Yale University Press has now published the paperback version of Tenor: History of a Voice. This isn’t an update and the great Lanza/Caruso sheet music on the back cover has been replaced by a long list of flattering press quotes, but it does have the typos etc corrected from the hardback version, together with an extra paragraph acknowledging those who wrote in with corrections and suggestions. I hope I haven’t left anybody out – do let me know if so. I’ll be doing the first update of the tenorography as soon as I have a spare day or two, and the plan is still for a 2^nd edition in a few years’ time. I’m still thinking about additional chapters as well as updating the existing material. South and Central America, South Africa and Australia, as well as the eastern Europe countries are obvious candidates, but other ideas will be keenly looked at so do let me know (Comments button or email) or maybe get some discussion going on Amazon.

Having escaped academia I now have more time not only for performing, but also doing that thing that academics fantasise about but rarely have time for: research. I’ve completed two chapters for CUP histories over the summer and Neil Sorrell and I are scheduled to finish our singing history by Christmas. I’m also writing a chapter with Liz Haddon on university instrumental teaching for the book of the IMP project, and there’s an article on Peter Pears’ voice in the pipeline too.

I found myself in a car in Slovenia recently with two people who’d read Vocal Authority, which must be some kind of first. I suppose what isn’t so surprising is that I get more feedback about my first book than anything I’ve written since. Although it came out of my PhD (written on the road with the Hilliards over a very long period) it was before I got really entangled with academia, so it’s much more of a polemic than a 21^st century PhD would probably get away with. It’s very old now, of course, but I’m still touched when people tell me what it has meant to them (and sometimes people quote whole chunks of it at me, which is rather disconcerting). Next year I want to begin a sequel, which will take up the story where Vocal Authority left off.  As I’m now released back into the community it won’t be an academic tome so I may have to venture further afield to find a publisher. The working title is Classical Singing and the Death of Creativity. That may be a bit pessimistic – one of the things I hope to enthuse about is the fantastic potential the 21st century has to offer singers.

When the Hilliard Ensemble became internationally successful in the 80s the group was increasingly asked to coach young ensembles. For a while we had a regular week in Kangasniemi (Finland) organised by the Sibelius Academy, coaching mainly Finnish groups and discovering smoke saunas, midnight barbecues, swimming in the lake and that Finnish beer made of French rabbits. We got the coaching bug and Paul Hillier suggested we start a Summer School in Lewes, close to where he lived. We had a visiting star each year, and Jordi Savall, Roger Norrington, Arvo Part and Bill Christie were among our first guests. It was a huge success and an administrative nightmare, initially taken on by Paul and his wife Lena, and subsequently shouldered by David James, catering to groups from all over the world. When Paul left the group we started again in Hertfordshire where we first met Selene Mills, and we followed her to Trinity Hall Cambridge where she set up a series of early music summer schools. Our guests there included Paul Robinson, Ivan Moody, Piers Hellawell and Gavin Bryars; several of our protégés, Singer Pur, Amarcord, Trio Mediaeval, went on to international success themselves. From the start we’d had many more groups from the European mainland, especially Germany, as well as singers from the USA and Japan. Costs eventually became prohibitive, and largely through the good offices of Werner Schüssler we were able to move to Schloss Engers on the Rhine, where the composers included Roger Marsh (whose Pierrot Lunaire was a summer school commission) and the jazz drummer Peter Erskine. Eventually Engers too succumbed to rising costs and soon after I left the group the Hilliards stopped the annual summer school, though I think they still coach from time to time. Looking back on it, the HE Summer School was a great thing: a galaxy of star composers and performers interacting with some exciting groups, many of which found inspiration and subsequent success, and many of whom are still firm friends.

Around the time I left the Hilliards I was editing the Cambridge Companion to Singing, and I decided to include an ensemble singing chapter as it was a topic I really felt confident to write about (unlike jazz, which I also found myself rambling about in the same volume when the original contributor disappeared). It was a good opportunity to summarise how I thought the whole process worked. We had mostly coached instinctively, had never been taught anything, and only gradually came to understand how we did what we did. It also seemed mad to me that there were so many successful professional ensembles and yet none of the conservatoires offered courses in ensemble singing (this is more complicated that it appears – one of the reasons so many ensembles are successful may be because they don’t start in conservatoires, but that’s another story). When I got to York I decided to run an ensemble singing MA, inspired by 5 graduates who wanted to stay on and work together as a group. They called themselves e-tone (for reasons I never fully understood) and under the Yorvox name gave the first UK performance of Gavin Bryars’ 3^rd Book of Madrigals (recently recorded by the Italian Vox Altera Ensemble). They are all still involved in music (Anna Snow is a third of the vocal trio Juice). It was obviously going to be difficult for whole ensembles to come as a group, but there were successes in the form of the American groups UnCloistered and Bright Cecilia among many other ad hoc ensembles. It sometimes wasn’t easy to maintain the liberalising agenda in the more traditional academic environment, but I like to think that there are ensemble singers out there who transcended the ethos.

Almost since it started some 20 years ago, I’ve chaired the jury for the ensemble singing contest at the Tampere International Vocal Festival (Finland). This is a biennial event and has produced some stunning groups across the whole field of acappella singing, perhaps the most famous being Rajaton (one of the world’s most exciting and inventive ensembles). The Tampere week is one that I look forward to most, and the 2011 event, masterminded by Jussi Chydenius, promises to be one of the best yet. I now coach all over the place, not often in Britain  – though I did have the pleasure of working with the Finnish ensemble Versio during their recent UK tour. They are a wonderful 12 strong group – a large number to manage as a ‘small ensemble’ – very creative and receptive to new ideas. We hope to meet again in Tampere next year.

When I proposed writing a history of singing for Cambridge University Press I was also intending to write a book on ensemble singing. The plan was to cover the whole acappella spectrum, much of which I’m not really qualified to write about; so I enlisted the aid of The Real Group’s Anders Jalkeus. Anders also sits on the Tampere jury and each time we meet we ask each other how our book is coming on. Trouble is, we’re too busy doing it, so it’s probably going to take a while yet…

Being Dufay ( Offenbach-Hundheim)

Vokalmusik entlang der Romanischen Straße

September 24

Being Dufay (Bratislava)

Bratislava Convergence Festival

October 3

Robert Kirby Memorial event

Cecil Sharp House, London

October 15

Sound & Fury live broadcast from Mauerbach ORF 22.00

October 15- 19

Sound & Fury recordings (Vienna)

November 3

Dowland Project (Prague)

Strings of Autumn Festival

November 6

Gavin Bryars Ensemble

King’s Place (London)

November 11

A Musicall Banquet (Birmingham) with Ariel Abramovich

Birmingham Early Music Festival

November 24

Roger Marsh 60th birthday concert (York)

November 25

Launch of UYMP Songbook (compiled by John Potter & David Blake)

Birmingham Conservatoire

These were mine:

“Ho conosciuto mia moglie nel 1966 quindi non potevo a quel tempo interessarmi di calcio.
Nel 1994 la canzone per i mondiali dei ‘Tre Tenori’ era numero 1 in tutto il globo dunque l’album ‘Officium’ dell’Hilliard Ensemble era fermo al Numero 2.
Quest’anno però ‘Being Dufay’ ha avuto un successo inaspettato, come Totò Schillaci in Italia 90…”

(with thanks to Ned for the Schillaci reference…)

We have performances in Germany and Slovakia over the summer, and we will soon be scheduling performances of the new programme (once we’ve thought of a title) for 2011.  Ambrose’ new piece will be a stunning audio experience (the extracts I’ve heard are like nothing I’ve heard before). It still has the old/new agenda, but this time he tributes fifteenth century composers who are tributing their own predecessors.  I’ve always found composers working with other composers’ music very moving (even just thinking about singing the three note ‘Ockghem’ motif in Busnois’ In Hydraulis can bring a lump to the throat), and this album and its associated multi-media event will do that in excelsis.

The Sound & The Fury in Vienna

The Sound & The Fury get together twice a year to record Franco-Flemish polyphony. The line-up varies at top and bottom depending on the music, but normally consists of David Erler (countertenor), Klaus Wenk and me (tenors),Thomas Bauer (bass) – whose idea the whole thing was – and Richard Wistreich (bass).

The recording project is a collaboration between Bernhard Trebuch of ORF and the artists Markus Muntean & Adi Rosenblum. We’ve made 10 albums to date, all on ORF’s label, and this July we will return to Kloster Mauerbach just outside Vienna to sing more music by Ockeghem and Caron. There will be a live broadcast on ORF at midnight on July 9th (probably including the Ecce Ancilla mass). The eccentric timing is at least an improvement on the last live brooadcast,  when the temperature in the church was minus 12 with all of us wearing all the clothes we had with us and the audience covered in blankets.

It is, of course, a bunch of (mostly) old (-ish) blokes getting together to do the music we love and have been doing for longer than most of us can remember, and our sessions locked away in the monastery (we sleep in the cells) are among the most enjoyable things I do.  There is an added frisson provided by the fact that although we ‘know’ how the music goes, it’s nearly always new material that none of us knew existed, and there’s always lots of it so little time for re-takes. It’s a high-risk process…

Tampere Vocal Music Festival 2011

Details of how to apply for the ensembles and choir competitions have just been announced. You can download entry forms here. The Tampere Festival is one of the great vocal music weeks of the year anywhere, and I’m delighted to be back chairing the ensemble jury after doing my year as artistic advisor last time. For vocal ensembles the festival means maximum fun, lots of networking and plenty of performance opportunities. Some 30,000 people reckon it’s THE place to be in the second week of July every other year.

Work not in progress…

Liz Haddon and I have postponed what would have been our final ‘work in progress’ session. We’ll be finding interesting places to do similar events once I’ve left the day job at the end of September.

This was particularly important to me, as it represented everything I value about a performance MA, and it was the refusal of the Music Department to allow me to make the (currently taught) Vocal Studies MA in to a ‘research by performance’ course  that was the final straw in my decision to leave the University (more about that in future posts).

Performance by research is a much-contested idea in academic circles. My own take on it is that if you’re going to have a post-grad course it has to be related to the likely future performing life of the participants. This means it has to be grounded in the students’ own individual performative creativity, giving them the maximum opportunity to experiment. There can be nothing generic about it: it should be loosely structured, with almost no teaching. The role of the supervisor is as a facilitator, enabler, consultant – call it what you will – a role very similar to that of a PhD supervisor whose knowledge and expertise in the relevant area will eventually be outstripped by that of the student.

Nora Ryan is an American singer, dancer, performance artist who has created a portfolio of events both here in York and in Leeds, working in multi-media with musicians, dancers and visual artists. This was one of  her last shows before returning to the USA, where she will continue her career as a freelance performer, and featured some of the Music Department’s most creative improvisers. The event was a stunning tour de force.

Italian opera from scratch

The next day there was the ‘outcome’ (as we academics are obliged to call it) of my final undergraduate project. The Project System at York is unique, and the only reason it’s not copied in universities throughout the land is that the people in suits just don’t get it. It’s an incredibly creative way to engage groups of students over a period of time, enabling them to flourish as individuals within group activity that is challenging, stimulating and fun. It produces highly motivated students, who have a direct educational investment in the process, and highly motivated staff who can teach what they want in the way they want to do it. The suits have tried to rein it in from time to time: we have to produce in advance what they call ‘differentiated outcomes’ for different year groups  (around 3 of each!). This is completely daft, and is only there because (as one of my colleagues put it) our marking system has to be identical to, and understood by, people in the Biology Department). In practice what happens is that everyone takes away a completely unquantifiable set of ‘outcomes’ which is unique to each student and cannot possibly be predicted in advance. I suppose it’s not surprising that a centralising university bureaucracy committed to standardised rule making across the board, can’t get to grips with all that. I mean, what would a Handbook entry look like: we expect you to take away an unknown number of outcomes, none of which we can predict in advance…

The project was called ‘Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera’ (my original inspiration for it was Philip Gossett’s wonderful Divas & Scholars: Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera). I had 20 students for a day and half a week for four weeks. I started by giving them a brief history of the process of creating opera in Italy, homing in some more obscure composers but mostly Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini and Mascagni. We then set about creating an opera for ourselves, keeping roughly to the kind of process that might have happened in a provincial Italian opera house towards the end of the century. This particular opera house had a company of players but no music, so had to devise a complete show using only what they already knew or could find in time. They were also heavily into the game of Cluedo. I don’t know what Verdi and Bellini would think about some of their best bits being cut up and reused, but we had terrific fun with it. We also inverted the Cluedo plot so there were multiple deaths giving plenty of opportunity to raid the operatic death scene repertoire. It was in a mixture of English and Italian, and featured some of the greatest hits of the 19th century, arranged for an eclectic ensemble of instruments (including accordion and trumpet)  as well as spontaneously improvised recitative and dialogue. It was entirely student-devised and performed, and there were some stunning performances.

Work in Progress…

While on the subject of last performances, Liz Haddon and I are planning our final ‘work in progress’ session in the Music Department on June 22 (we hope to do similar projects elsewhere in the future). These have been an attempt to break down the oppositional nature of the recital genre, and to re-introduce something of the informality of 19^th century domestic performance (for which much of the repertoire was originally conceived). It’s work in progress because we’re not giving definitive fully-formed performances, but exploratory sessions where we sing and play the music at that very creative stage where you’re encountering things in the music for the first time. The idea is to share that experience with anyone who turns up. We don’t expect people to sit there and just worship the music. Eating, drinking, chatting and interaction are encouraged, and we’re quite happy to repeat pieces if we feel there are other interesting things to do. It’s a bit like an open rehearsal. We’ve even been known to start again mid-‘performance’ to look in more detail at something. Not sure what the music will be for this one yet (it’s important we don’t do too much cheating in advance), but it might include some Chausson, Duparc, Tchaikovsky, Webern and early Schoenberg.  The date’s not quite certain yet but I hope   to confirm it shortly.

Diary update

I will get around to doing this when things get a bit less hectic. The next Being Dufay is in Foligno on June 26th in the Dancity Festival (which has a football theme since it coincides with the World Cup). After that I’ll be recording in Vienna with The Sound & The Fury, and gigs over the summer include Bratislava (Dowland Project), the Radovljica Festival (with Ariel Abramovich), the Kultursommer Rheinland-Palz (Being Dufay) and even a couple of rare appearances in the UK. More details next time.

]]> http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/11/last-performances-in-york/feed/ 0 http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/03/villazon-horses-and-toothpaste/ http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2010/06/03/villazon-horses-and-toothpaste/#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:39:01 +0000 John Potter http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/?p=231 Well he was quite something, wasn’t he? What struck me, apart from his tremendous energy, humour and complete lack of divo-like arrogance, was his taste in tenors – Juan Diego Florez and Jonas Kaufmann  in particular – both not only supremely elegant singers but reflective and creative artists. It was great to see clips of old and young Domingo, and to be reminded of the influence of Mario Lanza (particularly apt in view of Marjan Kiepura’s comments further down these pages). There was a bit too much Verdi for me, and not enough Wagner (a bit of Ben Heppner wouldn’t have frightened people too much). Bizarre to have Alagna speaking in French when he’s perfectly competent in English. Rolando singing into the horn was a great idea (and his reaction priceless) – it really gave you a sense of what’s missing from early recordings.

I liked the format. I’m not sure my little contribution added very much – a lot of what I said in the original recording was actually illustrated very engagingly by Villazon himself and it was much better TV that way. It’s a pity I didn’t think to ask him if I could post the cartoon he drew of the two of us, because it’s absolutely him – you can almost hear it.  And it had all been rather tidied up – I remember lots of twinkly bits that didn’t find their way into the final cut. The best bits were where his spontaneous reactions were left in. But what a phenomenon – and that lovely bit at the end which could so easily have been tenor ego-mania in full flood but was just him being almost childishly amazed at what he was doing…

If you’re near a TV set on June 2^nd at 9.00 in the evening you might catch me being interviewed by the amazing Rolando Villazon on BBC4. I had a wonderful time at the Royal Opera House; Villazon is a real powerhouse and has an incredibly quick brain. When I arrived he was sitting on the floor doing a piece to camera on Franco Corelli. At the end of the first take I couldn’t resist suggesting he mentioned Corelli’s legs, which were reckoned by some to be the best pair ever seen on a tenor. He began again: …and Franco Corelli, he had it all, including two of the best pairs of legs in the business…immediately realising what he’d said, he added…though he only used one pair at a time, of course. I don’t suppose that will find its way into the final cut.  It was all enormous fun, with Rolando fizzing away the whole time. So much energy! I’d taken the precaution of bringing along my copy of his Massenet & Gounod album – one of my favourites – which now has on the liner a Rolando cartoon of the two of us talking tenor stuff.

Tenor paperback

Tenor: History of a Voice is to be reprinted by Yale as a paperback in September. There won’t be any updated content, but I hope I have  corrected most of the misprints etc – so thank you to all those whose sharp eyes caused me all sorts of embarrassment. There may well be a substantially updated 2nd edition in a year or two, so I hope people will keep sending suggestions for updates.

One of the difficulties of writing any sort of history is that you’re always at risk of colouring your narrative with the ideologies of the present. In Tenor: History of a Voice I had a small section on screen tenors and commented that history has tended not to look kindly on successful opera singers who later went on to have commercial success through recordings or films. Mario Lanza, Richard Tauber and Jan Kiepura were among those whose reputations seemed to have suffered in recent times in part because of spectacular success in their own lifetimes, reaching beyond the opera world with wider repertoires in different media.  I was taken up on this point by the pianist Marjan Kiepura, who is the son of Jan Kiepura and the great soprano Marta Eggerth.  Marjan reminded me that success on the screen (or with lighter material) in no way diminishes what these singers achieved in the opera house. He pointed to the example of the Three Tenors, whose legacy is surely to broaden the appeal of good singing, and who certainly wouldn’t have turned down the opportunities their commercial success brought them. Kiepura was ahead of his time in this respect: in the 1930s film was the new cutting edge medium, and no singer would have passed up the chance of screen stardom.  Of course, we can’t imagine what a reputation would consist of without all its constituent elements, but I wonder if in the case of Kiepura, Lanza and others our sometimes rather snobbish attitude to commercial success has coloured our judgement of their place in history. Kiepura, in contrast to Lanza who hardly set foot on an operatic stage at all, became a screen star as a result of his successful career in European opera houses. He happened to be blessed with the kind of full visual package that the new medium was crying out for, and the studios could expect considerable benefit from his already stellar reputation.

Most tenor enthusiasts would acknowledge the art of Kiepura as equal to the finest examples of his time. In his native Poland his reputation was close to that of a national hero, with streets, monuments and even stamps and trains in his honour (if you want to travel from the UK to Poland by train, you take a lunchtime Eurostar to Brussels, a high-speed train to Cologne, then the overnight sleeper ‘Jan Kiepura’ from Cologne to Warsaw).

Kiepura was, of course, successful all over the world (becoming an American citizen in the 1940s), but the old division of Europe into East and West has often resulted in the marginalising of composers and performers from the central and eastern republics. The former Soviet bloc, by isolating the East from research into both the post-war and pre-Soviet period, effectively prevented the development of a coherent historical narrative.  I’ve touched on the cantorial tradition, the roots of which go back into and beyond the history of eastern Europe, but I also hope to give much more attention in future to the wider tenor history outside the conventionally recorded West.

I’m extremely grateful for the assistance of Marjan  in writing this short post.The family’s history is an extraordinary one, and YouTube will provide hours of audio and video of Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth, and indeed of Marjan himself. A good starting point for those wanting to explore the Kiepura legacy is Marjan’s own website, where you’ll find details of his own Chopin recording and a double CD of Marta Eggerth.  The latter, ‘My Life in Song’ is a wonderful compilation of Eggerth recordings between 1932 and 2002 (when Marta was 90) and features both Jan and Marjan. There are YouTube clips of Marta performing at 80 and 90, and many clips of Jan, ranging from Verdi and Puccini to operetta. I will update the Kiepura entry in the Biographical List of Tenors in due course, though there are surprisingly few authoritative sources.  Open Library contains links to books and articles, and there is a biography (in Polish) from 2006 by Wacław Panek. You’ll find a short web biography at History of the Tenor which also has some sound clips. The German Wikipedia entry is more comprehensive than its English counterpart, but both are eclipsed by the Polish entry.  CD Re-issues of Kiepura’s substantial catalogue are not extensive so far.  Volume 2 of the Pearl collection My Song For You (GEMM CD 9079) is also available; the Lebendige Vergangenheit site has a detailed breakdown of their Preiser compilation.

The NME site gives access to a huge number of audio and video clips of Kiepura singing in various languages. Almost all of them are examples of his exquisitely lyrical sound and fine control, especially when combining a diminuendo with a rallentando.  There are extraordinary clips of Marta Eggerth singing as freshly as ever at  80 (video) and 90 (audio), accompanied by Marjan Kiepura.

If anyone would like to add more info about recordings and literature on Jan Kiepura, do use the Comments box.

photo of Marjan Kiepura by Diane Brown

other photos by kind permission of the Kiepura family

The possibilities of performance using the world wide web was something I encouraged the Tampere Festival to look at last year. As things turned out we couldn’t get it together on that occasion, but the Chicago experience has been a great  opportunity to look creatively at performance beyond the concert hall. We can, not merely in theory but also in reality, perform the piece in different countries simultaneously, or with the two of us in different countries from each other (though Ambrose is reluctant to do this until the technology is completely glitch-free) . But whether you’re saving the planet or your promotion expenses, Being Virtually Dufay reduces travel, accommodation and carbon costs…

I don’t have much luck with Chicago – though it’s one of those great American cities that everyone should experience if they have the chance. The Chicago Sun Times was one of the few papers ever to notice my performance as Pilatus in Arvo Pärt’s Passio. It reckoned I was ‘effete and degenerate’. This time round the Chicago Reader  promoted me to  ‘one of the most daring singers in the classical world’. They know a thing or two over there.