A Singer’s Life - A Typical Day of Rehearsal - Part 2

Read Part 1 here

In Part 1, I wrote about a day working with Pacific Opera Victoria in Canada. One can hardly imagine a more different working day from that at Pacific Opera than Covent Garden. My last experience of that great theatre was in 2017, when I played the master coppersmith, Hans Foltz, in Wagner’s ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ and understudied the main bass role, Veit Pogner. The production wasn’t great, but it gave free rein to us, the minor masters, dressed in outrageous robes and wearing splendidly silly hats. If I have much to sing, I hate wearing hats on stage, as they interfere with the way we hear our voices, often muffling the sonority. I always tell costume designers that a lot of our resonance as singers comes through the skull, and sticking a load of felt and cloth over that skull dulls the sound, but do they listen? If I am given a hat to wear on stage, I find the earliest possible opportunity to take it off! However, as Foltz, with minimal solo lines, I was quite happy to wear the crazy hat provided.

A big company like the Royal Opera House is a mammoth organisation, which involves literally thousands of people to make it work. It consists of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet, and operates in the recently restored opera house in the middle of Covent Garden in London. I was a tiny cog in the great wheel: soloists, dancers, extra actors, chorus, orchestra, music staff, stage crew, costume department, wigs and make-up department, scenery construction, administration, security, ushers and front of house personnel, all of these have to work together to produce shows which run throughout most of the year. A company manager and her assistant are largely responsible for the day to day functioning of the place, and they do a phenomenal job, organising daily schedules for rehearsals, coaching, fittings etc. It is a military machine but with artists and not soldiers, and somehow it works. Not only does it work, but it functions in a friendly and civilised fashion, and is enormous fun. Everyone knows their job, and provided you are well prepared and READ THE SCHEDULE, things go extraordinarily smoothly. It helps that, in an enterprise where egos are rampant, somehow, people park their egos at the door and muck in. Each individual cog is treated well, and the lowest and the highest profile people all work together for the common good. There is no serious competition within an opera company, no one wins or loses, it is all about the art. That must sound insufferably twee, but I do believe it to be true. We really are all working towards a common goal, artistic excellence, and that can only be achieved by everyone working together. This is where administrators and politicians get it all wrong, moaning about elitism, and wanting to lower standards in order to be more inclusive. If anything, we should be pursuing even higher standards, and shouting out the achievements to the world at large.

Let’s look at the equivalent stage of a production to the one I described in Canada. The process is exactly the same, with a meeting of everyone, a sing through, and then a blocking out of the basic feel and look of the opera in order. Once that has been done, we go back to the beginning and start on the detail. The difference at Covent Garden is in the number of people involved!

There is also the small matter of the calibre of artists you are working with. Although somewhere like POV punches well above its weight, at Covent Garden, you are suddenly working with the world’s best. We had Sir Bryn Terfel, Allan Clayton, Gwyn Hughes Jones and Johannes Martin Kränzle in ‘Meistersinger’, with Sir Antonio Pappano conducting, and yet, the atmosphere among the performers is much the same as anywhere else. We still mostly went to the pub after each day’s rehearsal, and this is what makes my life such fun. Since few singers are super-famous, Bryn excepted, we can work at the highest level of excellence but afterwards, outwith the theatre, we can carry on undisturbed and largely unnoticed.

A work as monumental as Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ needs amazing scheduling to make the rehearsal period progress smoothly, but the extraordinary administration at Covent Garden achieves this goal easily. Since we are in London, simply making sure people are in the right place at the right time becomes complicated, as distances are vast and travel can be very complex. When a huge chorus is involved, everything must go like clockwork to make sure all the scenes are covered in a way that doesn’t waste time and energy. If we add in the fact that most roles are covered by understudies, the preparation is even more complicated. The covers have to be rehearsed separately, but at the same level of artistry as the principals, with musical coaching and separate staging calls. In this show, I was singing a small role and covering a big one, and one day I arrived at 10.15 to be told that my principal was ill, and that I would be singing his role from the side of the stage (it was a Stage and Orchestra rehearsal, about a week to 10 days before the Dress Rehearsal), while a stage manager walked the role, and my own understudy would be singing and acting my role. All this was done and we were ready to go at 10.30 when Pappano arrived in the pit ready to conduct the rehearsal in the theatre. All went swimmingly, everything went as normal, except that I got to sing the whole First Act of ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ on stage at Covent Garden, with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. I had sung Bartolo in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ with Tony in the Monnaie Theatre in Brussels nearly 20 years before, so we knew each other, but singing a big scene at Covent Garden with Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs was a different prospect. It went well, and Tony actually apologised that he hadn’t been able to alter anything to suit my performance since time was short. I was understanding!!! Stepping up at that level is daunting, but the short notice and adrenalin meant that I didn’t have time to worry, and actually, it was great for me, as the other main singers could hear that I was well prepared and more than competent, and worthy of a place on that stage. Even at the age of 62, one likes to be noticed!

Another perk of working at Covent Garden is just the excitement of being there. Apart from our show, there were two or three other operas in rehearsal or in repertoire at the same time, as well as ballets. One of the fun things about being there is standing in the queue for coffee; you could be next to a huge opera singer (many are bigger than me) or a tiny ballet dancer. It’s like going for a walk with a Great Dane and a Chihuahua at the same time. The Royal Opera has a superb canteen restaurant on the top floor, where you can look out over the rooftops of London (just like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins). It’s quite magical.

Yet looking out from my suite in Victoria, BC, I was able to watch the great ferries arriving at Victoria Harbour or the seaplanes taking off every hour or so. That was pretty magical too! All these experiences were possible because I, somehow, have been given a good voice. Weird eh?

Cover photo: Dominic Klimowski