The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Mezzo Jennifer Johnston talks to James Naughtie
Which singer’s favourite dish is Lancashire hotpot? Which pianist makes his own porridge with Irish pinhead oatmeal? And which conductor wouldn’t let you visit without serving his own Olivier Salad, a concoction which graces every Russian meal?
The answers are bass Sir John Tomlinson (no surprise there), pianist Stephen Hough and conductor Vasily Petrenko.
And the link between them all is the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston. While we’ve all been listening to musicians making the best of wretched isolation and the miserable sight of closed concert halls and opera houses by playing online either solo or in remarkable ensembles, Johnston has gone a step further. She’s put together a cookbook that’s also an insight into the life and character of all the musicians who have contributed. ‘It took off like lightning,’ she tells me. ‘A little Facebook group started growing so fast. Before I knew it there were 800 of us. To be honest, I panicked. I was pulling my hair out.’
But then it became fun, and she’s now hoping to publish a book of the recipes, which are already online and available for a modest subscription, all the proceeds going to Help Musicians UK – a charity that does exactly what it says and, as we know, has never been needed more. ‘It’s not good enough to just have a Facebook group, and it’s not going to raise the money. So I wrote to my friend, the soprano Madeleine Pierard. She has her own cooking blog called Diva Kitchen so she’s been the perfect person to help me with it all. She very quickly designed the website, and then we decided that, rather than simply putting recipes on a Facebook page in a closed group, we’d make it a subscription thing.
It’s different from asking people for general donations. There’s a one-off £10 fee and all of it goes to Help Musicians.’
And so Notes from Musicians’ Kitchens was born. The recipes flooded in, from
Andrea Baker’s Presbyterian Chicken (a recipe from her mother) to Nicholas Daniel’s Polish Apple Pie, Tamsin Waleycohen’s Cumin Crusted Salmon, Isabella de Sabata’s Italian Gratin. And on and on.
Our conversation turns, naturally, to a musician’s life, which is often quite solitary and, for soloists, involves weeks of journeying from one hotel to the next. And for an opera singer like Johnston, periods of a few weeks in a self-catering apartment which some opera house has forgotten to equip with anything more than the most basic kitchen equipment.
‘You can imagine the scene,’ she says. ‘All of us have become quite inventive in a way. The podcast I’ve done, which is attached to the project, has been enlightening in that sense. But when travelling, not everybody wants to sit in a restaurant by themselves all the time. Conductor and singer Nathalie Stutzmann talks about that. But the loneliness of being away combined with the business of being a conductor means that she doesn’t have a choice but to go and sit in restaurants.
‘Her recipe is the ultimate Quiche Lorraine. She’s from Lorraine so it’s her regional dish. And because everybody internationally knows it and there are various forms, she thought it was important to include this recipe. Her parents were opera singers and stayed away from home a lot, and she grew up with her grandparents in a bakery, so she really knows her stuff. During lockdown, she’s returned home to Switzerland and she cooks and cooks and cooks because of the joy of being able to have the access to all of the things she needs to be able to make good food.’
We speak about the relaxation of cooking in a life that demands periods of intense concentration. There’s no doubt that the sensuality of food is akin to the instinctive feeling for music that is so natural to Johnston. ‘Food is not just a universal need but also a universal link to our homes and communities. Just like music, it’s a universal pleasure and so, in the midst of this worldwide shutdown, I want food to bring us all together as a global community, uniting us with the aim of raising money for musicians.
The musical world across all genres has been very seriously affected, and there are millions of musicians and music professionals worldwide who are out of work and fearing for their futures and the future of the industry.
‘We rely on food in the same way that we rely on music at extraordinary times like this: to bring structure and a feeling of normality to our days, to alleviate boredom and frustration, to entertain, to strengthen the feeling of community and to bring comfort, joy and solace.’
Solace is certainly required. Take Johnston’s performance diary. Before the world changed she could look forward over the next couple of years to a crowded schedule of opera, oratorio and recitals from Mahler in Spain to Korngold’s
Die Tote Stadt in Munich, Stravinsky in Frankfurt, and a host of performances at home. Everything is now shrouded with uncertainty for the next period – how long or short, we can’t know.
‘It really isn’t clear what, if anything, can go ahead. Which organisations will survive? Do we dread the next year? I think most of us take an attitude that we have to roll with it. And what’s interesting about that is that the contemporary music community is starting to wake up, and I’ve got several projects with living composers beginning quietly in the background.’
‘Food is not just a universal need, but also a universal link to our communities’
Composers’ commissions, of course, mean that for many of them the calm of lockdown has been a bonus. But lurking behind, despite the government’s arts package of emergency help, is the fear of a contraction in the number of companies and venues. And when will audiences be able to sit together again?
We come back to the solace of food. Johnston, I learn, takes her cooking seriously. During her childhood in Liverpool, where she still lives, her father was an instinctive and creative cook who never used a recipe book. She treasures his love of the kitchen. And she acknowledges that it is a revealing place – nearly 120 recipes have come flooding in from other musicians, often with a family story attached, or a telling personal anecdote.
I admit to finding some of the choices of favourite dishes unsurprising. As it happened, just before our conversation I had been listening back to a concert performance last year of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung from the Edinburgh Festival – doing a commentary for edited highlights which are now available on Youtube, since the International Festival can’t have a physical presence this year. The soprano Christine Goerke was a marvellous Brünnhilde that night. She is a wonderfully over-the-top, bubbly character and I didn’t find it strange at all that her recipe for the cookbook is… Nonna’s Sour Cream Chocolate Cake. As an Italian-american, what else would she want to do but sink into a sea of grandmother’s chocolate? Rather more appealing to me, too, than Charlotte Gardner’s Baked Bean Lasagne. But she insists it’s much better than it sounds…
In the course of collating the recipes, Johnston also dug up some intriguing history. In 1950, a cookbook was produced to raise money for returning troops – still in a time of rationing – and all sorts of characters contributed, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Benjamin Britten (who submitted a version of an Edward Lear joke recipe that didn’t quite work as a joke for me, as it involved beating a pig with a stick, and I couldn’t quite get the point).
And there too – talking of Brünnhilde – was the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad herself, with a surprisingly dayto-day recipe of baked haddock, though all of us who grew up on either side of the North Sea do tend to think of that as some kind of ancestral food. Conductor Adrian Boult is equally down to earth with a cheese flan with the distinctly 1940s instruction to find ‘scraps of cooked meat’ to give it some flavour.
Perhaps some day in the future a food historian will dig out Johnston’s book – she’s hoping for publication early next year – and try to apply psychological tests to the choices of the musicians on the pages. Glancing through them, none seems to have plucked an off-the-shelf recipe, but to have submitted something personal that has meaning for them. The result is that on the website you can graze happily on Madeleine Pierard’s Rhubarb Frangipane Tart, Danyal Dhondy’s Granny’s Tarka Dal and Tom Hickox’s John Cage Boiled Egg (yes, you’ve guessed it – it has something to do with time).
I make a note to construct a meal from recipes starting with Kyoko Nojima’s
Fried Shiso Aubergine, followed by Gary Matthewman’s Slow Cooked Lamb and Jennifer Pike’s Lemon Cheesecake. To bring things to a close, I think it might be Christopher Ovenden’s Vodka and Lime Sorbet before Belinda’s Broughton’s Marinated Goat’s Cheese. Perfect.
I ask Johnston the obvious question. Her own recipe? She laughs. St Clements Gin and Tonic Cake. That’s the thing about food. It reveals your secrets.
To subscribe to Jennifer Johnston’s cookbook, see notesfrommusicianskitchens.com