A Singer’s Guide to Programming a Recital Pt1

It occurred to me recently that I had written a lot about opera, a fair bit about oratorio, and rather less about recitals. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that, with very few exceptions, most professional singers spend only a small part of their careers singing solo recitals. If I am in a taxi, and the driver asks what I do, I never say “Oh, I’m a recitalist”, rather, “Oh I’m an opera singer!” This prompts frequent replies of “Gosh, mate, I’ve never had one of them in my cab,” or “Do you know that Pavarotti, then, mate?” Famous singers in modern culture, for example Katherine Jenkins, Alfie Boe and Andrea Bocelli, all these describe themselves as opera singers (despite evidence to the contrary). I suppose opera is a sexier thing, with its history of glamour and high emotion. Solo recitals, a singer and a pianist, cannot compete in a society full of noise and showmanship. Recitals are by their very nature small scale events, designed for a small scale audience. They are a niche market in an already diminished marketplace, an art form which necessitates concentration, and a certain amount of intelligence, on the part of the listener. Most of the recital repertoire is in a language other than English, which makes it hard for the listener, but even in France and Germany, the countries whose languages provide the bulk of the concert repertoire, it is hard to sell the concept of a song recital these days. 

In Britain, we have the Wigmore Hall season in London, the Oxford Lieder series and the Edinburgh Festival morning recitals in the Queen’s Hall. Elsewhere, you will find recitals dotted around the country in summer festivals and occasionally in smaller concert venues. The Cardiff Singer of the World competition, not an event which floats my boat (I know I am in a minority), has a Song Prize, which is a worthy ideal. However, if you ask anyone involved in the promotion of classical music what is the hardest art form to sell, they will inevitably tell you it is a Song Recital.   

This is obviously bad news for singers, and extremely bad news for those of us who love programming recitals and are trying to put them on. Apart from these notable venues mentioned above, agents vary rarely find concert openings for their singers. I have an opera agent and a concert agent, and, in all the 40 years I have been singing professionally, I could count on the fingers of one hand, the number of recitals which have been offered me by an agent.  

Inevitably, this means that, if I want to sing a recital programme, I have to organise it myself, an exercise which necessitates finding a pianist, a venue and some form of sponsorship. I have been happy to do that over the last 25 years or so when I have been back living in Edinburgh, and each year, during the Festival period, I have hired either the Canongate Kirk, the church of St Andrews and St George’s West, or more recently, St Michael’s Church in Slateford Road. I do this largely because I love singing recitals, but also because, for reasons which I have mentioned frequently in these articles (a constant source of irritation), my professional work takes place outside Scotland, and I use these recitals to allow my friends and supporters to hear me in my homeland. 

In recent years, I have used these recitals as a showcase for some of the younger singers I have coached, either in St Andrews where I was Honorary Professor of Singing for 10 years, or generally, when I have come across a talent which I think needs to be heard at a high level. The programming of these recitals has allowed me to offer a more varied recital than I could manage as a solo bass voice, with themes such as A Rosenkavalier Extravaganza, Songs of Travel, Brahms and Liszt, Songs of Edinburgh and Now the Hungry Lion Roars (a concert reflecting the richness of the world’s fauna). 

However, my main purpose today in this article, is to explore some of the song repertoire, and perhaps give some suggestions to younger singers, and the public at large, on how to formulate a programme of songs to maximise their effect on an audience. Understandably, I will focus on programmes for my voice type. The sopranos, mezzos and tenors have it slightly easier, in that their voices can offer a greater variety of styles and sounds than the potentially rather monochrome lower male voice. I also hope I can provide a few caveats about what not to put in a recital! 

Balance is essential for a successful recital, and often I find that a singer has lost sight of this crucial aspect. I have been to any number of recitals when I have had the feeling that a singer has decided to put as many major works into his/her programme as possible, regardless of the balance question. It’s not all about length! You want the audience to go home wanting more, rather than be exhausted by an over-indulgent ego trip. 

Ideally, you want the second half to be slightly shorter than the first, and you certainly need to have an interval. I know some singers want to keep their audience in place for the whole concert, but really, a solo recital takes almost as much concentration from the audience as the performer. Even in the case of the great Schubert song cycles, I am firmly of the view that one should make a break half-way through, both to give the singer a breather and also to allow the audience to reflect on what they have heard so far. I remember nearly 50 years ago hearing Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Daniel Barenboim performing Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ in the Usher Hall. They played all 24 songs without an interval, a feat of memory and stamina of the highest quality, but it was the combination of the greatest Lieder singer of all time, a great young accompanist and a Festival audience primed and prepared for the concert that allowed the event to be the success it was. For mere mortals and a normal audience, it would have proved too much, both for performer and listener. It was though one of the great experiences of my life, particularly as it was one of the first times I saw my hero live. The whole recital was a revelation – Barenboim’s playing was mesmerising, his left hand in particular, striking me as astonishingly robust. I remember too that DFD moved about the platform in a way entirely at odds with all the lessons I had been taught about decorum on the platform, his tall, angular body suggesting, physically, the traumatic journey of the poet through the icy wastes of Germany. There and then, I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life, not to walk, grief-stricken, on a winter’s journey to nowhere, but to be an artist with the power to stir up people’s imaginations, simply by singing wonderful music with a sympathetic accompanist. Less than ten years later, I had myself sung this great song cycle, with the supremely talented Jeremy Sams at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, at the Guildhall School in London and in the Hill House, Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece of architecture in Helensburgh. Each time though, I had taken an interval after ‘Die Post’, the 13th song.  

The first thing a singer must do when programming a recital, is to decide whether he is looking at a themed programme or a balanced, varied one. Obviously, if you are planning to sing Schubert’s cycles, ‘Winterreise’ or ‘Die Schőne Müllerin’, these will make up the whole recital, and you needn’t even bother with an encore, since there is no way you can follow these two wonderful masterpieces with a jolly crowd pleaser. None of the other great song cycles are long enough to form a whole recital, so you have to think where to fit them in. The first ever fully integrated cycle was Beethoven’s ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, written in 1816, but it only lasts about 15 minutes. 

The whole concept of the song recital has changed in my lifetime. When I was at Guildhall in the late 70s, we were encouraged to construct a recital roughly along chronological lines. One would start with a couple of Baroque pieces, then something from the Classical period, Mozart perhaps, then something Romantic, ending maybe with something modern and pithy. All this was swept away, and the themed recital became more popular. Graham Johnson’s ‘Songmakers’ Almanac’, founded in 1976, was instrumental in this new movement, and it was hugely important and successful. I had met Graham at the Britten/Pears School at Snape in Suffolk in the late 70s, where with Roger Vignoles, Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, he was one of the accompanists for the student classes there. It is wonderful now to look back on those classes and marvel at the fantastic level of accompanist that we worked with. Graham and Roger had starry careers in Britain and elsewhere (Roger played for my Masterclasses with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the Edinburgh Festival in 1980), and Stephen and Bruce returned to Bruce’s homeland, Canada, where fortuitously I met them in Victoria BC when singing Falstaff with POV 30 years later. I never sang with the Songmakers’ Almanac, but Graham and I recorded a recital of Russian songs for BBC Radio 3 in the late 80s, which I remember with great pride. 

The appearance of the ‘Songmakers’ Almanac’ changed the world of song recitals, and now it is rare to find a programme that has not, in some way, been planned along a thematic line. This is in my view a good thing, but it does mean that a lot of planning must go into not just the singing and playing of a recital, but also the programming and running order. In Part 2, I shall have a look at how to plan a recital, and what to sing in it.