Baritone Roderick Williams on taking the slow route to the big roles
Rupert Christiansen meets Roderick Williams, the cheery baritone who’s carved out a niche playing opera’s nice guys
‘People often ask me why I always seem so cheerful. And I just say to them, why shouldn’t I be? I’m singing wonderful music, and I even get paid for it, too.” So runs the sunnyside-up philosophy of smiley baritone Roderick Williams and, in an anxious profession, it’s certainly refreshing to find someone of his eminence with so few hang-ups or inhibitions.
Williams, 52, has plenty to celebrate. He got the Rule, Britannia! spot at Last Night of the Proms in 2014, was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer of the Year for 2016, and was appointed OBE in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Next week he takes on the title role in Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses in a new Royal Opera House production at London’s Roundhouse, directed by John Fulljames.
“I’ve also been very fortunate to have avoided some of the tyrant conductors and directors still roaming round corners of the business,” he says, looking back on a career that began with the role of Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the Guildhall School of Music when he was in his late twenties. “Power politics come into play the moment you step inside a rehearsal room. Everyone suddenly becomes very vulnerable there, and if anyone in charge decided to dismantle my ego, they could do so without trouble. I’ve witnessed some bad moments for other people, of course, and I only hope my tendency to look for a joke may have helped on occasion to lower the temperature and
‘I’ve been very fortunate to have avoided some of the tyrant conductors and directors roaming round corners of the business’
stop an innocent colleague getting it in the neck from a bully.”
Williams is the first to admit that he’s been lucky. A middle-class, north London childhood with classical music in the background led him to Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in Hertfordshire and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a choral scholar. A self-confessed “slow developer”, who combined “lack of ambition” with “a great deal of naiveté”, he spent three years “happily enough” as a class music teacher at Tiffin School in Kingston-upon-thames. Singing was for evenings and at weekends – his closest brush with fame was his Oxford University barbershop quartet’s appearance in the 1987 final of Opportunity Knocks. “We entered for a laugh, and that’s what it was. We sang Bohemian Rhapsody, to wild applause. A 14-yearold girl who imitated Shirley Bassey came first. I often wonder what became of her.”
Inspired and encouraged by his wife, Miranda, whom he met while at Oxford (the couple now have three grown-up children and live in Warwickshire), Williams joined the Guildhall School’s opera course – but after graduating at the relatively late age of 30, he made his reputation more on the concert platform than the stage. His mother is Jamaican – might racism have had something to do with it?
“Has my colour stopped me being cast in certain roles? Well, that’s something I’ll never know, because I never hear what gets said on audition panels. But nowadays I imagine that our obsession with diversity means that, if anything, it works in my favour. Quite honestly, I would rather people judged me on the basis of my singing.”
If anything has held him back in opera’s casting department, it must be that cheery demeanour, which makes him more suited to the nice guy (the titular hero in Billy Budd, Ned Keene in Peter Grimes, Schaunard or Marcello in La Bohème) than the villainous seducer. And when he has played more morally complex characters – such as Eugene Onegin or Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro – critics have said that too much of his good nature shines through.
So it’s interesting that the part that really got under his skin in recent years was the sadistic, sex-crazed brute of a police chief, Scarpia, in Tosca, a heavy, roughhouse role usually sung by someone less vocally pure and refined than he is. He sang it in a concert at the St Endellion Festival in Cornwall and found it “enormous fun to be the downright baddy”.
“In a strange way, I think it was so far out of my comfort zone that it has helped me to develop as a singer and an actor,” he says. “But I’m not convinced that Italian opera is the right direction for me. I’ve had such a lovely career performing music that suits me – should I risk losing it all? I’m not hugely in love with failing.”
What feeds his enthusiasm is his appetite for new music and challenges. “There are a few things I’m truly
‘Our obsession with diversity maybe means that my skin colour works in my favour. But I’d rather be judged on my singing’
finished with now – Carmina Burana, for instance – but there are also things that I’m loving revisiting after a long gap, such as the Schubert song cycles,” (which he is exploring at the Wigmore Hall this season with students from the Guildhall).
For The Return of Ulysses, he’ll be singing in English. “Because I’ve sung so many of his madrigals in Italian, I was sceptical about that at first, but I’m amazed to find how nicely the translation sits on the music,” he says.
He doesn’t feel overly alarmed about the much-discussed “problems” classical music has in communicating beyond a certain white, middle-class demographic. “During my lifetime, it has always been in a niche, and it still is,” he points out. “Yet many people still get very excited about it and there are marvellous young musicians coming into the profession, both as composers and performers. So I can’t see any sign that it’s dwindling or dying.” As a former teacher, however, he laments that, “in the name of inclusiveness”, morning assembly and the hymns that went with it have vanished. “I suppose that in a few years’ time, congregations at weddings won’t be singing ‘Praise my soul, the king of Heaven’ any more.” He adds grimly: “Just listening to stuff coming through their headphones.”
Roderick Williams sings in the Royal Opera’s new production of The Return of
Ulysses at the Roundhouse, NW1 (020 7240 1200), Jan 10-21. He sings Schubert’s Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall, W1 (020 7935 2141) on March 19