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Rupert Christiansen interviews Gerald Finley for

Opera magazine, June 2005

 

Finley sings his first Onegin at ENO this month

You know, I'm still not sure if I've cracked the fundamentals of singing.' Coming from one of the most consistent, accomplished and versatile baritones of his generation, the remark may sound surprising. But Gerald Finley is not an easily satisfied man, and although he clearly loves singing- 'it's the thing that makes me least stressed, most satisfied with the business of being alive' -he knows that he's in a profession 'littered with horror stories about people being pushed too hard or not keeping their minds on the job. I tell myself, it's OK, don't get eaten up, you've done pretty well But I feel I have to keep moving as a musician. I'm not there yet. It's a constant search.'

 

And also one that has taken him some distance. Over the two decades of his still-ascending career, he has sung in all the major houses except Vienna and La Scala, combining opera with Lieder and concerts in carefully managed proportions (he undertakes only three operas a year). Mozart dominated his repertory for a long time, but that is now changing. Earlier this year he embarked on his first major Verdi role, Germont in the Royal Opera's revival of Traviata, and this month sees him take on his first major Russian challenge, the title role in Yevgeny Onegin, which he will perform for English National Opera in a revival of Julia Hollander's production.

 

Contemporary opera has come to play an increasing part in his activities too. He was the first Harry Heegan in Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie (for which he won the 2000 Royal Philharmonic Society award for singers) and the first Fantastic Mr Fox in Tobias Picker's opera of that name. Jaufre in Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin is another of his recent successes. In San Francisco in October, he will play the American nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the premiere of John Adams's keenly awaited new opera Doctor Atomic, a role he is scheduled to repeat in several opera houses over coming years.

 

One of his ambitions is to return to his native land to play a role in a new opera on a Canadian theme-'perhaps something based on Jack London's stories, or the quest for the north-west passage'. When Canada's first purpose-built opera house, Toronto's Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts, opens in 2006, perhaps that dream will come that much closer to being realized.

 

Born in Montreal in 1960, Finley is of Orcadian extraction. His father was an academic turned civil servant, at the heart of the Anglophone cultural establishment. 'I grew up during the Trudeau era, when Montreal was a hotbed of artistic activity. There was music everywhere, and it runs deep into my family tree: I have one cousin who is a pianist, another who is a rock drummer, and a great-aunt who composed choral music and translated Italian opera.' Another aunt married William Mackay, organist at Westminster Abbey, and through his influence the young Gerald joined a celebrated church choir in Ottawa. 'I adored it. Although I was an allrounder, quite good at sports and schoolwork, singing was the focus of my life, and when my voice broke rather late, at 16, I transferred almost immediately to the bass section.'

 

He sang in the chorus for several opera productions in Montreal, both as a boy soprano and as a bass, and has vivid memories of sharing the stage with stars such as Jon Vickers and Frederica von Stade. Yet he didn't burn to be a soloist-his first thought for a career was to train as a choral director, 'because I naturally liked organizing things and leading a team'. In preparation for this, he arranged through his uncle an audition with David Willcocks at the Royal College of Music, and came to London hoping to be accepted for a one-year singing course prior to advanced training as choral conductor.

 

'But I got into a muddle over dates, and discovered that I'd arrived too early for the auditions. David Willcocks suggested that I did the choral trials for the Oxbridge colleges instead. I was turned down by Magdalen, Oxford, but King's, Cambridge took me on.' He read French and Italian there, and enjoyed 'three years so intense and exciting that they left me rather depressed, wondering whether anything could ever be as good as that again.

 

'What I learnt at King's wasn't so much vocal technique as sheer professionalism - the discipline of having to get up and sing whether you like it or not. Some days it will go well, some days badly, but you just have to get on with it.' Philip Ledger was the director of music - 'a wonderful support' - and the choir itself was 'bursting with talent and competitive spirit'. Christopher Purves and Mark Padmore were among his contemporaries, and a highlight of his time there was singing the solos in a St Matthew Passion alongside Janet Baker, who has remained one of Finley's most fervent champions.

 

With the support of Ledger and Baker, Finley decided to train for a solo career and finally made it to the RCM as a postgraduate. 'Maybe it's better there now, but for me the place turned out to be very frustrating. My teacher there was Lyndon van der Pump, and although he may have been the best person they had, he didn't work for me. As a choral singer, you get into some very bad habits-short cuts and tricks, things you do just to get through-and I really needed someone to unpick everything and take me back to scratch. That I didn't get.'

 

'After the RCM, I went on to the National Opera Studio, and I guess that the course there would have been useful if I had been a better singer. But I was up against people from the Guildhall like Peter Rose and Alastair Miles - they sounded so fresh and vibrant, so in control of their instruments that I just felt paralysed. All I could think was: how do those guys do it, and why can't I?'

 

'In the mid 1980s I started professionally in the Glyndebourne chorus, and made a living doing bits and pieces. But I was flitting from teacher to teacher Rudolf Piernay, Erich Vietheer - and still nothing seemed to gel. Then in 1988 Glyndebourne gave me the John Christie Award, and I decided to use the money to go to New York and try Armen Boyajian, simply because he was the teacher of my favourite singer at the time, Samuel Ramey.'

 

'It wasn't easy to get to him, but I persisted and found what I needed. Over the next two years, I went over once every three months for a couple of intensive weeks, sleeping on people's floors and listening over and over to the lessons which I taped.' Finley still sees Boyajian today, and is evangelistic on the subject. 'If you have any doubts about the tuition you are receiving, then you should get out. I had received so much guidance from others and kept thinking that they must all be right, even though I didn't feel that any of them were. If I hadn't met Armen, that could have been the end of me.

 

'Looking back, I can see that my extended bedding-in period was positive. It's given me the sense that I'm in for the long haul. And that's another bit of advice I'd give anyone starting off - be prepared to wait for the right moment of opportunity, and then seize it. I haven't led a charmed life by any means, but I think I've always managed to respond to the big chances at the right time, and that counts for a lot.'

 

After training with Boyajian, Finley felt he knew what and where his voice was. 'I have a low range for a baritone-I'm more a Van Dam than a Prey or a Souzay. On my agent's [IMG] list in New York, they describe me as a bass-baritone; in the UK, I'm plain baritone; I'd say I was a baritone with a low extension, although recently it's been opening up at the top. I'm certainly not interested in the martin roles like Pelleas - I'd far rather be Golaud anyway, as I find playing romantic leads rather boring!'

 

In this respect, he complements his friend and Cambridge contemporary, another baritone but with a high extension, Simon Keenlyside. 'He's already played Pelleas to my Golaud, and we'll be paired again in Salzburg and at Covent Garden. It's a fun thing for us.'

 

Finley's breakthrough came in the early 1990s. ‘I’d done a Papageno with Norrington in 1989, which got me an agent, but it was a Figaro I did in Vancouver that did the trick - boy, it felt good. As a result of that, I did it again with both Opera North and with Renee Fleming at Glyndebourne in 1994' - a performance conducted by Haitink, now available on DVD (NVC Arts 0630 14013 2). 'Then John Eliot Gardiner asked me to do Papageno, and we recorded that too. It was a reassuring sequence of events!

 

'I've put Papageno - and Guglielmo - away now. Perhaps I'll try Alfonso one day, for the fun of acting it, but the Mozart role for which I still feel most enthusiasm is Don Giovanni - I've sung it at Paris, Covent Garden and the Met, and I'll be doing it again in Vienna. It's hugely demanding in terms of the acting and physical energy, but what I really love about it is the challenge of performing the character's transitions of mood and facets of personality. There's much more scope for that in Mozart than in Verdi or bel canto, if you think about it, and on the same score, I'm desperate to do Billy Budd - just for the chance to go through that complex inner journey. At this stage of my career, I suppose it's my major operatic ambition, because soon I'll be too old for it. I've had a few offers along the way but none of them has transpired. While I can still give the impression of plausible youth, I remain hopeful!'

 

Nonetheless, he is hugely excited by the prospect of playing Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic. When we speak, Finley had just received the score for the first act and is excited to discover that 'John has written me some very lyrical stuff'. The libretto was to have been written by Alice Goodman, until she withdrew over what she perceived as an anti-Semitic bias of intention. Her replacement is the opera's director, Peter Sellars, who has constructed an entirely documentary text, drawn verbatim from letters, documents and texts, including passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, reflective of Oppenheimer's Buddhism.

 

'The man fascinates me,' says Finley, 'because of his external dryness and self-control in the midst of this maelstrom of intellectuals and military hawks, and then his passionate, tormented inner life, focused both on his crisis of conscience over the atomic bomb and his feelings for his wife, Kitty' - played by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, no less. A seven-week rehearsal period will help him to mine the psychological complexities.

 

 

Meanwhile, he is looking forward to his first Onegin, at ENO. Whatever disappointment he feels at the absence of the flavour of the Russian text will he compensated for by the chance to absorb the music over another good long rehearsal period. 'It's time for me to do this role, and between a lot of big dramatic challenges, it will be a pleasure to revisit pure singing on stage again-not that I underestimate the difficulties of characterizing Onegin.'

 

He can scarcely hide his displeasure at ENO on another matter - The Silver Tassie, an opera clearly close to his heart and in which he gave a heart-rending performance as Harry Heegan, the Dublin football star whose life is blighted after he is crippled in the trenches. ‘I wasn't able to take part in the original workshops, which was frustrating. Then I was unable to do the revival, because the timings couldn't be adjusted. Now I hear that the production has been sold, which I find hard to believe. Well, at least we managed to record it.' Momentarily, this mild-mannered and good-humoured man looks dauntingly angry.

 

Whether he will pursue Verdi any further than his Covent Garden Germont is open to question. I’m more confident of my ability to deliver text than to sing line, and Verdi is mostly about line. How I envy those singers like Sinatra, Siepi, Cappuccilli, Hvorostovsky and Gruberova who can just deliver sound seamlessly! But Tony Pappano keeps telling me I should get into the Italian repertory, and I admit I found Germont - on ten days' rehearsal - thrilling. If I want to go seriously down that road, I'm going to have to do some hard thinking, because it's not something one can undertake half-heartedly.' Hugh Canning, in his review in Opera (April 2005, pp. 471-2) was sceptical too: although finding the interpretation 'generally beautifully sung' by 'an artist who sings words as if they mean something', he wondered whether Finley 'with his resonant bassy bottom register should pursue this line of repertoire'. There's no more Verdi currently signed up: we shall see.

 

With his King's chorister get-on-with-it background, Finley is not a fusspot or a neurotic singer, as one can detect from the bold, masculine vigour that underpins his performing style. 'I'm not excessive in my habits, and I don't feel the need to follow a regime, dietary or otherwise,' he says. 'Playing around with my kids keeps me fit, and I walk the dog.' His hobby is red wine 'though recently I have been polluted by the white stuff' - and he is something of an expert on the Italian varieties. 'I like them because they're cheeky,' he explains in impenetrable winespeak.

 

Married to the mezzo-soprano Louise Winter, who herself has an international career, Finley lives with her and their two sons near Robertsbridge, close to Glyndebourne, which he regards as his operatic home (apart from that Figaro, he's sung many roles there, varying from Gluck's Agamemnon to Nick Shadow and Owen Wingrave).

 

The amount of travelling he has to do is difficult, he admits, and he feels that he hasn't always managed it very well. 'But Louise and I are both pretty realistic about it, and we work hard to be as normal a family as possible. I want to be a father, and I think the positive aspect of my absences is that my experiences or the world can feed into my sons' lives and education. It's so much harder for Louise; the guys have it easy, really. She turns down a lot more work than I do. The going-away and coming-back and starting-over pattern is exhausting - it's no wonder really that there are so few two-singer families.

 

'I envy my friend Simon Keenlyside sometimes. Because he doesn't have my commitments, he's that much freer to say yes to things. He's made decisions and sacrifices too, and I don't regret for a moment what I have that he doesn't. But I wouldn't be human if I didn't look over the fence into his garden occasionally and think - hmmm.'