By Faye Courtney
Indisputedly one of the finest mezzo-sopranos Britain has ever produced, Dame Sarah Connolly has everything you could wish for in an opera singer: a vocal timbre of richest velvet combined with sensitive, intelligent musicality, a dazzling technique and a commanding stage presence that never ceases to impress, no matter what acting challenges are thrown her way. Though equally at home with Wagner and contemporary opera, Handel has always been very close to her heart, as well as an integral part of her career and she was happy to talk to Handel News about her experiences performing the music of the man she describes as “the ultimate dramatist”.
Do you have a favourite Handel role? “Whichever one I’m singing at the time, I cannot be disloyal to the others” – although she has particularly fond memories of the John Copley production of Semele in San Francisco (2000) where she unusually sang the roles of both Juno and Ino, requiring a somewhat frantic 50 second costume change at one point. Although Dame Sarah has sung in three different productions of Semele, she felt Copley’s 1982 Royal Opera House production was absolutely superb, particularly in the handling of the comic scenes and loved the acting challenges of playing two such contrasting parts. “One minute she comes off stage as a sort of frightening Mrs Thatcher person and then 50 seconds later she goes back on as the meek little sister, and I found that ‘schizophrenic’ side of the character very funny.” She felt somewhat “cheated” that she only got to sing one role (Ino) in the Robert Carsen production for ENO but admits it wouldn’t have been practical to do both, due to the complicated nature of the costumes involved.
The title role of Ariodante is also very special, although naturally does not provide her with the same opportunities for comedy. Though there are usually no laughs in that opera, she notes that the character of Polinesso does have the possibility to get the audience on side (particularly when played by a natural stage animal like Christophe Dumaux), and Sir David McVicar’s 2018 Vienna production absolutely understood the comedy potential of Polinesso trapping somebody as gullible and easy prey as Ariodante. Yet the Richard Jones production she performed (in Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam) had no comic elements whatsoever and was a “deeply nasty” affair, with Polinesso depicted as a violent sexual predator. It is this ability of different directors to portray Handel’s characters in such different ways that she finds so fascinating. In terms of technical challenges, she finds the role of Ariodante the hardest, followed by Xerxes – particularly as you need a very ‘gymnastic’ voice with a big, flexible range to sing arias like “Se bramate” and “Crude furie”. In comparison, the role of Giulio Cesare is not about range but does require coloratura, whereas Semele’s Juno is more about the character than vocal challenges.
Concerning da capo ornamentation, Dame Sarah always makes a point of starting fresh and usually writes her own, and in the past she has collaborated with her singing teacher Gerald Martin Moore, who is also an expert harpsichordist. While rehearsing Xerxes and Alcina at ENO, she found herself at odds with Sir Charles Mackerras, who expected the entire cast to use the same decorations he had written for completely different singers in past productions. Although he eventually, grudgingly allowed her to use her own ornaments at ENO, the two artists later came to a complete impasse in a San Francisco Semele, when he asked her to sing ornaments he had written for Felicity Palmer, including a “comedy bottom G sharp” which Dame Sarah barely had in her voice back in 2000. She politely pointed out that her voice was totally different to Felicity’s and requested to sing a top G sharp instead but Sir Charles took umbrage at this and literally stopped speaking to her for an entire week! On opening night she baked home-made biscuits as presents for her castmates and left some for Sir Charles with a note saying “I’m sorry if you think I’ve been difficult, it’s nothing personal. It’s just that I have to tailor make my decorations to suit my voice. Being given something that isn’t suitable for my voice just won’t work and I’m very sorry if you’ve found this a problem – blame the Irish in me!”. Just before curtain up, he popped his head around her door and said “Thanks for the biccies – I’m half Scottish, you know….Mackerras!” and grinned at her. From that point onwards he couldn’t have been nicer and actually went out of his way to publicly praise her musicianship at a Handel convention in San Francisco, where she was replacing a pregnant Patricia Bardon. Very interestingly, after this incident Sir Charles Mackerras stopped insisting that singers used his decorations.
Dame Sarah has sung Handel with both modern and period instruments but has a definite preference for the latter. She notes the enormous difference it makes, particularly for a high-lying role like Agrippina, where the tessitura feels much more comfortable at the lower baroque pitch. “Because the violins play largely without vibrato, you find yourself as a singer automatically trying to pair the vocal line, expression and phrasing with that of the obbligato solo instrument or just general string sound”. She credits the ten years she spent working with Philippe Herreweghe with influencing the way she sings baroque music; eschewing anything remotely resembling a 19th century sound.
Renowned for her trouser roles, Dame Sarah’s incarnations of male characters are so convincing that one frequently sees confused audience members flicking through their programmes for clarification. While aware of the conceit that she’s a woman playing a man, her approach always starts with the psychology of a character; who he was in history and who Handel intended him to be, and she reads as much as she can about any real-life characters she portrays. Though she feels Julius Caesar definitely had ‘sex appeal’, the main ingredient which makes him attractive is a combination of fear and power, as is still the case today with other men in high office. On the first day of Giulio Cesare rehearsals at Glyndebourne, director David McVicar asked her to improvise the opening scene, which prompted her to naturally sit down on a chair in the centre of the stage – an idea McVicar loved. “That’s something I’ve noticed about all heads of state, including Donald Trump” she remarks, “Trump has learned many things about power, and he’s learned that the person who is seated is the most powerful person in the room”. For that reason (but not because of Donald Trump!) she sings most of the aria “Empio, dirò, tu sei” in a seated position, even though it wasn’t easy and she had to contend with the discomfort of the breast plate on her costume constantly riding up towards her neck.
Why does she think the major international houses programme Handel so infrequently? She feels this lies squarely on the shoulders of the programme planners but also mentions the practical difficulties of either getting in a specialist period orchestra (at considerable extra expense) or using a house orchestra whose musicians are usually not experts in performing baroque music – with the noted exception of the ENO orchestra, who Mackerras trained brilliantly for so many years. “One could easily sell Handel if it’s well directed and well sung. It’s a crime to make Tamerlano boring, an absolute crime. I just think some directors have no business going anywhere near Handel, to be honest, or any opera for that matter. By all means do Handel, but make sure you hire a director who loves it – and who gets it. If you don’t get it, go away!”. She firmly believes that Handel operas don’t need enormous budgets or lavish 18th century brocade costumes to be successful and that with the right singers and a director who really understands what’s going on, a piece like Tamerlano could still be great if set in a simple black box.
On her Handelian wish list, she’d love to sing Dejanira in Hercules and feels she’s the right age to sing it. She would also love to do staged versions of Jephtha, Solomon and Theodora, noting how successfully staged oratorios can work if handled sensitively, such as Peter Sellars did at Glyndebourne. Although recordings are currently off the table in this present Covid world, she does hope to record some more Handel oratorios in the future.
Dame Sarah was widely praised for being so open and honest about her breast cancer diagnosis last summer, an attitude which many found inspiring. She recalled how she Googled ‘opera singers with cancer’ but could only find information about those who had sadly died of the disease, such as Lorraine Hunt and Tatiana Troyanos. She thought “What about the ones who survived it? Where are they?” and had to ask her colleagues who else had experienced cancer, so they could help with her questions about the effects chemotherapy has on the voice. Thankfully she has now finished both chemotherapy and radiotherapy but found the treatments horrendously gruelling; “My vocal cords dried up, my whole throat got swollen and my body was in such pain I couldn’t use the support muscles in my ribcage or my abdominals – everything hurt”. She found herself thinking “Why sing right now? Why bother?” and instead chose to use the time to listen to plays and audio books, as listening to music was too upsetting.
Another result of going public was the enormous outpouring of support she received from friends, colleagues and fans alike, something for which she feels incredibly grateful. Her visibility also meant that she was able to provide vital moral support and be “like a sister” to several other musicians with cancer, who didn’t know who else to talk to during their treatment because nobody in the music profession in general discusses this subject. As well as this desire to break down the ‘taboo’ of cancer not being spoken about in the music world, she didn’t want to become the subject of rumour and speculation that perhaps she was cancelling because she couldn’t sing any more. “These ghastly, gossipy people in the opera world, they’re going to start creating fantasy stories. And anyway, I couldn’t find anything online about women singers with cancer who’d survived and I thought ‘I’m going to flipping well do it, I’m going to say I’ve got breast cancer, there’s no shame’. And if people don’t want to give me work as a result of that then shame on them!”
For the future, Dame Sarah particularly looks forward to singing new music specifically written for her voice, including eight songs Mark-Anthony Turnage has recently composed for her. She would also love to sing in operas about contemporary issues which are relevant to everyone today. An opera about Brexit, perhaps? “Why not? It’s the biggest upheaval in our times and Handel certainly wrote about issues of the day via his music”. Perhaps one day someone will compose that Brexit opera and cast Dame Sarah as Angela Merkel……