How did you get into opera?
I actually trained as an actress first. I did a degree in English and Drama; I didn’t do music at all. But I’ve always sung and my mum’s always sung. When I got to university I discovered, to be perfectly honest, that I wasn’t a very good actress, there were people a lot better than me on the course. But there was an option of a course with either the dance people or the music people, you could cross over. At Birmingham University you could do an opera course as a drama student. The first thing they threw us into was The Coronation of Poppea, which was not exactly easy because it’s not written as what you’re used to as normal music, but it sort of whet my appetite.
In those days (the mid-eighties I hate to say), the actor’s training was very focused on being small and intense; it was almost television acting. It wasn’t what I did , I’m much bigger than that. But opera is huge, so I found my natural home: I could act and I could sing – and it was big! So I enjoyed it and that’s how I got into it. But I actually didn’t study it until later on.
When I came out of university, I had a choice how I was going to pay the overdraft. I thought I didn’t want to be an actor but I wanted to be in theatre. So I went and worked as a publicity officer for my local theatre. I applied for jobs all over the country, but what I got, happened to be in my home town. For two years I was selling theatre, about 140 different events a season, three seasons a year, selling what people enjoyed in the theatre, looking at what people enjoyed watching in the theatre, what worked. I went to everything: African dance, Shakespeare, the most grotty pantomimes you’ve seen in your life…I thought it was really interesting stuff. Then I picked up the singing again and eventually ended up at Trinity College of Music on their Postgraduate Course, studying opera.
Is there an operatic tradition in your family?
No, not at all. My mum loved G&S. When I was about eight, she took me to the amateur operatic society doing The Pirates of Penzance. When I came home, I sang all I could remember for two hours in my own key. We went every year to see a show.
My grandmother sang, but not professionally. Now, I wish I had my grandmother’s voice, because she was a true British contralto, an incredibly low and resonant voice. She was a furrier by trade. Once We went to see the Noel Coward musical Perchance to Dream, which features the famous tune, ‘We’ll gather lilacs in the spring again’ I kept hearing a low rumble and I wondered what it was – it was the grandmother humming three rows away, and the row was shaking from her resonant voice. She was a little sparrow of a lady, a tiny person, with a huge voice. Unfortunately, over the generations we got higher: my mother was a low mezzo and I am a higher mezzo.
Contralto seems such a British phenomenon…
I think it has to be the true voice. You cannot fudge the low notes, as we all know. A contralto, when she sings the low notes, you know that they actually belong to her. Perhaps it’s because we in Britain are matriarchs, we go around shouting at the bottom of our voice, like Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps it’s a Victorian thing. A booming voice, like Clara Butt. You could make a lot of money if you had one of those true voices these days. Bradamante in Alcina is a true contralto, with a huge flexibility. We don’t always think of those lower voices in terms of flexibility…
Would it be that contraltos are to Britain what tenors are to Italy?
Why are British voices reserved and Italian voices are not? Laura Sarti says it’s because here we pick up the phone to talk to a friend across the street, while in Italy they shout the message across… It is loud, direct, vibrant, with so much energy in it. While in Britain we suppress the voice a bit, seen not heard, that sort of thing.
Not so many low voices in Italy, but the Italian operas always have a deep, low voice role in then, you need the bottom line, a father, a baddie or a wise king. But the super-star voices who are topping the charts are either a soprano or a tenor. It’s very simple: they get the tune… How many people can sing a harmony of a pop song? The top line is the one that the ear is drawn to. And also, they are loud!
What do you think about mezzos singing soprano roles? It didn’t quite work for me with Violetta Urmana, a wonderful singer, as Leonora in La Forza at ROH. There was something not quite right...
When you’re in a role, if you’re really in a role, the only way that a character can express themselves is through the music and the words given. If you have to work extra hard at it, it is going beyond the character, pushing it too far. Dorabella will only sing the music Mozart's given her; she’d never dream of taking the top line, because that’s not her. If you get someone just singing the notes, it sounds nice, but it doesn’t sound right for the character, it doesn't ring true.
I don’t like pigeon-holeing voices, because it depends where you are: what you sing in a room for 500 people you wouldn’t dream of singing for 2,000. On the other hand, it’s where you sound right. Tenors sometimes say that Mozart is too light for them – try Belmonte! He gets heroic arias.
What was your first serious opera?
There were two. In the late eighties, Welsh National Opera put on a whole series of operas with Ruth Berghaus directing in the East German style. Suddenly Carmen stopped being frilly skirts and Spanish figures and turned into revolutionaries and guns; there was an extremely weird Don Giovanni, set on the moon, and various other things. They were very bizarre. People in Winchester and Southampton were completely confused with this odd, modernist approach. I found it fascinating to watch the audience’s reaction.
I was interested in interpretations of opera, the way the director was working with it; it’s back to the theatre again. I saw La boheme and Traviata in one week. I went with a guy who was in the Territorial Army, big, burly chap, who thought he ought to see some opera. He thought La Boheme was alright. Then we went to Traviata - and he cried throughout the last act! I though it was amazing how opera moved people.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Traviata, which hasn’t got anything in it really for a mezzo, apart from the role of Flora, that is, if you want to be a tub of margarine… I like Traviata very much, it is a complete story, incredibly moving in the right soprano’s hands.
But if I’m singing, I want to be Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte because you can take that ending wherever you like. Does she go back with Ferrando? Does she say, ‘Stuff you, mate?’ I personally think she fancies Guglielmo at the end of it and she doesn’t want to go back with Ferrando. As long as you’ve got a good director, who doesn’t force it on you, it can be very interesting. Especially if you’ve got a good Fiordiligi and you play it as sisters, not as two different people. That’s the secret. Dorabella does what Fiordiligi daren’t, and then they swap: Fiordiligi goes further, Dorabella goes back into flirt mode.
My dream opera would be Rosenkavalier. If I had months and months to prepare and money were no object. Of course, no-one is going to cast me as I haven’t got the beef in the voice, but I would love to do it. Even if I were not to sing for the next five years, but I could have one night doing the opera I want, it would be Der Rosenkavalier. Because it is the ultimate acting challenge: you are a mezzo, you start as a boy, then you fall in love with a girl, then you dress up to convince a bloke you’re a girl, then change back to the boy at the end. And the audience must believe in you, every step on the way. You must never look like a girl playing a boy playing a girl; you must be a boy from the beginning, they must see the boy playing the girl. It gets awfully complicated.
You must be picking up a theme here: for me, everything comes back to the drama: telling the story - and singing it in a most sublime way. All my favourite operas have a strong sense of drama. I think Mozart and Rossini are great story tellers: their stories bubble along and move; something is always happening. Whereas Verdi is more gritty. But let’s face it: the man who did Traviata also did Trovatore, so let’s not get too excited here. You have to bear it in mind that the 19th century is the era of melodrama; we are talking screaming women strapped to train tracks. You either have to go with it, or try and update it. But Traviata is basically a story of one woman who loves this bloke and would give anything for him, she would even give him up. She’d rather be on her own and have loved him, than not have loved him at all. It’s quite amazing and it still rings true. While in Trovatore you’ve got things, like the gypsies, that get in the way.
Have you got you favourite period in opera?
It must be the eighteenth century, with the crossover to the nineteenth, Mozart and Rossini, the sense of fun and enjoyment. Once we get into the post-war twentieth century, past Albert Herring which I adore, I’m more interested in music theatre because it takes on some of the story-telling aspects in a more accessible way than opera. This a horribly sweeping generalisation, but modern opera sort of meanders for a while in terms of what it wants to talk about, and then suddenly comes back again. Although more recent operas, John Adams’s Nixon in China and Jonathan Dove’s Flight, have a stronger focus on the actual story. I’m a sucker for a traditional story and I want somebody to be either happy or entirely miserable at the end of it. I want something resolved.
If you had a chance to put together an ideal cast for an opera of your choice, who would it be?
Good grief, that’s a question and a half! It changes. The thing I’m struggling with would be the tenors, funnily enough…Jose Cura is a very exciting tenor, but he can be quite wayward. Pavarotti had the most sublime Italianate sound in his youth but I don’t think I would pay to see him in the stadium now.
Let’s say, Der Rosenkavalier. If I wasn’t allowed to do it, I would put Anne Sofie von Otter as Octavian, or Katarina Karneus, who I was in college with, because both of them are very convincing actresses and they move very well on stage. While they may not be the heaviest and biggest Octavians, I don’t think Octavian should be big and heavy – he is young.
At college, the inspiring voice for me was Dame Janet Baker. I was very lucky: my coach played for her a lot. Geoffrey Pratley’s incredible talent was to realise that you don’t have to sing things in the original key, when it comes to song. Even a semitone can suit one’s voice better than the standard song book key. He was tweaking the key to suit my voice, saying it was young Dame Janet’s key. Nine times out of ten his choice was right. The slight change of colouring that the key brings can help suit it better to your voice. It’s very interesting and that’s what I mean when I say a voice suits a part. If Octavian were written a tone higher, it might suit someone else better.
Barbara Bonney would suit Sophie, a clear, beautiful person, with a great sense of fun.She is bursting to get out. She can’t believe the hunk that turns up with a rose. She is really cheeky, flirts with the messenger, not with the Baron, she seems to be carried away. I’d like a clear, bright, young and energetic Sophie. Set against it is the Marschallin, who still has lots to give but also realises she has to let the next generation take over. It is sad, because the whole society claims she is now beyond the age to fall in love with a young man. Everybody has expectations of her. She still has got that energy and doesn’t feel any different than when she was 30. She is Sophie but 20 years older. You want to cast someone who has that sparkle, that sense of energy. I like Felicity Lott. I am fond of some British singers and I think we are underestimated. She may not be powerful, but she knows how to hold the stage. I am seeing those people more than hearing them.
Baron Ochs: any bass who has been there for over 40 years would have the notes. He needs the worldly experience. John Tomlinson would just come on and do it, but I don’t know his lower range. Then you wheel in Pavarotti to sing the Italian tenor’s aria, he steals the show, and it is over. And you need a decent band with somebody good to wave the stick, who is generous and knows singers, enjoys it, doesn’t slow things down too much, keeps things going. Solti. Or Sir Colin Davies.
Let’s go back to telling the story. What do you think of Wagner’s stories?
I think Wagner also had a huge agenda behind all his stuff. He is creating a whole mythology on stage. I was watching the Walkyrie on telly, Wotan was arguing with the giants, fine, so I switched over to something else for half an hour, came back and he was still arguing with the giants. I was thinking, ‘Can’t you solve it yet? Go to arbitration or something?’ Yes, it is sublime, it is glorious, it is incredibly slow. There are so many messages packed into it. You must be sure that you get all of them at every twist and turn.
But of course he had great control over his drama; he built his own theatre for it, with the orchestra hidden, so nothing interrupted the drama. It was very indulgent. No new composer would now have the money to do it. If Jonathan Dove now came and said, ‘I have this opera, it lasts five hours, it has this cast, it’s going to have explosions’, they would just laugh him off the stage, ‘Sorry, mate, it’s great if you’ve got thousands of dollars, but you haven’t’. A different era.
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Have you been tempted to write your own opera?
No, I haven’t, actually. I attempted to write my own plays, but never got round to it. But I’ve just written some words for a piece which our composing baritone, Bryan Kesselman, is setting to music. We are going to an opera festival, operafringe.com, which runs at the same time as Castleward in Northern Ireland. When they approached us, I looked at their website which is covered with pictures of chickens. I said we would do a piece about chickens – and they took me seriously. I was only joking. We had to turn around, apply for a grant, do a whole opera about chickens. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the grant, so the opera got scaled down. It is called The Story Of Chicken Little and I’ve written the libretto. We are touring it for a week in Ireland. I think I prefer to direct, to put a spin on established things, rather than create music from scratch.
How did you end up with your own opera company, as a director?
That’s very easy. I came out of college with no job and no experience. Eating my usual comfort food, a large chocolate croissant, I wandered into HMV. In the classical department, every album in the top ten was a Greatest Hits compilation. I thought, ‘Where can you actually SEE the operatic highlights?’ You could see it at the Barbican, in the Royal Albert Hall, at the Festival Hall, presented by people like Raymond Gubbay. But no one was touring it in the provinces, except for galas, which is different.
I started Hatstand Opera specifically to do opera highlights. I got six friends from college together, we did a photo shoot in my front room and sent out a brochure, as if we’d been going for years and years. And blimey, the next day a booking comes in. So we had to put a show together. We didn’t have a show; all we had was the photo shoot. Oops. So we rehearsed the Christmas highlights show in the autumn and our first performance was a live broadcast on Classic FM - talk about baptism of fire. In those days, Classic FM was based in the Oval, in the basement of an office block, and you actually sang in the office. They had cleared all the computers out of the way, there was a piano at the end, they set up two microphones, and we sang to a room full of computers. It was bizarre.
After that we started touring operatic highlights. We discovered, as I thought but had no proof of, that people wanted to see the best bits. But it had to be staged properly, each excerpt. Each singer gets only one aria and has to learn all the ensembles. All along, the emphasis has been on the drama. Some singers improvise, some need directions from me.
I realised the drama wouldn’t mean anything out of context, so I started introducing each item. It started all dry and academic, with a tight script, but one day I forgot the script and had to make it up, so I added a couple of jokes (it was La Boheme), people laughed, it went twice as well as before. The audience were into it, but it was lighter. They didn’t have to be serious! If they wanted to laugh at Rodolfo finding the key for "Che gelida manina" and sticking it in his pocket, they could, it was him being sneaky. That’s how our style has evolved. The name Hatstand Opera came from the fact that we had to hang our costumes on a hat stand at the back of the stage. We’ve been going on for 12 years.
Are small opera companies the sure way to start one’s career?
What you call small companies I call training companies. Sometimes they put on a good show, sometimes they don’t. They rely on singers who are prepared to pay. The singers have often no previous stage experience and don’t know roles. These companies are a great way to build up the CV. Morley College is a fantastic course. It has been going for years. Lots of people going through. But there comes a point where you have to go from paying to being paid, you have to say to yourself, ‘I have trained, now I’ve got to take my leave. Now I am going to be paid to do this.’
Small opera companies, like Hatstand, are professional companies and you are paid a professional wage to be on the stage. They have small casts, don’t necessarily do more than one show a year, don’t have a resident orchestra. Then we have the medium-scale people, like Pavilion Opera, and ETO, medium to large.
There is no career ladder for a singer, like there is for a doctor. You can’t say, ‘I have made it when I am at…’ Also, there is a huge gap between the good, solid singers, those you see at ENO, and the stratospheric superstars. The difference is that you either know their name or you don’t. I think it’s a big problem. It’s very difficult to make a living singing opera unless you are in the superstar bracket. Below that, there are lots of very, very, very good singers doing excellent work, who haven’t quite got up to that extra level. In simple terms, you are going from being Manager of a Department to being CEO, and there is nothing in between.
Singing, acting, any kind of performing, is a very tough mistress. As money gets tighter in the outside world, the number of companies shrinks. Basically, people realise they can’t do it. The pool of singers gets cut down because people realise they have to pay the mortgage. They branch out, go to teaching. Then the economy recovers and gradually the pool expands again. It’s an undulating curve. When you see the opera companies pages in the British Yearbook of Music, you’ll be surprised how few stay and make it year on year.
What’s the recipe for success?
I think if you are starting a company, do what you enjoy. Don’t for God’s sake start a company doing something you don’t like! If you think your company should do contemporary opera because there are very few who do that, but you can’t stand singing contemporary opera, don’t do it; you’ll never enjoy it. What you need is a heck of a lot of passion, an awful lot of dedication and skin like a rhino hind.
Are there enough audiences for small opera companies?
There is a very good article in Arts Professional about that, and I think in Classical Music as well. A theory has come out that audiences are changing in the way that they want to experience art. Instead of people wanting to go to see a particular show, they are going for an experience. The more money they pay for their ticket, the more they believe the quality of their experience is assured. At the big events, people are getting standing ovations all the time. It is almost as if the audience are saying that they have paid so much to guarantee a good time, the person next to them is thinking that too, so it must be good, and they rise to their feet. It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are paying £50 a ticket instead of paying £10 a ticket five times.
People are now looking for an experience. The marketing ploys have changed. Now arts providers offer an experience that fits what people want – similar to loyalty cards. At Tesco they know what Kirsty the Tesco card holder buys, so when they market to me, they send me the details of the products I normally buy; they are tailoring the Tesco experience to my requirements. And that’s what they are now trying to do in arts. Apparently, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra are doing it now: they got rid of their brochures and their direct mailing letters. They want people to buy into their experience, to suit what people want. It’s the same about opera. Of course, you have to keep the quality lid on it.
It’s one thing to get someone’s money once, it’s a double achievement to get it twice. At Hatstand we are obviously doing something right, because we are going to the same audiences for the ninth time. The fans keep coming back and the fan base keeps growing. As long as people have a positive experience about things, it will grow.
If you have a negative experience, it only takes one person at the call centre who doesn’t give you a decent answer, and you won’t buy from that company. The same goes for opera: one grotty opera is enough. I once met a very unhappy opera goer who had paid £9 for his opera ticket, for an amateur company. He thought it was a professional company because they’d charged him to see it. He paid, so to him they were professional. His expectations were high. He had a bad experience and ended up hating opera.
What’s the future of small opera companies in the UK and specifically in London?
We don’t perform in London, except privately. There is too much available. If you are an opera lover and you have £20, you spend it on the cheapest ticket at ROH, which you don’t mind, because you might get a glimpse of Gheorghiu’s left ankle, or at least hear her. You go to ENO because they are putting on something that you are interested in, like Lulu in English. Do you want to spend that £20, going twice to see a company where you are not sure what’s going to happen? You don’t. Nine times out of ten, you go for the big boys, because you know the brand. People will take more risk if they know that their last experience was good.
I used to work in rep theatre. A rep theatre puts on six to seven plays of its own production each year. You ask people at the beginning of the season to become a subscriber. They want to see only four of the plays, but because they trust the theatre, they will come to all of them. There is a very strong case for doing local theatre, local opera, to build up an audience that now will love it. Because they will go and travel, if they have to. They will. Or someone will invite them to come and visit another place. Or they will bring in friends from somewhere else. We get that quite a lot. But London is like a sponge, it draws in audiences from all around.
Is opera art or is it business?
Well, there is money at the bottom of all this; it’s all cash. Opera companies need money to put opera on. Opera is a very expensive thing to put on. If you’re doing it right, you’ve got 67 people in the pit, a hundred people on stage in a crowd scene, and a stage crew behind, so you are looking at least at 200 people. That’s a lot of people. Think about it: if Manchester United had to put out 200 players every time they set out onto the field, it would be very expensive. So yes, economics underlines a lot of it.
But you have to get the art balanced with that. It is similar to visual art: you look at the artists, you see a very talented one, but you think that the picture of the elephant dung is never going to sell. Or, it’s cheap enough, perhaps I don’t mind the elephant dung after all. Or, the picture fits my life style because I hate pretty pictures…
What do you do when you are not doing opera in any form?
I garden. It sounds terribly boring but the truth is that as a singer you spend half of your life in the dark. You are lucky to see the sunshine. You drive to a gig, it’s dark when you get there, you sing in the dark, you come out into the dark, you wake up and it’s probably dark. You get so fed up with it. I have a tiny garden, 100’ by 20’, packed with plants. It’s physical and it keeps you moving. Because the other side of running an opera company is that you spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, doing administration. It’s good to get out.
A couple of years ago I did the Groundlings Course at the Globe Theatre. That was just pure fun. It is a workshop of six to eight weeks, culminating in performing a bit of Shakespeare at the Globe. Which of course is outdoors, I hasten to add. Foolish me, I did the course in autumn and we performed on the 12th of December. It was extremely cold. It was fascinating. We learnt all about the costumes and particularly how to speak the text. Every comma, every line break and every pause had a reason, so you had to use an edition with Shakespeare’s punctuation (or the closest to it). We had a real mix of people, as Groundlings, lawyers, personnel managers, etc. Everyone could audition. It was great, although they kept saying to me, ‘You’re not in opera, there's no need to shout!’.
View Hatstand Opera’s page HERE.
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