Gregory Kunde on Then and Now

I certainly wouldn't have predicted that Gregory Kunde would mark his seventieth birthday with a heartwarming album of jazz standards, but perhaps the American tenor is an artist from whom one should always expect the unexpected. Having cemented his reputation as one of the world's leading Rossini tenors during the 1980s and 90s, Kunde made an extraordinarily successful transition into more dramatic repertoire at an age when many tenors are winding down their operatic careers, and spent his sixties singing taxing roles such as Verdi's Otello and Berlioz's Énée at many of the world's major houses.

The morning after a remarkable 'night before' at Verona's amphitheatre this summer, Gregory joined me to reflect on 'the new part of his career', why the songs on Then And Now are so close to his heart, how he maintains his vocal health and equilibrium with such a taxing schedule, and some of the roles which might figure in his future...

Many thanks for joining me this morning - I gather you had rather a late night...

I sure did, but thankfully they have the best coffee in the world here! I’m out in Verona singing Radamès in Aida, and this season all the performances have started at 9PM. Because there are such complicated scene-changes we didn’t finish until after 1AM, and got home some time after 3…There were 14 000 people in the audience last night, and I think they all ate in the Piazza Bra afterwards!

This Aida is a restaging of the original Verona production from 1913, and the sets have been reconstructed down to the last detail. The Triumphal Scene is one of the most amazing things you’ll ever see: there are 300 people on stage plus four horses, and as the hero I get to come on last in a big carriage like Ben-Hur! 

You sound extraordinarily fresh - not only this morning, but in general! How have you kept your voice in such good shape for forty-five years (and counting)?

It’s not much of a secret - I just try not to push the voice and don’t over-sing anything. I don’t do formal vocal exercises every day, and live as normal a life as possible: I love sport, and playing golf is one of my favourite things to do (that’s true of a lot of tenors, strangely enough!). I do maybe twenty minutes of warm-ups before performances, and these days I don’t really warm up for rehearsals…When you get to my age you think ‘I’m just gonna save it for the show!’.

Over the last year or two I’ve got stricter about not singing performances too close together. Opera companies today often schedule just one rest-day in between shows, and that’s really not enough – you need two days minimum to recover from screaming your head off for three hours and getting to bed late. Having said that, at a festival last year I ended up doing two performances of Les Troyens on my nights off from Otello, because their Énée got sick and I already knew the production. When they called me up I said ‘I’m 70 years old, what do I have to lose? Let’s go!’. That’s one of the things I pride myself on: doing what I need to do when I need to do it, and so far the body always responds. It takes a toll every once in a while, but I had two days off afterwards so I was good!

Your new album of jazz standards and numbers from the Great American Songbook is a far cry from Otello and Énée - has this music always been part of your life?

It’s very much the new part of my career. The name of the album is Then and Now, because it says a lot about where I came from and everything that happened before the opera career. I was born in 1954 - before The Beatles, before Bill Haley and the Comets, before Elvis Presley - so these are the tunes that I listened to every day in my hometown of Kankakee Illinois in the late 50s and 60s. We had one radio-station, and all they played was easy listening standards: Sarah Vaughan, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, all those great names. 

I learned to play guitar when I was nine and played with friends in a garage, because our parents banished us there! Then in high school we formed a rock band called 'White Elephant' and played together until university: there were twelve of us, and we had a lot of fun gigging around doing weddings and receptions for quite a while. 

Then I discovered opera, so I left that world behind and never looked back…until COVID hit. During the lockdowns I saw a lot of my colleagues putting out recordings of arias they’d made with a pianist on Zoom, but I found karaoke tracks of some jazz standards and decided I’d give that a try… I downloaded Frank Sinatra’s 'Fly Me To The Moon' and sang along with the Count Basie Orchestra backing-track – I really had nothing else to do, but I wanted to sing these pieces forever. I put one out on Facebook, and it just took off because it was so different from everything I was doing before. People were messaging me with requests and I ended up doing twelve videos: 'Let It Be', Billy Joel…all sorts!

How did the recording itself take shape?

When I got back to working in opera it was always in the back of my mind that we could have fun with a studio recording. But we needed the right pianist to make it happen, so when I was in London for Trovatore I asked my manager Julia Maynard at Intermusica if she knew anybody in town who might fit the bill. She recommended an old college friend who’d gone on to be a conductor in the West End and was doing Hamilton at the time: his name was John G. Smith, which I thought had to be a pseudonym…!

We got together one afternoon and I gave him a list of five songs I wanted to record or flesh out. He came fully prepared with his kit and charts and asked what key I’d like them in, which I thought was a good start! And honestly, it was like magic or fate again – as soon as we started working I knew we were meant to be together. 

We made the album in January, recording and editing fifteen tracks in two days! We had John on piano, Sam Burgess on bass and bass guitar, Mike Smith on drums and three spectacular ‘blowers’, as John calls them – a sax, a trombone and a trumpet-player. I’d never recorded like this before: putting the headphones on, having a mic in front of you and being in your own booth, with the other guys in different rooms and everyone connected by headphones and the TV monitor.  We did most of the songs in just one or two takes, and I had the time of my life.

My wife Linda Wojciechowski is the Executive Producer of this recording, and she has done everything: Linda is a woman who just learns whatever skills she needs to make something happen and gets right on with it!

Are you taking the programme on tour?

After we made the demo I went to Japan with the Royal Opera House, and a friend arranged for us to pitch the recording to Rakuten as we were looking for sponsors. It turned out that they don’t do direct sponsorship but they invited us to give some concerts, so we’re going out there in January then onto Korea.

But first up was Brasserie Zédel in London, where John’s played many gigs with his jazz trio. I didn’t know anything about the place, but we put an hour-long show together and had a blast! And after we’d booked that, the Rossini Opera Festival asked me to do a concert in Pesaro: Juan Diego Flórez is Artistic Director there now, and we’ve known each other since his debut. I don’t sing Rossini any more, but I convinced him and Ernesto Palacio [the Intendant of the Festival] to take this programme. John did new orchestrations for the occasion, and it was great to see this orchestra that usually plays Rossini having a whale of a time with jazz standards!

Long story short, I just love singing this music - as an American it’s right there in my heart, and I’m having so much fun with it. I never thought I’d get the chance to record this stuff, and my hope is that anyone who’s heard me sing opera won’t believe that it’s me! 

You had another big career-transition around fifteen years ago, when you moved away from Rossini into more dramatic repertoire - how did that come about?

Being labelled as a Rossini tenor turned out to be a blessing and a curse. The voice-type didn’t really exist until Chris Merritt and Rocky Blake started growing that repertoire at the Rossini Opera Festival in the 1980s, and whilst it certainly paid the bills it also meant that agents and opera-companies were unwilling to consider you for anything else. Even breaking out into the heavier bel canto things was a struggle, and it wasn’t until 2008 that my Italian manager suggested I might enjoy looking at Pollione in Norma for a concert performance with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra…My initial reaction was ‘Are you crazy?’, because the role’s associated with huge dramatic tenors like Mario del Monaco and Jon Vickers….

I took it home and wrestled with it, and just as I was about to give up I closed the score in front of me and had a revelation. Obvious though it sounds, the cover says ‘Vincenzo Bellini’ - not ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ or ‘Richard Wagner’. Once I started singing it like Bellini I couldn’t believe the change: it took me into this world of serious bel canto. Santa Cecilia was a nice success, and not long afterwards Gianandrea Noseda asked me to sing I vespri siciliani  in Torino, which was a piece I’d never heard before. I downloaded the score and damn near had a panic-attack: it was the longest thing I had ever seen in my career!

But I was up for the challenge: I knew I was coming to the end of something I’d been doing for a long time and had been thinking there wasn’t much left for me besides teaching. My mindset was: ‘I’m going to try this and see if it works out, but if not I’ve had a great career!’ Luckily my Italian manager was right and it did work out: the next year I sang Verdi’s Otello, which was the start of a fifteen-year journey…It’s become my most-performed role, and probably my favourite. In 2015 I sang Rossini’s Otello at La Scala and Verdi’s in Peralada: only crazy tenors do those kinds of things, and that would be me!

Could you ever be lured towards Wagner?

I’ve had a lot of offers, especially over the last five years. Katharina Wagner invited me to sing Die Walküre at Bayreuth after hearing me as Peter Grimes in Valencia in 2017/18. I was flattered, and I really thought Wagner was going to figure in my future, but I studied Siegmund and it’s not for me – it sits a bit too low. Except for maybe Siegfried, Wagner doesn’t go into the upper area of the voice which is my real strength. I’d also planned to do Lohengrin as well, but I just couldn’t make it work. 

I sang my first and last Bacchus [in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos] last year in Dresden: it came off well, but twenty minutes of singing that music and I was spent. That didn’t bode well for Wagner, and I feared that if I carried on down that road it would be the end of my Verdi, Puccini and verismo singing. The reason I’ve been having fun in Italian repertoire is that I understand the language, and I figured that starting to learn German at this point might be a little late in the day – this brain is kinda full right now! 

I still have a couple of new Verdi roles to attempt, and I’m going to do my first Dick Johnson in La fanciulla del West next year. It’ll be so much fun to sing an opera that’s set in America - I’ll bring my own chaps! Fanciulla was the first opera I was involved in as a professional: I covered the role of Nick the bartender in Chicago in 1978, and 47 years later I’m going to sing Dick.

I’m also thinking there could be more Britten in my future, which I absolutely adore. Up to the age of 40 I didn’t really get it, but having worked on Grimes I’ve become a huge fan. I’m singing Captain Vere for the first time in Vienna this autumn: I wondered if anything could be better than Grimes, but Billy Budd comes really close. My first line is ‘I am an old man who has experienced much…’ - how fitting is that?!