A Singer’s Guide to Voices: Soprano Pt1
I was at a friend’s birthday party yesterday, in the splendid surroundings of Prestonfield House Hotel in Edinburgh, and picked up on a conversation across the table from me. A lady was talking about opera (with no knowledge of me or my career), and how she had only come to it very recently, as she had always had a fear and horror of screaming, raucous women. It had taken decades for her to discover the delights of deeper voices, and through them, she had come to appreciate the screaming much more, and to find some pleasure in it! I kept my counsel, but started to muse on this problem, which I have heard expressed many times before now. How can we find beauty in a sound which appears so mannered and artificial, where the words are often completely lost in the voice production, and where the emphasis is on volume rather than anything else? In other words, what can we do about Sopranos?
So far, in these articles, I have written about tenors, mezzos and baritones, and am obviously keeping the Bass voice until the last. However, it is not just a waiting game I have been playing since I am actually ambivalent about certain soprano voices. Possessing a low voice myself, I have some empathy with mezzos and baritones, and I can ascertain how these voices work, to an extent. I have always been thrilled by tenors, although having no real idea how they make their noise, and I happily listen to tenors more often than to basses. I am drawn to the cello more than the violin, while still appreciating the skill and beauty of a well-played fiddle. But sopranos? I can’t put my finger on it. There is no real reason for ambivalence. All classical voices are, to a greater or lesser extent, manufactured. No one sings in the street with a trained voice. Pop, jazz and folk singers thrive on the naturalness of their sound. I have as much of a problem singing along at a football match or trying to sing a hymn in a church as any soprano, and yet I find myself being more critical of the unnatural sound of the soprano voice than any other, and will often switch off if I hear one on the radio.
However, I have worked professionally with some of the greatest sopranos of the 20th and 21st centuries, either as student or colleague. I studied with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Galina Vishnevskaya, as well as some of the sopranos who were closely associated with Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh. As readers will know, I worked closely in the 1990s with some of the top baroque ensembles and conductors in the world, and sang extensively with such luminaries as Nancy Argenta, Emma Kirkby, Lynne Dawson, Sandrine Piau, Véronique Gens, and Lorna Anderson and Mhairi Lawson in Scotland. In the wider operatic world, I was lucky enough to sing with Rita Hunter, Kathryn Harries, Marie Mclaughlin, Rebecca Evans, Jane Eaglen, Susan Bullock, Natalie Dessay, Camilla Tilling, Mireille Delunsch, Anja Silja, Carol Vaness, Erin Wall and many more. Did I have a problem with these wonderful singers? No, not at all. So why the ambivalence? I can only think it has something to do with frequencies and pitch, since I actually have the same problem with high pop and musicals singers, like Céline Dion, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston and Idina Menzel.
Thinking about it while I’m writing this piece, I have a problem with classical soprano voices singing in English. This may just come down to being Scottish, albeit not with any sort of broad accent, but listening to women enunciating in over-ripe, Oxford English while singing, comes over as terribly mannered to me. This is completely irrational, and yet when my friend Beth Taylor was singing the first of Tom Cunningham’s Songs of Edinburgh in our recent concert, the comical ‘Gym Lesson’, when describing one of the girls in the lesson as having “artistic hopes”, Beth put on a funny posh voice. It was hilarious and clever but revealed my difficulty with this type of singing. In fact, before we started rehearsing Tom’s songs, I spoke to Beth about how I wanted her (and me) to sing in a much more natural way, getting as far away as possible from the standard RP!
Anyway, frankly, this may be more my problem than an actual one about sopranos, and maybe my lady who didn’t like screaming sopranos was just as wrong as I may be. So, having cleared the air, and leaving prejudice aside now, let’s have a look at the soprano voice, and some of its greatest exponents with whom I have worked. As you can see from the list above, and all the names I didn’t mention but could have, I have been privileged to know and work with many of the legends of our time and of a previous generation. In addition, I have been lucky to have heard in the flesh some of the finest sopranos of all time, and I will write about some of these as well.
Slightly perversely, I’m going to start with the lightest and least mannered of all sopranos I have known, Emma Kirkby. I only sang with Emma once, a very long time ago, but she was one of the singers I listened to most often in my university years at St Andrews, as I discovered the wonders of early music. Firstly with Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir in the early 70s and then more often as a soloist with Anthony Rooley’s Consort of Musicke, Emma was omnipresent as the doyenne of the revival of interest in pre-Classical music. Her light, clear voice, with not a trace of vibrato or wobble, was perfectly suited to this music, and the many recordings she made in the 70s in particular, are still marvellous to listen to. The very early advocates of this old music, David Munrow, Andrew Parrott and Nikolaus Harnoncourt had discovered that there was a wealth of unpublished and unknown music waiting to be performed, and their researches showed that there was also an entirely different style of playing and singing which was needed for this music. Lower keys, lack of vibrato, gut strings, natural brass instruments, more simple reed instruments and voices shorn of the demands of modern singing and projection, all these changes were introduced. This was truly revolutionary stuff, and not everyone bought into it, but gradually the “authentic performance” style has become the standard, until now it is almost unthinkable to hear music from before Beethoven played with lush modern instruments and wide vibrato. Emma Kirkby was the first and most perfect proponent of this style of singing. Many of the works she sang were written to be sung by boy sopranos, and her voice can often be mistaken for a boy. However, the flexibility of her vocal production, the smooth coloratura and above all, the musical intelligence of an adult woman singled her out. I had a friend in St Andrews who could not see past Emma’s voice, and who wanted to hear her in all sorts of later music, but, for me, she was pre-eminent in the many lute songs she recorded with her then partner, Anthony Rooley. His beautiful lute playing, and Emma’s clear voice made an excellent match, and I still enjoy listening to them. She was rightly made a Dame in 2007.
As the Early Music revolution gathered pace, with Trevor Pinnock and John Eliot Gardiner to the fore, more sopranos were discovered who were perfect for this style of music. Without sacrificing purity of production, some exponents managed to acquire a bit more weight to their sound than Emma Kirkby could muster, and so the early music bandwagon entered the world of opera. Purity of sound, flexibility and lack of vibrato were all required, and, just as the authentic music instrumentalists became more and more technically perfect, so the voices, especially the sopranos, became able to sing more difficult and complicated music. This revolution had taken place and been led by British musicians, and so, nearly all the early superstars of this genre were English speakers. Lynne Dawson, Linda Perillo, Lorna Anderson, Judith Nelson, these were the names you saw most often, and I was lucky enough to sing with many of them. We have produced several excellent Scottish early music sopranos, following Lorna Anderson’s lead (she is still singing splendidly, by the way), and I love listening to Mhairi Lawson and Susan Hamilton. Susan was co-founder of the Dunedin Consort, and deserves an important place in Scottish music history. She started out in several European vocal ensembles (I first met her in Belgium) and she appears on all the Dunedin’s early recordings. I particularly treasure appearing on the same recording as her in Bach’s St Matthew Passion which we recorded in 2007, and which was judged the best version by Radio 3’s Building a Library programme. That she has been rather forgotten in Dunedin’s recent history is a shame and a sad reflection on that excellent ensemble’s record.
For me, the supreme exponent of the Early Music soprano voice is the peerless Canadian, Nancy Argenta. I first met Nancy in 1991, when we recorded Purcell’s ‘King Arthur’, incidental music to Dryden’s play, with the English Concert, directed by Trevor Pinnock. We went on a world tour, taking in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, and culminating in a BBC Proms concert in London’s Albert Hall in front of over 5,000 people, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. No pressure there! We were held back until Act 3 Scene 2, in the famous Frost Scene, where Nancy, as Cupid, melts the heart of the Cold Genius, the Spirit of Winter (me), with Love. It is a scene of great invention, as both the Cold Genius and the Chorus of Cold People sing in shivering broken voices over creaking and scraping strings, and Cupid intervenes, exclaiming “Tis Love, that has warmed ye!”. The newly warmed Genius recognises his saviour as Love, “Heaven and Earth by Thee were made!” and the two sing a tender duet. Later in the piece, Nancy sang the wonderful song,” Fairest Isle, all Isles excelling” in her beautiful, mellifluous voice, extolling the virtues of wondrous Britain. Her clarity of diction and warmth of tone flooded the Albert Hall with gentle tenderness, and a rapt silence ensued, followed by thunderous applause.
I was able to sing many more times with Nancy over the years, with the English Concert, and in other projects, including a St Matthew Passion in Ottawa, and discovered to my utter delight that, after her singing career, she and her lovely partner Ingrid Attrot (a fine singer herself – I sang Swallow when she sang Ellen Orford with Richard Hickox in ‘Peter Grimes’) had moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, where they both taught at the Music Conservatory. My several visits to Victoria to sing with Pacific Opera Victoria allowed me to meet up again with Nancy and Ingrid, and a splendid reunion followed! I was amused to discover that, like me, Nancy sings under a name which is not her own. As I was obliged to add my mother’s maiden name to my own for professional purposes, so Nancy adopted the name Argenta, from the settlement in BC where she spent her early years instead of her own name, Herbison, as there was another soprano of the same name operating in Canada.
I mentioned earlier the profusion of British singers at the start of the Early Music Revolution, but it was not long before other countries began to produce wonderful singers. Montserrat Figueras emerged alongside her husband Jordi Savall, both from Catalonia, to explore the marvellous music of the Iberian Peninsula, and the arrival of William Christie in Paris and the emergence of Marc Minkowski ushered in a new generation of splendid French sopranos, my favourites being Véronique Gens, Mireille Delunsch and Sandrine Piau. Although these great singers emerged from the Early Music scene, it was in different contexts that I sang with them. Véronique was the Countess in Mozart’s ‘Figaro in the Aix-en-Provence Festival when I sang Bartolo in the great production by Sir Richard Eyre, conducted by Minkowski, and what a performance she gave! Tall in stature and thrilling of voice, she made the Countess a truly tragic figure, and I found her a delightful colleague. Mireille sang all the soprano roles in an exciting production by Laurent Pelly of ‘Les Contes d’Hoffmann’ by Offenbach, again conducted by Minkowski in Lyon. I was Crespel, the father of Antonia (sung by Mireille), and I had to spend a lot of time shouting at her in French, as we were using the version with spoken dialogue. She never flinched and was also a lovely colleague. As Olympia, she had to sing amazing coloratura while rollerblading around the stage which was a staggering achievement. Sandrine Piau was Tytania in Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Aix, and then Beijing, in Robert Carsen’s marvellous and timeless production. Her voice was magical, perfect for Tytania, and her English, often a problem with French singers, was impeccable. I have only just been made aware of the fact that our performance in Beijing was watched online by at least half a million Chinese. A drop in the Chinese ocean, but probably (definitely!) my biggest audience. I wonder what they made of Snug, the Joiner!
It was wonderful to see how these fine singers, all schooled in the Modern Baroque style, could adapt so easily to different composers, and it was a privilege to appear with them.
Next time, I’ll move on to more mainstream sopranos, and look back at a few older stars.
