REWIND
Great artists talk about their past recordings
MY FINEST MOMENT
Vivaldi Sacred works for soprano Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano); Florilegium
Channel Classics CCSSA32311 (2012)
Having done a ‘best of Baroque’ album with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Harry Christophers, I was looking to do complete pieces of Baroque music. This wasn’t my first project with Florilegium – we’d done some performances of other Baroque music, so by then we were very much friends and collaborators. Working with them is like all your dreams coming true, because these incredible musicians all bring their expertise and passion; as a soloist you have been working hard on your own part, and then with them added it all falls into place.
When we came to record, we hadn’t performed it together before, and so we met in a cold church in south London, in many layers of clothing, and brought our interpretation to it. You pool your resources and it just makes it greater than the sum of its parts. Knowing you can trust each and every single person is a feeling I really enjoy. For me it was the height of collaboration, understanding and trust.
Every now and again, especially with Baroque music, we genuinely make magic. I mean, we’re just people! We do all that and then walk down to the coffee shop and chat about the price of petrol. It was an exciting project to be part of.
MY FONDEST MEMORY
Karl Jenkins Cantata Memoria
Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano), et al; Sinfonia Cymru
DG 479 6486 (2016)
I didn’t grow up in the shadow of Aberfan – which in 1966 saw the terrible collapse of a coal tip at a Welsh village, killing 144 people – but for everybody I knew it was the byword for tragedy and sadness. I was asked to sing in a performance that was being planned to commemorate the disaster before Karl Jenkins was going to be writing the work.
We recorded it separately, one after another; so the orchestra was recorded, and then David Charles on the euphonium, Catrin Finch on the harp. Bryn Terfel did his bit before I came in, and then the choirs – adult and children’s. For Karl it was like a huge jigsaw to pull together. When I listen back to the recording it doesn’t feel as though I just went in and sang part of it – the sense is of everyone being together, and that’s because of the meaning behind it and what it meant to everyone.
Karl did a tremendous job combining the desperation and the desolation, the loss and the sadness and the threat. He played it to me a few weeks before the recording, and I read through the score; I think I started crying from the minute it started, and I didn’t stop.
Recording it was an emotional experience, and it could not have been a better memorial to the tragedy – it was a proper community effort.
I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT…
JS Bach Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ ihn, BWV 1127
Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano); Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/john Eliot Gardiner
Soli Deo Gloria SDG114 (2005)
I’m a ‘no regrets’ person – I do it the way I want to do it on the day and I’m usually happy with it. The difference with this is that it was a world premiere as it had only recently been discovered.
The thing about JS Bach is we all come to it with preconceptions – there are literally centuries of colour and analysis. This work was brand new, though, and the contract said that I couldn’t take it for a lesson or coaching; I wasn’t even allowed to hum it on the street in case I gave the game away. So the first time I really heard the piece was when I was singing it in London’s Air Studios with an orchestra and conductor John Eliot Gardiner.
After that we toured it across Europe, and it started to grow on me. I wished that at the end of the tour we could have recorded it again – I don’t know if it would have been particularly different, but there were new little quirks. Some bits were slowed down, while sometimes we added a bit of warmth. When you perform something a lot, you get a different view on it. It would have been nice to have done the first recording as just a test.
Elin Manahan Thomas appears alongside the Armonico Consort in Toby Young’s Beowulf, out now on Signum Records