How did it all start?
I've been singing professionally for 33 years. I got chucked out of music college when I was 20, having been told that I would never have a career as a musician. And funnily enough, I think if I'd stayed in college, I would never have been a professional musician. I wouldn't have had the ambition.
Did you grow up in Scotland ?
I have a Scottish background but I grew up all over the country, because of my parents' vocation. They were moved around every couple of years. They spent many years in Scotland. My father was originally from Newcastle, my mother was from Ireland, they met at college in Denmark Hill where they trained to be Salvation Army officers. After a few years in England during the war, they were posted to Scotland for 16 or 17 years. I and two of my three brothers were born there. But we lived all over the North of England, then as far south as Portsmouth and Southend, and then settled in Staines. Between the age of 0 to 18 I lived in 12 different places. Since then I've lived in London, Switzerland, Scotland, for the last seven years in East Sussex, and now I am moving to Munich.
Was there an operatic background in your family?
I grew up in the Salvation Army and it was a very rich musical family life. My father, for his generation, was a very liberal man, very open-minded. There was always music in the background, and with three brothers it wasn't just classical music. That rubbed off on all of us, particularly on my older brother Nigel, who is also a singer. In my middle adolescent years he was very much the guiding light for me, in terms of coming to music as something to do professionally.
When I was a child, I hated music because it was stuffed down my throat (laughing), but as I went into my teens, I got more and more interested in what my father and my older brother were doing, what they were listening to. Now my brother and I have almost identical tastes in music, almost identical styles in the way we perform, the way we think about performing, what we get out of it, what we want people to get out of it.
I began to think about music as a profession in my mid teens. Before that I wanted to be an architect.
What was the first opera you ever heard?
I think the first opera I ever really heard was Peter Grimes. The first opera I actually saw was Tippett's Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden in 1968. The second opera I saw was Tippett's King Priam, two years later.
Did it impress you enough not to want to be an architect?
It impressed me enough to think about music much more seriously, at the age of 14-15. In our household, my father was always listening to a lot of twentieth century music, Baroque, not so much Romantic – he was a romantic himself but he didn't really listen to Italian Romantic music. He liked the German Romantics, Wagner, Strauss, but mostly his listening habits were 20th century English and European composers, also American composers like Barber and Carter, who were hardly known in this country at that time. He listened to a lot of Bach, Handel, Telemann. The big gap was really between Beethoven and 1900, but everything on either side of that he listened to a lot.
My father had a great love of modern poetry and maybe that's why he also loved modern music. Or didn't necessarily like it all, but took an enormous interest in it. He had a great love of English 20th century music. Interestingly enough, he loved people like Birtwistle and Maxwell-Davies, when they were young composers in the sixties, and he got me and my brother listening to that sort of stuff in our teens.
I have a slightly broader taste now, simply because having been a performer, firstly as a student trumpet player and then also as a singer, I've had a much wider experience of repertoire. I've really covered everything from medieval to modern in my work, not only as a soloist, but also as a session singer and choral singer back in the early days. It was just as easy to turn up with the Ambrosian Singers to do a Beethoven session as it was to do a Handel session. Being a countertenor didn't mean I wouldn't do a Donizetti chorus on a disc. A voice was a voice, and if you were good at it, they employed you. I had a lot of experience of other styles of music apart from what is my principal repertoire as a soloist.
What did you think about Peter Grimes when you heard it?
Oh, it blew me away. It's partly also because of Peter Pears: my older brother being a tenor, Peter Pears was a hero in our house in terms of singing and artistry. To eventually hear Peter Grimes live was quite extraordinary. Also, as a trumpet player, I was really excited by the orchestral writing. That combined with the fanaticism for Britten that my brother was going through at that time meant that we listened to the recording endlessly. We ended up going to concerts, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with Pears and Barry Tuckwell at the Queen Elisabeth Hall, Rostropovitch playing the Cello Symphony, concerts with Britten conducting Mozart. It was all a bit obsessive.
Peter Grimes has become almost iconic, hasn't it? The influence it's had over music and opera in this country. It completely revived English opera writing after the war. English opera had really not been vibrant since Thomas Arne and John Gay. There were some token gestures from Vaughn Williams, but nothing as prolific as Britten, who put on stage something completely modern and also completely home-spun, in terms of the story line and the feel of landscape. Extraordinary! But for me as a musician – the intellectual side of it went over my head at the age of 14, but the visceral quality of the music was very exciting.
What other opera do you consider your favourite or really important?
Coming into singing from being a brass player, I really love Renaissance and early Baroque music. Orfeo is important to me historically and personally, as well as on the level of listening. It brought me deeper into Baroque music in my early years.
Orfeo was also the first opera I sung at ENO, in 1981. The production was very inspirational for me, it showed me what was possible to do on stage. It changed my life completely: it wrecked my marriage, it put me on a sometimes very destructive but extremely exciting path of exploration, both personally and professionally. It tapped everything that had been latent in me, the skills I had as a performer. Somebody needed to press the right button, and this particular director, David Freeman, definitely did it. Interestingly enough, it happened for my brother as well, who was in the same cast.
That particular production of Orfeo changed our lives. It sparked my development in a very rapid and exciting way. We worked in an intense acting atmosphere, completely within the character all the time, and enormous discipline. Unfortunately the spin-off into the personal life was quite devastating, relationships got build with the colleagues, you wanted to be terribly earnest and honest, and actually found that in the end it ++++ed you up. But the work made it worth while. It was so rewarding. It was hard to discipline myself in my day-to-day life. I don't mean I let it go to my head, but I became too uninhibited and took too many risks, and then I had to pay the price for it. As a consequence, the opera remains very close to me. I was very sad I wasn't a tenor, to sing the title role (laughing), it would have been fun!
There were other operas in later years that were very important as a consequence of that experience, like Akhnaten at the Coliseum.Orfeo was where everything started for me as an opera singer, although I had done things before like a tour with Kent Opera or festival performances at Camden and in Birmingham.
The operas I love most are not necessarily the ones I'd been in, which is quite good, I think. In my years at ENO I saw so many wonderful productions which really developed my taste. In my twenties I would never had listened to Rigoletto, but after seeing it I really grew to love it. La Boheme I never really loved as a piece, but over the years I learned to appreciate it. I learned to love the Romantic repertoire. But I wouldn't do anything as silly as a drag role in a Verdi or Puccini production, even though I've done silly things before (laughing).
What opera do you enjoy most?
The music I tend to enjoy the most is the 20th century repertoire. I suppose doing that has sometimes been the most rewarding theatre experience, particularly doing new pieces like Golem and Flight. Even with quite a disciplined director you are still able to really explore it in a way you cannot explore older music. There are fewer boundaries in your way, less theatrical conventions – unless it's specifically written with conventions. Quite often the composer has a particular idea what he wants his opera to look like. But generally one has a lot more freedom how to create the character and play the role, simply because the libretti have a contemporary feel to them, even if they have to do with historical characters. It's much easier to relate to them. They have sharper, more pointed meaning, although I don't mean they are less intellectual. Somehow they feel a part of your environment, because they were written in our time, even if it's about historical characters.
Particularly Golem was a very exciting show to do, with director and librettist Pierre Audi. It was John Casken's first opera, a major event. Ometh was a role specifically written for me. In fact, I think all the roles were written with the cast in mind.The character was enigmatic enough to explore it, which was great fun. I was able to use things that I had learned in the previous ten years, not just physically, but also in terms of the intensity of the character.
You are a fan of modern opera.
I'm a bit lazy to go and see new things, but if there is a new opera on, quite often I'll put myself way out to go and see it, because I really believe in the strength of modern opera. I believe that a tradition has to be continued. It's not just continuing tradition of opera that's started with Caccini and Monteverdi, and gone onto Handel and Bach, into the Romantic period. 20th century opera, which a lot of people moan about, is what people will be listening to in another hundred years, and it will be its own epoch.
When Puccini's La Boheme was first performed, it was received very badly, and considered very modern. It was so different from the other operas of the previous 20 years that people had grown to love. It was a completely different style and a relatively new musical language. So when we hear all the squeaky music now, we mustn't slam it down too much. Because there might be people around in a hundred years time who'll think it's great...
Personally, I love it because I like the fact that somebody would dare to explore a new sound world.
What do you like about being an opera singer?
In the beginning it was the thrill of going on a stage or on a concert platform, the enjoyment of it. But when I look back on what I've done, I think in the end it's because I could express myself better in a performance. When I lived in Zurich, my partner who I lived with came to see me in Xerxes at ENO in 1991. About a week later, she said to me at dinner, 'Why can't you ever talk to me the way you talk to people when you're singing Arsamenes?' It was quite a shock, because I'd always considered myself quite an open book. I'd never realised that I was holding back the things I was frightened of expressing sometimes in real life, but I could express them easily somehow as a performer.
Ironically, when you're performing on stage, a lot of people think that it isn't the real world. I've always thought that when you're on the stage, you're creating a character, you're being really honest, you're trying to express that character, that character has to come to an extent from yourself - it is real. If it's not real, what's the point of doing it? If you want to pretend, you could do other things that are much more fun! (laughing)
To walk onto the stage and sing something which you would never say normally in real life, is impossible to do truthfully, unless you really believe what you are singing. Consequently, it IS real life. Those moments on the stage when a person is talking to somebody else, or talking to the audience, are really happening. That's the wonder of theatre. You don't go in just to be entertained. You go in to really experience somebody else's life, in order to enrich your own. It's not just music, it's everything within. Everything is equal: text, design, music, stage management, everything contributes to a really wonderful performance.
The performers have to be brave enough to really believe what they are doing. When it comes across, it has a potential not only to shock people, but also to really help them understand why they're seeing what they're watching and why what they're watching is important. They go away questioning what it does for them, and I think that's much more interesting than coming out and saying, 'Oh, that was lovely. What a nice evening!'
I think that's what is important to me about opera: that it communicates, and the communication isn't superficial - it is brave and very honest. Then the audience can really understand it. I could go on for hours about that... (laughing)
Is doing opera lots of fun?
One thing that opera isn't, in the end, is a lot of fun - because it's really, really hard work. Even the easy things are difficult. And as your career goes on, you're always compared to how you were the time before. As you get better, you set a standard, then eventually you begin to get worse, because we all do as we get older (laughing), and you find yourself struggling harder and harder to keep up the standard which you've set and which people expect of you.
I wonder if there is something that you really dislike about opera? Or maybe something you would like to change?
A lot of the things I dislike about opera are very difficult to change, because of the institution of opera and music, particularly in the modern, easy-access age. A lot of things I hate about opera are the superficial things. I have a girlfriend who likes to dress up to go to the opera, while I would just as happily go in jeans and a T-shirt. I hate the restrictions on the appearance. I hate the restrictions on one's appearance and I hate keeping up appearances when you go
to such public events. But that's the convention and you don't want to be seen as too radical or out-of-touch.
The professional institution of opera is sometimes rather despicable. The politics that goes on behind it... But then, there's politics behind everything, just as much in a music college or in a secondary school. The machinations are the same wherever, often with the best intention, I have to say. It's easy to criticise the way opera houses are run, and it's easy to criticise the rather two-faced attitude of a lot of people, particularly in management. But the restrictions put on the Arts in general mean that people have an almost impossible job to run a company. Even with a company as successful as Glyndebourne, which has no public subsidy (and you certainly don't work there for the money) the things that go on behind the scenes make you sometimes wonder if those who are running it really love what they do or have another agenda. But they must love it, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
Sometimes when you see certain castings, or you see the way people are treated, you do think that opera houses could be more humane. But at the same time, it's only humans that are running it and all humans are fallible in some way, so one has to be forgiving. Though, when you see the amount of money ploughed into some opera houses by governments, one could argue that the money is not always well spent.
|
You have sung a lot in Munich. What are the differences?
In Munich, where the state subsidy is roughly 2.5 times more than what Covent Garden gets, they are able to put on 340 opera and ballet performances in a season. It accounts for 60% of their budget. In Germany opera tickets are subidised by the government as well, so you could say they get three times what ROH gets. When you see what they do in Munich, you think it's a bit of a miracle. The opera house is generally only closed on national and religious holidays. Over 300 shows a season is quite extraordinary. It's packed all the time, with an average attendance about 96%.
And it's not the only opera house in town. Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz is a much smaller house, I think it seats about 1,100 and does most of its repertoire in German. It has a bigger mixture of popular musical theatre and more operetas. They also have their own ballet company. It's quite remarkable. Then there are four other Schauspiel (i.e. straight) theatres in Munich, plus all the other little places, run by little companies, also with subsidies. Munich is an incredibly rich city in that sense.
The money they get at the Bavarian State Opera House in Munich sounds like an awful lot, but what the public gets for eturn is just extraordinary. I have to say, it's great to be able to get a seat in the stalls for top price £80 instead of the £180 you might pay at Covent Garden.
What have you noticed about the Arts in other countries?
Outside of the UK, perhaps not so much in France, but in the German-speaking countries, in Italy, Spain, Portugal, all the Eastern European countries, the Arts are a major way of life that the majority of the population grow up with. Here in the UK, especially in the last 30 years, Arts Education has plummeted. Young people don't grow up in a very broad-minded artistic environment, mainly because of lack of funding in education. When I was at school, it was the other way round. Music classes were about Beethoven and Brahms, as well as some jazz and pop. Now it's much more about Robbie Williams and boy bands, girl bands and pop bands, not so much about the classical side.
What people now perceive as the classical side, tends to be rather corrupted by so-called cross-over music, like Russell Watson and Andrea Boccelli. They are marketed as opera singers but they are not real opera singers. I mean, Watson has a nice voice, he just doesn't have a great deal of technique. Boccelli has to my ears a horrible voice and technique, and, indeed, if he wasn't marketed as totally blind, he would have possibly no career. If it became public knowledge that he is not totally blind, and in the music profession it's rumoured that he is only partially sighted, we would have to ask, 'Why is the man doing what he does?'. He does it because the public want and like it. They have been educated by his marketing machine.
It's a great shame the government can't educate young people more in the cultural heritage that started thousands of years ago. Not just music, but also history. We shouldn't moan too much about the government subsidising theatres. Covent Garden is subsidised a lot. Luckily, they are doing very well and I hope the same will happen with ENO, but sadly the subsidy for the Arts in the UK is still too little for what the public deserve. Indeed, it seems the government is going to be taking more away from the Arts in order to subsidise the 2012 London Olympics!
Where do you think ENO's future lies?
With a much more visionary management. It was a great shame they got rid of the last true visionary. But it might change again. Now that there is no one on the board who has a vested interest in the company financially, things can only get better; I think it was a big mistake to have a Chairman of the Board who put such a lot of money into the company, it should have never been allowed. Also, they should have had a Chairman of the Board who was more vociferous in demanding government support, as it used to be with Goodman and Harwood.
The government should capitalise on the strengths of the company. Since Peter Jonas left, the subsequent General Directors have not always had the support of the board. I thought it was a great shame when Nicholas Payne went. Great shame.
But it should get better now, I think. I don't know how long John Berry will last, but I do think they need somebody with real vision, and once they have that person, the ethic and purpose of the House can be restored.
Incidentally, there's a great book about ENO called Power House, written in Sir Peter Jonas's last year by the in-house dramaturg Nicholas John. It is a most blisteringly brilliant defence of ENO as an institution, as an artistic stimulus, as a bastion for exploring theatre. It also contains some of the most articulate and convincing arguments for doing opera in English.
What do you think about performing opera in the language of the audience?
It's ridiculous to claim that opera is better in its original language. Even some composers didn't think that! Verdi was quite happy to have Don Carlos translated into Italian from the original French, and it seems that Cavalli had one of his operas performed in English in England in his time. I think the argument for the language of the people is a good one, though not necessarily all the time. I think it's important that somebody does it. It's also a very good way of training singers to work freely on the stage; it opens so much more possibilities as a performer.
It is a shame that some singers don't know the language they sing in. Although I'm guilty of it myself as I couldn't really hold a conversation in Italian and I can just about do it in German, I know every word that I sing because I sit down and translate it word for word. So many American, British, and even German singers just learn the opera, get up and sing in Czech or Russian, and have no idea about the text. How can you expect them to be free enough on stage to express themselves?
To sing in your own language is such a wonderful luxury, and to sing it well is even better. When it's sung really well, quite often people don't realise that it wasn't the original language in the first place. When we first did Xerxes at ENO, the translation by Nick Hytner (the director) was so clever and witty, so "English", that it was really hard to imagine that it was originally an Italian opera libretto.
What is your opinion on surtitles at ENO?
I find it very difficult. There are arguments on both sides. I went toFigaro two months ago and I couldn't understand why they had the surtitles. The majority of the cast for most of the time were audible and had reasonably good diction. The surtitles were not necessary. It was awful, I actually found myself looking to them. But then again, I would find them useful and interesting when I saw Janacek at Glyndebourne, even if I knew the story line.
You could argue that if the production is very good and clear, you don't really need to know the meaning of every word, but it's a very difficult argument. Being a performer, I have to say that too many singers are too lazy to really work on how they put across the text, not just enunciating it, but also in terms of their character. The reason we have surtitles is that not only audiences are a bit lazy, but also because often the performers are a bit lazy(laughing).
Were performers less lazy in the past?
It is remarkable how in the last ten years or so the quality of enunciation at ENO has gone down. Sometimes it has been due to the fact that some singers just don't have voices focused or big enough to carry in such a big room. You don't have to have a big voice to be heard, but it has to be really well projected. The enunciation of the text was rigorously coached during the years of Mackerras, Peter Jonas, Mark Elder, Harwood. The music staff that were employed knew that it was absolutely necessary to hear as many words as possible, given the general vagaries of singing technique.
You should be able to understand the words the majority of time, particularly if you're singing stuff that's not melismatic, that's more syllabic, like in Mozart and Janacek. In Wagner and particularly Romantic Italian opera, where there is much more melisma, it is much harded to follow the structure of the word. A lot of singers now really don't do it well. It is a shame that places like ENO aren't working on that more vigorously.
When I listen to operas in Italy, I can often hear every word. In Germany, it is very rare not to be able to understand the text - it is so clear, even when it's a translation. I know from working in Munich that the demand is text, text, text, in any of the languages that people sing there. They have surtitles, but not normally for the productions that are sung in German.
You have been singing in Munich for quite a while...
I owe my thirteen years at the Staatsoper in Munich to Sir Peter Jonas. When he took up the job there as Staatsintendant, one of the first new productions was Richard Jones's Julius Caesar. Richard asked for Ann Murray and me. And then I did thirteen seasons on the run.
The Bavarian State Opera is a repertory house, and we did revivals of Julius Caesar nearly every two years, sometimes every year. In a repertory house, once the initial run of the production has happened, the production can stay there for years. Die Zauberfloete production, recently re-invented, has been in the repertory for 30 years! Long time. Of course, they had to re-paint and re-build everything. It looks exactly like it looked in 1976 - and it looks amazing. It is very conventional, but extraordinarily well directed and executed. It's probably one of the greatest things Everding ever did as a director.
I was there, I think, in ten productions altogether. With constant revivals, that's quite steady work, 17 - 18 performances a season, or even more if it was a new production. It was like being a house singer, but only a few months of the year, in and out, a couple of weeks at a time. In the last Festspiel, we did all of the Handel repertory that the house had. In July, I had performances of five different operas, plus a quick off-the-cuff revival of Dido. We did all that with one or two runs-through, no stage rehearsals, the performance two days later. A real repertory system.
I have done about 70 performances of Die Fledermaus in the last ten years there. That was sometimes a pain! Every Christmas and New Year in Munich... I would have to leave home on Boxing Day to be there on the 27th to rehearse, and then every Sylvester (New Year's Eve). This year the new management decided to change cast, which was fair enough, so I went to Munich on holiday for the first time in my life... (laughing) and I spent Christmas and New Year in Munich with my girlfriend Marie.
What are your plans?
I'm planning to move to Germany, which is going to be quite a gear shift, especially for my son who is only 12. I am going to Italy in the spring for seven weeks to do a modern opera, then a few concerts over the year. I have started working again with Philip Pickett, who I did a lot of work with in the eighties and nineties. I've never been free to do much ensemble work in the last years, so it's nice to get into that, particularly with colleagues that I grew up with as a session singer. I'm going to be working with The New London Consort. This kind of work always feels like a frantic rush: rehearse the day before, fly out, rehearse, do a concert, fly back again. You sing some crazy Renaissance or Baroque music that's really, really difficult, and you are just glued to the copy... It's been fun to get back to that. It's actually quite exciting. There's more of that in the pipeline.
I'm looking to branch out into a bit of teaching. I've applied for a job at the Hochschule in Munich and I have to do an audition. It's going to be quite hairy (laughing). I'm also looking to do a bit of directing, with some tentative talks going on, maybe to do something little in Germany 2008-9 that not too many people who know me will go to see...(laughing)
I'm fairly relaxed at the moment. I have a good ten years of singing maybe left in me as a countertenor, but obviously I'll do less and less opera, because there are no comprimario roles that I can do into my old age. I will not be doing a Met debut at the age of 80 in a small role because there are no such roles. The roles I have done are big. In the standard Baroque repertoire the little roles are reserved for tenors, baritones and women; the castrati roles are normally big roles. And as I get older, I notice there are some really, really good people coming, I mean, some of the new talent is amazing.
Have you got any time for your other passions, outside singing?
I have to say, being at home is a great passion. I love being at home and sitting in front of the telly. I love being at home and watching DVDs with my son, or playing computer games with him, or going out together to have a pizza. I love being able to sit down and enjoy a whole bottle of wine without somebody telling me I have to sing the next day (laughing). Living in Eastbourne means easy access to Glyndebourne or Brighton Festival, but coming to London to see shows can be a bit of a pain.
When I'm in Munich, it's a lot of fun leisure time: going to the cinema and theatre with my girlfriend (she is herself a film director, travelling to the lakes near Salzburg, dirty weekends in Budapest... (laughing)
VIEW Christopher Robson’s page HERE.
|
