Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake talking to Sean Rafferty
BBC Radio 3 In Tune, Thursday 8 October 2009
This interview can be heard through the Radio 3 website until Thursday 15 October.
SR: …Allan Clayton will sing live for us later, and so now does Ian Bostridge – he sang at LSO St Luke’s for Radio 3 at lunchtime, you can hear that at the beginning of November. He’s performing Brahms and Britten for us, with the pianist Julius Drake. And we begin indeed, this great English tenor begins, with one of the Lyrics Rhymes and Riddles by the Scottish poet William Soutar that Britten wrote for the 700th concert of the National Gallery of Scotland.
[Music: Britten: Who are the Children? From Who are these Children, op. 84]
SR: Ian, thank you. Who are these Children? from a series of settings of the Lyrics, Rhymes and Riddles of William Soutar by Benjamin Britten. It’s a strange little collection of songs Ian isn’t it. I gather Soutar set these after he saw a photograph in the 1940s showing a hunt going through a village which had been obviously disturbed and ravaged by war and it set him into a sort of wail of protest.
IB: I think the two things in Britten, the anti-war sentiment but then of course also the anti-hunting sentiment which comes out so strongly in the early piece, the orchestral piece Our Hunting Fathers which he always called his opus 1 even though it wasn’t literally his opus 1. It’s a funny piece because it’s a mixture of these Scottish, these songs written in Scottish dialect, which are sort of riddles and little children’s poems, which I’ve never done ‘cause I’ve never dared try out my Scottish accent [laughter], erm, and these four fantastic poems, more serious poems in English
SR: Soutar is not someone who’d be particularly well known here, would he?
IB: No, but I do think they are really fantastic poems
SR: He died himself, what, in the 1940s?
IB: Yes [SR: about 1943] he had TB for a long time
SR Yes, well obviously his views chimed very, very strongly with Britten’s as a pacifist and socialist. Where do they fit into the cannon because you don’t hear them very often do you?
IB: I think, although we do – Julius and I do – the four English songs a lot as a group and they work very… I mean they’re a very dark group, but I think they’re as great as any songs he wrote. Incredibly, incredibly powerful.
SR: Well it’s nice to hear your voice nicely warmed up after Schubert at lunchtime. You sprang into the breach at LSO St Luke’s, we’ll hear that on 5th November. That all went fantastically well I think?
IB: Um, Yeah. I haven’t done a lunchtime recital for a long time so it was nice to get back to that time of day… [laughs].
SR: What does it take to get the voice going a little bit earlier in the day?
IB: Um, it’s a bit easier now ‘cause my children get me up so early in the morning [laughs] which helps it all fall in place… in time… but I haven’t… eating is always a problem as a singer, when do you eat, because you don’t want to eat too much and on the other hand you don’t want to be, your blood sugar level to drop disastrously, so I haven’t quite got the eating for lunchtime right I think, but whereas in the evening I’m quite used to it…
SR: You mean there isn’t a handbook for English tenors on what to eat at the right time?
IB: No, sadly not…
SR: Maybe you could publish one?
IB There are not that many… small print run…
SR: But Britten obviously suits the voice very well, and actually just listening to you and looking back on recordings even a year or two ago, your voice seems to have filled out, I don’t mean darker necessarily, but it’s got richer
IB: Um. People have said that to me, which is nice, ‘cause the worry is I suppose in some sense that things will get worse, that you always keep an eye on it and don’t want to necessarily… you want it to keep sounding young and light in a way, because I’ve got a light tenor, you know, you mustn’t thicken the voice, but I’m going to a new teacher at the moment so maybe that’s helping to keep it all in gear, I don’t know…
SR: No, I meant that in the nicest possible [IB: Hm, hm] way…
IB: Yeah. But I think it is, with the sort of voice I’ve got, which is a light lyric tenor, it is very difficult to really keep in the right place, not push it too much especially singing what is a lot of quite dramatic, low stuff in the Lieder repertoire in a way
SR: You’re doing Britten of course, the BBC Philharmonic coming up, Nocturne, what’s that, though I suppose Nocturne does say… give a clue doesn’t it
IB: Yes, I mean Britten was fascinated by sleep, I suppose really fascinated by the unconscious mind, I mean he’s a sort of a musician writing in the shadow of Freudianism in the heyday of Freudianism and no doubt thinking and probably quite rightly that most of the work that’s going on goes on in your unconscious mind and the Serenade is about night time, and so is the Nocturne. The Nocturne is different from the Serenade in that it is through-composed, you have this sleeping figure which runs throughout the piece. Um, and what’s amazing about it is that it is very fragmentary and very colouristic and with little tricks trying to summon up a particular atmosphere. There’s a setting of Wordsworth, Wordsworth stayed in Paris during the September prison massacres, so it’s a sort of terror of him in his room, and he uses the tympani for that, to create that. He uses the bassoon to create an image of Tennyson’s Kraken, waking up this monstrous sea monster, but then suddenly at the end everything comes together. It’s written for a string orchestra and seven obligato instruments, one solo instrument per piece, bassoon, horn, tympani, whatever, and they all come together in the last movement which is suddenly this amazing, romantic, lush setting of Shakespeare, a love sonnet. And it suddenly struck me a while ago that it’s a sort of reference and homage to Tchaikovsky and that is what’s really going on and that’s why the music suddenly changes and is so different, and of course Britten was an enormous admirer of Tchaikovsky’s
SR: Well, all those pleasures to come. We’re back to one of these Soutar songs again. Is the mood very much the same? Is it all anti-war and anti-hunting as we go through, or is it a bit more oblique than that in some of the others?
IB: This is more direct in a way. The one we just did is really more about class and the fact that… we have this myth, what’s called the myth of the blitz which Angus Calder has written about, which is the idea that in the second world war everybody pulled together, as David Cameron has been saying recently “we’re all in this together” which slightly beggars belief, but… during the war this wasn’t really true either in lots of ways, and the class divisions and those sorts of things still continued, and there’s a lot of evidence of that and the blitz spirit was a bit of a myth in lots of ways, people in the East End were actually very cross[?] etc, etc. So that song is about that really, about hunting still carrying on during wartime, why there are all these people with the silver and the dogs during this time when we were all supposed to be pulling together, whereas this song which is coming up you’ll hear at the beginning he creates this fantastic effect, a very Britten effect, of sirens on the piano, an air raid siren, and it’s about children being killed in air raids… is something that is eternally relevant, obviously.
SR: Ian thank you very much indeed. Ian Bostridge singing live for us with Julius Drake at the piano
[Music: Britten, The Children from Who are these Children, op 84]
SR: Thank you, an intense setting by Banjamin Britten of The Children from Who are these Children, little poems by William Soutar and sung live in the studio for us by Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake at the piano. I need a minute or two to recover from that I think. Are they quite searing to sing Ian?
IB: Um yeah, they are very well written for the voice, I mean…
SR: But they’re quite disturbing obviously, they’re so direct…
IB: Yeah, they’re very… in one sense they’re sort of easy because you can’t help but get involved in them, it makes you do things… I just noticed I shouted the end of one phrase and that’s a sort of decision you make on the spur of the moment and you might not want to hear it again and again but it is the performance. It has a wonderful… he’s such a brilliant… people used to throw this it at him, they’d say “Oh he’s too clever by half” because he always does these wonderful things like the siren is amazing, but he uses it emotionally, and he uses this fantastic thing at the end where Julius’s foot’s on the pedal and he brings the keys up one by one and you hear, you don’t hear music, you hear the noise of the piano key which is really extraordinary, I really love it when noise comes into music [JD: Mmm]
SR: And silence in music as well of course. The space between the notes [JD: Absolutely, absolutely]. Well you’re obviously not involved in the BBC Philharmonic concert Julius?
JD: They didn’t ask me. I’m very offended, but…
SR: You wouldn’t like working with conductors anyway [JD laughs] that’s one of your great passions in life that you don’t have to bother with conductors
JD: [laughs] Well I… Well. You’re being indiscreet. I must say sometimes, sometimes I do think I’m very lucky that I can go conductor-less through my life
SR: Yes you can. Not rudderless but conductor-less. You know where you’re going…You’re doing something together quite soon – you’re part of this great Schumann quartet tour aren’t you?
JD: We are indeed, yes, yes we are…
SR: My goodness, I’m just looking at that coming up at the end of the month you hit the Barbican, what a line-up, Mr Bostridge, Mr Quasthoff, Ms Kirchschlager, Ms Röschmann, that’s quite something…
JD: And what about Mr Drake and Mr Deutsch? [Laughs]
SR: I know, Mr Deut… [splutter] I mentioned you first! [JD: laughs]
IB: What’s great is the element… because we know each other so well, we’ve done so many… the six of us have done so many quartet concerts together in so many different places that it’s got this cabaret element which it’s… we just did it…
JD: You think he’s joking [laughs]
IB: … we just did it in the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg which you know, for myself I normally do deeply searing programmes but this was one where the audience quite enjoyed in a… well OK they may not have enjoyed it…
[laughter]
SR: …in an obvious and lighthearted sort of way. So is it the jovial side of Schumann then you’re doing, or…
JD: Um, well it is… actually it was a programme put together by the director of the Schubertiade, Gerd Nachbauer, and I think it works wonderfully. The second half is the Spanische Liebeslieder which is piano, four hands and four singers, and the first half is Liederspiel which is for piano, two hands and four singers, and the Minnespiel, which is also for piano, two hands and four singers, and so Helmut is doing one of those, I’m doing the other and then we join together and fight our way [snigger] over… four hands over the keyboard…
IB: …they fight over the pedal – you can see Julius’ foot drifting towards Helmut’s and going {bangs}
[laughter]
JD: … Helmut is a pedal-tyrant, he takes the pedal and you don’t get a chance…
SR: Well I think he’s probably met his match. Like with the conversation about conductors, you don’t like being pushed around Julius do you [JD: laughs] I mean I’m sure he’s got used to that by now
JD: I’m a great friend and admirer of Helmut so he can have the pedals…
SR: Have you – I was talking to Ian about his voice changing – have you noticed it changing over the last year?
JD: Yes, and er… but I think that is something every singer has to cope with in one way or another which is that they change, they get older, physically they change as well, and their voices change, and so every singer’s voice is changing all the time in the long term at any rate, and so that’s always something…
IB: That sounds terribly… in the long term [JD: I mean you don’t notice...] degenerating…
JD: What I mean… – I didn’t say degenerating!
IB: Degenerating is what my first ever, one of my first singing teachers, she said that you do get better til you’re at least 50, which with most other things you get worse at, I suppose, I don’t know…
JD: I think that’s true
SR: I think that is true. You’re at your peak, you’re heading toward your peak
JD: Yes…
IB: But just physically…
JD: But, but you know, when Ian was singing when he was 22 he sounded like a 22 year old singing, and when he was singing at 42 he sounded like a 42 year old. It’s, you’re a different person aren’t you. And that will show in a way that it doesn’t when you’re sitting at a piano
SR: well yes, but we can’t see at all Julius [JD: laughter] you are forever youthful [JD: Oooh!][IB: laughter]
SR: All these intimations of mortality, in the nicest possible way, I wish there was, well there is something pleasurable to come but it’s not exactly uplifting is it, it’s a pair of lovers drifting in a boat and they notice nothing of the ravishing, shimmering beauties of nature, they just go on comfortless
JD: It’s a bleak song but it’s one of Brahms’s real masterpieces
IB: And an amazing piano piece
JD: An amazing, amazing song, yeah
SR: Well you’re going to perform it now with what somebody called “passionate melancholy” is what’s required isn’t it
IB: OK, I’ll try [sound of glass clinking] [SR: ...and maybe a glass of something...] last time I should have had a glass of water as…
SR: Yes, as a well known singer once said, the best way to keep the voice supple and wonderful was to take two sips of water every 15 minutes, but maybe life is too short, possibly, I fear it may be like stuffing mushrooms…
[Music: Brahms, Meerfahrt, Op.96 No.4]
SR: I feel I was in the boat. Thank you very much. Turbulent but beautiful, Sea Journey by Brahms, Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake performing live for us in the studio. Thank you very much indeed for being with us, and Ian is at the Bridgewater Hall coming up on the 10th, what’s that, two days away from now yes Saturday it is, the Britten Nocturne, Yutaka Sado conducting the BBC Philharmonic. Today’s London Symphony Orchestra, LSO ST Luke’s concert you can hear on Thursday 5th November at 1 o’clock here on BBC Radio 3, and that great quartet including two pianists, including the great Mr Drake, with Ian, Quasthoff, Kirchschlager, Röschmann and, erm, who else, have I left anyone out? [JD in the background: Mr Deutsch] Mr Deutsch as well, that’s at the Barbican in London on the 29th. Thank you very much indeed.