A Singer’s Life Pt8
Ah, the Romance of it all, the Glamour!
The life of a professional singer is quite different from most other lives, I think. However, not all singers have had a life like mine.
If you are a member of an operatic chorus, your life is much more regimented. Rehearsals are strictly controlled, certainly in the major companies, and you spend most of your time living at home, going into work daily almost like an office worker, although each day is infinitely more interesting! You work with wonderful musicians and artists and get to observe at close hand how some of the great singers and conductors make music. Smaller companies tour two or three times a year, but the big ones much more rarely, although often to exotic places.
There are small touring companies in most countries which act as staging posts for young singers and conductors, and of course, there are the summer festival companies where a singer spends a whole summer in a rather nice location, rehearsing and performing and relaxing, while making high quality music to entertain usually well-heeled audiences. Glyndebourne and Aix-en-Provence are top examples.
I mentioned in Part 6 that oratorios and recitals tend to be of a shorter duration. The exception to this rule is the touring done by the great chamber and baroque ensembles, which spend a lot of their year touring around the world. I was fortunate in the 90s to tour quite frequently with The English Concert, conducted by Trevor Pinnock, and sang with them in locations as diverse as Berlin, Mallorca, Barcelona, Halle, Cremona and Buenos Aires. Other groups took me to San Paolo, Ottawa, Beaune, Ghent, Turin, Stuttgart, Israel, Sarajevo and Salzburg.
One of the most fascinating touring experiences I had was with the Hilliard Ensemble. I had met the counter tenor David James in a couple of understudy jobs in the 80s, most notably when covering in Reimann’s opera “Lear” at the ENO, when poor David had to carry me off stage. I was younger and slimmer then but still much bigger than him! I had a similar experience some years later at the Monnaie in Brussels when I was supposed to carry the heroine off stage in de Falla’s La Vida Breve. There were two sopranos engaged and for the early performances it was ok, in as much as I had only to pull the poor (operatically deceased) woman off into the wings. Sadly, the second singer was slightly (a lot) larger, and I couldn’t shift her. Fortunately, we had a pre-performance rehearsal, and I was able to save face by pretending to have a back spasm, and we agreed to get a couple of chorus lads to do the shifting. I don’t think she ever knew!
Anyway, David James (DJ) and I became good friends, despite the back-breaking event, and I went along to several concerts given by the world famous Hilliard Ensemble, of which he was, by this time, the sole counter tenor, and de facto fixer. My wife and I were invited to a performance of Arvo Pärt’s miraculous “Passio,” a deeply moving setting in Latin of the Passion according to St John, in Chelsea and I fell in love with the piece. It is set for a quartet of singers (SATB -soprano, alto, tenor, bass) for the Evangelist’s words, a tenor Pilate, violin, cello, oboe and bassoon, a choir (SATB), an organ and a bass for Christ’s words. The Hilliards had already recorded the work, but the singer who sang Christ had become quite a solo star in his own right and was rarely available for concerts, so another singer (very fine) sang the Chelsea concert. I had managed to suggest around London that I would quite like a stab at this piece and found myself singing Christus in St Alban’s Cathedral with a good semi-professional organisation. I mentioned to DJ that I now knew the work - hint hint! - and thought no more about it.
My wife and I were on holiday with our car behind the, slightly rusty by this time, Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia and Hungary when I received a message from DJ wondering if I could join the Hilliards in Bolzano and Trento in Northern Italy for a couple of performances of Passio. We looked at the map (Sat Nav non-existent) and it didn’t seem all that far from Lake Balaton to the Dolomite region of Italy, so I said “yes please, we’ll leave tomorrow and be with you that evening, ready to rehearse on the following day for the first concert.” What we hadn’t quite worked out, and what Sat Nav would have told us, was that there were Alps in the way! The drive seemed to last for ever on difficult roads and we arrived at the hotel at approximately 4 in the morning. I was younger then and, nothing daunted, did the rehearsal and then two performances of this miraculous piece, and thus started an association with the Hilliard Ensemble and Passio that took me all over Europe and as far as Japan, as well as the marvellous King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.
I described in Part 7 how an opera singer’s life worked in the essential details of rehearsal and performance. People have asked me how we fill our days and nights on an operatic project, which, as I said, often lasts over two months and even longer.
During the rehearsal period, life revolves around the theatre and the studios. On the whole, the hours are quite agreeable. We rarely start before 10am. This may seem crazy to office workers, but for most singers, their voices need to wake up even more than themselves, and one can do damage if not properly warmed up. This is one of the reasons that, although the public love the 11am Recitals every day in the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh during the International Festival, the singers are rather more ambivalent. It’s not just a case of getting up three hours early – our whole lives revolve around evening performances. If, like me, you can’t eat before you sing, this inevitably results in late dinners after the show, along with a modest (?) glass of wine! Starting again early next morning is difficult. Obviously, we don’t usually rehearse or perform the next day, but our lives are largely weighted towards the end of each day.
In most countries, although the singers themselves are not in Unions, the rules about rehearsals are quite rigid and defined. This is because chorus singers, music staff, orchestral players, stage management and technical workers are unionised and also because, particularly in the big national companies, the theatre is often rehearsing and performing several operas in a week, and the schedule is enormously complex, often involving whole sets moving round the theatre. Covent Garden and the Bastille for example have space backstage for 2 or 3 sets. An amusing aside is that the Land of the Free and its near neighbour Canada are both completely unionised even for soloists. You cannot work in an American or Canadian theatre without having a union card. This means that we have to join AGMA or Canadian Equity, and often have to keep paying dues even when we are home. To work in any theatre in the USA, British artists have to be invited and have to go, in person, to the US Embassy in London, pay a large fee and receive, after an interview, a visa as “An Alien of Exceptional Ability.” Cool eh? Apart from the hassle, the journey, and the money!
When I began, we too had to be members of British Equity and paid a nominal sum. Nothing was ever done for soloists, but that was the law. One of the few good things Margaret Thatcher did was to end the Closed Shop (joke – no trolls, please). Equity were silly in my opinion because once this happened, we would have carried on paying our nominal sum (I think it was £32 a year), but they decided to insist on a percentage of our income as well. Singers left in droves!
Countries differ enormously on rehearsal times but, in Britain, it is quite rigid. 1030-1.30. I hour break for lunch or whatever, then 2.30 -5.30. Sometimes, particularly later on when we are on stage, we work evenings 7.30 -10.30, but usually on those days, you work only a morning or an afternoon session. Occasionally, directors insist on a three-session day, but these are rare and usually counter-productive, as by 10pm everyone is knackered and grumpy.
During the rehearsal period, the evenings are mostly our own, and unless you have a huge role, there are many days when you are not called at all. Working in Germany, where they still have a strong company singer ethos, most of our colleagues return home to their families in the evening, like office workers. We then either liaise with other foreign soloists or stay at home with TV or a good book.
In most other countries, including the UK, most of the soloists are guests, and are living away from home. This means that you naturally socialise with your fellow singers, and here I have noticed the difference in mentality between Northern Europe and Southern Europe. On the whole, and this is a ridiculous generalisation, the most fun is to be had when there are more Brits, Scandinavians, Dutch and some Germans in a cast. We can add some Americans and most Canadians and Australians to this outrageous assertion. For some reason, the southern Europeans are more inclined to return to their apartments and keep quiet and sober (old meaning!).
We are on the whole lucky that international opera houses tend to be found in rather nice and convivial places - capital cities and towns where there is a good intellectual and artistic life. This means that when you are not rehearsing or between performances, you have the possibility to visit art galleries, museums, sporting venues etc. Some singers prefer to go home to their apartments, cook a light meal and rest, and, obviously if you are singing an enormous role like Tristan or Carmen or Turandot, you need a good rest, because the physical and mental strain of singing these parts is immense. However, as a bass, I have rarely had to worry about such things, and even when I have had big roles, the whole experience was so exciting that I lived on adrenaline.
Another fantastic perk of the job is that many of our theatres are near wonderful scenery. When I have sung in Geneva and Lausanne, I have had the Swiss Alps on the doorstep. The Swiss trains are so fabulous (and reasonably priced if you buy a monthly pass) that I was able to travel all over the country, taking mountain railways and cable cars up near the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau, and to other cities with a different language and culture, yet still Swiss.
In the early days of mobile phones, I would often send photos of Alpine scenes or beautiful lakes home to my wife, all excited and thrilled. I found out, not much later, that a photo of glorious clear skies and the Matterhorn, complete with me holding a foaming stein of beer, was not necessarily what she was wanting to see as she sat by her computer on a rainy day in Edinburgh! The upside was that she and the children were often able to come out to these exotic places for a performance and a few days of holiday where I could show them around, as the seasoned traveller. One of my favourite trips was when I was singing Pistol in Falstaff in Lausanne and had a free day. I hired a car, which, with Scottish thriftiness to the fore, was a Smart car, which is somewhat small. I proceeded to drive this little chap all the way round Lake Geneva, even managing to get it up into the French Alps to meet some Edinburgh friends who were skiing there (they all wanted a go in the Smart car – only room for one smallish passenger), returning through France and back into Switzerland, stopping at the Chateau de Chillon on the Lake near Montreux.
Ah the romance of it all, the Glamour!
