IESTYN DAVIES | INTERVIEW
Renowned countertenor Iestyn Davies is regarded as one of the finest singers in his field. His pre-Christmas schedule includes a concert at Wigmore Hall and singing Messiah at the Barbican. James Ellis joined him for a talk on life and music.
How is your day so far?
I’ve been on the phone to somebody else about interviews and things like that. I’ve been sleeping quite badly recently – waking up at five every morning – because the world is a bit strange at the moment. Your priorities change. I did a concert last week, which was nice – a rare thing at the moment, going from the previous existence pre-Covid, where I was working all the time and maybe had two or three days off. When you suddenly have one concert, it feels like the beginning of your career again. Your reaction to the concert can be like, “Oh, I’m going on holiday now!” instead of “I’ve got a concert in two days!”
Tell us more about your upcoming Wigmore Hall concert. What can we expect?
I’m singing Handel’s Nine German Songs: they are quite unique in his repertoire. Ninety percent of what he writes is either in Italian, like the operas – he moved from Germany to Italy, where he developed his style – or in English. In Germany, he was friends with Barthold Heinrich Brockes, who was a town councillor in Hamburg. Brockes was also a poet and he published these poems based on how we see God’s goodness in a sort of moral way. They’re moralistic: God’s goodness in creation. One aria will be about vanity and saying how we can’t take things with us when we die – but, actually if we look around us, in the trees and the streams, the wonderful things that we see. The greatness of the creator.
The poems were not written specifically to be set to music, but in this period of time people were starting to say, ah, this could be set to music – so they are sort of set out in publication to encourage a composer to take them on, which is what Handel did. They’re originally written for soprano voice; I’ve always loved them as a set of pieces to perform together, so I did a transposition, so that I could sing, and brought them down to the right, comfortable range. I first performed them at Wigmore Hall around 2008: my first ever Wigmore recital. A couple of the players were in that original concert as well. To me, Nine German Songs are unique because I don’t know any other countertenor who has transposed them and performed them. Not a song cycle like that of Schubert, where it’s got a story, or anything like that. They work well in concert, because there are nine and you can divide them up.
I’ve got some of my favourite players with me, under the banner of Arcangelo, whose director is Jonathan Cohen playing harpsichord. My great collaborator Thomas Dunford on archlute and theorbo; Tom is one of the greatest musicians at what he does. Just to be on stage with someone like that – we don’t really need to rehearse a lot of the time. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way! Sometimes rehearsal can trick you think you into thinking you achieved some level where the concert is now oven-ready, for want of a better phrase. But actually what comes out is a lot of spontaneity – using what we’re good at and suddenly putting it together.
We have violinist Matthew Truscott and cellist Jonathan Manson, both part of the Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment. Matt’s going to play Handel’s Violin Sonata and Jonathan’s going to play one by Geminiani. Tom’s going to play this wonderful piece by Marin Marais, who was a court viol player for Louis XIV. He wrote a piece for viol – though Tom plays it on lute – called Les Voix Humaines [The Human Voice].
It’s about a 70-minute concert – no interval, a COVID-aware concert, and we’re going to have an audience, which is going to be great. I did a recital in Wigmore in June, with lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, to nobody – it was live on the radio, which was kind of nice, but weird, because there was no dissipation of tension.
One thing I’ve learned through lockdown is that it’s nice to have a break and not to sing everyday. What I really missed was not just singing, but singing to people. Maybe that’s the difference between being a professional and an amateur? For what we do to be successful, it’s not about perfection – it’s about people being there to listen, even one or two, just to have a response. Without the audience, you don’t get any sense of communication. You’re just putting stuff out into the ether. I can do that at home in the shower!
What was the last event you went to before lockdown?
I was in New York just before lockdown. I was doing Handel’s Agrippina at the Metropolitan Opera; John Eliot Gardiner and his orchestra were doing a Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall over a weekend. I heard the Ninth Symphony and I think he did the ‘Pastoral’ (Sixth Symphony) as well.
You’re also performing in Messiah later this month. What does Handel mean to you?
You can always rely on Handel. With things like Bach, you have this unspoken connection with them. You’ll never meet them – yet there’s something in the music. There is music here that every day can sing over the centuries, make it a gift for everybody to sing, a generosity of spirit. Composers like him feel like godparents in a way. They really are the backbone of what you do.
Things like Messiah are what I call bread and butter gigs, because they come every year. This year in particular, I am so grateful for it. Such an affecting piece. I did a Messiah the other day, a slightly scaled-down one – but to do the one we are doing in the Barbican, the full piece, it feels like an amazing legacy for Handel to have left. It gives you the most beautiful music to sing, where you can be really expressive, and without fail it’s one of those pieces where you look at an audience and they are transported. Quite a long piece, yet he sustains the drama through this amazing arc.
What’s the most demanding role you’ve ever played?
It depends. Musically, I’ve had demanding things to learn: contemporary operas like The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. George Benjamin’s Written On Skin, once you learn it, is one of the greatest operas ever written. I think Handel operas can be quite demanding, when you have a lot to sing and do onstage.
One of the most demanding things I ever did was the play Farinelli And The King, which went to the West End and then Broadway. I committed myself to six of eight shows a week – actors who do that are amazing. I didn’t drink, and got a trainer. After, I thought I never wanted to do anything like that again. I suspect it might be a bit like childbirth… you forgot the pain.
While I was in New York my old manager, who had had a stroke, was having his life support turned off and I saw him the day before his relatives. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that position, where someone has to die and they haven’t died yet. You can’t talk to them, but you know they’re going to be sentenced to death, in a sense. Being the consummate professional I am, I did the show that night. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I had to sing Lascia, Chi’o Pianga as the finale, which is always quite moving, and right at the end, I suddenly saw him in my head. The last note of the whole thing was a wobble. Mark Rylance said to me afterwards, “I can’t believe you just did that, I thought you would have pulled out”. Music is such a good distraction and a healer: what you sing, you cannot hide behind.
What’s the worst thing that has happened to you on stage?
Laughter! I think losing yourself… corpsing. But then again, they’re not too bad because they are so enjoyable. When something goes awry musically, the audience don’t seem to notice in the same way, but it’s still quite embarrassing. A friend of mine was doing Messiah, had to catch a train back, and asked the conductor if he could do his aria, then leave to get his train and not stay for the bows. The conductor agreed. He did his aria, left the stage and went through a door – which turned out to be a cupboard. He had to stay in the cupboard until the end! He couldn’t just come back out and be like, “Sorry!”
There was also a time in Cardiff. In The Return Of Ulysses with Welsh National Opera, we lost it laughing! We did two performances in Cardiff, and then there was a month-long break. We had a brush-up rehearsal the day before, thought we all remembered it, went on stage the next day… and everybody started forgetting it. I started the piece: I played Human Frailty and had to pull this cord so all these arrows shot me. It didn’t really work. I also had the same music repeated three times with different words. I remember just completely fluffing what I had to sing. Rinaldo Alessandrini, who was conducting, started calling out the Italian. I just wanted to be swallowed up.
A friend of mine, Elizabeth Atherton, was doing her thing, which involved a kind of tap-dancing number on a chair whilst singing, and it got out of time. We were in our dressing room and we could hear the whole thing start – it was one of those terrifying moments, like a bad dream where you go on stage and you don’t have any trousers on! It was a lesson in coming back to a piece four weeks later and what you remember.
What was it like to take part in John Tavener’s The Veil Of The Temple?
When I first came to London, I did a weekend job at the Temple Choir, and so we were in this piece – an all-night piece. The whole thing was a massive procedure to put together; conductor Steven Layton said it was like the Bible. These choirs rotate around the church, there was even two conductors. It started at about 9pm and ended about 6am. It sort of reminded me of a midnight feast in boarding school – a communal excitement about the whole thing, and coming out at dawn. We took it to New York, at the Lincoln Centre Festival, a year or two after we premiered it.
I was very much just part of the choir – this was before my solo career took off. It was fun, a nice thing to do, and quite barking mad, like a lot of Tavener. Quite transcendental: I imagine some in the audience got something slightly out there with it.
What is the role of the countertenor in the classical world today?
I suppose if you’d asked me this question about 1960, I would have said the role of the countertenor was being discovered as a solo voice. So in that sense my predecessors, James Bowman and Alfred Deller, were always fighting to make it valid – make it a serious voice type – and it has become that. It’s still an unknown quantity to a lot of people, in the way that classical music is generally: people like it, but they sort of feel patronised by it.
I don’t think the countertenor has a particular role now, other than being another avenue, another instrument. I think it is now a normal thing for people to say – OK, I’m going to be a falsetto, I’m going to be a countertenor. You see it starting to become common parlance when people say “countertenor” – they know what you’re talking about. It gives young men an opportunity other than tenor, baritone or bass; for composers, it continues to be another option for them.
I wrote to James Bowman once for advice on a role not written for countertenor, but they wanted to cast one. He said he felt like he was always having to justify the countertenor voice as a serious artistic choice, and he said to me that I was now considered a serious artistic singer. And that if something doesn’t feel right, if something feels like a circus trick – careful. It can be easy to slip back into that. It’s sometimes people going “oh, it’s funny because it’s a high male voice!”
What he said moved me; he warned me that if I took the role, I would be seen as a sort of affect, rather than a serious artist. I felt like I couldn’t do that, and disrespect what he had to go through. Our role today is to continue that, to leave a legacy for future generations, and to set in stone that it is a serious artistic choice.
Iestyn Davies performs tonight (Mon 14 Dec) at Wigmore Hall. Watch for free on their website, YouTube, or Facebook from 7.30pm; donations welcome.
Davies also performs in Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican on Sat 19 Dec. Book here to watch online.
words JAMES ELLIS photos CHRIS SORENSEN