The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Countertenor Andreas Scholl and pianist Tamar Halperin enjoy a conversation with James Naughtie
We are at Wigmore Hall in London. The countertenor Andreas Scholl and keyboard player Tamar Halperin not only know this venue intimately, but in the artists’ Green Room they feel as if they’re in a musical Valhalla. On the wall are dozens of signed photographs of heroes: singers, pianists and harpsichordists. ‘It’s a temple of music,’ Halperin says. Scholl talks about the experience of singing under the hall’s distinctive Arts and Craft cupola: ‘It has this slightly strange acoustical effect. When you’re in the centre of the semicircle and you find the right spot, it’s like an amplifier. You hear the sound coming from behind, just as if you’re wearing headphones. You have to get used to it. But when you do, you learn that you never have to push.’
If the place feels like a home to these two artists, so does their musical partnership. Scholl and Halperin are a husband-andwife team, living in Germany with their four-year-old daughter. Conversation naturally turns to the particular artistic avenues they can explore together that take them farther than either can go alone. Our subject is their new album Twilight People, the title of which is taken from a Vaughan Williams song. The programme is based on one they’ve developed in concert over the last few years. It’s an intriguing mix of periods and styles, and the recording deliberately tries to replicate the experience of a concert. In other words, they don’t want you to listen to tracks separately or to jump around between them. ‘We adjusted the programme into this format, made it a bit shorter, changed the order to get the pace and made it something that can be played in one go,’ explains Scholl.
‘‘I didn’t plan to be a musician. But it’s something in you so strong that it prevents you from actually doing anything else ’’
The album is conceived as a journey.
‘It’s made in such way that the ending of each song lapses into the beginning of the next one. And that’s a kind of bridge. It slows down or then it opens up,’ says Scholl. ‘Listening to one track can be one kind of experience, of course, and we hope a deep one. But the initial thought behind Twilight People is that it’s something that you should take time to experience, to slow down and really be part of it. That doesn’t happen in the three minutes of one song.’
Halperin sums it up: ‘I think it’s a lovely idea that you should take time and try to listen to it in one go.’
Now in his early fifties, Scholl has had a blazing career for more than 20 years since he made a sensational operatic debut in Paris and followed it with such memorable performances as Bertarido in Handel’s Rodelinda at Glyndebourne. As a Baroque specialist with a PHD on JS Bach to her name, Halperin has a natural affinity with Scholl’s repertoire. They’ve recorded together before (see box-out, left), as well as often performing as a duo in concert – they head to Wigmore Hall in January 2020. Their music-making together is alive: they give polished performances that don’t feel at all static, or complete. It’s on the move.
But this album takes them onto rather different territory, one that’s marked out with striking originality. There are English folksongs, works by Vaughan Williams and Copland and, lurking in the middle, Berg, of all people. And as bookends to the programme they’ve deliberately chosen new, unpublished works by young composers. The Israeli-american Ari Frankel’s The Rest sets a text by Primo
Levi, and Beauty is Life is by the Londonbased Egyptian-australian composer Joseph Tawadros, who also appears on the disc playing the oud.
The consequence is a recording that tries to distil beauty in simplicity. For
Halperin, it offers an opportunity to build on the simple harmonies of folksong. Her arrangements of uncomplicated melodies – say from Britten’s own arrangement of the traditional Welsh folksong The Ash Grove – lead to some startling expeditions on the keyboard. Throughout you can hear her love of the Baroque, and the relationship Scholl has, for example, with Elizabethan song.
‘There’s something I want to say about the characteristics of English folk music,’ says Halperin. ‘I think because I come from a very different country, Israel, I have always felt that this kind of poetry is about a completely different landscape from the one I grew up in. The music feels fast. It feels like something that’s not urban at all. It’s absolute – very open. And it’s awesome. I don’t know if it’s true, but the feeling is that it’s music from the place where the weather changes. You feel it sometimes. Even in the second part of one note, how the mood changes. It can be very positive and innocent and so interesting. Simple, but everything’s in the detail.’
Harmonically, the opportunities seem endless. ‘I mean, the music is so open it actually could be harmonised in so many different ways, which is what our album tries to show,’ says Halperin. ‘Because some of the arrangements are actually not so simple. No, they really explore this space.’
So what of their musical partnership? Who is in charge? Scholl recalls once working on a Vaughan Williams song, and as a result obtaining pile of scores of English folksong for them to explore. ‘Take a simple song like Waly, Waly,’
Scholl directs this comment to Halperin. ‘So you took the song and worked on it. And then you said, “Well, that works”. Or, “that doesn’t work”. So you’re in charge, basically.’ They agree.
Halperin continues, ‘He once came up with a very elaborate lute arrangement by himself. And I thought that I liked the simple one he had done before it, but he insisted… so we played the elaborate one. And after years he said, “Ah, let’s forget about what I like!”.’
There is a good deal of laughter. This project has clearly stretched them both in ways that they’ve found intriguing and satisfying, not least in the juxtaposition of songs and musical styles that seems
‘The Twilight People album is something that you should take time to experience’
unusual on the page, but which sound part of a journey that takes surprising turnings that nonetheless feel natural. A prime example is how they move from Britten’s arrangement of Greensleeves into Berg’s Vielgeliebte schöne Frau (known in English as Late Autumn Fog, Cold Dreams).
Scholl compares the album’s constant changes in character and pace with a meditation: ‘It takes time to get into this space, to get into this world of these ancient melodies and also sometimes the atonal sounds. It’s not something that we just bring from the streets. No. And this is calculated into how the programme is designed. If there’s a discrepancy between the CD and what it sounds like in concert, that ought to contribute to counterbalance or to support this meditative mood. It’s very, very sparky or super soft.’
For Scholl, steeped in the German Lieder tradition, there’s always a Schubertian tinge in his approach to song. It’s true, too, that with the passing of the years the natural changes to his voice suit the repertoire in this particular programme and give it opportunities that, he happily admits, he wouldn’t have fully understood as a young singer. ‘My role model, of course, is James Bowman. Yes. Keep active and treat the voice respectfully. That’s one of the reasons why he is such an artist, still.
‘I think it has a lot to do with strategy, especially from, I think, 20 to 30, maybe to 35. You can do pretty much what you want to. Which I never did. You could go out and party after a performance – I had countertenor colleagues that were real party animals, for sure.’ There comes a time when those days pass.
His range, he says, hasn’t changed much with the years, but the character of the voice has. The Twilight People repertoire is the natural partner for his voice. He speaks about the simplicity it can convey, and the dangers that come with that. He also has less appetite for the on-stage fireworks which were one of the reasons for his rise to stardom in the 1990s. A certain slowing down has to happen, and the journey he and Halperin are making together allows them to set their own pace.
‘Force and stability, that’s what we both get individually out it,’ Scholl says. ‘You can talk to each other about what’s happening to your voice, what you’re feeling about it. We’re really partners on this journey and in being musicians.
‘You know, the job is your identity. A problem in the practice room reflects on everything that happens at home. Because what’s interesting happens in practice. A musician cannot escape the fundamental fact that that’s what you are. It’s not [just] something you do.’
Halperin agrees: ‘We have a young daughter. And, of course, people ask if she’s going to be a musician – if we want her to be. Well, I really think it’s an identity thing. I’m sure she’s growing up with so much music around her. I didn’t plan to be a musician. Neither did Andreas, I think. But it’s something in you so strong that it prevents you from actually doing anything else.’
Scholl reflects that, ‘by nature… the countertenor voice is more exposed than the other voices. It’s in this blurred boundary between male and female. It’s just so much more direct. Of course, that means if we have any problem with the voice, we show it right away.’
The risk of performance is always there. But these two remarkable artists exhibit a calm about this phase in their careers. And they’ve found a path that they feel instinctively stretches far into the future.
Scholl and Halperin’s song recital disc, Twilight People, is out now on BMG