How would you classify yourself: Conductor, Organist, Musical Director, Pianist or Opera Composer?
I’m a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve written quite a few dramatic works and I’m still writing. The first thing I got involved in quite a few years ago was a musical, with Roxanne Houston, called The Sarong Song. It was an attempt to make a crossover work. We recorded it with the Forest Philharmonic Orchestra and Frank Shipway. Other works are Over the Sea to Skye about Bonnie Prince Charlie and The Christmas Story , now available on CD.
La muerte de harmonia, a one-act opera, has a libretto written by Antonio Colinas, one of Spain’s national poets. I taught organ, harpsichord and piano at a summer course in Spain for about five or six years and I got to know Colinas, whose daughter was a student of mine. I set some of his songs to music. La muerte de Armonia, The Death of Harmony, is a different take on the Orpheus story. It is very static but it's definitely a stage work. I am working now on the vocal score reduction. There is quite a good chance it will be put on in Spain in La Baneza in the Northwest, which has a big theatre with an orchestra pit. Spain has quite a few big theatres that are suitable for opera.
I’ve also written a mass, In Passione Domine Motet for A Cappella Choir, pieces for clarinet and organ. I’ve done quite a lot of conducting church music. I like conducting, not only my own works, but also other composers. It’s very enriching, but it is a lot of work too. Conducting for small companies involves a lot of arranging and editing. A good example is my own performing version of Gluck’s Orfeo, which I think is very practical.
Who are your favourite composers?
To say one has an absolute favourite is a difficult thing. Mozart was a keen observer of human nature and understood what human beings really are, which comes through particularly in his opera buffa. Mozart is human and intimate. He is very popular because people can relate to his characters. I have periods of loving Wagner, but my feelings about Mozart are pretty constant.
The inherent drama in the sonata style, the idea of juxtaposing first subjects, second subjects; key structures, the balance of the key. Drama through the sense of balance and structure. Mozart introduced modulation and he was very good at changing the mood of the piece very fast. I cannot think of any other composer who can write one barpiano and the other bar fortissimo bravura. And it changes very suddenly, it’s almost schizophrenic. That’s something that tingles the back of your neck. That’s unique. Then there is the intimate dialogue between his soloists and his orchestra. And of course Mozart had an inherent sense of drama. He was extraordinary.
Someone who is a great opera composer would be Benjamin Britten. He almost had a Mozartian genius. When I was very young, I was conducted by Britten. He wrote The Children’s Crusade for us. An incredibly sensitive bloke, very strange. We did Schuman with him, with Fischer-Dieskau, at the Maltings. We recorded quite a lot of his music when I was in the boys’ choir.
I adore Peter Grimes. It has total magic in it. But then Britten got self-conscious and he didn’t carry on. I don’t like Death in Venice, it’s not what opera is about. I like The Midsummer Night’s Dream; it’s lovely, but there are elements in it when he is holding back. I don’t know what it is but I think it should have been more melodic. It's only Peter Grimes that you remember a few days after hearing it, it makes an impression that stays with you. That’s certainly true about all Mozart operas.
Now we have something of a Janacek syndrome and I think it’s fatal. I call it bubble-and-squeak. It is prevalent. The problem is not communicating with the audience enough. It gives opera a bad name.
There is something about melody. It is very difficult to write. To write a good tune is the most difficult thing you can do. It is about capturing the essence of things. It is magic. It is indefinable. You’ve got to attempt it, to avoid murdering the audience.
I like Richard Strauss. I love Der Rosenkavalier. People sometimes say that I’m too influenced by Richard Strauss. I don’t think so. If you think about it, Strauss and Mozart are close together. Carl Bohm is very good at both. Elektra is fascinating, because of the different style. Now, Elektra is not what you’d call very melodic but it is electrifying and incredibly dramatic. I like Strauss' concept of orchestration, although sometimes he can over orchestrate for opera, using very big orchestras.
Strauss is just such a lyricist. He wants to write a melody - and I love that! The Four Last Songs are beautifully written. Fabulous things. Really fantastic.
I like Wagner but there is too much philosophising in it. On the other hand, Wagner introduced new things; he had a different concept. He was already thinking cinematographically. Bayreuth has a hidden orchestra, therefore it brings forward the singers. It is more “the world” as opposed to the 18th century opera which is “the house”, flirting with the boxes, interacting. It’s revolutionary, but even his theories sometimes failed: the endless monologues can get tiresome.
And your favourite modern composers?
I find there’s a tendency with lots of modern opera composers to be too self-conscious about melody. They are scared of melody. It’s not politically correct to write a melody at the moment. You’ll be branded. To write a melody means to be written off as totally naïve and irrelevant.
For me, it doesn’t work. Without melody opera is not opera. Simple. Of course you can discuss what melody is, and the way Wagner used the melody, which was more in the orchestra than in the voice, is a different way to Verdi. I personally think it should be fairly prominent vocally, in the solo parts.
That’s what is wrong with Janacek: there are some wonderful things in it, but it is continuously recitative, there is not one moment of lyricism. The art of singing is not about jumping around all the time. It’s not satisfying and it’s difficult to memorise. I’m very traditional. It will affect the future of audiences, especially for smaller companies.
With modern music, everything is abstract. You’ve got to give the audience quality despite this. If the structure goes, the interest goes, too. Modern opera refuses to accept the essentials. It is refuting the laws of harmonics. You can’t refute the laws of harmonics – they are vital!
How did your interest in opera begin?
My parents are artists. I’ve got aunts that were musicians, one of them sang in a production with Kirsten Flagstad. My parents like music. My brother and I went to a comprehensive school in Wandsworth, which had a fantastic choir. That was a formative experience not only for me and my brother, but a whole generation of musicians: one is in RSO, another is a famous tenor.
I had the opportunity to sing in The Wandsworth Schoolboys' Choir with so many great conductors – Solti, Haitink, Colin Davies, Giullini. There even was a Panorama programme called The Wandsworth Sound. It was phenomenal. Such an exciting sound, raw and vibrant. The director was Russell Burgess. He was assistant chorus master of the Philharmonic Chorus. He had a sort of genius about him. He did something very difficult: disciplining sometimes very rough kids into the choir. I suppose it was the excitement of it, controlling the uncontrollable forces! He inspired a whole generation of people.
I always wanted to write. The creativity has always been in the family. I discovered there was a composer on my father’s side. I guess it is in the genes. My mother’s parents were a part of a family orchestra in their big house. There has always been music around.
After college I went to Italy and France. At college I met Herbert Howells, a composer now buried in Westminster Abbey who knew Vaughan Williams, Ravel and Elgar. He took me on as a composition student. I also had a great organ teacher, Richard Latham.
Later I went to Italy to study harpsichord with Ruggero Gerlin at the Academia Chigiana in Siena. I also studied intensively in Paris for four years, but I wasn’t getting any writing done, so I had to make a decision and came back. It got me out to Europe in a big way; I now network with musician friends in Spain, France, Italy and Scandinavia.
How does the English concert life compare to these countries?
There is so much going on in London that audiences are a problem. I was in Southern France last summer and there were concerts everywhere, in the middle of nowhere, little villages would be packed for a piano recital, and clearly – people are on holiday and there are masses of French festivals.
There is one thing I find really difficult about English concert life: the hours we have concerts at, as opposed to France and Italy or Spain. In Spain, when you do a concert or go to a concert, you have time to eat and appreciate and enjoy food, and then go to a concert, or vice versa. But it is tailored around the need of people to eat decently; that means sitting down and enjoying the meal. In this country, the concert is at 7.30. I eat usually at 8pm. I find it really difficult. When I decide to go to a concert, I have to really kick myself! (laughing)
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In your opinion, do small opera companies have any future in London?
I think if you look at what’s on offer in London, the competition is ferocious. There was a culture, The Covent Garden Festival, which has now disappeared. Several years ago when I conducted for a small opera company, there were good audiences, full houses. It has been getting more difficult.
I think even small companies should vary its soloists more. It’s good to have certain principals associated with a company but you also need variety. It’s the same in opera houses! A Mozartian voice, in general, cannot do Wagner properly.
I also think there should be a venue, open to different companies. Some space in London could be found and the small companies could work it on a rota system. There are a lot of very good people around that are not getting the opportunity. Maybe it would help if people pulled their resources and their thoughts together and came up with an attractive venue in London that was privately run or associated with something, the more central the better. Somewhere in Covent Garden would be easy to get to for all those tourists wishing they had tickets to ROH. They would visit it and enjoy themselves – and they might discover opera. A place that can be converted into a good performing environment, perhaps with a pit. That would create an audience and a cult following to it. I think something like that might be a good idea. The problem is location and getting enough heads around to have an agreement.
I think the scene for smaller companies is changing and particularly now audiences have been hard to get. I think it could be a way forward to join some companies together. Opera is very popular.
There are companies in London who decided to put on rarely performed works of established composers purely to get reviewed in the national press. Do you think it might be the future for small opera companies? I sometimes think an opera is not being performed because it’s not that good...
Yes, often there is a good reason behind it. Let’s think of Weber. For me, he was a genius. Der Freischutz is such an important work. I adore it. You can’t say that the libretto is fantastic – but it’s good. It’s strong. There is a good story line and a lot of fantasy in it. You are transported by it. It’s a good show. I personally love the Wolfgang scene, Annchen’s aria is beautiful and the whole opera works superbly well. But then look at Oberon: my God, that’s a disaster! It’s got beautiful music, but the libretto is really crap. Euryanthe is something in between – it can work, I’ve seen it work.
Weber was let down by bad libretti. If you haven’t got a good libretto, a good story – however much genius the composer’s got - I don’t think you can save it. If the book isn’t good, you’re in trouble. I think one of the problems with lots of composers is that they want to write their own libretto, but then the dynamic is lost, the conversation or even friction between the librettist and the composer is not there. Look at Da Ponte and Mozart, there was something amazing going on between them. They had similar points of view, but they were different people.
And don’t forget what opera is: people are there to be entertained. The audience is all-important. I always put myself in the position of the audience. Because that’s the end of the line, what they see and what they hear. It’s essential.
Let’s go back to the question of melodies in opera.
Basically, with the march of modernism people equated some sort of false sense of Darwinian evolution. You’ve got the Gregorian chant, Mediaeval music, Renaissance music, Baroque music, Classical music, Romantic music, Mahler, Berg, the 12-tone school, Birtwistle, post-Birtwistle – so what do you do next?
Most modern composers are frightened of tonality, because that gives a sense of direction, so you can oppose one thing against the other, For opera, that’s fundamental. If everything is discordant, what we get is a continuum of discordance, of scrunch, which physically tires the ear. If the ear is just listening to continual dissonance of one form or another, it switches off and stops registering. (The opposite extreme is Steve Reich, the minimalist, stretching it the other way.)
I know that composers want to find new voices, but it’s not the way to do it and it’s not going to work. So they get self-conscious about displaying any references to 19th-century composers or writing something that might be vaguely reminiscent of say Schubert or Mahler. They don’t want to be accused of copying.
However, people in the past didn’t think like that. Look at Raphael: he tried to copy the old masters. That was literally what he did, yet he was himself. And he got copied later on. Before, people were not so worried about it. They had to put on a good show, to entertain.
What would you change in producing opera?
Opera must be done in period! I’d like to see straight productions. I think for example Don Giovanni is much better in period. People go to the opera to be entertained. They want to hear great singing, to be transported out of themselves. Modern directors think it’s almost their religious duty to put our noses at the bottom of the gutter and rub our head in it. I get so cross! It just happens time and time again… The magic that opera can have is destroyed by that. So musicians have to work against it to create Mozart’s intentions, You get the paradox: the director doing something he thinks is relevant to modern people, and the musicians trying to be as faithful to Mozart as possible and yet communicating with a modern, live audience. I’ve recently heard many people insisting on authenticity.
Where is opera going, in your opinion?
There’ll be people like me, and others, who will write, come what may, what they want to write. Full-blooded and direct as you can be, and knowing what it’s all about. Probably not succeeding all the time. But the more direct you are, the more likely you are to succeed.
Opera can go in every direction. It can get more cinema-like, it can be done on a smaller scale, or it can go grand. I’d like it to diversify. Personally, I’ve written some small-scale things and I’d definitely like to write a grand opera.
What about audiences? Are they diminishing?
My Italian teacher, Ruggero Gerlin, toured Europe to packed houses everywhere – in those days, I suppose, television wasn’t about. There were lots of soloists going around the world, performing in small towns and getting good audiences.
We are living in the age of "the pyramid". Fifty years ago there was a lot of talent around, as there is today, but there were more venues and more variety. Now, instead of what you would expect, the media actually make less opportunities for artists. This is what comes from recordings. So you’ve only got Pavarotti on the top, you’ve only got Rattle. Then there is the huge raft of considerable talent – equal talent – not being used. It's certainly true with singing and with instrumentalists - and it’s a shame. But I think things are changing with the Internet, which is making things much more democratic. I think all that technology should be used to get things going.
You mentioned magic in performance…
It doesn’t happen every day. It is fantastic, incredible, amazing when it does work. But it’s getting less common. That’s the problem. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older. I used to go to concerts by famous conductors and just be lifted from my seat. So exciting, so involving. You were transformed. A lot of modern performances are really professional but not really alive. They get everything absolutely right – but…
One of the most extreme examples of that was a few years ago. I went with my father to the Wigmore Hall to listen to a well-known quartet. After the concert we walked through the hall and I said it was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. My father agreed. What was it? Everything was just great. Every gesture was in place. Every phrase was correct. You couldn’t fault it. Yet it was stone cold. It was dead. I don’t know what it was. Lack of involvement? Lack of communication? An obsession with being correct at the expense of expression? I don’t know.
If you were not a musician, what would you be doing?
I always liked architecture and, coming from a family of artists, I paint a bit. My brother is a concert pianist and a painter. My sister-in-law is a painter. My father, now retired, still teaches at Prince’s Trust Foundation and also sometimes in the British Museum.
Is cooking one of your hobbies?
No, I don’t cook. When I do, I cook badly. I teach the piano to a friend’s daughter and I get Italian lessons in exchange, including Italian cooking. I’ve learned three or four dishes. I do enjoy it but it’s time consuming! A lot of the time I am cooked for. I am lazy.
My hobbies are cycling and walking in the mountains. I try to do it every year. My brother lives quite close to the Pyrenees. I’ve got an on-going project to walk the whole of the Pyrenees. I do it on my own, with a tent. My aunt has a house in Normandy, near Cherbourg, and this year I decided to bike from there. I took a bike with me, stayed in Normandy for a week and then biked all the way to my brother’s near Toulouse.
I have also cycled in Spain, around Santiago, along the medieval pilgrim route. It is amazing. You get completely out of the modern life: it’s a different sensation of time. I visited all of my Spanish friends on the way, so I had a good time. I’d like to do more of it, it’s great fun.
View David's page HERE...
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