James Naughtie meets…
Had life’s course run differently, the countertenor may have found himself bestriding the pop charts rather than the world’s great opera stages. But actually, he says, things have turned out for the best
Countertenor Iestyn Davies
Fortunately, the pop career of
Iestyn Davies ended before it had really begun.
In the mid-1990s, he and a few friends at Wells Cathedral School answered a magazine advertisement that asked three questions: are you between 16 and 21; are you in a band; and do you want to be famous? They said ‘yes’ to all three, and attached to their reply a photograph from Country Life magazine showing them playing as a group inside the cathedral.
They called themselves Cage – this was the era of one-word band names that meant nothing much (Blur, Pulp and all) – but they’d never played a proper gig, although Iestyn, then 16, had written some songs and they enjoyed playing together.
Someone at Epic Records liked the photo and they turned up at the Sony studios in London for an audition. One of the songs they played was Iestyn’s ‘Up and Above’ –‘it’s not a bad ballad; I can still play it, though it doesn’t really mean much’ – and for a few minutes things looked good. Rob Stringer, now CEO of Sony Music but even then a big man in the record industry, announced that the song could make it to No. 1. Then he added the dreaded proviso: ‘with the right financial backing.’ That was all.
For a few days the boys thought they might make the big time. But it was not to be.
‘They didn’t so much drop us, it just went away,’ Davies tells me. ‘And to be honest, my mum put pressure on me to do some work – A-levels and so on – and that was that. I’m quite glad it didn’t work out…’
Everything else did. Within a couple of years his voice had changed and he realised he was a countertenor. A choral scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge (where he read archaeology and anthropology) followed, then time at the Royal Academy of Music. By his mid-twenties, his professional career had begun, a career that has since taken him to international heights.
Davies remembers telling his teachers at the Academy that he wouldn’t be able to take part in one of the planned opera performances because he’d got an agent and had been asked to sing at the opera house in Zurich. ‘They said OK – but of course there were no prizes for that. Soon after that, I left.’
We are chatting at the Royal Opera House, just after the end of a hugely successful run of George Benjamin’s opera Written
on Skin (first seen here four years ago) which has already taken its place among the contemporary operas that can safely be predicted to enter the repertoire and stay there. Given that Davies has a performance coming up at Covent Garden in the summer in The Exterminating Angel, the third opera by Thomas Adès which was something of a
‘The biggest pitfall is to accuse the audience of lacking something’
sensation at its premiere in Salzburg last year, it’s a good time to talk about new work.
‘The moment you sing it with the orchestra you realise how well-crafted it is,’ Davies says of Benjamin’s opera (with libretto by Martin Crimp). ‘The balance between the voices and the orchestra is perfect, almost like a chamber piece but with this huge range of instruments, and yet as a singer you’re never covered. It reminds me of when you’re singing polyphonic music – Palestrina or something. It’s so different from Handel, for example. It reminds me more of Bach, frankly.’
Davies, whose recent solo disc of Bach cantatas (Nos 54, 82 and 170) has attracted great admiration, talks about the differences between Benjamin and Adès, who approach their work in quite different ways. Of
Written on Skin, he points out how ‘it’s an extraordinarily detailed score. You can’t switch off in George’s music.’
And the composer – who conducted this revival – is a demanding taskmaster. ‘One of his big bugbears is the length and the rhythm of the notes. In lots of music, it seems you have much more licence to play around, but if you do that with George’s music it won’t work. That’s not to say it’s rigid, but it forces you – like Katie Mitchell’s directing – to care about the way the score is marked. You have no choice. It doesn’t work otherwise.
‘And for George, it’s a personal, almost physical thing. It hits him in the solar plexus when something is out of time. You see him wince. If you look around, he’s pulling a face – “I spent three years getting that rhythm”. He thinks about every word and gives it meaning. He says, “Please sing that as a triplet”. Now, for a musician it’s a very thin line between that and something that’s not quite a triplet. Most people don’t mind. But George says, “I want you to sound sarcastic there and if it’s not a triplet it doesn’t sound sarcastic.”’
Part of the excitement for Davies was in the knowledge that the piece could appeal to many people who might harbour nervousness or even an antipathy to opera. ‘I think if you come to this production as an opera virgin, you don’t feel you’re being subjected to a
Royal Opera House plush evening. You’re going to something that could almost have been a play – and you think, “gosh they’re all singing. How strange.” Opera often takes a long time to say something. But in this it’s syllabic drama, in every word. It pushes through. Moves fast.’
The Exterminating Angel is a contrast.
Adès took the story from Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film and has produced an intricate, vast score – ‘symphonic’ says Davies – to cope with a dramatic problem that he confronts with relish – 15 characters on stage from start to finish, trapped at a weird dinner party that lurches from surrealist fantasy to dark comedy. ‘The director has to work out how all these people make something interesting for us to watch as well as to listen to. You can imagine what it was like for six weeks. But when it finally got going it was great.
‘Six weeks rehearsal in Salzburg! And difficult. I can put my finger on how George Benjamin’s music is put together, and there’s a sheer joy in singing it. With Tom, the satisfaction is not in the joy of singing it, if I can put it like that, because it’s hard and not necessarily in your comfortable range. It’s much more about emotion for him… but an emotion from an alien world. But you realise afterwards what an amazing work it is.’
The Salzburg cast, which will be reunited in London, is a formidable bunch – Anne Sofie von Otter, Thomas Allen, John Tomlinson, Sally Matthews among them – and Adès was exacting with all of them.
‘You say to Tom that something is really difficult. And he says “Yes it is; it’s meant to be.” I say to him that that top A flat is really difficult, and I show him what I mean, and he says “There you are, you just did it. You just have to do it again. All right?”’
The excitement of these two operas for Davies is in the fusion of contemporary music and drama, so we talk about the understanding in his generation of singers that the days of performers being able to get away without a subtle sense of stagecraft – ‘park and bark’ opera – are long gone. ‘The style of directing has changed so much,’ he explains. ‘We’ve got much more of a crossfertilisation from straight theatre and dance too. Film directors coming to opera. There’s a lot of pressure on it to be visual art. And think of the cinema broadcasts: when they’re done well, they’re extremely good.
‘People come and they don’t feel that it’s an intimidating space. I think that has much more of an effect in building an audience than, say, crossover classical which claims to do that. That, incidentally, is complete rubbish most of the time.’
By now, Davies is in passionate form. ‘Crossover? It’s just not the same thing as opera. We know that. But there’s so much pretence. The biggest pitfall for us is to accuse the audience of lacking something. I think it’s the fault of the people who are not giving it to them, not the fault of the audience.
‘If record companies, instead of going down the road of Katherine Jenkins and Charlotte Church had taken Danielle de Niese, for example, who really is an opera singer, then they could have done just as well. But they didn’t. Crossover is a different business, and
‘We’re fortunate because we’re a niche within a niche’
it’s just dressed up to look like opera. The pop music pace couldn’t work for an opera singer. All they do is tour and make another album; they don’t have time to do six weeks’ rehearsal and do a serious production. And the trouble is they have to rely on success to justify what they’re doing.’
Davies’s own career has led him to stellar success around the world, but like any professional singer he’s aware of the precarious nature of the business. He got some serious advice as an 18-year-old from James Bowman, the grand old man (in the very best sense) of British countertenors, with whom he took some lessons. ‘James said “Think if you want to follow a music career. Remember that if you’re ill, that’s this month’s mortgage payment gone. No one will give you money to say sorry. That’s the way it is.”’
So what of the fact that countertenors are something of a different breed?
‘We’re fortunate because we’re a niche within a niche, really,’ he replies. ‘I think if you are a soprano it’s much more difficult. Many of them want to be opera singers and they don’t want to fall into the trap of being a chorus singer, despite the fact that there are so many great choral singers. A countertenor can’t do that. It’s all or nothing.
‘We’re lucky because Baroque music is always going to attract people, and look at the number of countertenors who are constantly doing castrato roles. Isn’t it true that eight out of ten operas were written before 1780? A lot of them are rubbish, of course, but there are lots of enthusiastic scholars and musicians who are digging about and giving it a good go, and playing the music very, very well. French and Italian Baroque groups are discovering unknown things, and that attracts a whole new generation of young singers.
‘But in the end, the countertenor will only survive if people write music for him, and that’s why George (Benjamin) and Tom (Adès) are so good. Otherwise it will become a museum voice. We’ve relied on A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the last 40 years.’
As it happens, Davies will sing Oberon in Britten’s opera at Aldeburgh this summer, the part written for Alfred Deller in 1960 which later became the making of James Bowman. ‘It’s one of those roles where you don’t do much, but it’s memorable because you sing this one stunning aria, which is a gift. It’s what everyone had in their audition briefcase: two Handels and one Britten. But now you can do George Benjamin, maybe. George said to me, “I’m very happy I’ve written an aria for you”, and you look at it and it’s got a glass harmonica in it. I can’t go round with a glass harmonica in my briefcase.’
Auditions for Davies are, of course, a thing of the past. He’s in demand in opera houses around the world. Later in the year, there’s a Broadway run of Claire van Kampen’s play Farinelli and the King (with Mark Rylance), and a regular programme of recitals.
Recordings, too. But that business has changed. ‘A friend of mine was telling me that only ten years ago he was doing a recording, and was picked up by a limo driven by a man in a hat. Then paid a good fee. Those days have gone, believe me. If anyone tells you that you’ll make any money from recordings, they’re lying to you. I suppose at the end of your career you have something to show for it. That’s maybe the best way to look at it.’
But he’s not complaining. Iestyn Davies, not yet 40 years old, is currently on the crest of a wave. He enjoys the memory of the boy band that never was.
‘That thing of being a singer or being in a band was such a distant dream that it seemed very far away. So far away that you didn’t think about it. But I did always have in my gut a feeling that something would happen. I don’t know why. But I did.’
Iestyn Davies will be singing in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, from 24 April – 8 May