Interview, Lawrence Brownlee on Rossini

It’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to delve behind the scenes for our Recordings of the Week, especially when the artist is engaging and enthusiastic as American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who spared the time to have a chat with me last week about trading top Cs with Michael Spyres on Amici e Rivali - out today on Erato, this all-Rossini programme was inspired by the partnership between Italian tenors Andrea Nozzari and Giovanni David, who created principal roles in operas including Otello, La donna del lago and Ricciardo e Zoraide. Our discussion encompassed the origins of his friendship with Spyres, how he found his niche as a bel canto singer, and the challenges which artists of colour continue to face in the opera world today…

Opportunities for you and Michael to work together in opera must be pretty rare, given how infrequently most of these works are staged – how did your paths first cross?

I met Michael many years ago at the Bad Wildbad festival, which specialises in Rossini – I’d already heard quite a lot about him and knew that he was doing some interesting things, and we hit it off straight away. That first encounter grew into a sort of casual friendship based on mutual respect for one another’s work, and I always hoped we’d actually get to sing together some day: I knew that Michael was one of those real baritonal tenors in the Chris Merritt mold, and I thought that could make for an interesting contrast with my own voice. As Americans, we were both very aware of coming from a long legacy of US Rossini singers, including Samuel Ramey, Marilyn Horne and of course more recently Joyce DiDonato, and more specifically tenors like Rockwell Blake, Bruce Ford, Chris Merritt, Gregory Kunde, and Stanford Olsen. Michael and I are both passionate about carrying on that tradition of American Rossini tenors, and our friendship has really blossomed from that shared passion.

Did any of those singers mentor you in the early stages of your career?

I didn’t have direct contact with any of them until much later on, when I was already making my way in the profession: I actually got to sing with Rockwell Blake many years ago in Genoa in Il viaggio a Reims, where he was singing Libenskof and I was singing Belfiore. I told him I was a big fan of his work and he was very kind to me; to get the opportunity to be on stage with someone I admired so much was a wonderful experience for me. So whilst none of them were really mentors in the sense of us getting up close and personal, listening to their recordings and admiring their artistry inspired me a great deal.

Did you have an affinity with bel canto repertoire from the very beginning of your studies?

When I first started studying I wanted to do things like La bohème and Traviata - at that young age I wasn’t really aware of what type of voice I had, so I was just singing what was popular. (This was around the time that The Three Tenors were doing all their big stadium concerts, so that was the tenor repertoire I knew and loved). But one day my teacher presented me with Il barbiere di Siviglia and said ‘You know what, this is what you were born to sing’. I was probably 19 or 20 years old at the time, and that was when I really began to say: ‘OK, I’m going to try to be a bel canto singer’.

When and how did you make your professional Rossini debut?

It was as Count Almaviva in 2001 in Virginia Opera in the US, and the story behind that is quite a funny one – I’d already actually been hired to sing second cast to Juan Diego Flórez at La Scala, but the Virginia dates ended up being earlier so it was a great warm-up! That was my first chance to do the complete opera in Italian, including the full final aria, and I was very glad to get that under my belt before I had to set off to the hallowed ground in Italy…

The title Amici e Rivali is an intriguing one: how much do we know about the friendship and rivalry between the two singers who inspired much of the music on the album?

I don’t know for sure if they were friends or just colleagues, but given that Rossini wrote for them together so often they must have at least been amicable. I can imagine that there was that sort of mutual respect which comes from knowing you can highlight one another’s strengths, and we certainly have a similar dynamic going on here: my voice seems to be constructed in the same sort of way that Giovanni David’s was, and likewise for Michael and Andrea Nozzari. Michael and I feel that we have the type of chemistry that they probably had back then, even though the two of us have actually never been cast in an opera together! But the title of the CD really comes from the repertoire itself rather than the relationship between Nozzari and David: we knew we wanted to put the spotlight on Rossini’s duets and trios, and when I started exploring the characters it struck me that some of them are friends and some of them are rivals. I don’t know if I’d call it a stroke of genius, but 'Amici e Rivali' just came to me one evening! I presented it to the record company and they loved it, and Michael loved it too, so here we are…

How many of the operas featured on the album have you performed in full?

Not all that many, actually: I’ve done Armida, La donna del lago and of course Barbiere, but not Siège de Corinthe, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, or Otello. I have wanted to do Otello for some time, but the role that is right for me in that opera is Roderigo, and I haven’t been cast as it because I am a Black man. I already had a signed contract in the bag from Theater an der Wien some years ago, but then the stage-director came along and said ‘I don’t know how I can make this work with you being Black - it just doesn’t fit with the story’. Today I still aspire to sing that part at some point: I guess I have to find a director who can get on board with the idea that the colour of my skin is secondary to what I can bring to the role, because I think it’s something that would suit my voice. Ricciardo e Zoraide doesn’t sit well with me because the libretto really does talk negatively about Black people, so that’s another one I’m probably not going to do, but there are still so many Rossini roles to explore – I think I’ve sung about seventeen to date, and right now Ermione is top of my wish-list!

How much of a precedent is there for Black singers taking on Rossini’s Otello?

Curtis Rayam had a good career in Europe for a while, and Otello seemed to work well for him, but otherwise I don’t know of any bel canto singers of colour who sang the role: Bruce Ford and Chris Merritt are the singers who’ve been most closely associated with it in recent times. Interestingly Bruce told me that he didn’t have the low notes at all when he started out, but they emerged eventually over the years, and when Chris was on my show The Sitdown with LB the other week we were discussing how it really was written for a different type of vocality than the classic ‘Rossini tenor’.

There are a lot of instances of singers trying to fit their voice into a role rather than singing what’s right for them at the moment, and it completely takes away from the essence of what the composer wrote: I don’t think the singers themselves can necessarily be blamed for that, but it’s something I always resist. And at present Otello is still a bit too low for me: I’m 47 years young, but if the voice seems to gravitate a little lower in the coming years so that I can navigate the writing then I’d be happy to tackle it. If my being a natural bel canto singer of darker skin brings more credibility to the role then I think it would be great to explore that: if I’d been living and working as a Black singer in the time of Rossini then perhaps he would have written it differently, but for now I’d just be happy to get a chance to sing Roderigo.

In terms of vocal demands, how much difference is there between the tenor roles in Rossini’s comic operas and the various characters you portray on this album?

I think you definitely see the maturation of Rossini in his opera seria, which were mostly written later in his career – Guillaume Tell was his last opera, and that’s a completely different world from Barbiere or L’italiana in Algeri. He was the type of person that actually moved the needle in some way, and in those late works you really see him pushing towards Verdi and even Puccini. There are some differences in the technical challenges, too: the opera seria require all the stratospheric roulades and coloratura that you need in the comic operas, but they also demand a bit more depth. Even in some of the trios and duets we’re doing on this album, you need to lean into your sound a lot more: that trio from La donna del lago asks for something completely different from the light, airy sound you want in an aria like ‘Ecco ridente’ from Barbiere.

The opera seria roles generally call for a more virile sound, and I’m getting to the age where that’s something I want to explore: I hesitate to say I’m moving into more lyric territory, but I do now understand how to use my voice in a way that I can maximise my sound for that repertoire as well as the high-wire stuff. Having done things like I puritani - and started looking at Il pirata - I think moving into opera seria is really a step in the right direction. I doubt if I’ll ever get to Verdi and Puccini, but I think I’ll be exploring more Donizetti in the coming years: in fact I’m supposed to be at Covent Garden right now singing Nemorino! I haven’t actually sung there that often – this would have been my third appearance - but I’m hopeful that I’ll be back there more in the future.

And how’s the future looking for you in general at the moment?

Well, I certainly have a lot of things on the calendar: in fact it’s jam-packed through to 2022 and beyond! But like everybody right now I’m wondering just how much of it is going to happen…I’m fundamentally an optimist, though, so I do believe that we will get a grip on what’s going on fairly soon - and having had this year to recalibrate I plan to come back even better!