Tag: Interview

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An interview with Dame Sarah Connolly

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……

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Handel and Crime Fiction: an Interview with Donna Leon

Tony Watts

Donna Leon is a very successful crime novelist. Her series of 27 crime novels are set in Venice, featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. They have been translated into 35 languages and also, in Germany, into a well-known television series. She has been named by The Times as one of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers. But Handel operas have also played an important part in her life.

She was born in Montclair, New Jersey, USA in 1942. She taught English literature in various countries, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her PhD on Jane Austen (still her favourite novelist) was aborted when she had to leave Iran hurriedly in the revolution of 1978/79, losing all her papers. In retrospect she feels it was a merciful release: ‘I was free from Graduate School – praise the Lord!’

In 1968 she visited Italy for the first time, fell in love with the country, and decided to live in Venice. She started writing her crime novels there when she was 50, and fairly soon became sufficiently successful to give up her teaching. She now only teaches once a year, at a music festival at Ernen in Switzerland. She moved to Switzerland in 2015, with two residences, in Zurich and in the mountains, though she still returns to Venice for around a week per month. She claims that her fame is accidental: ‘I’m irresponsible: I’ve never had any ambition to be successful or well-known.’ Her writing started ‘as a joke – pure dumb luck!’ She has resisted her novels being translated into Italian, to avoid celebrity there.

Her transformative induction into Handel was a performance of Alcina at Carnegie Hall in New York in the 1970s: ‘it was different from any opera I had experienced in my life, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the music’. Thereafter, she listened to lots of recordings of Handel operas, and went to performances when she could. Now, she experiences them almost exclusively in live rehearsals and performances. She particularly pursues Handel operas and recitals featuring her favourite singers, notably Anna Bonitatibus, Joyce DiDonato, Ann Hallenberg and Inga Kalna. Her favourite Handel works are Alcina and Giulio Cesare, with Il Trionfo, Semele and Rodelinda in contention.

For her, Handel is the pre-eminent composer. She likes other baroque composers, including Telemann, Vinci, Porpora, Cavalli and Purcell. Mozart and Bach are also ‘part of the pantheon’, and she goes to operas by Donizetti, Rossini with great delight. But for her, Handel is distinctive: ‘the plots are not important, but what matters is people’s feelings, how they express them in the arias, and how they learn. And how they forgive: I love him because he’s compassionate, and the music is compassionate.’ There are not many people in Handel operas who are wholly bad. The same is true in Donna Leon’s books: ‘I don’t think there are many people who are wholly bad. Usually they become heads of state’ (we agreed not to mention any names).

Also, Handel ‘understands the plight of women: women are toys to most operatic composers, but not to Handel: he takes them very seriously’. In this sense, ‘he’s Trollope and all the others are Dickens: Dickens will teach anyone how to write a novel, but he doesn’t know anything about women’.

A further transformational moment was a serendipitous meeting with Alan Curtis at a dinner party in Venice: ‘One of us said “Handel’s the greatest composer”, and the other said “By God he is!” And that was it: we married one another (figuratively) at that instant!’ A little later, Alan Curtis happened to be at dinner at her place when the phone rang. It was Dino Arici from the Solothurm Festival in Switzerland, wondering whether to include a baroque opera in his next festival and ‘whether there was a baroque opera that hasn’t been done much. So I asked Alan and he said “Arminio”. And I said “Alan can probably bring it”. So we took Arminio to Solothurm, and we had so much fun, that it took off.’

She supported Alan Curtis in sustaining Il Complesso Barocco, leading to its series of Handel CDs. The group ended with Alan Curtis’s death in 2015. But she continues to provide similar support to Il Pomo d’Oro, of which she is one of three founders. In addition to financial support, she likes to make suggestions, particularly on possible singers, though she leaves it to the musicians to make the decisions on such matters. ‘I’ve known some of the musicians for 20 years: they’re like my kids’. She is a doer, ‘but I avoid any responsibility about anything: I don’t like the idea that I might influence people’s lives in a bad way – that frightens me’. There are plans to record Agrippina, and she would also like to do Semele and Il Trionfo. Given the finances of the music world today, ‘to record an opera by Handel is an act of folly, but it is also an act of love – to the orchestra, to the singers, and to the people who like the music enough to try a new version; and I think it should be done’.

A major project with Alan Curtis was her book Handel’s Bestiary, published in 2010/11 in English, French, German and Spanish. He selected 12 simile arias from Handel’s operas that made reference to animals, and she wrote short essays about each of the animals, drawn from history and mythology. They were illustrated by Michael Sowa, with an accompanying CD of the arias performed by Il Complesso Barocco. She is currently doing a series of Bestiary concerts, with readings linked to the music.

Her novels include some operatic elements. Two are located at La Fenice in Venice: Death at La Fenice and Falling in Love. All include an inscription drawn from operas. The first 15 were from Mozart, because the Da Ponte librettos are ‘wonderful texts’. But the subsequent ones have all been from Handel. The latest novel also draws from a Handel text in its title: Unto Us a Son is Given.

Living so long in Italy, she has realised that ‘Italians and Handel don’t go together. They don’t like baroque music, and don’t play it much. The giant paradox is that many of the great baroque orchestras and conductors are Italian, but where do they work: in England, France and Germany. But if you live in a country that has given the world Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, why would you go and listen to this German?’

She does not have strong views on staging: ‘I don’t care – it’s not important to me. I can always close my eyes, and listen to beautiful singing. I go to the opera to listen. I’m much more aural than visual. And visual judgement is far more subjective than aural judgement. We’re in 2019, so people have to take chances.’

Donna Leon loves Handel, but does she identify with Handel in some ways? After all, both are voluntary exiles. And both have lived their lives as single people, yet have such a deep understanding of family relationships: many of Handel’s most moving duets are filial (usually mother-son or father-daughter), and an important feature of the Brunetti books is his relationship with his wife and children. She rejects the suggestion: ‘He’s fat, I’m thin; he’s a boy, I’m a girl.’

Whereas nearly all Handel’s operas have a happy ending, this is not true of any of Donna Leon’s novels. ‘My vision of life is very bleak. I’m a very happy person, and my life in many ways couldn’t be improved. I can do what I want, and I have a lot of people who I love, and who love me. But I’m no fool: people can be very unpleasant and nasty. And they’re crime books, after all.’ Nonetheless, she does not reject Handel’s lieto fine: ‘that was the convention, and what’s good enough for Handel is good enough for me’.