"Gold"

JW: Well, thank you for letting us do this

GF: I’m very happy…

JW: You’re currently in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt as Frank/Fritz…

GF: That’s it…

JW: So, do you think it’s more corn than gold?

GF: Oooooo, I saw that as a quote from… can’t remember who… erm…

JW: ... and do you think it matters if it is?

GF: Well I think the fantastic thing is that a composer that has had a major influence on the way we hear music now, both from a cinema experience, but also his niche, you know that central European lyricism that one probably thought went with Mahler, and was stretched in a strange direction by Strauss… it was still there in what he decided to do… become this huge… in some ways what I love about it is he’s become a huge quilt-maker, he’s drawn on all these wonderful sources of colour and breadth of expression and things, it’s… I’m staggered at the orchestration, all the time, the bravura with which he puts it all together, and he makes demands on every single musician in the place, the singers and the orchestra, and the conductor then has to pull all that together and decide how to sweep through phrases and… the score, I could show you, is meticulously marked with, you know “a little bit broader here” “move on here” “always accelerating to this point” “Give a little time here”, and the singers are given little accented marks and things. So he was meticulous in how he perceived it.

I think one of the dangers is that we can wallow a bit in the music because it is so tuneful and so lush, and so many great harmonic climaxes here and there. Interesting that there are really only two main aria moments, which he does exploit, but even so you get the “bumbum baaaaa, baadadadadum” and that sort of theme comes along in various forms throughout the night, and … not corn certainly… burnished copper I’d say… a lot of it, and it leads me to want to listen to more of his… violin concerto, his piano concerto and things like that… and one symphony? I can’t remember…

JNG: We heard something of the symphony on the Royal Opera House Insight evening – wonderful

GF: yeah… it’s great that he’s here, so gold that it’s here [laughs]

JW: Well I think we both think it’s gold … enjoyed it tremendously

GF: yeah… fantastic

"A sense of excitement"

JNG: lots of people have asked us to ask you, what is a performance day like for you? What do you do?

JW: … because we’re actually staggered that you’re letting us interview you two hours before you go on stage

GF: Right… it’s hectic, it’s always hectic, I mean actually the only thing that I’m not necessarily doing on a performance day is rehearsing, rehearsing for something else, it’s just one of the ways I like to work, I just like to have the performance as the end object of the day… if it’s a matinee then that contracts it a little bit.

Um… I’m really um… busy,  busy all the time… today I was doing really tedious things, I was doing accounts and I was doing administration and looking at future projects, and yeah, the menial tasks and getting on with it. If I’m in the UK and I’m around people that I can sort things out with then that’s what I’ll be doing. I try not to sing too much… again depending on the role, if I was doing anything like Don Giovanni or the Count, maybe even… I was thinking Yeletsky… and certainly Doctor Atomic, I wouldn’t be doing any warming up at all until probably just before. I have to be very wary of trying to get in and use those few hours or that hour I may have in “Oh I should be learning that music” but that’s not very conducive…

Rehearsals for Le nozze di Figaro, ROH 2006 

So mid morning I’m up… It’s no different [to any other day]. If my boys are with me I’m taking them to school… if I’m not then I’m up at nine and getting on with the rest of the day… yeah… I mean I don’t go shopping or anything like that [laughter] ... they’re usually quiet days when I’m on the phone or just getting things together

JW: And I assume that keeping busy stops the nerves from building up

GF: very much so, very much so.

JW: …or do you not…

GF: No, no, no there’s always a sense of anticipation, sure…

JNG: Does it change once you have done things a couple of times?

GF: No… erm… no. One of the rewards of performing is that excitement, really, I don’t recall ever, ever being in a performance where I thought “Oh I wish I didn’t have to do this tonight”… except if I’m feeling pretty ill [laughs].

No, mostly I’m here because I love doing it and that’s something that is critical… to come and want to do the best I can, and with a view as well of maybe making something different or making sure that something that went quite well goes even better. A sense of fun really, and anticipation for every performance, and obviously if there are people in the audience that I know, or even if there’s not people I know… if I don’t know people are there, I always think “well, for someone this is a special night” so… yes a sense of excitement.

JW: Well that’s really nice to know, as a member of the audience…

GF: Yeah! Yeah!

JNG: I think it’s important for members of the audience to know that.

GF: Yeah, completely, completely

Poetic character

JW: You’ve been in many world premieres – The Silver Tassie , Fantastic Mr Fox, and of course Doctor Atomic which is just about to start in London - you’re known for championing new works and you feel very strongly about that… [GF: Yes] …but is it more difficult to learn a contemporary piece? As an audience member it is often harder to listen to in that you have to do more work to get something out of it. Do you recognise the worth of a piece immediately, or do you have to work at it?

GF: I always start with a sense of trust… er… that the composer knows what he’s doing… first of all. I do feel much more - in that relationship I do feel the servant to someone’s ideals of musicality. What I then try to bring to it is my own sense of trying to make that journey from page to public, and make it mean something. It is sometimes difficult to know whether a piece in its entirety will have an impact. I mean I didn’t know any of Doctor Atomic until the first rehearsals, I mean I didn’t know the whole score because I didn’t see the whole score until the first rehearsals, so that was difficult to assess whether as an entire piece it would be... But I was very thrilled obviously to see the part of Oppenheimer, which I’d sort of got to know six months before, was something that I with John [Adams]’s assistance and collaboration that we could make something, you know, quite… special.

And it began with something like, say L’amour de loin, although I wasn’t involved in the premiere itself I was involved in all the subsequent renditions [JW: fabulous] and as soon as I saw the music I found there was an element of it of pure poetry, and I think that in the end is what I’m looking for. Is the character poetic, does it have... is there a journey that the character goes on, and does the music allow a certain revealing of the challenges that the character is facing, and... that’s a really nice start...

Fantastic Mr Fox is not something perhaps too... deep as a story [laughter] but it was fun and what was completely fun about that was I knew it would be athletic, I knew it was going to be a lot of exuberance, kids, stuff like that, and that appealed to me a lot. In the same way The Silver Tassie had that same kind of youthful exuberance to what was going on, and yet a very, very powerful theme and a hugely sad and powerful story, and that was one I wanted to be part of too. I have to say that I do sometimes commit to these projects, and I’m considering a project at the moment where not one note has been written and in fact nobody really knows what the story is going to be, but there’s a sense of OK, if I’m going to be involved I do need a direct line to the composer, I’m not going to receive the package and go “Oh, thank you very much” because in these days you have to commit three or four years away, and they are already planning it at various theatres, and it’s a big chunk of my time if I were to do that.

"Still learning"

JNG: How long does it take you to learn a new role from scratch?

GF: Ah, it really depends, it really depends. I mean even if I were to sing some Webern, . the cantata I sing, the Webern cantata is 5 minutes long but it probably took me upwards of between 60 and 80 hours of learning because it was so hard, it was so hard trying to find some way of learning it – I don’t have perfect pitch so that’s not something that helps me, I do have to learn it by [JNG: hearing it…] hearing it and physicalizing it... and when it’s challenging like that it’s really... I was speaking to Tom, Thomas Glenn [right]who’s singing Wilson [in Doctor Atomic] and he said he is learning Schwanengesang at the moment, the Schubert cycle, and he said “how long did it take you to learn Oppenheimer” and I said “I’m still learning it!” [laughter]. You know there’s always that thing, I learn all the notes for the first rehearsal...

"Not just an actor with pitches"

JW: I guess it helps that it’s in English?

GF: Yes. Well, funnily enough that can be interesting, if I took Thaïs for instance, Athanaël, that was actually easier to learn because of the way Massenet just makes you expect what the next kind of phrases are, it was really, really straightforward. And sometimes English, although you might know what it all means more instantaneously, sometimes… [JW: the word usage?] ... the word usage can be a little awkward and sometimes the rhythm of the word can be strange and actually you have to be careful in learning English because you have to learn it as a singer and not as a speaker, because of the way the vowels have to travel over longer periods and so...

JNG: Can you demonstrate the difference?

GF: OK... if I was going [sings] “Batter my heart, three person’d Go…”,  so, I’m taking “Batter my heart three person’d God,”  if I were to actually just to condense it all into what I would call poetic reading you would find the rhythm of the “Batter my heart, three person’d God, that I may rise and stand”… um whereas in the way it’s produced musically it’s “batteeeerrr” so “batteeeerr” so that the vowel extension on  “eeeeeeeeer” is not “batter” or “batterrrrrrrrrr”, it has to be extended… so in a way you’re learning to sing on vowels which are close to English but may not be aurally immediately... you couldn’t sing “batter my heart” because people don’t want you to do a poetic reading, but in a musical reading you have to extend that vowel …

Or things like diphthongs... I’m just trying to think… in the Blake songs I’ve recently recorded there are some very interesting word-settings that Britten uses. When Julius [Drake] and I were reading through the poetry there was a very definite sense of how the meter should go, but then Britten kind of pulls it all apart, and has made it powerful as he’s doing in rhythms and things but it’s really challenging, really challenging.

JW: I’ve always had a problem English songs [GF: Hm hm] I mean seriously, until I heard you singing some of them, Songs of Travel for instance, I absolutely adore it now [GF: Ahha] but it always sounded wrong before...

JNG: it depends who’s singing it...

JW: Sorry Jane, I know we don’t really agree on this...

GF: One of my things is simply that... I wanted to be comprehensible, I wanted to have a musical line, and I don’t want people to feel that there’s any distance between my energy of speaking and their hearing... so I don’t want any effort into the projection... and this is the real challenge as in big recital halls or in big performing spaces, of course the way singing has developed in the last 100 years or so, it’s the case that bigger needs much more sort of sustained way of projecting the text, and so…

And when you’re singing of course then you have to have a certain sort of buzz and a sustaining of your actual vocal delivery through breathing. But for me... now it’s not done consciously, but when I listen to myself, as I was a younger singer I realise that I didn’t enjoy other people sing:

“in summertime on Bredon” [click to hear]

[JW: Exactly. Laughter]

...because I want to hear the poetry and it’s a beautiful:

“in summertime on Bredon” [click to hear]

...there’s such a sense of liveliness, it’s enhanced poetic delivery rather than... some people would argue with me about that, they would say “well that’s not really the style of singing in which those songs were composed”... because singing has come from a very Italianate school…  and so voices were trained in order to give that sort of flat vowel colour all the time, which means the voice speaks very well, but it can be very dull... if it’s not delivered very well... that’s my impression in any case.

JW: Well it makes sense to me

GF: It’s been a decision about how I perform those songs, and actually I have to be very careful because it can... I have to remind myself that I’m a singer and that I’m not just an actor with pitches, because that can be not very healthy, vocally

"To sing with feeling rather than hearing"

JNG: if you’re singing a recital, the same recital in lots of places, is it very difficult to adjust to the hall?

GF: I had a very strange experience, yes, in San Francisco in a place called the Herbst theatre, when we had been in Roy Thomson hall and we’d been in a lovely, quite large university hall in Montreal, and we flew to the Herbst Theatre and it was a dry, proper, theatrical space. Dry, absolutely dry. And that was terrifying, absolutely terrifying, because I had been used to getting back resonance, I could hear the fringes of my voice coming back and reassuring me that I was doing the right things, but when going into this place it was like “chhhhhkkkkkewwww” everything just went, and that was very difficult. In fact I didn’t really sing very well that night because I was constantly trying to make sound and in fact I learnt quite quickly that you have to just trust that what you’re delivering and how you have delivered before is… good enough. I think our ears, as performers, are almost the worst elements of our craft because we judge ourselves when the sound is only this far away from us [holding hand up near mouth] whereas where we actually need to be is in the hall, saying well, what’s the ambience... and singers give themselves a very, very hard time about what they hear rather than what they feel... so that’s my ambition at the moment just to be able to sing with feeling rather than hearing

Broadway melodies

JW: I can remember hearing you, with Louise Winter, singing Manhattan[GF: Oh yes... Okay...] the Rodgers and Hart song... [GF: Yes, yes] which I absolutely adore... and you can really sing it! [GF: Yeah!] I mean, I love Ella Fitzgerald singing it [GF: Yes, yes], but you are my second favourite [laughter]. Is there any chance of you doing some crossover?

Click to hear excerpts         Manhattan 1               Manhattan 2

GF: Well... I mean... yes... OK we can get into this now. What is interesting is that singers throughout… throughout, have always sung all types of music, you know what I mean...

JW: ... yes, but not necessarily well...

GF: ... yes, not necessarily... some better than others...

But there’s always been an urge to sing the tunes of the day. One of my heroes was John Charles Thomas. He’s an American who had a prolific career, he began his career on Broadway, although he was trained in a classical way he loved the Broadway idea of... popularity, as much as anything… and he sang like a real, properly trained singer and he did amazing things in the 30s and 40s and 50s, big recital tours but his signature tune was Home on the range... it was from him I got the Green-eyed dragon...

JW: OK! not StanleyHolloway then?

...no not at all …and numerous albums of his now which I have, erm “Rolling down to Rio”, I mean real popular tunes, and it’s sung with such gusto, and he loved doing it, you can tell that, and I think that’s the thing, we all have that element of swing in ourselves, and we probably could deliver it, but we just don’t have the time, it’s all about branding these days, we are all products of our advertising age and...

I am a singer, and I love to do all these things, I like to sing recital, I have to work very hard to make sure it’s part of my diary, I love the concert and choral work, that’s wonderful, but I also love the stage, so you know, my agents pull their hair out thinking “Well what does he want to do next for goodness sake!” and that’s really hard. So while I have explored things like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or anything of Rodgers in any case, that’s all been hugely rewarding and fun and I love to do it and sure, I would go and sing Sound of Music if anybody asked me to do it [laughter]... you know what I mean…

JNG: How about On the Town?

GF: Ah well sure, any of that, any of that. Carousel... lots of baritones have that ambition to sing Bill’s soliloquy [from Carousel] and, you know “A bright sunny day on the medderrrr” anything from Oklahoma or South Pacific, and that’s what’s happening now back in New York, the serious young opera singers are starting to queue up to do Emile Lebeque [South Pacific]

JNG: Showboat?

GF: Sure… well Showboat, that’s difficult… we have to be a little clever on that… but of course, I just watched Jerome Hines singing Old Man River… and so why not… why not…

Pleasing the masses

JW: So what about the converse of that, non-operatically trained singers who are hyped by the media as opera singers?

GF: Well again, I think it’s a branding thing, it’s really something which is geared and promoted by people who want to make money, and there are these voices that come into the sphere of the performing world, you know, either through training in drama school or even in the music colleges I’m sure, the thing is it’s the pathway by which people come and one of the most impressionable things that was ever said to me by one of these producers is “Well, we always need a story to go with the singer. We need the story”. So there are a lot of really wonderful voices out there, a lot of people singing in choruses, singing in the back room of a fish and chip shop, and you know it’s the people in the fish and chip shop who are more likely to get seen than the people in the chorus. That’s not against anybody, everybody is equally talented. So the people that find their way into these positions actually do have remarkable performing talent, and I do acknowledge that actually they do bring something of… zest and… performing capability, I should say, which is backed up by quite a substantial fundamental of talent, I have to say they are fundamentally talented people, who then within the service of that particular circumstance…. And it’s very hard to cut through to the person and personal ambitions really, but I think once you are in a situation where your life is controlled more by recording and promotional agents, then actually your own sense of independence has really pretty much disappeared, and that’s why I love being in my part of the business, I feel my independence, my artistic independence is much, much greater. I’m not out to make a profit for a record company, I get to have a really good time with the things I do. I’m not saying that these people don’t enjoy their fame and fortune, because they work really hard…

JW: Yeah, get it while you can really…

GF: Sure… yes, completely. And they can make enough money in a short period of time to then say OK maybe I can make a difference in an associated way, or a different way, or work with charities or things like that

JW: And also getting a wider audience. I know a lot of people who have been introduced to opera through it…

GF: Yes, well completely

JW: … and maybe they’ve moved on after a while

GF: Yes, and you hear people say “I’ll go far to listen to Paul Potts doing whatever…" or "I love Katherine Jenkins, she has a sweet personality on stage” but really people would rather see that than Katherine as a Rosina or a Carmen, because people, more or less go to see her as Katherine and not in roles, so I’m not saying they would be short changed but it would be a different experience for them. So she might as well do her own concerts… and please the masses…

Villazon, Jenkins and Domingo

Photo courtesy of http://www.katherinejenkins.co.uk

Vocal crises and new opportunities

JW: One thing a lot of people are interested in: you did a wonderful article for Opera Now discussing your vocal crisis…

GF: Oh yes right, right

JW: And retraining. [GF: right, right] Although we haven't any direct questions to ask you it's something, as lay people in particular, we'd love you to talk about it…

JNG: and explain what happens and how you get round it.

JW: …and how you're retraining...

GF: Yeah, yes… In a nutshell... that’s a challenge! But I think the fundamental is … fundamentally what I believe in is that in some way we singers are a bit like figure skaters. That we use our, you know the energy and discipline of a sporting… of an enhanced use of muscles which are only really there for survival in some ways. You know, to train them up into something which they perhaps weren't initially meant to do, except in terms of an appeal for help or great crisis or whatever [JNG: or run!] So the idea that we use the muscles of our throat in a way for which they were never really designed by nature to do, takes a hugely patient and disciplined and methodical process. And that's one of the challenges, we all speak and therefore we all think we ought to be able to sing [JW: I’m living proof that isn't so!] ...but actually I think it's a very rare thing.

The idea is, and it's one of the hardest things too… in social situations, people say "Oh I can hear you're a singer because you have this great resonance". And you think: Well, I only have that resonance because if… because the development of the muscles there have come from, pretty much, training step by step and making sure that the breath support is as it needs to be.

Vocal therapists will take great pains, great pains, to re-educate after a crisis like I had. Where the… its like when an athlete gets injured, injures their foot or twists an ankle or sprains some sort of ligament. Where in order to protect the healing you adopt other mannerisms, so there's a compensatory activity in order to protect the area which is… it's because human beings like to keep moving. The idea of human beings NOT moving is really very difficult… for human beings. But that's effectively what the healing process should really be, all about rest. But because we move, we're always putting stress on the injured bits, simply because it hasn't got time to heal. So it doesn't heal in a way in which it goes back to the original configuration – there's always kind of an adaptation, and, you acquire habits to compensate for the injury. Or to support the injury. Which is why a lot of back problems multiply into other things because of the compensatory movements.

So, anyhow. From a singing point of view. You train your whole life towards a certain point and then find, at one moment that, for whatever reason, no fault of anybody's particularly, blood vessels come and go on your vocal chords, and if you happen to make a very vigorous attack on a vulnerable spot, then that can lead to the… haematoma. So it's something that's not anybody's fault necessarily. But the repercussions of that are, you have to then go back and say "how am I going to deal with this". Because you can't sing on it, because if you sing on it you will then cause scarring and other vocal qualities will disappear.

So you have to be very, very careful. The whole manipulation, therefore, about getting yourself back into shape has to be measured and very calm. It IS a very good moment to say "How am I doing here? Where have I come to, what do I want to do? How can I improve?" So that was really the decision that I was able to make at that point. To say "Yes, I've had great success up to here. I'm very happy to look at this situation and see it as a benefit really, enforced time off – great!" you know, four weeks of near silence and then let everything get back into shape. Now I could have just leapt back into how I was doing things. But I did feel that maybe there were things that I needed to address. And through that I've been able to go back. Not to the beginning necessarily but reacquaint myself a little bit with really what a singer does, and how they should do it and if I want to sing a lot, and if I want to sing a lot and have a long career I have to do this properly.

So that was really the whole… that was my excitement, really, about going back to it, and thankfully things have worked out pretty well. And really it's something that I had been frightened of before, "Oh I'm very vulnerable here", but actually, once you experience it, it's a bit like having your first auto accident I think probably. Hopefully that doesn't happen and is not fatal to anybody or injurious, but it's something that once it happens you don't need to fear it any more, because it's happened.

And actually, the thing is that many, many, many, many singers go through it. Many singers. Some don't realise they've been through it and that's kind of alarming. That can be alarming. But many people, many colleagues say "Oh yes. I had this" and "Oh yes. I've been through that" And you think "No-one talks about it! No-one talks about that they had a sore throat, sung on it, and something's happened." And some people try to cover it up, some people think it is a failing in themselves. Anyhow, some very distinguished colleagues told me afterwards "Oh, I've had that". And then, you know, other people say "I've had surgery" and you think "Surgery! Oh my heavens, urgh, but I haven't done that!" but there are people that have and you know, their careers flourish still, so why not? You know there's some amazing medical things going on and I think we just have to treat it as part of the game. I mean in terms of a sporting activity it's actually something we want to do, we're putting our bodies under stress, we're putting our throats under stress which they weren't designed to do. We have to really be gentle, it's a really wonderful thing to have and it's a wonderful thing to be in charge of and I think that’s for me really the most important thing. That I have. I'm better looking after myself now than I was.

JW: Good!

Expanding repertoire

JW: So you are expecting your voice to get heavier and darker maybe as you get older, and taking on heavier roles?

GF: Yeah. It's a mutual situation. I want to explore that repertoire. I want to see whether that's where my voice is maturing. It may be, or it may not be. I may be Robert Goulet for the rest of my life. [Laughter]

But I'd like to feel that if I can exploit the development… as I say I still feel like I'm re-learning the craft a little bit. And learning on the job is a little, kind of, frightening because you have to take calculated artistic risks about doing it. That's why I'm not, obviously, singing Iago in a full blooded production.

I mean I take a leaf out of Mirella Freni's book and just say, you know, she was trying things, she knew that she would have a larger voice at the end of her career than she did at the beginning. And she allowed herself to learn roles, but in a very protective environment. You know, through a recording studio, or through concerts.

Anyway, intelligent use of opportunity. And I'd like to try that too. My Hans Sachs I'm really looking forward to. [JW: Absolutely! JNG: Oh yes, yes!] People are surprised generally, of course they are, they are going "What's this guy think he's doing?" but, actually, that's something that from an artistic point of view, really it's a dream character.

JNG: It's a wonderful part.

GF: And you get the girl, nearly! And then you get to be all wise and then you get to extol the virtues of…

JNG: …of whatever…

GF: … of whatever! And you're pretty much guiding the whole show. And that's a hugely… I'm flattered to be asked and was absolutely delighted that Glyndebourne felt that it's something that could come my way.

So it's great, but, you know, things like Escamillo I'm going to be doing…

JW: You are going to?

GF: As far as I know that's now on the cards, that’s on the cards... [laughter] ...I've never had a chance to do that sort of thing.

JW: Of course, I've heard you sing the Toreador song

GF: Yeah. So I think it's something that, not that I'm enjoying playing necessarily, but I really want to sing well and develop with those fundamental roles which I haven't had a chance at yet.

JW: We have strict instructions to ask you when you are going to be Mandryka?

GF: Ohhh, golly! Oh well, Mandryka is absolutely on the list of desires, absolutely. And I hope that is something which is not too distant in the future, because I know I need to learn it sooner on rather than later. Hans Sachs is kind of going to get in the way, I think, for the next three years. But I would hope that I would develop...

 Fleming and Brendel as Arabella and Mandryka

I mean Wolfgang Brendel you see, is somebody who is just the personification of it. And I'd love to, I'd love to but I think Arabella is something that takes… that is more towards the German Houses and I haven’t really been in the German Houses very much. Vienna State, I still need to… I would love to go there sooner rather than later. I will be there eventually, but I hope at some point Arabella might be there soon.

I'm going to have to stop, but let’s do this again…