The BBC Music Magazine Interview
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW Rosalind Plowright
Mezzo Rosalind Plowright talks to James Naughtie
‘Now in my later years, I’m playing the mothers of the heroines I used to play,’ Rosalind Plowright laughs. ‘Actually, sometimes the grandmothers when you think about it.’ When the British singer first appeared in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier at the Royal Opera House, she played the role of Maddalena di Coigny, a young aristocrat in love with the eponymous poet, played by José Carreras. That was in 1984. Now Plowright is back at Covent Garden to sing the Contessa di Coigny, Maddalena’s mother, in a revival of a 2015 production.
The switch sums up the story of an artist who, in her 70th year, has become an acclaimed mezzo-soprano having risen to stardom as a soprano who could soar away in the most demanding Verdi roles. It’s a
transition that was completed nearly 20 years ago, and which opened up a new path for Plowright.
‘The mezzo tends to take the older roles, of course. They’re the characters I play now – for obvious reasons! Each one is very different and everything is in the music. Think of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. her music is so low and it’s wonderful stuff. I adore that. I can sing in my chest voice all night. It adds to the music and the colour.
‘At the moment I’m singing Lucia in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in Gothenburg, and it’s good. She has very little to sing but in this production her role has been enlarged. Because the character role is not principally about the singing, it’s about the acting.’
As a soprano, Plowright was more concerned with the technical feats required by her arias. Sometimes, she feels, these got in the way of the drama, even if they shouldn’t have done. ‘They certainly did for me when I got nervous,’ she recalls. ‘But I sometimes tried to use that nervousness in the role – to give it something extra – and somehow I got away with it.’
Rather more than that. She first came to serious public attention in the late 1970s with Glyndebourne Touring Opera in roles in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. It was a golden era at the Sussex opera house, and her appearances became the springboard for a career that then took her round the world. She sang some of the most demanding roles and gave some memorable performances on disc, notably when she sang Elizabeth I to Janet Baker’s Mary, Queen of Scots in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, conducted by Charles Mackerras, in 1982.
Her first child, Daniel, was born five years later. She was due to sing in Gluck’s Alceste under Riccardo Muti at La Scala, but her baby was a touch later than expected. ‘They kept ringing up from Milan asking – has the child been born? Then after my second baby I did have some troubles. I became quite thin. And that was the start of the change. I knew that my vocal cords had thickened.’
Plowright was in her prime but, she says, after her daughter was born, things didn’t really recover. ‘Vocal problems do come. There are some famous singers at the moment whom I needn’t name who are going through that. It’s happening all the time. One becomes very aware things aren’t the way they used to be. Maybe
I’m just too honest and I was just too vulnerable. You say it will be all right. But sometimes it isn’t.’
So she regrouped, and started the gradual process of moving from soprano to mezzo. ‘The thing about me is that there’s nothing else I can do. There’s nothing else I want to do. That has always been the case. My career has been called a rollercoaster by critics – and in a way it has been – but I’ve never given up. I know many who would have said it wasn’t worth it. But I’ve always gone to find new teachers and try to fathom the thing out. That’s quite exciting.
‘The first thing is that you have to have that burning hot desire to sing. Without it, really you should think of doing something else. Work, work, work. Never think your voice is finished. Push yourself. Go forward.’
That’s advice that Plowright gives to young singers in the many masterclasses she has done during her career. She notes, however, that advising is more difficult than one might imagine. ‘If the singers don’t ask me to be honest, I don’t give advice that’s as hard as probably it should be. A singing career can be tough. If there is an amazing singer with the right vocal equipment and they don’t have any doubts, those are the ones that go forward. They say they’re going to make this work come what may. If there’s any doubt there, I would ask them to rethink.’
There was no shortage of enthusiasm from Plowright – she first knew she wanted to sing when she was eight or nine. Her mother thought she had a good
voice, and went to a record shop where she bought an album of Maria Callas singing various arias. When she heard Callas’s voice, Plowright was hooked. ‘This was the early 1960s. I also listened to sopranos Renata Tebaldi and Joan Sutherland on disc. I tried to emulate Tebaldi’s Mimì from Puccini’s La bohème. I could hear something utterly thrilling in Callas, and I loved the way Sutherland could deal with Bellini’s Norma.
‘Puccini’s Tosca was my first complete opera. I got the whole thing. Act II must have been worn out on the record. It was the famous recording with Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano and Tito Gobbi. It was astonishing and I was stage-struck, because I knew wanted to perform in some way. I knew that once my voice worked for me I would do it.’
It’s discipline that keeps Plowright’s voice in shape today. ‘As you get older every muscle in your body starts to wilt a bit. That’s why every day without fail I will vocalise. I will keep that muscle as flexible or taut as I can.
‘I have a routine. I will do 30 or 40 minutes, just vocalising and getting the voice going. If I’m performing I sing the handel aria “Where Shall I Fly”, from Hercules. I can sing it, but it’s not my repertoire. It works because it keeps my voice flexible. I certainly do my Ulrica from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera because she can be quite daunting.’
Does she feel the old buzz on stage? ‘Yes and no. I’m certainly not getting it with Mama Lucia in Cavalleria in Gothenburg. But you know when that music starts, my heart does leap. Because that’s my music – the Italian verismo repertoire.
And Klytaemnestra’s entrance in Richard Strauss’s Elektra. Well, what can you say? I did that first in Seattle and I was so excited. It’s the music, isn’t it? That’s all.’
The search for the heart of the drama is something Plowright keeps returning to in conversation. That aspect is even more satisfying for her now than at the height of her soprano career. ‘If you take the soprano Leonora’s second aria in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, it’s very much a heartwrenching thing. There’s not a lot you can do dramatically. You just have to live it and feel it. In that way you are very exposed. As a soprano, I was always trying to find stuff that would help me in the stagecraft. But often there’s very little. You know it was so often “park and bark”.
‘Then I started to discover the wings of the drama more and more. Once I started to do the dramatic mezzo stuff it was great. I also like the nasty ladies of the soprano repertoire: Medea and so on. It was wonderful singing that role in Greece.’ Plowright remembers the visceral atmosphere created at Cherubini’s Medée by an audience for whom the passionate, gory story, based on Euripides, was part of their common culture.
The response was quite different when she sang Medée in the UK in 1989. ‘They laughed at the production. What was that about? Nobody would laugh about it in Greece! But in the production here a rock cracked open and I appeared. I remember the laughter. That threw me. It was terrible. There was once laughing in Tosca because they put the surtitles up late. But I think people who laugh are people who don’t go to the opera often. I hope so anyway.’
Despite that laughter – 30 years ago, after all – Covent Garden audiences are still for Plowright some of the best, the exceptions to a trend which she finds a touch depressing. ‘Apart from elegant cities like Munich and Milan, the public is just a sea of white hair in front of you, and that can be slightly alarming. What’s going to happen when all these people die?’
But in the meantime there’s more work to be done, into Plowright’s eighth decade. ‘Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth helped me in the latter stages of being a soprano. When you become a mezzo, there’s nothing but nasty ladies…’ Bring them on. She’s ready for them.
Plowright appears in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier at the Royal Opera House from 20 May and in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Opera Holland Park from 8 June
‘The public is just a sea of white hair in front of you and that can be alarming’