Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Jonathan Lemalu Bass
Some recordings are like old friends. Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress was one of my first roles at college and when I looked for a recording, I found Bryn Terfel singing my role with the LSO. It’s such a cinematic opera and I love the way they delve into the quite angular music and play with the language. I learnt the music so quickly for the role because I had listened to this recording so many times it was like I subliminally already knew it.
Bryn Terfel’s ability to spin a vocal line is incredible – he’s such a classy singer. When I first heard his album The Vagabond, I remember laughing at how easy he made these difficult English songs seem. He was able to control his voice and sustain pitch so well, which for lower voices like mine is the litmus test of one’s ability to sing this kind of repertoire. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard Finzi, who is now my favourite composer of English
Bryn Terfel’s ability to spin a vocal line is incredible – he’s such a classy singer
songs. It’s not all pastoral, which really intrigued me.
The bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is similar to Terfel, in that he also has a lower voice with colour and elegance to his sound. He also performs with such clarity and simplicity. Despite initially performing Mahler’s Des
Knaben Wunderhorn with piano, as soon as I heard Quasthoff’s
1999 orchestral version with Claudio Abbado, I realised I didn’t ever want to do it with a piano again. There’s such an epic movie landscape to the orchestration – it’s like an epic Star Wars battle, and the Berlin Philharmonic really brings the music off the page.
And also…
My job is basically story-telling and my Samoan culture has a real oral history. I’m a big fan of comedians, and Dave Chappelle’s stand-up album Sticks and Stones is really intelligent. He’s more of an orator than someone trying to make you laugh.
Jonathan Lemalu will be appearing in Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at The Grange Festival this summer; tickets on sale 10 March Sofia Fomina Soprano
I really love listening to jazz, which is what I tend to put on when I have free time or am at home. My favourite female singer is Ella Fitzgerald, whose voice is just magical. Hearing her sing, you could never mistake her for anyone else and it’s also incredible what she can do – I was listening on Youtube to some of her improvisations and they really are quite special. Among male singers, meanwhile, I really like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.
I also have a passion for rock and pop groups such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones – because I have so much classical music in my life as a singer, I don’t tend to listen to it much at other times. I was recently listening with my husband to The Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night on vinyl. It is so full of life and love, and they talk straight to your heart. It’s a really popular disc in Russia, where I come from.
It is so sad that the singer Amy Winehouse died so young. She had this amazing voice, but it didn’t sound like it was from the
21st century – it was more like something from the 1960s. Her personality was extraordinary too, and it’s such a shame that she didn’t believe in herself. I really love, above all, talented artists who put their personality into their music, and Amy Winehouse was a great example of this. Back to Black is such a wonderful album.
And also…
I love watching films, particularly at home. Not necessarily the popular Hollywood ones, but ones with a bit of history in them and from different countries. Schindler’s List was an exceptional film – it was very hard to live normally after seeing it – and I’m also a fan of The Last Emperor. Sofia Fomina sings the title role in Massenet’s ‘Manon’ at the
Paris Opera on 7, 13 and 22 March Robert van Sice Percussionist
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to my old vinyl recording of Debussy and Ravel by the Tokyo String Quartet. I’m lucky enough that Yale, where I teach percussion, still has turntables! That recording made me fall in love with chamber music when I was a young kid coming out of the conservatory; the performance is just full of effervescent energy, commitment and love for the music. I listen to it for both inspiration and therapy.
I’m married to one of the most obsessive music-listeners in the world – my wife is in love with music more than any professional musician I know. I came home one day from teaching and she said, ‘I’ve just discovered a French countertenor and you have to hear this!’ That particular record, Opium by Philippe Jaroussky on the Erato label, is still really poignant to me. There’s one piece, Reynaldo Hahn’s À Chloris, that I simply adore; it’s just an organic study in how to form a melodic line.
I’ve always been, in a way, the new music guy of the marimba world. But in all the commissioning that I’ve done,
I’ve never had anybody write a piece for me that I think opens the soul of the listener like Garth Neustadter’s Seaborne. It’s kind of a duet between film and music – Garth worked with my son
Kjell who is a photographer and filmmaker. I’m hoping it will be a gamechanger for people’s opinions about percussion.
And also…
We have this beautiful museum that belongs to Yale University, but until relatively recently, we didn’t have a gallery space that was befitting the collection of 20th-century paintings that the university owns. The same paintings set into a magnificent new gallery is like a great concert hall taking a good piece of music and making it sound better. It’s a space that I visit as often as I can when I’m on campus, just because it’s airy and full of light.