played complete. I had pointed out that, in particular, as I was coming from some distance, I might be too tired especially to sing the enormously high and lengthy The Trumpet shall sound aria, complete with the Da Capo (this is the full piece played twice with a B section in the middle, a veritable marathon and something of a killer for basses). When I arrived at Tewkesbury, and reminded the conductor of my proviso about being tired etc, I got the full works of how I was destroying his vision of the piece, how my not singing the full aria would totally spoil the whole evening and, basically, that I was singing it or not at all!
Well, I wasn’t going to lose a fee, but by the time we got to the Trumpet shall sound, several hours into the performance, I was so angry that I gave it my full force and energy, ignoring the conductor, and singing it, to my mind, in spite of everything, like Handel rearranged by Wagner. Friends who were there said they had never heard me sing better! It’s amazing what a shot of adrenaline and downright fury can do!
At the end of 1985, my wife and I left Glasgow for London, she to work as an accountant in a small oil company as the oil industry was booming, and me to start a freelance career. It was the only time in my career when I had a rather sparse diary, but was lucky enough to get invited to the International Bamboo Organ Festival in Manila in the Philippines. Having been originally a Spanish colony, this country covering thousands of islands in the China Sea, was still largely Catholic, and in a suburb of Manila, Las Pinas, a Spanish priest, Father Diego Cera had built an organ whose pipes were mainly made of bamboo in 1824. A century and a half later, having fallen into disrepair, the organ was shipped to Germany where it was restored and brought up to date. It returned to Las Pinas in 1975, and in 1976, the first Bamboo Organ Festival took place, featuring organists from all over the world and a programme of concerts were inaugurated, using the organ for oratorio performances.
When I arrived in 1986, it was a full-scale festival with a local choir and orchestra. Soloists were supplied by the cultural departments of world governments, the British Council being my sponsor. The others were American, Austrian, Belgian and German. We performed Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Vivaldi’s Magnificat, with an American and a German conductor, and it was a magical period. We had rooms at the church itself (not air-conditioned) and at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Manila, 10 miles away. I stayed mainly at the Hilton and took taxis back to Las Pinas. Every taxi journey, I was offered the “sister” of the driver, and if not happy with my refusal, his brother’s cousin!
From my window in the Hilton, I was able to watch the mass rallies in favour of either President Marcos or his rival, Cory Aquino. Huge crowds thronged the great public space below my window, and at that point it passed without too much trouble. After I left, Marcos refused to accept election defeat and was overthrown in the People Power Revolution and Aquino took over. Exciting times!
The concerts were a great success, and I was also asked to sing a recital for the British Council in Manila. They wanted a concert of English songs, and as a proud Scotsman, I managed to persuade them to let me sing a cycle by Vaughan Williams but with words by our own Robert Louis Stevenson. I had to get the score transposed down a tone as it was written too high for me, and we found a splendid lady who not only transposed it but wrote it out with her own hand. No computers then! I still use that transposition to this day, having sung the cycle in the Scottish Portrait Gallery last year, and I am planning to release a CD later this year of these songs and several other songs by Ronald Stevenson and Francis George Scott.
On my return to London, I was delighted to be contacted by the two conductors from Manila, who invited me to sing with them in Europe. Bernhard Emmer asked me to sing Christus in a one voice to a part Bach St John Passion with his early music group Ensemble Contrapunctus, based in Wiesbaden, a show which eventually toured all over Germany to critical acclaim. Miles Morgan, the American, lived in Rome and invited me to sing Bach’s solo cantata “Ich habe genug” there. We performed in a Renaissance palace where Corelli had been the court composer and changed in a room decorated by frescoes by the great master Vasari. Heady days! Miles was a personal friend of Gore Vidal and had many a story to tell!
After all this excitement, I was asked back to Aldeburgh to take part in masterclasses, as a mature student, with Suzanne Danco and performances of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” as Arkel, the old king, a part that was to become one of my signature roles later in my career. This coincided with the great hurricane of 1987, when we were cut off in deepest Suffolk for two whole days, as fallen trees blocked all the roads. My wife back in London slept through all the mayhem, and wondered what all the fuss was about, until she looked out of our window to see the destruction of many of the trees in Hackney where we lived! She had to climb over tree trunks to get to the tube station.
