Mary Miller’s review of ‘A Singer’s Life’
Brian Bannatyne-Scott: A Singer´s Life
Let´s start with a confession: as a former performer, festival and opera house director, reading Brian Bannatyne-Scott’s memoir is like enjoying a warm hug. His life and the world that he has embraced over a long career is so familiar, so peopled with friends and colleagues, that it is hard to write about it with any true dispassion. Bannatyne-Scott has sung world-wide across multiple stages with the great and not so, with conductors and opera directors both zany and conventional and with a cast of colleagues who while raising the roofbeams with extraordinary sounds, also accompanied him to vineyards and delightful restaurants. So, most certainly he illustrates a singer’s life with all its intensity, joy, disappointments and unpredictability.
Bannatyne-Scott does not necessarily intend his book to be for his own profession, however much his home team might relish descriptions of their shared experience. His book is primarily aimed at music and opera lovers for whom a glimpse behind the scenes is both intriguing and instructive. With a mix of somewhat suppressed frustration and good humour, he explains that beyond the top notes and crescendos, there are grim dressing rooms, stroppy administrators and long chilly bus rides from unpleasant airports in alarming places. He explains in detail how the voice may develop or distort from early twenties to six decades plus, how a good teacher can redirect a misplaced tongue or a malfunctioning diaphragm and how exhausting Wagnerian roles or Baroque twirls can strain the stamina of the most seasoned board-treader.
We also learn some excellent background – clearly laid out context for how a composer might reflect his country´s history and politics, how musical language can reflect national dialect and its distinctive patterns. Bannatyne-Scott’s writing is also vivid in its description of travel with a painterly eye for landscape and a happy ear for clanking trains and disfunctional hire cars.
I would take him to task for his distrust of the music written in his own time, although some of the works he mentions do deserve a raised eyebrow – he is far from the first artist to suffer from the sometime arrogance of composers who simply don’t wish understand what instruments and voices can reasonably achieve – but while I, as a new music afficionado, may overall disagree, his wide career entirely allows him to express his view. I’m with him all the way, however, in his emphatically expressed loathing of the directorial genre regie – the style of over- interpreted production which favours yelling naked tenors hanging from lightbulbs, washing machines whirring as the soprano sings Mozart and an obsession with knocking over chairs. Pace for sure, some current young directors who, with diminishing budgets, are working miracles of clarification while working with reinvention of old texts.
Bannatyne-Scott’s writing style is highly personal – lots of exclamation marks! – and highly readable. Perhaps he over repeats some of his experiences, but there is much charm in his honesty, his love of wine, fun and food. Overall his passion for music is critical and without doubt, his care for culture in Scotland, his homeland, has initiated a deal of good for a new generation of singers and creators. He´s singing still and let´s hope that his memoir will inspire us to keep on listening.