REWIND
Great artists talk about their past recordings
This month: GERALD FINLEY baritone
MY FINEST MOMENT
Ives Songs
Gerald Finley (baritone),
Julius Drake (piano)
Hyperion CDA67516 (2005)
I heard Thomas Allen sing ‘Tom Sails Away’ in one of his recitals at Wigmore ★all earlier in my career, and it was a soundworld that spoke to me. I felt it was really worth looking at, so it was a question of combining a sense of what the music is and discovering that it was a treasury. ★yperion felt it was a part they could play, in putting as much of Ives’s catalogue for male voice out there as possible. Julius Drake and I really enjoyed putting together the programme and mining the songs that are available. It was a wonderful voyage of discovery and I felt a tremendous connection with the music; it gave me a chance to grow as an interpreter, but it was also a joy. Recordings can be very stressful sometimes and the only real pressure about this was which songs we should choose. We recorded in a wonderful church in East Finchley, and the acoustic is very natural – you
don’t honestly feel that there’s a lot of knob-twiddling going on. When it’s just four people – sound engineer, producer, pianist and singer – it is a really wonderful atmosphere of chamber music-making in its purest form. I remember feeling that we were unwrapping some beautiful little treasures, and I think it contributed to the legacy of Charles Ives.
MY FONDEST MEMORY
Duruflé Requiem
John Butt (organ), Timothy Hugh (cello), Stephen Roberts (bass-baritone), Janet Baker (mezzo-soprano), The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge/philip Ledger
Warner Classics 379 9942 (1981)
I was a really young singer, just 20, and maybe it’s the murky chapels that I’ve sung in my whole life, but there’s something about singing Duruflé in the chapel of King’s College with an amazing bunch of musicians. It was an emotional, personal moment, being part of one of the most extraordinary choral experiences, and it’s never ever to be forgotten. I remember thinking how could it possibly ever get any better than this? It may well be the reason why I became a soloist. I didn’t know whether I could reach the same intensity at a professional level in choral terms, so that was a hugely defining moment in the autumn of 1980. At that stage I hadn’t done the live broadcasts of the Nine Lessons and Carols. It was amazingly demanding for these young men and boys who were trying to give, literally, their full voice to the project. The boys were wonderfully spontaneous and their flexibility was always amazing to me, how professional and instinctive they already were as musicians. The level was absolutely of the highest calibre and it made such a big impact on me. This is as beautiful a disc as I could ever remember and I still put it on as a complete diversion from the craziness of the opera world.
I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT…
Schubert Winterreise
Gerald Finley (baritone),
Julius Drake (piano)
Hyperion CDA68034 (2014)
I just had the most extraordinary encounter with four very young singers at Juilliard in New York. I thought how amazing it is to have the chance to encounter Winterreise and perform it; they actually split it up between the four of them, which was an interesting, dramatic thing to do. I thought that exactly what this piece needs is an early look, to understand this amazing poetry, this extraordinary creation by Schubert. Then later, as you grow as an artist, you begin to see parallels in all the other repertoire that you might sing as a Schubert specialist and how it relates within his work. The wonderful thing about Winterreise is that it has a potential narrative, a potential theatricality to it, and it has a potential path through for a performer. I would like to say that my go-to recording is the Peter Pears and Benjamin
Britten one, and my ambition is to see whether I might have an opportunity to emulate the personality, devotion and lovingness that they brought to it, and the simplicity and the depth of the recording. I would love the experience of recording Winterreise again, just to have the opportunity to take it all apart once more and put it back together. It’s a hopeless indulgence to consider.