Isolde rising

I just interviewed Rachel Nicholls, who's about to sing her first Isolde at the wonderful Longborough Festival Opera. Piece is in the Independent today. Director's cut below. She tells me how her local comprehensive school helped her rise to the top; why sheer persistence was the key to embracing the Wagner that's now her home territory after she started out in Baroque; and that she's actually married to Kurwenal.

The shining sonic arc of a soprano voice in full flight cuts through the air in a Tower Hamlets backstreet. The Cotswold-based Longborough Festival Opera team has come here to rehearse its new production of Tristan und Isolde, which opens on 12 June. Anthony Negus, Longborough’s expert Wagnerian music director, is conducting, ratcheting up the intensity; and in a sunny studio with seated cast and piano accompaniment, the sound is overwhelming as Isolde – Rachel Nicholls – lets rip. 

The British dramatic soprano is performing this marathon role for the first time, and it’s fitting that it should be at Longborough, where her rise to fame in Wagnerian spheres began. The country house opera, its theatre a converted former chicken shed, offered a complete, staged Ring cycle during the composer’s bicentenary year, 2013; Nicholls starred as Brünnhilde. Turning 40 this year, she is blessed with a bright-edged, flexible and voluminous voice that has an uplifting sense of release and freedom, combined with precision and control – a near-ideal mix. 

But Isolde, as Nicholls points out, is a huge challenge, with more music to sing than Brünnhilde has in all of her Ring operas put together. Isolde – the Irish princess who comes to Cornwall to marry King Marke, only to fall in love en route with his emissary, Tristan – experiences deep inner conflicts, which are often expressed intimately. “While bits of the role are as muscular as Brünnhilde, there’s more quiet singing, more passages of light and shade, which makes it more interesting to sing,” Nicholls says. “Probably there’s nothing in it that’s quite so much fun as the Ring, charging about with a spear – as Brünnhilde I got very good at swords, spears and battles. But Isolde’s language is subtler; it is all about feelings, rather than action.” 

Nicholls, a down-to-earth personality with ready sense of humour, cropped hair and sensible shoes, hails originally from Bedford. She attended a local comprehensive school whose excellent music department, together with the county’s free music provision, offered her ample opportunities to test her wings. “My school happened to be fabulous for music,” she says. “Quite a few of us have made fantastic careers in the music world thanks to our teacher there.” On Saturdays she attended Trinity College of Music’s junior department, learning the piano and the violin: “The county paid for me to go there and paid for my travel too.” Bedfordshire offered not only a county youth choir, in which she sang, but also a youth opera group for the 15-25s: “Every year it would put on a fully staged opera with orchestra. I joined it when I was 15 – and I knew straight away that that’s what I wanted to do.” 

But after taking a degree in languages, plus postgraduate study at the Royal College of Music, it was in baroque music that she began her singing career. Changing from its light, somewhat constrained purity of tone to the full-blooded dramatic soprano repertoire did follow the needs of her voice, she says, but it also required immense determination.

It all began at Longborough. She first arrived there to sing Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. “I loved it,” she says, “but at that point Wagner wasn’t really on my radar.” Longborough was planning its Ring cycle at the time, and Nicholls’s agent persuaded her to audition for a small role in Die Walküre. 

“I was totally seduced by the music,” says Nicholls. “My friend Lee Bisset was singing Sieglinde. I listened to her and thought: I want to be able to sing like that. And I listened to the role of Brünnhilde and realised that that was what I wanted to sing. I knew I had the necessary weight in the middle range of my voice, and that the soprano Alwyn Mellor wasn’t available for the role at that time, so I volunteered to do Götterdämmerung.” It was a huge leap – both of repertoire and of faith – but she would not be dissuaded. “People told me not to do it, but I persisted and nagged until eventually they gave in and let me.”

“I did wonder if I’d bitten off more than I could chew,” she admits, “but I prepared it thoroughly – and I had the chance to study with Anne Evans. That’s the thing that’s made the biggest difference to my life.” Evans was one of the preeminent sopranos of her day, especially celebrated for Wagner: “She can take me through every note and word and suggest different ways to think about it and the emotion behind it.” 

Taking the time to retrain her voice, Nicholls says, was a big risk – “My income went down by about 50 per cent” – and she needed both inner strength and moral support. Fortunately she had them. She and her husband, the baritone Andrew Slater – who sings Tristan’s friend Kurwenal at Longborough – live in the Peak District and, she says, help one another maintain a healthy perspective. “As a baritone, Andrew usually has to play a king, a murderer, or somebody’s dad – often mine!” she remarks. 

“Singing’s very important to us both, but it’s not the whole story. If you put all of yourself into whether or not people like you and your singing on stage – which is entirely subjective – it’s a recipe for disaster. Sometimes you’ll get horrible reviews, or maybe someone’s going to decide you look fat in your costume and they’ll say something mean. And if everything about you is poured into that little public space, you could end up a very unhappy person. 

“I’m lucky to live in Derbyshire,” she adds. “The job is stressful, the travelling is too, and the pressure is immense. My release is getting out for a run or a hike in the hills. Being outside keeps me sane.”

Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival Opera, from 12 June. Box office: 01451 830 292

Tchaikovsky, spades and stalkers...

I had a chat with director David Alden about The Queen of Spades at ENO for The Independent (opening night was yesterday). He revealed that Tchaikovsky was no stranger himself to the sort of stalking that Lisa experiences from Hermann...

Few operas can boast a libretto based on a literary masterpiece that is also a psychological thriller. Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, after Alexander Pushkin’s short story, is the exception – and its gripping tale, focusing on a crazed anti-hero, presents a peach of a challenge for any opera company. English National Opera is about to stage its first production of the work in some 20 years with the American director David Alden at its helm. After his enduring success for ENO with Britten’s Peter Grimes, expectations run high.

The opera’s protagonist, Hermann, believes that if he can discover the secret of the “three cards” it will transform his life. He courts the unfortunate Lisa to gain access to her grandmother, an elderly Countess who guards the crucial gambling formula; tragedy ensues as his obsession spirals out of control.

“It’s not easy to stage,” Alden confirms. “It’s a very big piece, it’s quite a monstrous, gigantic panorama, and to keep refocusing it requires a difficult balance between its elements.”

Despite its scale and depth, The Queen of Spades is often overshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s operatic masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, also based on Pushkin, which preceded it by a decade. No less compelling, though, are the driven, haunted qualities of his music for Hermann and Lisa and the care and delight with which he created Mozartian pastiche to evoke the Countess’s memories of the court of Catherine the Great.

The score’s special intensity, Alden points out, may have been turbo-charged by a frightening situation that would have led Tchaikovsky to identify with the confused and increasingly desperate Lisa. Some years earlier, the composer had married, most ill-advisedly, a young woman named Antonina Milyukova who had pursued him by letter. He was gay; she was mentally unstable; disaster ensued. “He had got her out of his life, but she returned and started to make trouble for him,” Alden says. “She flipped over something petty and started threatening to expose him. He fled to Italy in order to write this piece.”

Hermann is in love, at a distance, with Lisa; he pursues her like a stalker, uses her blatantly to access the Countess, and finally drives her to suicide. His obsession transfers to the old Countess and her secret of the three cards. “It’s very Freudian,” Alden suggests. “There’s a triangle of him and the two women, and it turns out the real erotic zinger of the opera is between him and the Countess: his horror of her, his desire for her and the cards.” The setting of St Petersburg becomes virtually a character in its own right, “an aristocratic milieu with decadence and corruption only just under the surface”.

It sounds all too contemporary – but the psychological element remains timeless and universal. “It is very non-literal,” Alden says, of his new production. “It’s a weird, beautiful, dreamy thing.”

The Queen of Spades, English National Opera, from 6 June. Box office: 020 7845 9300

Glyndebourne baby arrives!

Many congratulations to soprano Danielle de Niese and her husband Gus Christie, chairman of Glyndebourne, on the birth of their baby son, who arrived today. Glyndebourne tells us that mother and child are doing well.

Here's some musical champagne to celebrate...

Looking ahead...

Taking a Barenbreather after the excitement of the Schubert series to reflect on the different things coming up this month. Do join me for some of them if they're in your neck of the woods...

TOMORROW: 5 June 2015, 8pm Riverhouse Barn, Walton-on-Thames A rehearsed reading of my play A Walk through the End of Time with actors Caroline Dooley and David Webb. The Cremona Trio will feature in a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time the next day. We'll be there for Q&A afterwards. Book here.

10 June 2015, Opera Holland Park. Pre-performance talk for Flight, in which I interview its composer, the fabulous Jonathan Dove. Talk begins at 6.30pm. Details here.

12 June 2015, 6.15pm Ulverston International Music Festival. Pre-concert talk with violinist Tasmin Little and pianist Martin Roscoe before their recital on the opening night of one of the Lake District’s most beautiful festivals. More here.

22-26 June 2015 Istanbul Music Festival A series of four pre-concert talks for the Istanbul International Festival, to be held in the garden of the Hagia Eirene Museum in the historic centre of this great and vibrant city… 22 June The Young Chopin. This evening Daniil Trifonov performs the composer's Piano Concerto No.1. 23 June The Fantastical World of the French Baroque. Preceding a concert featuring Magdalena Kožena (mezzo) and Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor). 24 June Brahms, Schumann, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim: The Indivisibles. Christian Tetzlaff performs the Brahms Violin Concerto. 26 June Mozart and the Violin. Arabella Steinbacher and Maxim Rysanov feature with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in two of Mozart’s violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante. Festival website here.

Barenboim talks to Channel 4 News

Let's continue the Barenboimfest. In case you missed this the other night - well, it's strong stuff and he says it better than anybody else could.