Tell us about your background.
I played the clarinet at school and played in youth orchestras. I did lots of amateur opera, mostly operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan, Die Fledermaus, so I hadn’t really discovered opera at that point. I went to university and played the clarinet there, saw several operas, a particularly good production of The Rape of Lucretia and The Rake’s Progress with a mixture of students and professional singers. That was at Cambridge.
Then I went to the Guildhall for postgraduate studies and I played in my first operatic production, Ariadne auf Naxos. It was a very difficult show to perform, a bit of a deep-end experience for most of the orchestral players. I hadn’t played any of the standard operas at that time, so Ariadne was quite a challenge. One doesn’t get to play Richard Strauss in student orchestras. Stephen Barlow conducted. The cast were extraordinary.
How did you get interested in opera?
The local library had a very good music department, with LPs as well as scores, so I would spend a lot of time at home going through it, particularly during school holidays. That’s when I got to hear my first Ring. It didn’t make a full impression on me until later. I would borrow one opera this week, and the next one next week, I borrowed vocal scores too. I was fascinated just finding out what there was. And there was so much different kind of stuff!
What was the first opera you saw?
The first opera that I remember seeing was Kent Opera coming to Reading’s Hexagon to do Rigoletto. They sang it in English. I can still remember some of the translation: “Women are frivolous/ Women are fickle/ First they adore you/ Then they ignore you.” That stuck in my mind. And all the drama.
Then when I came to London, you could get standing passes at Covent Garden and the Coliseum. I remember seeing Reginald Goodall’s Parsifal , which was my first Wagner in the theatre. I can still remember what it looked like. It was a very strange modernist production, but the music had this incredible breadth to it.
Goodall conducted Wagner mostly in the sixties and seventies. The operas were all in English. That was the way that English audiences got to know Wagner. My impression was that English audiences didn’t really like Wagner before that. It was quite slow to catch on.
Then I saw Lulu at Covent Garden, which I think was the first production here that did all three acts. That’ll be the early eighties. When I first discovered Lulu, it was done in two acts and bits and pieces and it didn’t make much sense.
When did you get to play opera as a clarinettist?
I didn’t really get to play a lot of opera professionally to start with. The first real professional opera company I worked for was the Almeida Opera. I moved into playing quite a lot of contemporary music, which fascinated me from very early on. At that time it spoke to me more clearly than for instance Wagner or Mozart. I was fascinated by the idea of playing stuff that was brand new. So I played in contemporary music ensembles and I was asked to join an ensemble that was being formed especially to work at the Almeida for the opera season. I did that for 15 years.
The Almeida was a really nice place to do an opera in, because there was no pit and the orchestra was placed to one side or sometimes behind. You always felt that you were part of what was going on. You couldn’t always actually see it, but you weren’t down the pit, out of the way.
Have you got your favourite composers?
Yes, loads. Stravinsky, Bach, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Ravel, Janacek, Berlioz, and lots more.
Are you a fan of contemporary opera?
I worked for Charles Hazlewood’s opera company at Wilton’s Music Hall which is the most fantastic, oldest music hall in London with beautiful acoustics. It was called Broomhill Opera. We did The Turn of the Screw, a most amazing production by Elijah Moshinsky - it was like in the haunted house.
What are your favourite operas?
It has to be Elektra. So much hatred in such a short time! Especially female hatred, which big-voiced singers do so beautifully. After that, L'enfant et les sortileges, The Nose, Moses und Aaron.
Have you got your favourite things to play in opera, as a clarinettist?
I’m looking forward to doing The Barber of Seville again, because it’s very big: the clarinet has as much as any of the main roles to play. I enjoy playing The Marriage of Figaro even though the clarinets play next to nothing; in Act III it’s just 20 bars in the Wedding March.
But I enjoy the drama of Figaro; the more productions I do, the more I realise that every single character is a real person, even if come are caricatures, and can be played any number of ways. The possibilities how they can interact with each other are limitless. And the energy of the music… The second violin part is incredible. It looks like a William Morris wallpaper on the page.
Mozart seems to have used the clarinet for specific emotional moments – and he uses it much more often in Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni than The Marriage of Figaro.
I don’t know how Mozart chose it, but we’ve worked out that every single aria has a different combination of wind instruments. It’s never exactly the same. And only the big finales have all the wind payers together.
So even when I was doing a long tour of Figaro when I hardly played at all, I found it constantly fascinating.
How did you end up on BBC Radio 3?
They wanted a new voice for The Young Artists’ Forum to do interview features. They offered me a voice trial. It was fun doing that. It led to a couple of other programmes and doing the regular music broadcast, Hear and Now. That lasted a couple of years.
It’s a very different working experience. I was used to recording, but you don’t get that sense of performance when you’re doing this. Obviously, you are at concerts – I did a couple of concerts in front of the audience - but most of the work was done in studio. You would either attend the concert or hear the tapes, and then write the script and record it. Some of it was interviews with the relevant composer or performer. When you’d finish doing it, they’d just thank you and you’d go away with the sense that you hadn’t done anything. It’s so different from recording as an instrumentalist.
The downside of it was that people thought I’d given up clarinet. I had to work quite hard to stop that rumour. It was nice being on the radio - actually, I am still there on that programme, playing the clarinet in the ensembles.
Radio 3 used to be the only station playing classical music.
Radio 3 has been heavily affected by Classic FM, which is hugely successful. And Radio 3 knows that it should be doing something different but it still hasn’t quite worked out what that is. The network has changed massively since I listened to it as a kid. It knows it can never compete with Classic FM, and why should it? It covers hundred times more stuff. It covers all the jazz and world music, swing, the commercial end of jazz, and the entire history of church and art music from the Stone Age...
Classic FM broadcasts the same stuff all the time. It's a niche market, but a very popular one. I don’t think there is very much opera on Classic FM. I’ve never noticed any.
There isn't much opera on T.V, either. When I was at university, opera was on telly a lot more than it is now. Now you can’t see it, not even on BBC Four.
What do you think about showing opera in cinemas? Some opera companies in America have protested that it takes audiences away from them.
My hope is that if opera is available in the cinema, it would increase the audience for them. People would be more likely to risk an evening in the cinema than in the opera house. And then you would find maybe that the local opera audiences would expand as a result.
There’s a big argument in the media now about whether Leslie Garrett brings more people to opera, or whether she is doing opera more harm. There has been correspondence in the magazines about what’s real opera singing. Again, it’s creating another niche market, I think, and that market won’t necessarily ever be interested in opera GoING. There are people who are now releasing albums of pop-opera numbers and are thought of as opera singers, but haven’t actually sung any opera on stage. That could be popularising the music - but they’re doing the stuff that is already popular. They are not popularising anything new.
If you can sing the Habanera, it doesn’t mean you can do the role. I have this on-going argument with a dear friend who maintains that a certain tenor can sing Nessun dorma because it’s on the CD.
There’s nothing wrong with a good microphone voice. It’s a matter of taste.
Most orchestral musicians don’t like a very, very big, wobbly voice; they find that too much. Also, most professional musicians are fully aware who can sing and who can’t. They can tell the difference between a pop mezzo and a real mezzo, but they’re professional, they’re doing the gig, and they’ll do it well. To my ear, the voice of a well-known soubrette is not very attractive when she sings a big Verdi aria in concert.
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You also had a part on a TV show…
I had an opportunity to do some acting and playing on TV in The Genius of Mozart. They needed someone to play Mozart’s friend, Anton Stadler, the clarinet player. I had one line. It was nice, playing in costumes, in a beautiful courtyard full of flowers.
It was a period instrument orchestra, which gave me the opportunity to expand. Since then I have done more operas on period instruments, the tour of The Marriage of Figaro and Iphigenie en Tauride in Covent Garden.
How do period instruments differ from what we’re used to hearing now?
The Baroque clarinet is a very strange thing, like a recorder, but with a reed in it. I really like opera on period instruments because they let the voices through a lot better. Especially in Mozart. The sound is silky, rather than glossy. The period instruments still use vibrato, only it’s not a predictable or constant timbre vibrato. It’s used ornamentally and expressively. And you can actually play a lot louder on period instruments; you can give more. On modern instruments you have to hold back when you’re playing Mozart, or it’ll sound like Rakhmaninoff gone wrong. On the early instruments you have to give it everything that you can. You can hear the difference: it’s just much more emotional. You have to give the same amount as you would give in Puccini on modern instruments.
What do you think about the concept of “reduced orchestra”, used by small companies?
It’s a thorny subject. I think it's almost impossible to make a good reduction. Starting from the orchestral parts and using the piano to replace them is not a very good idea. If you do it the other way round, like we did in the educational project for ENO, and start from the piano reduction, then add a cello and a clarinet, it works much better. It's like a Brahms trio. Opera sounds pretty good on the piano anyway.
When you start reducing the opera down to five or six players, it can turn into a monumentally bad production. It happened with I pagliacci. The orchestra had no double-bass in it. The lowest instrument was a cello or a bass clarinet. It didn’t sound right. A good double-bass player makes everybody sound good. You have to have a double-bass in opera, I’m sorry!
In the Figaro that I’ve toured this year the strings were 3-2-2-1-1, which is practically chamber music, on gut strings, classical pitch – and it sounded fantastic, very intimate. With a very good bass player and a very good cellist it really worked.
I always wanted to find out what it is like in the pit.
The orchestra are the only people that really experience the whole show. Yes, the pit can be claustrophobic. It varies. If you’re very tall, it can be. I am medium tall. I played in a West End show for six months on and off, where I couldn’t stand up. The roof was about six inches above my head when I was sitting down. It was like going into a cave, you had to double up to get in there. But then playing the same show every night is a claustrophobic experience anyway. Once, the pit was so low, they couldn’t fit a tuba there at all because it would touch the ceiling, so the part was played by the fourth horn.
Last year I played in Covent Garden first time, in the main house, and it was a different experience. The Covent Garden pit isn’t claustrophobic at all. You can see the audience very well. The Guildhall pit is so deep that you cannot see anybody.
Of course, if there is no room to move, there is no room to play. Some of the most squashed-up places I’ve been to have no pit at all, so you are in the area in front of the stage. In general, the strings get all the room, because they need to bow. Whereas they assume that wind players don’t have to move a great deal so they can be scrunched up. But if you’re playing more than one instrument, which is common in contemporary opera, then you would have the bass clarinet laid out on the floor where no one can fit in and it would take three times as long to reach the instrument and change. So you have to take off some bars at the beginning and some at the end of what you’re playing to be able to do it.
What would you change in the world of opera, if you had a
chance?
I'd like to suggest something about theatre pits. They're always just big enough for an orchestra one player less than there is. The pit in Theatre Royal Brighton somehow manages to be dusty and damp at the same time. It is a joy to play in theatres without a pit, i.e. Almeida and Wilton's Music Hall.
In the opera production the stage and the pit are two different worlds...
… and after the show, when you go for a meal, the orchestra and the singers always sit separately.
Yes, it is a different world. It is also different depending on the size of the company: with a really big orchestra, the different sections of the orchestra don’t really mix with each other. The strings are the pond life, the brass are the piss-heads, the percussionists all fancy themselves, the oboists are neurotic – and you have presumably heard all the bad jokes about the viola… They are very old, stereotypical ideas.
And have you heard the soprano jokes: do you know the difference between an operatic soprano and a bull terrier? Lip gloss. There maybe an odd soprano who would fit that description… Or the one about the soprano and the light bulb: how many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? All of them. One climbs up the ladder, the others watch and say that she can’t do that, it’s too high for her…
There is an assumption in some orchestras that the singers don’t like each other. The orchestra are a unit but the singers are in competition with each other, particularly the same voice type.
Does it mean that you would never be tempted to become a singer?
Maybe, but I am also aware of the fact I may not have the skills… Though one of the skills I’ll have if I ever sing something is that I will not come in a bar early and I will keep my place because I can follow the conductor and listen to the orchestra. I know how to do all those things.
Through working in opera I have developed a real love for the human voice. I did The Dream of Gerontius last month, which I’ve done many times, and I appreciate the human voice even more.
Instrumentalists often say that opera singers are not musicians. Do you think it’s true?
Singers don’t have the skills that instrumentalists are expected to have at the basic level of the professional freelance or any kind of orchestral career. If you put a piece of music in front of an instrumentalist, they will play it perfectly, straight away. They know that singers aren't expected to do that
- they spend months learning and rehearsing a role, but the orchestra
gets one rehearsal.
What do you think about funding opera and redirecting to the Olympics?
It’s certainly not right if money is being diverted from the Arts to any kind of sport, Olympics or not. In operatic terms, the Olympics is next Tuesday afternoon and it’ll be over. And we will have opera afterwards. We’ve had opera for longer than we’ve had Olympics.
In general, Arts funding is a problem in this country and always has been. It changed a lot during the Thatcher years. We don’t have the tradition that America has, of enlightened private sponsorship – or even enlightened corporate sponsorship. Corporate sponsorship has a lot of strings attached to it, so you don’t have artistic freedom with that.
There are strong arguments for making sure the Arts don’t pay for the Olympics. For a start, we need to have the Arts happening when the Olympics are going on. There’s no point inviting an audience from around the world to London if there is no opera, no concerts. People aren’t going to come just to watch the swimming; we have to offer them more.
What are your plans?
I am touring The Barber of Seville with the Armonico Consort, the same company that I toured The Marriage of Figaro with this year. Although it would be possible at classical pitch, they are doing it on modern instruments. as it’s a reduced orchestra. Then I have university work. I don’t actually have a teaching post because I found that it got in the way of playing. The flexibility you need for freelancing doesn’t allow you to do it. I know some players do that, but you spend a lot of time either fixing deputies, or making up.
How do you spend your time outside music?
Nearly two years ago I joined a Tai-chi class and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a local class, taught very much from the martial arts point of view. You do get a bit bruised and battered occasionally. I find it utterly fascinating. It’s changed my whole outlook on the body. It’s twice a week and I get really frustrated if I have to miss it. My other two fascinations are Pinot Grigio and The Bill. That keeps me going.
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