Does It Hurt? and other thoughts...

Handel's Altos....

2012-02-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

As a preface to a few concerts I'm giving with the Baroque Band and Harry Bicket here in Chicago in March I composed a few thoughts on the background to the programme. A version of this, or in fact this article will appear in the programme.

Handel’s Altos.

When we think of Baroque music and Baroque opera in particular we tend to make an automatic association with the castrato; the male singer, castrated on the eve of puberty to preserve his treble register in the promise, met by few, of a career as one of the operatic superstars of his day. In attempts at authenticity over the past half a century, baroque musicians have had to concede that it ‘takes balls to sing like a castrato’ (as one journalist recently put it) and our closest modern day equivalent is the male alto or ‘countertenor’. Many of Handel’s operatic roles, especially those written with the alto castrato Senesino in mind suit the range of a modern countertenor. However, as fashions and tastes change the argument returns again and again that it is in fact inauthentic to employ a countertenor at all in these roles; Handel himself replaces absentee castrati with female altos. This misleads some into banishing the countertenor voice altogether from the 18^th century stage. On the contrary, Handel did employ solo countertenors in his Oratorios that dominated the latter part of his creative life; countertenors such as ‘Walter Powell’, ‘Daniel Sullivan’, ‘Brent’ and ‘Russell’ premiered major roles in five works; Joad (Athalia), David (Saul), Athamas (Semele), Joseph (Joseph and His Brethren) and (Hamor) Jephtha. Sullivan in particular should be noted for singing solo roles in works by other composers such as J F Lampe’s “The Dragon of Wantley” produced by Sheridan amongst others. Garrick describes Sullivan as “looking gay and sensible” whilst Mrs Delany calls him “a block with a very fine voice” who puts Handel “mightily out of humour”. So whilst Handel would have had most contact with countertenors through choral establishments such as the Chapel Royal or Westminster Abbey he was perfectly aware of the potential of the voice type to be a solo instrument on the stage at Covent Garden and the King’s Theatre, Haymarket and as always exploited this.

The cantata form further enabled Handel to write for an alto. We cannot always be certain for whom a cantata was composed or who might have performed it, but thanks to research that pinpoints a date of composition and location of composition we can make tantalising assumptions. For instance, ‘Splenda l’alba’ celebrates St Cecilia the patron saint of music. Written around 1711/12 in London it could be argued that one of the cast of Handel’s new opera ‘Rinaldo’ was in London sometime around November 22^nd (St Cecilia’s Day) perhaps preparing for the revival of the opera in early 1712. The castrato Nicolini may have wanted the music a tone or so higher than written and this perhaps suggests a female singer, maybe even the Goffredo at the time Francesca Vanini-Boschi. The cantata and the role of Goffredo sit in a similar compass.

By 1730 the castrato in Handel’s company, the second Royal Academy of Music, was Antonio Bernacchi, who had stepped into the formidable breeches of Senesino, soon to defect to Porpora’s ‘Opera of the Nobility’. Bernacchi created roles in Lotario and more famously as Arsace in Partenope. Praised as an intelligent singer by Charles Burney, he was unfortunate not to emulate the same success with the London audiences as had Senesino. “Bernacchi has a vast compass, his voice is mellow and clear, but not sweet as Senesino, his manner better; his person not so good for he is as big as a Spanish friar”- (Mrs Delany).

Handel’s genius was to write so convincingly for all voice types and ranges, especially the three “C’s” – castrato, contralto and countertenor. His compositions were consistent in their quality and the variation of voice type can be explained equally by his awareness of changing tastes and fashions as to the constraints of finances and resources at his disposal. The modern quest for authenticity often casts a shadow over the great versatility of Handel. His own example shows that any evolution in style and performance needs to be adaptable to our own time. We can therefore only be truly authentic by adapting.

This is the Record of Joan.....

2011-09-23T04:34:00.000-07:00

News that Lincoln Cathedral Choir has appointed a female to sing alongside the 3 remaining countertenors has rocked the choral world, some seem to think. Over breakfast this morning I ignored my VAT return, closed the Rodelinda score I’m supposed to be absorbing, poured myself a large coffee and engaged in one of those Facebook discussions that start as a comment to a status update and end up being a game of who-can-type-fastest, with the result being a series of half-finished sentences, victims of pressing “return” too hastily and lots of out-of-sequence answers. “I was referring to the posts two about this one!” etc etc.

There seems to be at the heart of the “uproar” two things – one of which I know very little about and the other of which I know a great deal more about than say, the Daily Mail journalist. The first is the appointment itself – rumours abound and it does very little to dwell on the “whys” and “who dunnits” here. Lincoln has every right to appoint whom it wants and deal with that in anyway it wishes. The second half of this episode involves the disquiet around how a female alto has been deemed appropriate for a job that for the best part of 900 years has gone to a man. On the face of it the accusations of sexism when so-called traditionalists make their voice heard can be well argued; plenty of choirs around the world are served by both male and female altos.

What really annoyed me about some of the press coverage was the complete absence of anyone pointing out the very exceptional difference between "natural" tenors, basses and baritones and the so called "un-natural" voice of the countertenor; that is to say that male falsetto does not equate to a female alto. There has been and still is a very rich seam in the English Choral tradition of encouraging and nurturing countertenors, one that is unparalleled throughout the world and without which there would be on offer far fewer opportunities for the young and burgeoning countertenor to embrace and cultivate his voice. The short-sightedness of the decision is what worries me. A flurry of female altos abound that could out-sing a countertenor at every turn. If all lay clerk alto positions were open to both sexes it would become very clear, very quickly that in general women have far stronger and far more reliable voices than male falsettists. But, what may have begun hundreds of years ago as an arguably sexist stand point from the Church has developed today into a unique and very British tradition, without which the likes of Alfred Deller and the revival of the countertenor voice as a viable instrument on the concert and operatic stage would be very difficult to imagine.

For the past 60 years (possibly hundreds more) the countertenor voice has almost consistently been the butt of all vocal jokes, the voice that is seen as strange, bizarre and often a consequence of some underlying “theatrical” persuasion. The one place that it is has been truly respected and acknowledged and more than anything given a harbour, has been the choir stall of the British Cathedral. My year of singing at Wells Cathedral and three years as a St John’s, Cambridge choral scholar were without doubt instrumental in forming my countertenor voice; I cannot stress how important the opportunity such as this is for a young singer, not least a countertenor. The alternatives are few and far between in this country. Had I competed for a place against a female alto I wouldn’t have stood a chance at aged 18, having sung countertenor for just under a year whilst displaying the stamina of a limping sloth. So many young countertenors around the world yearn to sing with a British cathedral choir; the admiration for our strong traditions and the overwhelming lineage of fine countertenors that they have produced excites them beyond belief. The sound of the ‘English’ countertenor you could argue is exceptional – so often this is brought up in reviews or critiques as a product of the “English school”. Whatever that may be it is inextricably conjoined to the choral tradition of this country. For that, cathedrals, including Lincoln, have a degree of responsibility for its nourishment and "preservation".

When girl choristers arrived at Salisbury some years ago now, the continuation of the boy chorister tradition was without question imperative. And likewise, at other Cathedrals the intention is to maintain both boys’ and girls’ choirs. It is neither here nor there if one sounds better than the other. You could argue that some all male choirs are absolutely dreadful compared to others, but that’s not a reason to disband them. Whereas, the arrival of a female alto in place of a male alto rings distant alarm bells. And I only mean that in the sense that I don’t believe it to be sexist or that the choral tradition is crumbling to its death, but rather that it is sending a fairly strong and confusing signal to young, aspiring countertenors. It is worth remembering, the male falsetto is a very different beast to a female alto.

On the operatic stage nobody would think of calling mezzos and contraltos the equal to countertenors. There is a very, very obvious difference and this is reflected in casting choices. As Alfred Deller's biography calls it, it is a "Singularity of Voice" and one that for all the love in the world is still “up against it”. The last place I’d have expected to have brushed aside the male alto was the Church of England.

I hope that the appointment at Lincoln is a success if anything to quell the slightly hardened traditionalists from dragging the countertenor voice through further unnecessary scrutiny.

This said– one of the reasons I started to sing countertenor in the school chapel choir was to go and hang out with the girls at the front. Let’s be sexist for a moment... and just imagine the influx of applications Lincoln are going to get next time a job comes up. I think, in fact, they’ve cracked it:

“Alto choral scholar applications welcome, must be able to sing and deal with the very real fact that there’s a CHICK NEXT TO YOU WITH NICE CURVY BITS AND LOVELY SMOOTH HAIR!!”

Wehey!! Genius or what?!

IT’S ALL OK…YOU CAN GO BACK TO YOUR GIBBONS.

Some like it Hot.

2011-07-06T01:38:00.000-07:00

Obviously I have returned home and immediately re-opened the blogmaker to continue on with the last post...ho ho. No, as I predicted, my attention span of approximately 3 seconds has meant that there were too many other things to distract me at home so once again I'm playing catch-up in this particular arena. Which is a shame as I had lots of things to report about the rest of June, but have since forgotten every single one of them. Except the one about the Elizabethan sauna in France.

Briefly then, there's a mock Globe theatre in a place called Chateau d'Hardelot which is near Boulogne-sure-Mer in the Pas de Calais. Rather than construct the outer walls with authentic wattle and daub an alternative measure has been achieved in the form of a large marquee like polythene/rubber/pvc (you name it) wrap, adorned with printed pictures of windows and the suggestion of a timber framed construction. Imagine then our surprise upon arrival here to perform a concert of Purcellian duets when used to Wigmore Halls, Barbicans and Salle de Pleyels. The promise of the name "Chateau d'Hardelot" too.... picture this; a giant Moules Pot with 150 punters, 20 stage lights to make the Gestapo weep and add 6 black-clad performers with a harpsichord, chamber organ, lute and viola da gamba onto a cheese-board of a stage and turn the heat up to 30c. Yum yum. Would you like white wine sauce with that?

To add insult to injury I was exercising a maneuver known in the trade as a "gig-in-a-bag" which essentially relates to any concert performance for which one's personal paraphernalia including such things as music, toiletries, phone chargers and so on take up no more space than that offered in one small and preferably cabin-luggage sized bag. A major factor in all of this is that the traveller wears his or her concert gear from the moment they leave home to avoid unnecessary baggage administration. It goes without saying that such an operation cannot be very well achieved when the concert demands white tie and tails. I've not tried that one yet as it draws the obvious conclusion that besides looking a bit of a tit dressed as Bertie Wooster on an Easyjet flight the overseas gig involves a return journey by which time tails have lost their currency. A simple black suit on the other hand acts as the camouflage de nos jours allowing the day tripping singer to slip easily into 'international businessman' mode or 'holidaying security guard'. In short then, the smaller the hand luggage and the easier it is therefore to travel, slipping from border to border unhassled, the smugger and more content you should feel. That is until it becomes the hottest weekend of the year and you are performing in a rubber tardis.

What options I had were few; I would have to negotiate the sweaty rehearsal and even sweatier concert in such a way that at all times there was ventilation through my shirt. Of course from the moment I opened my mouth to sing "O Solitude, my sweetest choice" my clothes clung to me like a drowning mermaid. The worst was to come when the following morning I awoke bright and early to make my 8am Eurostar back to London with the world's first seaweed-cloak awaiting my full attention, hanging in the cupboard. If you've ever forgotten to hang a towel up after a shower and returned the following day fully expecting to dry yourself then you're halfway to where I was.

Thinking back I should have known that the infamous 'gig-in-a-bag' often ends in tears. I remember one trip to Belgium with a choir and orchestra many of whom were cavalier enough to throw their small carry-on luggage (containing only concert gear and music) into the hold of the aircraft. The Gods of baggage-handlers just happened to have been angered that day and somehow between London and Brussels 4 or 5 of the musicians' one and only life lines to appearing on stage that night were left somewhere else. From what I recall the best efforts in concert-fancy-dress that evening involved a bow-tie constructed from a paper napkin, held together not by the mysteries of the Heian period Origami masters but by the singer's chin clamped rigidly to his upper torso. Another attempt at fashioning an imitation set of tails from what sartorial shopping could been done in the precious 3 hours before the concert resulted in an unconvincing blue velvet jacket being worn over black jeans. Beware the gig-in-a-bag, or at least never lose sight of your bag.

'Gig-in-a-bag'...just one of the many tried and tested touring phrases favoured by singer and instrumentalist alike. I believe there's a list somewhere of these so I won't make it now but by far one of my favourites is the ridiculous epithet for a cockscrew - the "gig spanner". Deary me.

I will return to France for much of August. A couple of weeks of holiday and a couple of weeks of concerts. I'm packing the black linen suit for this one and several shirts....but however much I try, I just can't, can't, can't get myself of this obsession with fitting everything into a tiny bag.......am I in denial or what?

Where did June GO?

2011-07-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

It's school holidays at St Britten's Boys (and two girls) and Mr Oberon has hung up his cane and dusted off the fairy chalk that stained his tweed. Mr Bottom the janitor found time to sew the buttons back on his dungarees, Mr Snug the PE teacher has been sent on extended compassionate leave following the assault of Miss Thisby (formely Mr Flute) and the board of governors has adjourned for the summer break having not reached a satisfactory conclusion to the issues raised by alumnus Mr Theseus. Regular fire drills and a new sprinkler system have also been implemented whilst Junior Head of House Robin Goodfellow has been demoted to milk monitor.

Yes, you've guessed it, ENO's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has come to an end. It seems an age since we started rehearsing and indeed it has been. What's a little more than disturbing is that for the past month I've gone about my life as normal save for 3 hours or so each week when I've thrashed a teenager in front of 2 1/2 thousand people. (Well....2 1/2 thousand seats). I read on Twitter that our Puck, Jamie Manton is as I write sitting on a flight to New York; I just hope he got upgraded, the welt marks will be furious from our final collaboration-demi-horizontale. Now that was method acting to make De Niro weep.

With this closing of another chapter in the operatic calender I've found a moment of two to attend to the athenian-weeds that have amassed on this blog. June 9th was my last entry...my excuse lies not in being too busy - far from it, that's what this is all about, but rather that my sodding hard-drive stuck one fat gigabyte of a finger up at me before trotting off to hard-drive heaven somewhere in a data 'recovery' lab near Hendon never to whir again. This has meant a huge amount of boring re-administration and above all else a sick, stomach churning anxiety descended upon me until all corners were straightened. With most of that done and the Dream a fading memory I'll make some inroads into the blogosphere once again.

In fact, a great deal of June wasn't singing the role of a twisted latin master at all. I actually managed to take a holiday for two days to one of my favourite places on earth, Bordeaux.

If you haven't been yet or rather, if you haven't been for a number of years then you'll have a shock. Gone are the cars and gone are the blackened buildings, in their place polished limestone tramways and the most handsomely faced architecture of the 18th century. Just take yourself to the very centre and marvel at the majestic head to head between the neo-classical Grand Théâtre and the window cleaning orgy of the 19th century Grand Hotel Regent de Bordeaux. They like their Grand in Bordeaux, but it's surprisingly small as a city. It basks in the Aquitaine sun, proudly autonomous, facing not to Paris and the north but to the open sea and all the trade that that has brought, allowing it to revel in its status as the wine capital of the world.

By good fortune the trip coincided with a performance of Lully's Atys given by Les Arts Florissants (or as they're known in the trade 'Les Arts Flo' which to me sounds too much like 'Aunt Flo' from Bod). To describe the evening's entertainment as an exercise in French trilling is akin to making a mild link between the Pope and Catholicism. I'm afraid this gallic shake was the overbearing guest in the proceedings, landing like a musical mosquito sucking the blood from every stepwise movement of the few tunes that slither out of this frilly opera. As the cortege of trill-taurettes slowly progressed it gradually dawned on me why Lully stabbed in himself in the foot with his conducting pole.
That said, and as I've been unnecessarily harsh, the production (which is quite famous in France) was utterly beautiful. M'colleague and sometime cassock wearer at St John's, Ed Lyon commanded the evening as Atys in a series of daft wigs. None dafter than that of Paul Agnew, who enjoying une brève camée as Le Sommeil had been deemed only worthy of a costume reminiscent of a piece of carpet fluff trapped to a yellow Quality Street. Stéphanie d'Oustrac and notably Emma de Negri sang the tits off their roles. I'm not a professional critic so I can say that.

Something spooky happened in Bordeaux. I became, totally unintentionally, Oz Clarke's stalker. The night before we left for Bordeaux I had a show at ENO and whilst dining beforehand (read 'shoving a burrito in your face-hole 60 minutes before assaulting a load of Fairies') Mr Oz Clarke glided past the restaurant door. Nothing strange about that (although he does look like Bod). No, the reappearance of the Clarke, shiny head and all, at my hotel reception in Bordeaux 36 hours later caused me to have one of those star-struck moments where you just gawp, attention I feel Clarke hasn't yet earned in his career as authour of the second-most-read-annual-pocket-wine-guide. Still I considered bounding up to him and telling him of this unforeseen rendez-vous, introducing the idea that having been a chorister just like him (he went to Canterbury) we must have something in common whilst adding "what's more I watched you walk past me in London as I ate a Mexican only yesterday". I managed about as much as I did when I recently shook the Queen's hand, which was "Ma........". (I still haven't worked out whether I meant to say "Ma'am" or some form of "My pleasure" which would have been completely idiotic considering I was in her house). I left Clarke to the Vinexpo going on in town and scuttled off to read my horoscope - "You meet a small dark stranger with advice on 2010 En Primeur".

Presently my train home to York is nearing its destination so this, so far wild description of the last month will have to be continued............

Backing Up. The Memory Game.

2011-06-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

As far as I can remember, this week has all been about memory. Over the weekend my trusted MacBook instructed me to restart (the machine not me...one day though, Apple..one day). What followed is best summed up by an online messageboarder as "oh you mean..the gray (sic) screen of death?". Fine, I thought, I have an external back-up disc so I'll just have to fork out for a repair or possibly a new machine, thank god I backed it all up....in...F*CK...January!! Yes, three months of .excel tax receipts ready for my June VAT return (in sterling and euros this quarter) into the ether...6 months of emails (deleted from the hotmail server of course) up the spout and who knows what else...probably just a couple of useless apps if I'm lucky.

Posting such distress to Facebook is the new form of catharsis and within a few minutes messages of goodwill, support and helpful advice would pour in to cleanse the rotten Apple. So given this opportunity I'd like to thank those of you who kindly pointed me in the direction of data recovery services or shared their own woes from similar failures, and to those of you who posted incredibly insightful advice (you know who you are) such as "I use an online backup service so all my data is fine" and "in future I'd back up your stuff just before your laptop dies" I offer an attentive discourse on the international language of the middle finger, gratis.

It's a good thing then that Steve Jobs doesn't do operas. Memory is one of the highest hurdles the singer has to jump and it's fascinating to discover over time how one's brain actually works to compute the mass of notes and words you come up against in any career. There are huge pitfalls.

Take this week for instance. On Saturday myself and the rest of the Midsummer Night's Dream cast will slip back into the familiar costumes and onto the well-trod boards of the stage at ENO and repeat a show we've done 5 times already and countless times in the rehearsal room over the past 2 months. Easy. However it will have been over a week since we last did this and though that doesn't sound long enough to forget it (it's not) it is just long enough for our brains to have begun to erase the "auto-pilot" which is the save-all resort in moments of memory-lapse panic. Day-to-day you can trust your onboard RAM to kick in and let you concentrate on the performance for the simple reason that you know and trust that you'll have the music and words on the tip of your tongue. But leave a week long gap and the post-it note always pops up as you walk onto the scene, reading "why the hell do you think you can trust your memory, it's been a week....a WEEK...you've done other stuff....I'm going to delete whole words from phrases....good luck... off you go!" I find in these situations to do what you'd do with your laptop and just put it to sleep or press restart. 99% of the time when it comes back on it'll have everything there ready to fire-up. So you tell your inner monologue to bugger off and stop concentrating on trying to remember and instead give in to trust. Failing that you make it all up in the most convincing manner you can.

Plenty of stories abound of such last minute brain-freezes. Some of them more famous than others and knowing my memory I'm about to make most of the details up. Peter Pears features in several such tales of which I can remember only a couple. At the beginning of Act 2 in Death in Venice he came to the line "So it has come to this, I can find no better description of my state than the hackneyed words 'I love you'", except all that came out instead of 'I love you' were prehistoric grunts. The other is one of the best and involves Britten's The Burning Firey Furnace. The correct line is "come fill up your goblets" whereas Pears sang "come gob up your fillets". Countertenor James Bowman is said to have mastered the art of spontaneously re-writing a libretto upon realising he had forgotten to carry with him the crucial prop, a dagger: "With this....er..FIST...I thee kill". Or something like that.
I too have experienced hideous moments of memory lapse and it's only fair to share them now. Both curiously enough happened in Monteverdi operas. I accept all responsibility for reordering the stanzas of Human Frailty's opening prologue in Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria but can't vouch for why the conductor felt the need to join me in a surprise duet from the pit, with him singing the correct words. It is worth pointing out too (I'm offloading the blame now..) that this performance had come at the end of a month long break during which most of the cast had gone about their ordinary lives and in many cases (myself included) rehearsed and performed entire other operas in the meantime. My other Monteverdi fail was in fact more embarrassing because it made me laugh and was in front of an audience of just 25 people at the Handel House Museum (before you titter, that is sell out capacity). Ottone's beautiful and lengthy return home to Poppea that opens L'incoronazione di Poppea is a useful recital choice for any countertenor. There are good tunes, lots of contrasting moods, plenty of scope for dramatic exploration and of course this composer is revered for his exemplary and masterful marriage of text and music. Half way through, the scene breaks away from the mellifluous melodies to a more intense and drier, almost spoken recitative; this is where it gets particularly hard, especially for the non-native speaker. I was doing fine....stuttering my way through as I discovered the two sleeping soldiers and began to unravel the sordid bed hopping of Nero and Poppea when I got stuck...as if burdened by a stammer. I couldn't for the life of me get the word out. "E in .......aghhh......". The word in question was "grembo" so perhaps it is forgivable that eventually my diaphragm kicked in and sent flying from my mouth "quimbo". Yes, 'QUIMBO'. A confluence, my brain and funny bone told me at the time, of 'quim' and 'rambo'. MORTAL COSA SON IO, FATTURA HUMANA.

Learning music is one side of the coin. Remembering it is the other. And I have learned to respect that other side. Why was it for example, that after singing in a college choir for 9 years of my life during which I repeated some of the repertoire nigh on 200 times or so am I completely unable to sing any of it for memory, yet within 6 weeks of picking up an opera aria I can stand in front of 2000 people sing it and happily prance around in a silly costume at the same time? The pin dropped last year - it was just a case of dealing with two very different parts of my brain. With the music in front of me, or even a score just floating close by I was able to claw my way through most familiar songs, anthems, arias etc and give something of a convincing performance. Throw the notes out of the window and I became a quivering wreck. And that's because the brain used the printed music as its trigger. Try it sometime. If you've never sung Messiah "off-copy" but have performed it dozens of times the first time without music is a very strange feeling. We rely on the sign-posts even though the music is fully absorbed. These sign-posts however don't have to be the musical score and once you accept this you can start to really improve your memorising.

Without conscious acknowledgment most opera singers rely on the blocking in a scene to trigger their musical memory and eventually it becomes second nature. That's why a sitzprobe after 5 weeks of acting rehearsals feels so foreign. Suddenly the music is all alone again and your body and brain goes into some sort of quizzical overdrive.

Song recitals present an ideal opportunity to investigate how the brain takes in music. Gone are the supportive splints of the opera stage with it's props, actions and not forgetting other singers to prompt the memory. Last year I was in the rare position of doing an entire recital with just a piano. (Baroque repertoire lends itself to ensemble based recitals more often than not which relaxes the tension a great deal and often eliminates the priority of memorising music...for some reason...). I had a handful of English song to learn and 5 or so weeks to get it into the grey matter. All this whilst away from home rehearsing a Handel opera in which I was a central character with little time off during the day. I thought about how I had attempted and failed to memorise songs before. Often I'd just sing them through and with the aid of repetition they'd eventually fall into place. But the quimbo episode had shown me different. The problem with this was that I was always starting with the familiar opening and after singing through the song a few times I had convinced myself that I knew it better. What I was actually doing was repeating the same pattern of 'familiar tune and words..to...less familiar tune and words". Anyone who has played the shopping-list-alphabet-game knows that the longer the game goes on the harder it gets to remember what the previous player just listed, as it will be the final letter you get to before you play your next hand. If you started with their recent addition to the shopping list then it would be far too easy as you'd constantly be traveling towards the known. Ah-ha, I thought.

By patiently (and patience is the key here as it takes a while) commencing with the final comprehensible line of text and music and adding each time the line preceding it I was teaching my brain, in fact more directly my memory, the song from the 'newest information' to the 'known information'. It was a win win situation. The further I got away from the final bar the easier it became as each sing-through involved sailing into increasingly familiar waters. Indeed each bar of music became a content and calming waypoint on the voyage towards the home port at the final phrase. Once I'd completed this exercise I just had to keep repeating the song parrot-fashion as I had done before so as to keenly etch the pattern I had just memorised and lock it away. This method also has the added bonus that the sections that you have just committed to memory are always repeated first and it is this repetition that helps to cement the brain cells. A song with say 40 phrases to learn means that the final phrase has been sung 40 times and the first phrase only once in the course of the exercise, which whilst it sounds no better than starting at the beginning, is actually a more reassuring way to learn it as the sign-posts gather in familiarity as you progress and they serve to quiesce the torrid sub-conscious monologue that would otherwise be barking at you, "you don't know it, you don't know it". Instead it gently whispers, "ahh..you've done this pharase 35 times at least, and now this one 36 times..ahh" and so on.

It seems to work for me. So far. I've just done this with Vaughan-Williams' 'Watermill" which is something of a tongue-twister. You can hear the results on the radio next month if you like, though now I've mentioned it it'll be jinxed. Don't bother.

Memory is a wild beast but you have to tame it and learn how to employ it. Like singing itself the only secrets are those of patience and trust in oneself. Without sounding too much like some Buddist Yogi there's a grain of truth here, but none of it goes the distance if you forget one elementary procedure. That being to turn up. I kid you not, I heard recently of a singer who enjoyed a particularly sociable and hearty lunch after a satisfying morning's rehearsal with his colleagues. Farewells and see-you-laters were exchanged as always and the afternoon was spent making his way contentedly home on the soonest flight back, safe in the knowledge that things had gone decidedly well, his voice was in good trim, the conductor was pleased and everyone seemed at ease. Leisurely tucking into his supper that night he reflected on the good fortune he had found in his career as an international singer, little realising that as he chewed gently on his steak and drifted up the stairs for a well deserved kip the very concert hall he had been rehearsing in that very morning was slowly but surely filling up with an audience teeming with anticipation for his performance.

Humans too have major hard disc failures.

A Prayer.
Our Hard Drive Data-Recovery Agency,
Who art in Ealing W5,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy laboratories come.
Thy reparing be done,
With a 95% success rate as it is on your website.
Give us this day our daily emails,
and forgive us thy lack of back-up,
As we forgive those at the Genius Bar who refused to help,
And lead us not into temptation to make up my lost account figures,
But deliver us from my slow Mac G5 temporary solution.
For thine is the costliest at £300,
the power and the glory,
for recovering all my data for ever and ever,
Amen.

Finding a fourth wall.

2011-06-08T03:40:00.000-07:00

If I had a pound for every time I heard a singer give the advice, "Don't read the reviews, I never do" I wouldn't have to, as I'd be off swinging in the hammock on that plantation in St Kitts ordering endless cups of Belmont Estate Rum whilst Vervet monkeys scurried about me begging for peanuts and the Leeward breezes whispered about the palms above.....ahhh.

Back to reality...

It's not a bad thing to ignore reviews nor to read them, so long as you have your head firmly screwed on in the right orientation before you do so. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do".

Reassuringly enough this is often the case and I mean this in the most general of senses be it Pop Idol, X Factor, PopStar to Opera Star and so on - as a result it has become de rigeur to have an opinion on everything (blogging included...), to judge and more often than is healthy, condemn. Is being objective then the sole qualification of a critic? How much insight is too much?

I met a man the other day who had absolutely no musical qualifications, no background in the profession, no links..nothing. He loves listening to various genres of music yet until last year had never heard or known about the existence of a viol consort. Being objective as one could possibly be with his newly found musical love I was bowled over by his intelligent and intuitive expositions on the music he had discovered. For one he wasn't constrained by the bonds of chronology, by the placing of the sounds and instruments in some sort of musical time-line, so he spoke openly about the repertoire in the same analytical breath as the jazz he listened to more frequently. He did however refrain from making any critical comments about the playing save to express that he had the overwhelming feeling that the 6 musicians involved were doing something that seemed spontaneous and organic and that, to his mind, was evidence of their technical and musical excellence and high standards. He didn't have put that into words himself.

Recent reviews and reactions to the production I'm presently a part of (ENO's A Midsummer Night's Dream/Britten) have made interesting reading. As expected in a production that breaks from traditional and dare I say it predictable courses, opinions have ranged from elation to disgust. And as expected the ability to speak English and/or write a sentence on a computer keyboard has opened the floodgates to a multitude of musings on the topic. Rather than separating the wheat from the chaff by trying to decide who knows what they're on about, who writes for a pimped up blog, who falls into the "credible" published-in-print category and so on (the singer's resort to nursing their wounds) I took from all this an interesting collective sense about how audiences on the whole as well as individuals react to opera productions.

I received this from a tweeter recently: "Tho I didn't care for the Dream production, singing was great!" You can probably find it if you bother to look through my Histweetory. Now, I'll be the first to admit I greatly appreciate being told that the 'signing was great' as I and everyone else I know in the production work very hard for tediously long hours over many years to strive towards a sense of 'great'. Also I know what the authour meant to say about the production, yet it is typical of us all to so readily divorce the production from the music. Were I a much more sensitive wombat I could have taken this all as a backhanded complement, "Great singing but the production in which you played a major role having spent the best part of 2 months striving to create a credible character with some sort of depth, the production in which you and the others stood around for 40 days and nights of improvising and discourse is essentially, crap." Don't misunderstand me, I don't take it to mean this and I'm not looking for an Oscar. If anything, at the back of mind is an alarm bell that sounds when I read so many of the same sort of observations; if the one common denominator through all these reviews and critiques is that the music and staging are dealt with separately then hasn't the production as a whole failed? Brrrrrrrrrrring!

But isn't this always the case? Read most newspaper reviews, where word limits hold court and you'll notice that more than not the musical side of the affair is granted maybe a sentence or two if lucky: "X conducted the orchestra with vivid flair" or "I hope I never hear Y sing in all the days of the rest of my life". That sort of thing. Very rarely, but it does happen, the two aspects of stage and music are so well married that the review itself ignores the protagonists altogether reflecting therefore that no one person broke the fourth wall sufficiently to make themselves a disunited other.

I have experienced this successful marriage of stage and music only once, in Katie Mitchell's production of Handel's Jephtha. Think what you will about Stanivslakian methods in opera (often you'll find yourself singing with your back to the audience) it had the desired affect to stop the brain of the singer being fixed on the notes and the production of the music. During rehearsals Mitchell had a keen eye for singers who slipped back into "singing thinking", usually at the point of some Handelian cadence or other when the temptation is to start singing the most ingenious and seemingly spontaneous cadenza imaginable. "That was about 40% acting thinking and 60% singing thinking! I want 90% acting please!", she would shout from the directorial table at the back (front?) of the room. Mitchell has a terrifying knack of seeing your thoughts in your eyes and once or twice I was sent a note saying "make sure your conversations with the chorus members in scene one are about the ensuing battle and Jephtha's ascension as leader, not about what you got up to at the weekend". Indeed we stretched the dramatic threads far enough to have each written pages of back-stories for our characters and before every scene we would remind ourselves of the 'real time of day' on our working costume watches and set in our heads the imaginary temperature of each room we were to enter. (This particular production was set in a wartorn, dilapidated hotel so it was suitably always freezing). None of this is news to an experienced stage actor of course, but I find it a rare approach in opera circles. Accusations of navel-gazing abound, but I will go to great lengths to defend Katie's working methods.

As she argues in her book "The Director's Craft": 'some think that directing is an inherent talent that can only evolve on the rehearsal room floor, during the process of making shows. Others think that it is a skill that can be learnt over time in an educational context. I am of the latter opinion'. Mitchell is saying that directors too need a structured training. In suggesting this she highlights a glaring similarity between many opera directors and the arm-chair critics we all believe we are capable of being. This is that picking up an opera score and thinking up a context and setting the characters within it and pressing play is just as easy as saying "I liked the music but not the production". And in many cases one feeds off the other.

So I don't blame punters who react in this way to a production as they are probably just expressing what they saw; a production and a load of singers singing. And conversely I don't have a problem with directors who setup their work (deliberately or inadvertently) in such a way that there is a clear emphasis on the music over the staging or vice versa because what they are really doing is trying to find that tricky balance between presenting a believable narrative within the context of the totally unbelievable world of characters speaking to each other in song. Some manage it better than others and it's this symbiosis that when lacking is readily evident in the language of the critic, though they may not consciously express it in such terms.

I liked one particular comment by Michael White in his Telegraph blog about the Dream at ENO. "(it's) brilliant but I hated it." He manages to put into 5 or 6 words what some struggled to edit to less than 2000 words. It seems he saw it as a whole, music and drama as one and that's why he hated it because try as he might he couldn't divorce the music from this new staging. Underlying his comment then is an acknowledgment that this symbiosis of music and drama had been achieved. In his eyes at least.

We've moved on a great deal since the old school ways of 'park and bark' productions but it's clear from both sides of the proscenium that there's work still do be done. Or is opera forever in such a state of paralysis - it can never be as clear and straight forward as watching or performing a play because it is inherently a different beast; therefore what exactly should we be striving towards if anything? Maybe that's what makes it so exciting and interesting - it will always provoke discussion, opinion, critique and divisions - who'd want to be an opera director, eh?

What's in a name?

2011-06-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

There's an old and well known story about the countertenor Alfred Deller performing in a concert somewhere in France. In the mob afterwards who surrounded him a woman pushed her way to the front and threw open her arms exclaiming, "Monsieur Deller....Monsieur Deller....you are a........you are a EUNUCH!" Quick as whippet Deller retorted, "I think Madame the word you are looking for is 'unique'." There are two possible explanations for this woman's malapropism. On the one hand she is the love child of Inspector Clueso and Officer Crabtree from 'Allo 'Allo and we can put it down to the challanges of pronunciation and on the other, and I suspect more likely hand, she really had no idea what Deller was doing and from whence he had come.

Some 30 or 40 years later you'd be surprised if anyone still believed that a countertenor had undergone the snip but just occasionally the unprepared audience member is so taken aback that he or she feels the impulse to seek you out and check 'everything's ok'.

This happened to me once in the south of France at a concert blessed with the death-knell of a title, "The Three Countertenors". I won't explain too much about why or how I came to be involved with the kind of event I'd usually emigrate to avoid, but it's worth pointing out that due to some diva like behaviour by one of the 3 (confusing the number 3 for 1 possibly) and a therefore panic stricken promoter, we 3 musketeers ended up being 4. Strangely, nobody seemed to notice. But then this audience were holiday makers and travel journalists sunning themselves on the Cote d'Or, not likely to be too bothered who turned up on stage, just that they did so on time.

Leaving aside the episode where the clarinetist took his shirt off behind me as I stood alone at a urinal, the evening passed as well as an evening could, when 4 countertenors take it in turns to sing as many famous baroque arias under the direction of a conductor called Monsieur Bender who clearly stated in the first of two rehearsals, "I 'ate 'andel!". What sticks in my memory is the comment I got from an American gentleman I encountered on my way to the post-concert reception.

"Jeez....that was something. I mean, wow. I was so worried for you. You came on and started to sing and I thought your tenor voice had cracked and you were stuck up there. Like, for the whole concert".
I forgive him for having not necessarily understood the concept of the countertenor voice but what did he think was going on with the other 3?

It is then usual to laugh off comments such as this and put it down to innocent ignorance. Just sometimes though, you get a comment or a reaction that has no suitable answer. What's more worrying is that the same member of the Royal family has spoken to me twice in the space of one year after concerts and come out with the same incredibly daft question - "Does it hurt?"....(whilst tapping their throat, presumably to indicate where they mean). My answer the first time was "Does it sound like it?". Second time round they didn't tap their throat, so I just answered "Yes, just the once".

2011-06-07T04:59:00.000-07:00

I spent the best part of Sunday in a dale with no phone reception save for Orange customers. Rumour has it that their mast was erected around the same time that Orange's chief retired to this tranquil and disconnected part of Yorkshire. It was all very apt however, as the lure of Facebook, Twitter, texts and calls couldn't be further from the music we were performing in Grinton . Alongside the celebrated viol consort Fretwork was lutenist and Dales resident Jacob Heringman and myself filling the 'cathedral of the dales' with the strains of Byrd, Dowland and Purcell as part of the Swaledale Festival.

So it came as no surprise, once the phone reception barred its way back onto my mobile later that evening, that the twittersphere had entered a frenzy of cross-over artist bashing and general uproarage about a particular television programme and soon after a particular tenor and his dividing opinions. Interesting and intelligent thoughts such as this took their time to reply and so for the following 24 hours I was left trawling back through the sea of negativity that the lack of O2 had hidden from me.

And thank the gods of O2 for this. I left Twitter once before because it felt like a market place for whinge-exchange. If you ever find yourself broadcasting tweets along the lines of "I'm so bored" it's time to slice off your thumbs. The very public twashing (twitter bashing?) of you-know-whos is all very well and good but does it actually go to any great lengths to educate the very people that the you-know-whos are pretending to enlighten with their diluted version of The Truth? Probably not. I imagine that it makes those of us who sing in operas and concerts halls around the world for a living look like a bunch of spoiled, condescending know-alls. If we shower negativity with even more negativity what happens to the patient lying lifeless on the operating table...?

Taking some sort of positive action (it is possible on twitter) I've initiated one of those hashtag things that seem to get people to say stuff. #MFO of My First Opera I hope will get the boos and hisses out of peoples' minds and instead encourage us all to grab the nearest friend, relative, taxi driver or whoever who's never been to the opera and get them up there on the frontline watching the action. And of course, report back via #MFO. At least it'll stop the Popstar to OperaStar and Alfie Boe prattling. Oh damn, I mentioned them....I tried very hard not to.

Leading by example, I convinced an Opera Virgin to come and watch Glyndebourne's Billy Budd at the York City Screen. Not, I realise, the most obvious introduction for a first-timer, however I've been slightly in awe of these recent cinema screenings given by the ROH, Glyndebourne and most impressively the Met in New York. What we lost in the immediacy of live sound and all the energy that a theatre audience might channel we gained in Hollywood close-ups and vivid surround sound. Moreover gone were the constraints of dress-code, unpredictable view-restrictions and of course travel and accommodation concerns. Claggart and Popcorn went down well and my Virgin was given a good Britten seeing-to. He loved every second, and still one year later brings up the impact the characters had on him. I hope he'll now come to see the Dream at ENO - I know he wants to, but his one restriction is time and travel. Unlike the Germans we're not blessed with opera companies in every county so let's hear it for more of these cinema ventures...I think they are a Power for Good.

Bar snack of the year? Mini Yorkshire puddings encircling a ramekin of hot gravy as served at Grinton's local here.