JW: here we are again!

GF: Yeah. Well, at the other place [laughs]

JNG: Many thanks for agreeing to see us again

GF: No, that’s fine, that’s fine

JW: A bit of biographical stuff to begin with [GF: OK, yeah...] ... You come from a musical background, your father...

GF: well my father was a keen amateur singer in his youth... he sang in choirs... he grew up at  the Trinity College School at Fort Hope in Canada and had his musical education there, and loved opera very much.

Unfortunately when he was in the war he was wounded and lost some of his mechanical movement on his left side as well as his sense of pitch [JW: really] yeah, so I spent many Sundays standing beside him [laughs] and he would be belting it out but usually in a very... er... in the same sort of pitch… but he had a good voice, and my uncle had this great resonant voice as well.

As it happens I have two cousins on my father’s side, sons of two of his brothers, who are also musicians. One’s a rock musician, a rock drummer for a long time, and also his sister was a good classical pianist, she was great. And my other cousin is Brian Finley, the classical pianist who runs a music festival. So on the Finley side there’s quite a lot.

Brian Finley accompanying Gerry at Westben Festival. Photo courtesy of http://www.myspace.com/brianfinleymusic

And I’ve discovered as a matter of fact, genetically through the Finley ranks, there’s also a composer called Lorraine Finley who er... she was a composer and also a translator, a lot of the Schirmer Italian arias are translated by Lorraine Noel Finley into English, so when I first saw the name I thought “no it couldn’t be” because no one had ever talked about this, and she’s two generations above, so... it’s there, it is there, although I must say, no one ever expected it

JW: You have Orcadian ancestry?

GF: Yes, I’m three-quarters Scottish as far as I can make out. Finley is the only non-Scottish part. That is Northern Irish as an extraction. Some generations ago, probably three or four, the Finley side made their way to Canada.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, was born in Birsay in Orkney, which is on the west coast of the main land, in fact when I first came over to England in my first year it was his 100th birthday that year and so I went out there and saw a lot of people who I could see were very, very genetically linked to him [laughs] so that was great. His father emigrated to Canada in the late 1870s. Yeah, but a great Viking stock [laughter] definitely Nordic...

The location of the Orkneys in Scotland

The road not taken

JNG: You studied biology didn’t you?

GF: I spent my secondary school very much thinking that chemistry, physics and biology were just the greatest thing on Earth. I had a wonderful physics teacher who said

“I am ordered to teach you what we know” he said “but that’s as far as it goes. You are the ones who are going to find out more than we know now”.

So that was a huge incentive to learn what we knew and then keep going. So I concentrated on biology and chemistry in my final secondary year and as a result of that was offered a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in biochemistry, and the other option was to go as a chemist to Toronto... Trinity College [JW: Spooky!] Yes, well the word “Trinity” seems to pop up everywhere in my life, but I suppose it is everywhere so...

So that was it, the University of Toronto as a chemist or Ontario as a Biochemist –but at that moment I had decided to do music, to come and do at least a year at the Royal College of Music

Locations of Ontario and Quebec

JW: You have been quoted as saying that the reason for deciding against biochemistry was having to weigh out lamb faeces

GF: Yeah, yes, well, again, growing up in Ottawa which as the capital of the country gets a lot of funding of research, and as part of my work experience I tried to gain experience of veterinary practice at a wonderful place The Experimental Farm, where experiments were going on. I really wanted to be a vet... and... [laughter]

JW: don’t worry, you can be honest, we are scientists but we won’t be offended!

GF: ...well, it was very, very good. The placement was as an assistant to the manager of the project, which was testing the effectiveness of milk replacement, so lambs were fed along this huge long bar with nipples on it with various types of replacement milk, and then... one was able to... [JNG: see what came of it...] analyze what was being absorbed and what wasn’t.

And it was cool, you know, there was spectrographic analysis and other things like that going on, but yes, in effect I was [JW: weighing out lamb poo] weighing out the sheep dung... and we did this for a whole 10 days... and I thought wow! this is a six to eight month project [laughter]. OK, and then what? “Well, we’ll probably change the dose a bit”. Great, OKaaaaaaay. I just couldn’t see myself doing that.

The contrasts in my life were so... I was having so much fun in choirs and on stage as extra chorus, the offers that were beginning to come… [laughs] well, anyhow, it’s not to disparage any of those people who had great analytical skills and enjoyed the ultimate aim of deciding whether milk replacement is the way to go... [JNG: I’m sure it’s very important] ...yes.

However I feel I was not burdening the scientific community with my dull approach [laughter]

Luck and endeavour

JNG: So, to the Royal College of Music

GF: Yeah. Well, again the connection with the Royal College of Music really starts with a relative, Sir William McKie, who was the organist at Westminster Abbey from the 1940s to 1963, not during the war but he was busy during the wedding and then the Coronation of Elizabeth. 

Sir William McKie

His relationship to my family happened because he was a bachelor all his life but then married my father’s aunt, who was a widow, in about 1960-61. When he retired, she being Canadian they then moved to Ottawa in the early 1970s when I was just progressing through the choir - I was senior chorister at St Matthew’s - and he was very, very encouraging. And through his contacts I managed to have an audition with David Willcocks in Canada – again another fortuitous set of circumstances where I was singing in a youth choir which was part of a big conference, he became the conductor, I auditioned for him and he said I could have a place at the Royal College.

So I came with the full expectation of having four years on the Performers course, but within of week of having arrived – I was early because I hadn’t realised terms were different to in Canada – I found myself with nothing to do, so I met Sir David in his office and he said “Listen, I know the Oxford choral trials are happening next week and the following week is Cambridge. Why don’t you have a go?” and I said “Hmm, OK, well I hadn’t planned to do that until I had finished but it’d be good for experience”.

So I went and tried for Magdalen College and Christchurch as well… I was completely enchanted by the small cells that we were put into [laughter] as overnight guests, it was literally like going into a monastery, it was fantastic!

But I unfortunately said that I wanted to read music, but my musical aptitude at that point wasn’t really up to the standard of a music entrant at that college. And I came back from Oxford quite disappointed as I felt that vocally I was ready but subject-wise I didn’t know what to do… I was really green off the boat from Canada, and I went back to Sir David and said “My keyboard skills and my harmony skills are just not up to A level standard” and he said “You speak French don’t you?” “Yes” “Why don’t you try Modern Languages?”

So the next week I went to Cambridge, had an interview with the head of Modern Languages there… at Cambridge of course you have a primary language that you study but you can also pick up other languages from scratch, so I opted for German which seemed to be a sensible thing. But in fact by the time I got to Cambridge I hadn’t reached a standard good enough for German, so I then switched to Italian… so I ended up reading French and Italian.

Kings College Chapel

JW: Didn’t you do Theology as well?

GF: Yes, in my third year… I had a little bit of a bumpy ride in my second year…That’s a confession [laughter]… and through the… benevolence I would say of the college, and with a firm undertaking that I would not bring the name of King’s College into disrepute [JW: I feel there’s a story there…] well, there is a longer story, but the long and the short of it was that the Dean suggested that I do Theology since he would see me in chapel every single day and would ask me how my studies were going [laughter].

So Theology it was. Which actually in the end was…I mean I was academic, I just was not… I did find generally that the translation and the amount of reading that was required for the language course was absolutely… I was having so much fun as a musician – I ran the Music Society. University activities got slightly in the way of my academic career… In any case it was great because rather than being one of those typical casualties of the choir which at that point had a reputation for admitting people who then didn’t pass their Tripos, I was allowed to complete in Theology.

I got a 2.1 so I was very happy about that.

JW: You are a natural academic? Of a curious nature?

GF: Yeah. Boring as my kids would say [laughs] “Oh dad why do you have to find out about everything!” ”Weeeeell, I’m interested…”

JW: Your father, he was an academic wasn’t he?

GF: Yeah, yeah, he trained as an accountant but I think he found it a little dull… He had been very influenced by the first husband of his aunt (who went on to marry William McKie), Gerald Birks, who was a hugely influential leader and benefactor of the Scouts movement and who was very much into expanding education for young people generally, and my father was very taken up in that, and decided he also wanted to be an educationalist.

He taught and gained his degree and his doctorate in Education at Columbia, and became a Professor first at Sir George Williams in Montreal then in MacDonald College, effectively where I grew up in Montreal. So that’s why he was there and I was there.

Then through what was going on in universities at that time, the Government expanding a lot because of the change politically in the late 60s, Quebec was feeling a little tense because of the separatist issue, my dad had an opportunity to join the civil service in Ottawa, so he took that. He became part of the educational side of the Secretary of State. A few years later he became a museum administrator, part of research and development looking at folk culture, all the different things that were coming into Canada from everywhere, and seeing what people had done with their own native art. I remember one of his major projects was moving a log cabin from somewhere out in the sticks to the museum piece by piece so that everything was exactly as it was. So he was very interested in all sorts of cultures.

Language

JNG: Do you find it easy to learn languages?

GF: Funnily enough I really struggled with German. German has taken really the most of my energy in life. It’s the construction of it. The only way I learn languages is being in the environment, and the irony in all that is that I’ve hardly been in Germany and yet it’s a language I associate with very easily, I was introduced to the poetry of course very early on in preparation for Cambridge but also with Fischer-Dieskau ringing in my ears as a youth – I quickly learned from "Go-eth" to Goethe in my teenage years.

One of the advantages of singing choral music is that you sing in Latin so much so the Romance languages I realised were pretty straightforward. French was something that obviously I grew up with, half my school days were in French so I could understand it very well. Canadian French is obviously very different to European French and so when I first arrived I found myself not being able to communicate which was really extraordinary.

But the whole idea of language and of poetry and particularly of French, German and Italian, are things I absorb pretty well. Spanish I haven’t been too much in touch with, but Russian and Czech as well… Early on in my career I had a chance at singing a little role in Katya Kabanova but I can hear it now… Cunning Little Vixen as well, which I first heard in English but knew I would have to learn it in Czech as well [JNG: it’s much better in Czech] yeah, well the whole rhythms of the piece… so as good as English translations are they’re don’t always get it right

Gerry as the Gamekeeper in The Cunning Little Vixen, ROH 2003

Language for me is all about communication and it’s really important that I understand what’s going on, so I try to do a lot of work on that

JW: It's funny - Trish told me that she had asked you what language you found hardest to pronounce and you said Yiddish, and we were “I don’t recall him ever… not aware of him ever having sung anything in Yiddish” but of course now it has all become clear! [GF: Yes now it’s all about to happen…] I had no idea that Ravel had written anything in Yiddish*

GF: Yes, absolutely. This is a really nice discovery about that. It’s been interesting to be in touch with Yiddish speakers and as a result of that it’s really opened my eyes to a whole… another section of society, which is really wonderful, wonderful to touch on that. I mean, I’m not sure how far I’ll go down that route necessarily, but there are a lot of enthusiasts who are making me also enthusiastic

*Songs by Ravel due for release June 2009. Click cover for details

"No Domingo ambition"

JW: You once expressed a desire to be a conductor, or was that just a throw away line?

GF: No, no, in fact my whole ambition of coming to England, to London and the RCM - because I didn’t think I was going to be a singer at all, I was going to use the voice and my participation in choirs as a means to gain experience in the choral repertoire, and I was doggedly playing the organ at the RCM, playing hymns and trying to get through things, I mean it was absolutely terrible what I was doing [laughter] but with the idea that I had to know how to play scores and I had to hear instrumentation and the organ is a very interesting way to feel how that worked.

And I took some conducting classes in my first year, along with Grant Llewellyn actually whose [JW: OK] Yeah, he may not remember that… [laughter] but I did…

Grant Llewellyn

I only took five because in the sixth one you had to stand in front of the college orchestra, and I never showed up [JW: Oooooh really!] noooo well, I had conducted the church choir in Ottawa and I got all the beat pattern stuff fine, which was great, but I couldn’t bring myself to stand in front of my peers knowing that they would play what I conducted, because I though I just haven’t got the authority musically or… in any way. And I went through a long period as a singer thinking I really don’t… want… I mean the college environment is a very hard environment, I didn’t want to put myself into a position where I was telling people how they should make music. I mean I can tell myself, that’s great, but it was that moment when I started really realising that competitive singing and competitive musicianship, which is all about the college thing, it’s how they grade you and how they offer awards. You have to compete, and to me that was really… you had to be better than somebody, so it was that moment I thought I am going to be my own person here and I’m not going to tell anybody else what to do [laughs].

So I abandoned my conducting at that moment, though I really did want to be it, and I think now, as a means of being involved in music I love to have performed it would be very difficult for me to encourage forces to get together and do it the way that I want to do it unless I was conducting, so I don’t know… we’ll have to see… but there’s no Domingo ambition here [laughter]

War and Peace

JNG: You sing a lot of anti-war or pro-peace pieces, and one fan has the very strong impression that those "pacifist" declarations are very much some sort of personal concern - you have great conviction when singing them, and we’ve been asked to ask you about that

GF: I think the fact is that a lot of amazing music has been generated by certainly the composer’s passion for that position. Particularly when I did Owen Wingrave [left], particularly, when I looked at it when I was in my mid-thirties before I had children, at that point I thought you know, I’m a sensitive soul and very passionate about the fact it would be very difficult for me to go to war, to actually take a combatant role in war. I would probably try and do anything to avoid the combat, and yet want to support those that do, and I think that’s probably the toughest line to draw.

I lived for a while with a conscientious objector and he said it’s just the way that you absolutely cannot push yourself into being part of other people’s ambitions to fight and he said in war time that’s often seen as a way of getting around having to fight, but he said actually – and I understand exactly what he means now – it actually takes more courage to be someone who says “I am not doing this. I will try and do anything I can not to promote this mode of interaction with my fellow human beings” and that’s amazing, that’s really amazing the heartfelt convictions of all those people who found themselves being designated as conscientious objectors and then suffering the consequences because they were being judged by society as if they were not ready to contribute to the cause. And that’s not the truth. They do want to contribute, it’s just not in that way.

And when doing Owen Wingrave I suddenly realised he was a poet warrior. He was passionate about defending everything he believed in, so in some ways he has to take a vigorous stance like a combatant in some way, but not by killing. And I think for me I realised with great passion that that is what this point of view is trying to demonstrate, and I guess I’m sort of a flag-carrier for that in some ways.

For myself, as soon as I had children, it’s like I would do anything to preserve their future. I would, actually, do, anything. And if that meant that I was going to have to defend their future then yeah, I would die for them.

That’s the thing about Doctor Atomic which has been so shattering is to see what those innocent scientists, and they were really innocent, suddenly realised. It took two months for them to figure out that Germany were defeated, there was Japan still to go, should they do it? It was an experiment” “What would be the effects? We don’t know until we do it. Then within two or three weeks of the bomb going off they really knew. And you know, someone like Robert Wilson who was representing the real voice of pacifism – I’m full of admiration, I met his son, and they were absolutely fundamentally committed to these non-aggression ideas, and he never touched a tainted project again.

Robert Wilson

That’s a very long answer – am I taking a position? No, but I absolutely am voicing with deep, deep sincerity and gratitude the fact that there are strongly committed people, who will do great, great things but not in a combatative nature

JW: Of course one of the things about Doctor Atomic that has been very evident is its role in fuelling debate [GF: yeah, yeah]. I remember you saying in New York how thrilled you were that members of the International Atomic Agency [GF: yes] had had a work’s outing to Doctor Atomic [GF: Absolutely] and had come backstage to see you afterwards

GF: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, and literally their words were “You artists are doing the work that we’re trying to permeate in the media” so it’s great to have that sort of encouragement and er… it’s wonderful being an artist and thinking you’re actually involved in contemporary issues, it’s great

Teaching

JW:  You are a visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music, is teaching important to you?

GF: Yeah, Ooooooh well, teaching is a hugely important thing for me. I didn’t take very much advantage, when I was a younger singer, of professionals. They seemed kind of remote, slightly self-obsessed and self-absorbed. You know, great singers that you would come into contact with. And I was always getting the nudge from conductors saying “you should go and have a word with them” and I’d be “What are they going to teach me, they’re just gonna tell me to open my mouth a bit wider or not”.

It’s hard as someone now who’s spent 25-30 years trying to figure out what to do. I feel I know how hard a deal it is, and I think that young singers are put under a tremendous amount of pressure, right from the time that they can hold a tune, and they try and have all their formation kind of done by their early 20s, and I feel singing is a lifelong thing. So what I like to do is go in saying “are they being honest with themselves?” “do they think their real voice is coming out?” “do they enjoy the music that they’re doing?” “is their life enhanced by what they’re doing?”, it’s those kind of things. I’m kind of more interested in them as people rather than as singers, as I really want them to enjoy what they’re doing.

Gerry giving a Vocal Master Class to students at The University of British Columbia, 2007 

So my involvement at the moment is kind of in and out of young singers’ lives. I’m still enjoying my own music-making and have too much to commit to actually taking on one or two people. There are a lot of singers around who I know would work extremely hard if I allowed myself to do that, but it’s a huge commitment. I must say I think it is a noble, noble profession, because teachers who really stick very much at the basic with the psychology, and the support and the determination to get a singer from a stage where they have particular issues with their singing to the stage beyond that where they have new, more interesting things about their singing than they had before, you know, it’s a partnership all the way along and… I don’t know, I hope it doesn’t escape, I hope I don’t leave it too long to have the satisfaction of encouraging the right sorts of people to keep at it, because I’m still learning myself, I still have lessons, so it’s an ongoing process

"Statement" Baddies

JNG: Do you have a dream role?

GF: Ooooooh. Yes, well Scarpia is one I really want to do. An interview I recently did was talking about “you always do these elegant people, or these sympathetic characters or benign characters” but have I been a fool all this time to say yes to Papageno and to… but then I think wait a minute, Nick Shadow, the Count, there are characters in my repertoire who I’ve enjoyed, even Oppenheimer [JW: Don Giovanni] Don Giovanni yes.

OK it started with Figaro and Papageno and Guglielmo, things like that obviously, but then there’s Argante in Rinaldo [JW: Athanael] Athanael yes, and I’m thinking there are only so many baritone roles and how do you choose between Paolo and Boccanegra, there they are, one’s kind of mean… and so I think OK there’s Iago, good, let’s make a statement here. There’s Scarpia, there’s Escamillo, these lovely kind of meaty singing roles. And I think that’s the thing, if you’re going to sing Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress you’ve really gotta convince people that you can sing Iago [laughs] I’m determined to work pretty hard on that.

And it’s all about my own growth and all about being able to relax and say this is a side that I can offer to sing. Don Alfonso is absolutely in the corner, while it’s not a great role to sing it’s a great acting role…

Gerry as Guglielmo, Tom Allen as Don Alfonso and Kurt Streit as Ferrando. Salzburg 2004

JNG: are there any roles you’re not ready for yet?

GF: Oh yeah, absolutely. Hollander I would love to do [JW: I wondered about that...] I would love to do Hollander, I just need a little longer to mature, my voice has to grow and my stamina has to grow, and I need to sing a repertoire that is going to do that in training.

One thing about Doctor Atomic I’ve learned is that yes you can learn how to sing John Adams and survive and not feel that your voice is at the bottom of the stairs the next day. But any of the big Wagnerian roles or any of the Verdian roles, you know, I’m gonna have to sing them but I can’t sing them in the way I have in the past 10 years or 15 years, I need to break into an area where my whole style of singing can successfully encompass those things… I’m full of admiration for singers who do the progression quite well, Simon is an obvious example, Simon Keenlyside obviously [JW: obviously], to see how his progression has been to investigate the Rodrigos, I mean his voice lies higher than mine [JW: Of course]…

This is going to be I think the way my voice will go is that I will leave the high baritone things, just leave them, and Scarpia will be the type of thing that I do. Erm, I want to do Amonasro, I want to do things like Andrea Chernier, these are the kind of things that I just feel … I mean Tom Krause, that is where I see myself graduating to [laughs] if I can start to encompass that sort of repertoire then I would feel that I had done as much, vocally, as I can with my career, so Tom is really my model. He is an example of an opera singer who could also sing Lieder beautifully and yet never sacrificed this glorious Nordic majesty. He and José...

Tom Krause                        José van Dam

Music for pleasure

JW: Do you listen to a lot of music for pleasure or have you had enough of it by the time you go home?

GF: Very little. And hardly any singing, hardly any singing because I always on the… you know, my antennae are always up. No it’s really light music, very light music that I listen to, you know, my boys are teenagers now so it’s contemporary pop and stuff. I went through a time of Leonard Cohen and Joanie Mitchell, Eva Cassidy and things… I mean I enjoy hearing a good voice sing very easily, that’s really what appeals, that sort of ease. So when I do hear people like Tony Bennett or even Frank it’s just the way their voices roll and you know it’s just so relaxing, so when I do listen to singers that’s the thing I’ll go for.

I’ll always go back to my Mahler 8 for a power surge and if I want to cry, and church music.

 I love the whole idea of choral singing deeply stirring and I actually find it very difficult to go to choral concerts because I just wish I was in there [laughs]

Free time... what free time?

JW: What do you do if boredom sets in, i.e. when you're travelling?

GF: You know it’s funny, when people say “what do you do in your spare time” - I don’t have any spare time! [laughter] I will always try to plan holidays, trying to think about where I might go with the boys, or camping or a ski week or things like that, or just trying to plan literally when to take my free time, because the free time actually usually about planning when I’m not taking it, when there’s not a role to learn on the other side or there’s a recording project which I should be pulling together. A lot of what I do is because I love to do it and a lot of my spare time is in figuring out what the next project may or may not be…

I mean I’d be a fool if I said I didn’t enjoy looking through wine magazines, because I do that and fantasize about the next bottle I might drink… but that’s not anything where I’ve got… this is a profession where I have to treat that interest with erm… I love the organic formulation of winemaking, I think winemakers are very much like musicians, a conductor is somebody like a master winemaker bringing all the ingredients together, orchestrating what notes – literally when they talk about tasting – what notes are higher, what flavours are kind of… Anyway, it fascinates me. I don’t actually have a very good palate, and I actually partially lost my sense of smell last year as a result of taking over-the-counter medicine [JW: That's awful!] yeah very frightening, to prevent a cold. It’s sort of come back but only about 50%, which is frustrating as I did enjoy the taste of foods and wine particularly but I don’t find it easy to distinguish any more, though I can still taste a good quality from a bad one but it’s injurious to tasting [JW: well I do hope it comes back] Yeah well if I get myself together I may conscientiously try and kick it back into shape.

Thank you

JNG: Is there anything you would like to tell your fans?

GF: Simply that it’s just wonderful that people are as supportive as they are. There is never a time, never a time when I feel I’m not trying to do my best. If people feel disappointed in a particular performance, if one isn’t singing as well as one might be from one night to the next, you have to believe that I’m the person who is more frustrated than anyone out there. And I just want to say thank you very much for the embracing positiveness when people are in touch like that. It’s really wonderful.