There must be something in the water at Birmingham Conservatoire. As if an all-night piano marathon wasn't enough, complete with overnight cycle ride from London, their violist Alistair Rutherford is running a half-marathon for charity - dressed as a viola. It's all in a good cause, for Soweto string students. Do support him.
Birmingham Conservatoire tells us:
Donning a custom-made viola costume, Alistair Rutherford will be running the Liverpool Half Marathon on Sunday 2 April. Created by Merseyside-based designer Brian D Hanlon, the outfit is made from lightweight Plastazote foam.
Alistair hopes to raise funds for the collaborative UK-South African project, Cape Gate MIAGI Centre for Music & Birmingham Conservatoire – or ARCO. This project has seen 24 strings students aged between eight and 16 in South Africa selected to participate in weekly instrumental Skype lessons, given by academics, current students and alumni of Birmingham Conservatoire, part of Birmingham City University.
ARCO aims to provide the benefits and life-changing inspiration of music to children in the most deprived of circumstances. Conservatoire staff and students – including Alistair – have been acting as role models for vulnerable youngsters living in Soweto, a Johannesburg township deeply affected by poverty and crime.
Running the Liverpool Half Marathon is just one of several fundraising events Alistair has organised in aid of ARCO. Last year, he ran the equivalent distance of the length of South Africa’s coastline, clocking up 1,739 miles (2798 kilometres) by the time he flew out to Johannesburgfor the first ARCO Festival. Meanwhile, last month, he organised an evening of chamber music at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.
21-year-old Alistair, from Allerton in Liverpool, said:
“After running the distance of the South African coastline during my third year of study at Birmingham Conservatoire, and previously running a marathon when I was 17, I was struggling for fundraising ideas. One evening whilst in our local pub myself and fellow ARCO teacher Matt Johnstone joked about a Guinness World Record involving both the things I love: running and the viola.
“12 weeks later my application was accepted by Guinness World Records to attempt the record for the fastest half marathon dressed as a musical instrument at the Liverpool Half Marathon! Training has been going well and I am aiming to beat the record that currently stands at one hour, 26 minutes and 57 seconds." The current record was set by Rakshith Shetty in Karnataka, India on 5 December 2015. The Indian runner ran the SBI Bengaluru Midnight Marathon while dressed as a guitar.
Louise Lansdown, Head of Strings at Birmingham Conservatoire, initiated the ARCO project in 2015. She said:
“Birmingham Conservatoire is full of admiration for Alistair’s adventurous and rather ‘off centre’ project. We are currently enjoying daily updates, including photos and videos of Alistair’s training sessions with his brand new enlarged viola! Alistair and his viola can be seen running around Edgbaston Reservoir most mornings around 7am – a sight not to be missed..."
Louise will be running a festival in Soweto as part of the ARCO Project at the same time Alistair endures his half marathon. Alistair's journey will be streamed live to the ARCO youngsters, so they can cheer him on from the other side of the world. Alistair’s childhood friend James Sharples will be cycling the route alongside him and broadcasting the race over Facebook Live.
You can support Alistair’s world record attempt via his JustGiving page. You can also watch a video of Alistair training in his costume, while his progress in the Liverpool Half Marathon can be watched on Facebook Live from 9am on Sunday 2 April.
I'm a Londoner. I was born in Whitechapel, grew up in north London and now live south west near the end of the District Line. Tried to leave a few times, but always boomeranged straight back. It's a resilient place, full of hard-headed and capable people and the day after 7/7, the Tube bombings, a lot of us got straight back aboard to go wherever we needed to (in my case, the Wigmore Hall), knowing that was the best way to cock the proverbial snook at those who would threaten us. You don't let them. I was a child during the 1970s. The airwaves were full of stories of IRA terrorism and I was scared. My parents used to tell me not to be afraid, because that was what the terrorists wanted. If you refused to be terrorised, they couldn't win.
Times change and today London is a mass of paradoxes. It's richer and poorer all at once, home to both an unconscionable number of billionaires and also too many with nothing at all, sleeping rough in Strand doorways and Hyde Park Corner subways. It's a flourishing cosmopolitan melting pot that now risks crazy damage to itself through xenophobia. A futuristic hub of progress and technology sold on the legend of a misapprehended past. A home of some of the world's finest literature, theatre and music that often seems determined not to celebrate its own achievements. But it's still London, it's still home and we will always find ways to make the very best of it, despite anything.
After a hideous attack that has left four people dead and many injured, finding suitable music for contemplation can feel like a tall order. The LPO concert last night at the Royal Festival Hall was cancelled, apparently due to a police directive. My resident violinist was downhearted, having been psyched up to play Bruckner 9 and regarding "keeping calm and carrying on" as the best response. Several times during the evening we considered Dame Myra Hess and the National Gallery Lunchtime Concerts during the Blitz, not that the situation was comparable. Yet this too is about music as assertion of a shared humanity that is greater and stronger than any threats against it.
Here's what I've found for today, then: Eric Coates's beautiful meditation on Westminster itself.
ERIC COATES: "WESTMINSTER" (MEDITATION) from LONDON SUITE
It's springtime, the magnolias are out, it's Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday - no.332 - and it's time to look for hope for the future (this being in slightly short supply in other areas of life). One of the most heartening things about the music world right now is the startling number of interesting, individual and devoted young pianists in their twenties, who have been bounding onto the scene bringing audible love for their art and a profound, highly developed understanding of its necessary craft.
This is an age in which the industry tends to exploit and squander its stars. I expect most JDCMB readers can think of plenty of instances in which glorious raw talents have been overstressed, seduced by non-artistic aims, twisted, hideously distorted and ultimately spat out (well, some have been - others are still busy with the distortions). That's why the genuineness of these young performers is to be cherished and preserved. Among them are established stars like Igor Levit, Daniil Trifonov and Benjamin Grosvenor, but more recently it has been an absolute joy to encounter Beatrice Rana and George Li, both artists of whom we'll be hearing a lot more soon. And there are others besides, but I won't attempt to list them all for fear of forgetting some...
My plea to them all for Bach's birthday: you've got what it takes, and as long as you keep your integrity you could be blessed with long, splendid and happy lives making music at the highest level. Please, don't ever sell out.
For Bach's birthday, have a listen to Beatrice playing the Goldberg Variations. This recent release has been top of the classical charts and for a very good reason.
This is it: the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg's already renowned new hall, which opened in January after a long, long wait involving years of delay and hundreds of millions of Euros. I popped over for a couple of days to hear and interview the young American pianist George Li - more about him when the article is out, but suffice it to say that he is the real deal. He performed the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and it was a privilege to be there.
Sunset by the sea. Elbphilharmonie on the right
The Elbphilharmonie rises out of the shoreline like a great ship: that was, indeed, the idea of the design, complete with sail-dips and prow. It reminds me of John Adams's story of the inspiration behind his Harmonielehre: a dream in which he saw a giant tanker lift up from the sea and fly. The place has perhaps the finest setting of any concert hall since the Sydney Opera House, looking across the waters into the sunset. Hamburg has acquired a landmark to be proud of, and a venue to compete with the best in the world.
There's just one problem. The design priority certainly involves impressiveness, memorability, magnificence - and a fabulous acoustic. Yet it does not appear to have the wellbeing of its audience quite as much at heart.
It is vast. Not all of what you see in the picture above is hall, though: there are other bits and bobs inside the brick section, not least a luxury hotel, while the venue itself is up at the top. Perhaps it is not until you reach the entrance that you realise what a big deal this is. Because you have to get to your seat in time for the concert and it can take a while.
Walk through the electronic gates (your ticket serves as boarding pass) and you are faced with the most inventive format of escalator I've encountered since Charles de Gaulle airport, involving several shifts of gradient and a long, high ride. Once you've done two escalators, there are stairs, stairs and more stairs. They are sleek and modern, involving interesting angles and twists. They smell wonderfully of new wood. A few lifts exist as well, which is lucky because the clientele for the Hamburg Philharmonic's Monday concert were not all sprightly on their feet. Benefitting from a health app on my phone that counts my steps every day and awards points if I do enough, I wondered if a partnership arrangement might be feasible for those who choose to climb.
Inside, the design is in the round, with stalls plus four tiers of seating above. The nautical theme continues: the balconies undulate like waves or a shoreline and the wall around the orchestra is studded as if with stones from a beach. The place is enormous, yet feels intimate as the division of the tiers makes you feel that you are not surrounded by thousands of people, everyone has enough space and wherever you sit you are relatively close to the performers. A giant acoustic mushroom hangs from the ceiling (in the photo you can just see the curve of it at the top, studded with lights).
The sound is clear as a mountain river and as fulsome as the sea itself: an excellent balance of colour and timbre levels and a substantial bloom to blend them. At times it erred on the boomy, certainly in the Tchaikovsky Symphony No.5 which ended the programme, but George's wonderful, singing piano tone was flattered and enhanced, with a chance to appreciate the nuancing of phrases and the depth of legato in a way that is often not possible in certain other venues one could mention.
Unfortunately our conductor for the night seemed to think the Tchaikovsky Fifth was a sacred space requiring dubious extremes of exaggerated tempi, and he waited on the podium, motionless while his orchestra tried not to twiddle their thumbs, for absolute pin-drop silence from the audience before beginning the first, second and third movements. Quite a challenge in an acoustic so clear you can hear someone burp on the other side of the auditorium.
But...oh dear...you would think, would you not, that after spending hundreds of millions of Euros on this building, they could put in enough ladies' loos? Could they hell. On level 15 I and most of my fellow audience members spent the whole interval queuing up, to discover upon entry that there were only two (2) stalls inside that door. What the heck were they thinking?!?
Verdict. Architecture: inspirational magnificence reinvented. Acoustic: mostly splendid. Creature comforts: inside auditorium, yes; in entrance, foyers and facilities: nnnooooo...
Hamburg itself has much to offer the musical traveller. I spent a wonderful morning in the so-called Composers' Quarter (above). Brahms's birthplace having been destroyed in WW2, along with much of the city, a charitable foundation has created a block in traditional Hamburgian style in the area where Brahms's family once lived; it houses a Brahms museum (the stone portal on the right of the photo) and a Baroque museum for Telemann, CPE Bach and Hasse. It will soon be home to a Mendelssohn museum as well - the staff told me it should be opening next year.
The Baroque centre is full of fascinating bits and pieces, notably the delightful information that Handel and Telemann were great friends and shared an enthusiasm for horticulture; it seems they used to post one another rare flower bulbs across the Channel. There's a model of a baroque opera house, complete with deus ex machina, a modern clavichord and a beautiful spinet of c1730 akin to one that Telemann might have used. Best of all, if you're a musician you will be encouraged to play the instruments. At the Brahms museum (one of the wardens of which is named Frau Joachim, though she says she is no relation) historical displays with facsimiles and photos aplenty trace the outline of his life, his relationships with the Schumanns and Joachim, and there's a "table piano" that belonged to him, on which he used to give lessons. They let you play that, too... It's not easy to control the evenness of tone, but the sound is almost surprisingly rich and responsive and as you make awkward progress through Op.117 No.1 you might try to absorb the notion that Brahms's fingers touched these keys, and that the pupil who sat at this keyboard striving to make music would look up at his/her teacher for response and see that thoughtful broad forehead, those frank blue eyes...
For another startling spiritual hit, go to St Michael's Church (the Hauptkirche Sankt Michaelis, or "Michel"). The interior, recently painted, is bright and white, filled with clear Nordic light from tall windows and spaces that billow around you like those oft-referred ship sails. If you're lucky (and I was) someone might be playing Bach on the organ. On one side of the entrance is a plaque to Mendelssohn, on the other side one to Mahler, who held a music director post in Hamburg and wrote his Symphony No.2 here. In the crypt is the grave of CPE Bach. At the font, Brahms was baptised. The place has an intense charge, an atmosphere of peace and meditation that pulls you in and demands that you stay there a while to breathe in its peace and breathe out your stress before retackling the outside world. That is true sacred space. No pulled-around tempi needed.
The powerful and uncompromising Welsh tenor
Gwyn Hughes Jones sings Walther von Stolzing in the Royal Opera House’s new
production of Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg, alongside his fellow countryman Sir Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs. I
went backstage to meet him…
Hughes Jones (left) and Terfel (right) in the rehearsal room (c) Royal Opera House, photo by Clive Barda
Jessica
Duchen: Gwyn, can you tell us about Kasper Holten’s new production, without
giving the game away?
Gwyn Hughes Jones: No! Haha… I think people
already know that it’s set in a club, a sort of music club.
It reflects that idea of the application of rules to art and expression and
how, if they’re not applied conscientiously, they hamstring the expressive
sense of spontaneity, that creative evolution in art. We have to have rules in
art because human beings have to have structure. Two plus two has to make four:
we do need some kind of balance in nature and in the world. We can’t help
ourselves. But it’s when rules take over and exist for their own
sake that there’s trouble. I think this works for the piece: it doesn’t
compromise it in any way. It’s always interesting to see the path directors
take in their concepts of how to make a piece relevant to today. I’m sure that, as always, some people will like it and some people will not. We’ll see…
JD:
You sang Walther at English National Opera not so long ago, in English, so this
is your second Walther, but your first in German. What’s it like to make that
change?
GHJ:In a way, you start all over again. You can’t take anything for granted.
The structure of the language is different, the inflection of the stresses are
different, the way the language is used is slightly different too, so you have
to be mindful of those things in preparation and delivery. I think singing
these pieces in English is incredibly useful because you end up with a really broad
palette of colour choice. Instead of having maybe one to three colours for a
word, you have six or seven. Of course you still have to choose the right ones.
But as someone who works in, if you like, the discipline of sound-painting, to
have that choice of palette is always a very important weapon.
JD:
Walther is a notoriously difficult role. What are the biggest challenges?
GHJ: It’s long. It’s high in some places.
It’s not written in a friendly way. Nevertheless, you can look
at some works of Puccini and Verdi and you see they, too, are writing for the kind of
singer they have a right to expect. They don’t think we arrive without
having had any kind of vocal education. These pieces play a part in stretching
singers and not compromising them. I think the bel canto style was a
hugely important influence on Wagner and this is reflected in all his works to
some extent, but particularly in this piece. So it’s about having that elegance,
it’s having the youthfulness – and one of the biggest challenges is remaining
fresh to the very end.
One difficulty is
this paradox that characters like Walther are young, but in real life you have
to wait until you’re a fair bit older, a mature singer and a very physically strong
and sophisticated singer, to be able to sing these roles to their potential.
There is no other way. You will not find a 20-year old-who will sing Walther to
its potential. So one of the challenges in this kind of repertoire is to keep
the voice young, fresh and vibrant, so that when you come to
your potential you can fulfil it for as long as possible. That’s why singers
like Gigli, Björling and Pavarotti could keep that youthfulness and vibrancy in
their voices for a very long time and that’s what made them convincing
exponents.
Gwyn Hughes Jones as Walther with Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Eva in the new Meistersinger.
(c) ROH, photo by Clive Barda
JD: Do
you have a regime for looking after your voice?
GHJ: It’s a lot to do with choosing the
right kind of repertoire and I think the root of it goes to the beginning of my
learning about singing. You have to be fortunate enough to work with good
teachers, you need to work with people who know what they’re talking about and
you need to be incredibly patient in your development. By all means, have
targets along the way, have a long journey, but also work hard within a sense of
context. You need to be sensible about repertoire choices and understand that
if you do aspire to sing Wagner, if you aspire to sing the Verdi and Puccini
spinto roles, then in the same way Wagner was inspired by Bellini, you have to
sing that repertoire too: you have to immerse yourself in the bel canto style.
You have to sing everything, but it is a process of building by small bricks.
You build a very solid foundation, then build on that. You don’t just wake up
one morning and find you’re a Heldentenor. It doesn’t work like that – and if
people do do that, they don’t last very long.
JD: So
it takes 30 years to be an overnight success…
GHJ: Yes, and to remain an overnight
success, that’s the thing. It’s not about that initial splash. Spotting
potential is the easiest thing in the world; allowing it to develop is something totally different. The onus is on us as individuals, but on the
people we work with as well. So it is very challenging and you have to be
incredibly patient too.
JD:
How did you start to sing?
GHJ: My parents were not academically
musical, but they loved opera, my father loved singing and there was always plenty of music in
the house. Also coming from Wales there was always plenty of
great culture around, so I was never far away from great literature and great
poetry in English and in Welsh, and great music too. It was a very common thing
for me to hear operatic arias when I was very young, sung by schoolteachers or
farmers. In Eisteddfods these are competition arias, so you’d turn up to an
Eisteddfod competition and there’d be people singing the ‘Prize Song’ and ‘Vissi d’arte'... So there’s a sense that, yes,
they’re great, great art, but also that it wasn’t an elitist thing by
any means: they were extremely reachable. You saw people who were having
a singing lesson once a week or once a month, singing these arias as well as
they’d be sung at some of the greatest opera houses in the world. That always
for me was an example to say, ‘Yes, why not?’.
As someone who comes from
Anglesey, whose father is an engineer, whose mother is a housewife, some people
would say I have no business whatsoever doing this. And yet all these
influences I had in my upbringing gave me the privilege and the opportunity to
be able to pick these things, experience them, enjoy them and find a path.
JD: People
always think there’s a mystique about the Welsh and singing, but is it perhaps more
down to this musical tradition that is very egalitarian?
GHJ: I think it’s a big part of it. Our
historical, cultural tradition involves hundreds of thousands of years of
storytelling. In this culture before the Romans came to Britain, we didn’t
write. And that oral tradition has always been incredibly strong – the old
tales in Welsh are thousands of years old and he oldest piece of poetry in the
Welsh language comes from the 6th century. As a nation that
struggled for its existence, you keep these things very close to you and
they’re the things that keep you believing, keep you defending your culture and
your language. They are incredbily important to us along with the sense of
struggle and telling the story of the struggle. We love our heroes, yet
we’re extremely melancholic too. There is that range of expressive colour in
our culture that all goes to arm this huge weapon we have, called
singing or storytelling.
As Walther in the new production.
(c) Royal Opera House, photo by Clive Barda
JD: This is quite a Welsh dominated Meistersinger:
you are Walther and the freshly-knighted Sir Bryn Terfel is Hans Sachs…
GHJ: I think it’s a great achievement for
the background we come from: the Eistefodd tradition, the amateur tradition. It shows how incredibly rich that
was. We both were given a kind of unofficial education outside school: we were
being taught some of the most amazing ideas and shown some of the most amazing
art and weren’t really aware that it was happening. That’s the most wonderful
thing and it’s easy to take it for granted. But it’s not just the musical
aspect, it’s the literary aspect too, it’s the poetry, the understanding of how
people use words and why people choose certain words to describe something. Being
immersed in that – this is the consequence! I think it’s something worth
reinvesting in: not just keeping it alive but allowing it to go from strength
to strength. And it’s difficult, because Wales is economically poor. So it
needs as much support as it can get.
JD: Have
you worked with Bryn much before?
GHJ: We did some concerts together in Wales
years ago, and we did Falstaff together in Chicago, which was my American debut
in 1999. But we haven’t sung together for a very long time. I could have had
the chance to sing Walther with him as Sachs when Welsh National Opera did Meistersinger, but it so happened with
that season that I was debuting two big Verdi operas and one Puccini within the
six months previously and I didn’t think it was wise to take on the part. But
then ENO asked me to take on the role and it came at just the right time. It’s
about having the longer journey, seeing the bigger picture – you don’t
compromise yourself. For every Meistersinger,
you need to do a Tosca, a Butterfly, pieces that don’t put you out
there to the same extent. It’s good sense.
JD: Do
you see yourself doing more Wagner soon?
GHJ: I think so... Ironically, the
first opera I ever saw was the Patrice Chéreau production of the Ring cycle on
TV, when I was nine or ten years old. It
was Dame Gwyneth Jones and it was something amazing. Even on TV,
you could tell how amazing it was. Those costumes! Those giants! It made a huge
impression. Also, the first classical music tape I bought was 'Ten Tenors sing
20 Arias', which included plenty of Wagner. I enjoyed listening to it,
but it didn’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as the Italian repertoire, Verdi
and Puccini – that was what I really wanted to do and the kind of singer I
wanted to be. So I didn’t really entertain the idea of being a Wagnerian
singer. I started out as a baritone and when I became a tenor there’s an idea
of the kind of colour you carry through from being a baritone: people
immediately say, “Oh, you’ll sing Florestan, you’ll do Walther and Lohengrin…”
But I was thinking about Rodolfo, Cavaradossi, Chénier, all these pieces, and I
didn’t see myself as being a Wagnerian singer.
As Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly
I listened to snippets of Wagner over the
years and it didn’t appeal to me. Also the way it was performed didn’t appeal to me,
because it seemed that everything I believed in was being compromised. There’s
no point working to make the voice as expressive and beautiful a communicative
instrument as possible when you’re battling against an orchestra and a conductor
who don’t acknowledge that actually they’re accompanying, And in some instances,
too, you find that not necessarily the actual decibel volume, but the colour of the volume can be overwhelming
to voices, so you have to be incredibly careful with the way that you
accompany. Even when they’re
expressing emotions that are not beautiful, there still has to be a sense of
continuity in that character and that expression. You mustn’t compromise that in
order to be heard, because then it totally defeats the purpose. You miss the
potential of the work in the first place. So I was reluctant, from hearing the
way people were singing Wagner’s music, to entertain the idea of doing that.
But then I found people were saying, “Well,
Walther is a lyric part, it’s an Italianate part,” and your ears prick up
because you realise it can be done that way and actually it should be done that way. If you go back and
listen to people at the beginning of the 20th century, they sing this
music in a lyrical, Italiante way – Walther, Lohengrin, they have line, beauty,
harmony. You realise that somehow, in the last 50 years of performing this
music, something has been allowed to fall into the shadows. And the idea that
it can be, needs to be beautiful, it
needs to be expressive in the right way, that made me incredibly interested in
doing it. So when Welsh National Opera did put on Meistersinger in Cardiff, I
went to see it and finally thought that, yes, I could see myself singing it. When the offer did come to sing Walther, I jumped at it, because it had come at
the right time.
Now I’m going to be doing Lohengrin in
about three years in the US. Parsifal and Siegmund are certainly roles I’d do
as well. I do regard myself as an Italianate singer, though, so they’re not my
main mission. There is so much to do... I’m not really interested in saying I
have done 200 roles. I don’t think you achieve anything except marks on the
post that way. The more you do a piece, the more you realise that you actually
don’t know it and the more you discover about it. To do the iconic roles that
are the mainstream in every opera house in the world, to work those pieces to
their potential – not just getting through them but producing work that is
significant – that interests me a lot more than tallying the numbers. I’m far
more interested in doing 350-400 performances of Tosca than having 200 roles under my belt.
JD:
How did you turn into a tenor from being a baritone?
GHJ: I think it’s about the colours you
have in your voice. It’s funny – learning how to sing is like forgetting
everything you learned between infancy and adulthood. You have to go back to
that point where you find the voice works at its most efficient. One of the
biggest traps that young singers fall into is that they try to create a voice
colour well beyond their years. You have to allow the voice to develop
into these colours. It’s OK to sound young, it’s OK to sound not ready – it’s
part of that long journey. So in the pursuit of that idea, I sang as a baritone
because baritone music was what suited my voice.
I wanted to sing Verdi and verismo
baritones, but I always suspected I didn’t have that baritonal colour of all
the singers I admired – people like Piero Cappuccilli, Leonard Warren,
Robert Merrill had this beautiful round colour. Even at that age I wasn’t interested
in being a lighter baritone singing Verdi’s music because I didn’t think it was
honest. It wouldn’t have the gravitas, that noble colour, that these lines demanded.
I came to study in London at the Guildhall when
I was 18, with David Pollard. He said to me, “I won’t tell you you’re a tenor
or you’re a baritone, I have my suspicions of where you’ll go but what we have
to do is work to the potential. We have to get you singing, we have to find out
where your voice is most comfortable.” So I started singing as a baritone,
because that was the music that fitted my voice. I sang a lot of
song repertoire, so even though I didn’t have to make any cast-iron decisions
about the kind of voice I was going to be, I was getting an incredibly rich and
intense education in repertoire. I sang everything from the beginning, Verdi
from the beginning, to get the vocal culture in place.
Then I won the Kathleen Ferrier Prize in
1992, as a baritone, and people started asking if I was
interested in working on contract at various companies. The repertoire I was
offered, though, was far too challenging. It was understudy
work, but it’s one thing to learn a role and quite another to go on stage and perform it, which as an understudy you
would have to do, and it wasn’t a good idea.
Meanwhile with my teacher we were starting
to look at excerpts of very iconic
tenor music – the third act of La Bohème,
the first duet between Cavaradossi and Tosca, part of Manon Lescaut, parts that could show unequivocally whether I was a
tenor for that sort of repertoire. One day David sent me to William McAlpine down
the corridor, a very brilliant Scottish tenor who was also a teacher at
Guildhall, to see what he would say. I sang him one aria and he
said: “Yep, no doubt!”
But as I’d won the Ferrier as a baritone, a
lot of people refused to accept that it was a good idea. I’d also won a lot of
scholarships to allow me to study and those were as a baritone as well. But
the way I saw it, I was awarded them because of the singer I was, not because
of the voice type I was. That’s the point: you have to be allowed to discover
and develop. People will always have opinions about the kind of singer you are,
but in the end you have to decide where you want to go. And David said, “You
have to make a decision: you can be a very, very good baritone, or you can be a
better tenor. It’s up to you.” For me there was no question: this
was the time to study, to make those decisions, as opposed to
waiting another ten years when I might be already established in my career.
As Cavaradossi in WNO's Tosca. Photo: Robert Workman
JD: And
you’ve never looked back...
GHJ: No – there’s too much to look forward
to! But you do look back, of course, because this is a career that requires absolute discipline: it requires you to
be able to work right at the coalface, work in detail at things and not shirk
those challenges. It’s correcting those weaknesses that allow you to build. You
don’t want to take a step forward and then realise that the very thing your house
is built on isn’t sturdy. So you have to work in that way, while at the same
tine being able to step back and see how far you’ve come, and never lose
sight of that. It’s difficult to strike that balance. We’re trying to be as
good as we can be, and that’s always exciting.
JD: Is
Wales still home?
GHJ: Yes indeed. It is my home and I’m
obligated as a Welsh professional to work for Welsh National Opera. It’s a
fantastic company. You have the potential to produce world-class opera there –
you have a great orchestra, world class technical staff, a fantastic 2000 seat
theatre, the opportunity to work with Carlo Rizzi, you have the opportunity to
work with people who are at the best opera houses in the world and are regarded
as the best in their field in the world.
JD:
What’s next after Walther?
GHJ: Next I have some concerts between now and
the summer at the National Eisteddfod – there are some works I’ve commissioned and
as a Welsh artist I think it’s incredibly important to stimulate new compositions
in Wales. In the autumn I do my first Radames in Aida and then the new year
brings Forza. Next year is heavy on the Verdi and the Puccini, and then I come
back to Lohengrin. You have to find a balance between the stuff that stretches and
stimulates you and the stuff that stimulates you, but allows you to rest.
JD:
I should let you rest too... Thank you very much for talking to us, Gwyn, and
we’re looking forward to opening night.
Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 11 March. Kasper Holten directs, Sir Antonio Pappano conducts and besides Hughes Jones and Terfel the cast includes Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser, Rachel Willis-Søresnsen as Eva and Allan Clayton as David. Details and booking here.
Tonight at the Royal Festival Hall, the conductor Rafael Payare joins me on stage for a pre-concert interview about his life and work, his training in El Sistema and this evening's programme of Russian music: Prokofiev's 'Classical' Symphony and the Violin Concerto No.1 and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Frank Peter Zimmermann is the violin soloist. Do come along if you can. Talk starts at 6pm and concert at 7.30pm. Tickets here.
Thought for the day: let's persuade more of the great male performers to play some music by women!
If female composers are going to achieve equal recognition to male ones, we need men to play their music. After all, women performers play men's music. And one sometimes has the impression it can be a little bit tricky [British understatement -ed.] to persuade blokes to learn the material in question. So, chaps, I'd like to offer you suggestions for some very fine role models.
1. KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN PLAYS GRAZYNA BACEWICZ (1909-1969): PIANO SONATA NO.2
I remember Zimerman mentioning Grazyna Bacewicz to me in an interview at least 20 years ago - he was determined to champion her works beyond Poland. He proved as good as his word.
2. PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY SINGS POLDOWSKI (1879-1932) 'L'HEURE EXQUISE'
Irene Poldowski was actually Régine Wieniawski, daughter of the violinist. Quite a life. Check her out.
-- 2.2 WHAT A HERO - JAROUSSKY SINGS PAULINE VIARDOT (1821-1910) TOO. 'HAVANAISE'
3. GIDON KREMER & CHARLES DUTOIT PLAY SOFIA GUBAIDULINA (b.1931) : OFFERTORIUM
4. MATT SHARP & DOMINIC HARLAN PLAY ERROLLYN WALLEN (b.1958):
'Dervish' from The Girl in my Alphabet
5. GREGOR PIATIGORSKY PLAYS LILI BOULANGER (1893-1918): Nocturne
Recorded in 1936. Heard since? I hope so...
6. NICHOLAS DANIEL PLAYS THEA MUSGRAVE (b.1928)
His first CD was of her oboe works.
There's plenty more where this comes from, but we still need to keep proving it.
International Women's Day, 8 March, has risen to become a big deal in music programming these past few years - championing, not before time, the creativity and achievements of women musicians over the years, decades, centuries, often, and still often, against the odds. Here are a few highlights of the celebrations taking place around Britain this week.
• The UK premiere of Fanny Mendelssohn's 'Easter Sonata' when Sofya Gulyak plays it on Wednesday. BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting the performance live from the Royal College of Music at 1pm. The formidably gifted Sofya Gulyak is the only woman ever to have won first prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition. More about the sonata - which was mistaken for a work by Felix for years - and Fanny's 4xgreat-granddaughter Sheila Hayman's efforts on its behalf here.
• Plenty more on BBC Radio 3 this week for International Women's Day: they are playing only music by women on Wednesday 8 March. Catch up on new recordings of music by women with Alexandra Coghlan on Record Review, and an exploration of the works of Dame Ethel Smyth from Kate Kennedy. Now available on the iPlayer. And Composer of the Week is Barbara Strozzi. This is all part of some very welcome, intensive programming focusing on female composers. Full listing for Wednesday here.
• The Southbank Centre's week-long Women of the World Festival launches on Tuesday 7 March, celebrates women's achievements everywhere and surveys the obstacles that still keep them from fulfilling their potential. Musical highlights include the Women of the World Orchestra conducted by Jessica Cottis at the annual Mirth Control evening hosted by Sandi Toksvig. More here.
• Diana Ambache, head of the Ambache Charitable Trust which offers grants to aid the promotion of female composers, has started a record label and the third release is being launched on Wednesday. It's chamber music by the fabulous Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, including the Quartet for Four Violins, Trio for Oboe, Violin and Cello, Theme and Variations for Violin and Piano and more. Details here. More to read from Diana on the topic of women composers here.
Dobrinka Tabakova. Photo: Sussie Ahlburg/ECM Records
• St George's Brandon Hill, Bristol, presents a programme featuring the music of the dynamic young composer Dobrinka Tabakova, performed by the very starry Tabakova Players (Alexander Sitkovetsky and Roman Mints, violins; Maxim Rysanov and Philip Dukes, violas; Kristine Blaumane and Dora Kokas, cellos; Stacey Watton, bass; Ashley Wass, piano/harpsichord). Programme includes excerpts from her Grammy-nominated ECM album 'String Paths'. Dobrinka gives a pre-concert talk at 6.15pm. It's the culmination of a whole day of IWD events at St George's. More details here.
• Holywell Music Room, Oxford: soprano Claire Booth, cellist Natalie Clein and pianist Anna Tilbrook present a programme including music by Rebecca Clarke, Lili and Nadia Boulanger both, Elizabeth Lutyens, Clara Schumann, Roxanna Panufnik, Charlotte Bray and a new commission from Deborah Pritchard with text by Jeanette Winterson. Booking and details here.
Ruby Hughes
• Kings Place, London: soprano Ruby Hughes and Friends offer a magnificent baroque programme entitled Heroines of Love and Loss, launching their album of the same name. Music includes works ny Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana, Barbara Strozzi, Claudia Sessa, Antonia Bembo, Henry Purcell and John Bennet, as well as a song, 'O Death Rock Me Asleep', attributed to Anne Boleyn. Grab a ticket here.
• Hull University has a full day of events for IWD and as part of this a tribute to Pauline Oliveros is being given in a 4pm concert of her works. More details here.
• Cardiff, Hoddinott Hall: The BBC National Orchestra and Choir of Wales under its principal guest conductor Xian Zhang presents the world premiere of a new choral work, Speak Out, by Kate Whitely, which sets to music the 2013 speech by Malala Yousafzai about the right of every girl to an education. It's a commission from BBC Radio 3. In the same concert the remarkable Latvian Skride sisters, Baibe and Lauma, play Mendelssohn's Double Concerto for violin and piano and the programme ends with Zemlinsky's fairy-tale tone-poem The Little Mermaid. More here.
This are just a few selections, with a classical focus - there is much, much, much, much more out there for IWD in many different genres and countless spheres. And you can even go and hear music by men if you prefer. While the day-long celebration is snowballing into a week, sometimes longer, the challenge now is for women's music and musicianship to be celebrated not only in one patch per year, but across the board, all the time, to the point that special celebrations are no longer needed because equal representation will be a no-brainer, something that would simply be taken for granted. The more women are writing music and giving performances, the better for everyone, because there will be more music of still greater range, offering us all even more choice and even higher standards. Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that forecasts now say the gender pay gap won't close until the year 2186. That's how far we still have to go.
Composer Hannah Kendall, one of the 157 musical creators
supported by the fund so far
Five years ago the PRS for Music Foundation created a fund called Women Make Music, designed to encourage more female creators to step up for funding, make their mark on the airwaves and become role models for the future. The grants support tours, recording, commissions and other projects that develop female musicians' careers. The results of the first five-year evaluation have just been revealed during a parliamentary round-table session and the numbers make for stunning reading.
• 79% said the grant helped their confidence by helping to grow their professional profile.
• 82% described the creative impact as significant or very significant.
• 82% secured more bookings after receiving the grant.
• 64% secured new commissions after receiving the grant.
• 85% said their project could not have happened without this funding.
• 78% said they had experienced sexism in the music industry. Classical composers pointed to a lack of female role models; those of other genres described the industry as male dominated, lacking recognition of what women contribute and achieve. Many reflected that there is pressure on women to conform to a sexy, beautiful image. Some performers said they had been made to feel like sex objects instead of artists.
The fund so far has had:
• 1,300 applications
• £522,790 given in grants
• 157 individuals funded
• £3,513 average increase in grantees' income
• £3,600 was the average grant, therefore...
• ...100% approx, return on investment.
Vanessa Reed, chief executive of PRS for Music Foundation, said:
‘The impact of the Women Make Music fund over the past five years demonstrates how powerful and inspiring targeted funding initiatives can be. Not only is it a hugely popular programme, but a transformational one which has introduced us to new talent and positively impacted the careers of over 150 female songwriters, composers and music creators.
‘We’re pleased that the findings of our evaluation are being discussed in Parliament today and that Matt Hancock (minister for culture and digital) and Caroline Dinenage (minister for women, equalities and early years) have shown their interest and support of this work. We look forward to working with government, other funders and industry partners to grow this fund so that we can reach more of the women who deserve our support and accelerate change in an industry which would benefit from increased representation of talented women.’
Now the PRS for Music Foundation as a whole aims to achieve a 50:50 balance of male:female creator applicants by 2022.
As an addendum, here is the final section of the report:
WHAT NEXT? This evaluation concludes that ideally,
Women Make Music would not be necessary
and that the music industry would be gender
neutral in talent progression. But the music
industry does not operate in isolation. Many
of the challenges for women in the music
industry are part of much wider societal
challenges of gender discrimination and
sexism. The place to start overcoming these is in schools, giving girls the confidence to
overcome the barriers and crucially letting
them know that careers in all parts of the
music industry are possible for women.
However, for women who’ve embarked on a
career, support like Women Make Music is
equally crucial and still required. This fund
has had a significant impact. It has responded
to a specific imbalance in the professional landscape of the music industry; and it has
done something about it. The challenge going
forward is: • To continue to highlight gender issues in
the music industry and to influence others
to work collaboratively for change • To nurture female talent through targeted
interventions if the sector as a whole is not
sufficiently inclusive • To work toward a situation where the
success of such approaches renders them
obsolete because the industry is investing
in talent of all backgrounds and women
and men are putting themselves forward
in at least comparable numbers. There is a long way to go and for the
foreseeable future, Women Make Music and
other initiatives which support female talent,
will be vital for a healthy, inclusive and
innovative music industry.
JDCMB is 13 years old today! To celebrate, I thought we could show that 13 is sometimes very lucky indeed, so I've assembled 13 of the best 13-related pieces I know, aided and abetted by some friends.
The restrictions are: first, I'm leaving out the more depressing 13s - with apologies to their fans, but this is a birthday celebration! - such as Rachmaninoff's Symphony No.1, which is great but got off to a terrible start in life, Brahms's 'Funeral Ode' Op.13, No.13 from Schubert's Schwanengesang which is 'Der Doppelganger', and Shostakovich's Symphony No.13, 'Babi Yar', a towering work which deals with a horrendous massacre in Ukraine during WWII. And secondly, no composer can have two entries except Beethoven.
To offer a nod to a few other omissions, it was tempting to include the whole of Wagner's 13th opera, Parsifal, but we'd be here all day; George Crumb's 'Black Angels', which involves numerology around 13 and 7, but would need explaining; and I was intrigued by being offered bar 13 of the Andante in Haydn's last string quartet, which includes some particularly exquisite writing. Many thanks to everyone who wrote in with suggestions!
13. Beethoven: Piano Sonata Op.13, 'Pathétique' (Daniel Barenboim)
1 March is one of my favourite days of the year, because its arrival means that January and February are gone and won't be back for a bit. Seasonal music is always a big JDCMB favourite, so here is a piece for the incipient spring.
This was the world premiere in 2010 of one piece in the cycle of Roxanna Panufnik's Four World Seasons: it's called 'Spring in Japan' and it is played here by Tasmin Little, for whom it was written, and the Orchestra of the Swan conducted by David Curtis and led by David Le Page.
There's now a CD of the complete work - with 'Autumn in Albania', 'Tibetan Winter' and 'Indian Summer' - get it here.
