Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen on Uncharted

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen first came to my attention two summers ago at Glyndebourne, as the heroine's jilted lover Athamas in Handel's Semele. The role may be among the most colourless in the repertoire, but the American countertenor's easy charisma and rich, robust timbre made quite the impression - and were displayed to even greater effect the following year when he returned to the festival for the title-role in Giulio Cesare.

For his debut solo album Uncharted (released on Avie last Friday), Nussbaum Cohen has eschewed the obvious 'Handel heroes' concept and opted instead for Austro-German song repertoire which is still only rarely programmed by countertenors. In the lead-up to the release, we spoke about the singer who moves him above all others in this music, why he was encouraged to embrace it from an early stage in his training, and his rather unconventional path to a career as a classical singer - including supporting some of the biggest names in pop as a member of a New York childrens' choir, cantoring at a Brooklyn synagogue in his early teens, and eventually abandoning plans for a career in public policy in favour of pursuing opera...

Did any particular singers (or song-pianists) ignite your passion for Lieder?

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is my favourite singer of all time, and her recordings made me fall in love with the German song repertoire. There’s a Wigmore Hall Live recital from 1999 which includes the Brahms Lieder I’ve programmed on my own album, and I listened to it obsessively on my Walkman as a kid. The richness and humanity which she brought to these songs - to everything she sang - blew me away, and I still think she’s one of the greatest interpreters of Handel’s music in modern times. I never got to see Lorraine perform live; she fell ill just after I discovered her, but those recordings have always been running on loop somewhere in my mind and on some level I really think they guided me to where I am today.

Did you sing from an early age?

My parents weren’t especially into classical music, but when they figured out I was heading in that direction they found an opportunity for me right on our doorstep in Brooklyn. There are two elite children’s choirs in New York, and it just so happened that one of them rehearsed in a building we passed every day on our way to the subway. I joined the ranks alongside eight other prepubescent boys and about fifty girls, and it took me to places beyond my wildest dreams…

We sang a lot of classical repertoire but also did some incredibly high-profile pop gigs, supporting people like Billy Joel and James Taylor - singing back-up for Elton John at his sold-out sixtieth-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden is still the highlight of my career! As a child who’d grown up in a pretty insular Jewish community, it blew my mind to have all these celebrities dropping by our dressing-room after a gig to say ‘Good job, kids!’.

I’m that rare case of a countertenor who never sang as a tenor or baritone. When my voice dropped at eleven or twelve I was not ready to give up those starry gigs, so I kept going in falsetto…We didn’t have any opera or classical music recordings at home, so I didn’t even know what a countertenor was: I just kept singing high every day, and it strengthened over time. I passed my re-audition for the children's choir, and it felt completely comfortable to keep singing alto even though I hadn’t had any formal training as a countertenor: it’s still the most natural thing to me, so whenever I hear a tune I automatically sing it back in that register. 

Did you always know that you wanted to sing professionally?

I was actually at Princeton studying public policy and applying for law school when I saw my first opera, and I decided then and there that I wanted to pursue that as a career. I applied to various Masters programmes and didn’t get in anywhere, so I moved back home to New York and wrote to the ten or fifteen top voice-teachers in Europe asking if they’d take me on as a student. At least half of them replied saying ‘I’ve never taught a countertenor and I wouldn’t know what to do with one - sorry!’. I was surprised, but also grateful that they let me know upfront rather than letting me spend loads of money on expensive lessons!

So when did you find someone who was ready for the challenge?

The first Young Artists Program that I did was with Houston Grand Opera, and when I arrived there I started having lessons with the legendary American voice teacher Dr Stephen King - he’s taught many famous mezzos, but he’d never taught a countertenor before.  He was really up for the challenge and immersed himself in every study he could get his hands on; we only worked together in person consistently for nine months, but the amount that I grew was really remarkable.  

We were a perfect match, because Dr King is very focused on technique and physiology. A lot of the teachers I’d had up to that point were very sensation-based, and I’m quite an intellectual person so it just didn’t work super-well for me when they’d say things like ‘bloom like a flower!’. What does that actually mean in terms of vowel-modification and what’s happening to the vocal tract?! Stephen was super-precise about all of that, which was an absolute game-changer for me.

Did you encounter any pushback from coaches and concert-promoters when you started singing Romantic repertoire as a countertenor?

People have generally been really encouraging, right from the start. Part of the package at Houston was a recital series at the big art museum in town, and the musical director insisted I sing some Brahms and Schumann as part of that: he immediately pinpointed my voice for this repertoire that I’d already been exploring myself in private. That was when I first performed these Brahms Lieder; we’re going to stop in Houston on this recital tour, and I’m so happy that it’s come full circle.

I think there was less resistance when I first started singing this repertoire because my voice just feels and sounds a bit different than many countertenors; there was always an innate roundness and warmth to my sound, and I worked hard with my teacher to cultivate that without losing the ‘cut’ that you need as a countertenor. I have an unusually large voice for a countertenor, and I’m also quite a big guy physically: I’m 6ft 2 and broad-shouldered, which suits all those Handel heroes who’ve become my bread and butter. People sometimes come to me after performances and either say ‘I love countertenors, and I loved you!’ or ‘I hate countertenors, but I loved you!’. The second one is my favourite compliment! 

I gather from your booklet-notes that you feel an especially strong affinity with the music of Korngold?

100%. I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors (the Nussbaums) who came from Germany to this country, and that’s a great part of my attraction to Korngold. His story of reinvention kind of mirrors my own family’s story – coming to the US and finding the American Dream, which now has slipped away for so many of us...My grandparents had a good amount in the old country, but they had to start over when they arrived in the US: they brought one parcel each and immediately started painting apartments and cleaning houses to build up capital, and it’s the same story for so many immigrants today. 

Something which I think is often forgotten in America today is that we’re a nation of immigrants – a huge proportion of us are great-grandchildren or grandchildren of people who came here in search of a better life. And the sumptuous Romanticism in Korngold’s music comes from that reinvention: these are beautiful songs of farewell, and they speak so deeply to anyone who’s had to say goodbye to their homeland.

I also love learning things like these Korngold songs because I enjoy the intellectual challenges involved. I was a very cerebral kid, and I went to an Ivy League university before pursuing a career in singing. That probably seems quite standard to you guys in the UK where a lot of singers come through Oxbridge, but in America it’s very unusual: pretty much every professional singer you meet here went straight to conservatory and was really dedicated to that from the very beginning. 

I never wanted to be a countertenor who just sang the standard Baroque repertoire: I love Handel as much as anybody, but I like having a balance in my life and career to fulfil different parts of my identity. One of my biggest passions outside music is hiking, and when I conquer one of these difficult scores that countertenors often shy away from I get the same kind of rush as I do from summiting a mountain! I live in Northern California, which is a great source of inspiration for interpreting this music: the idea of wandering in the woods is so present in German Lieder, and a proper hike is just good for the soul in general. 

How closely were music and religion intertwined for you as a child?

The synagogue was where I first sang as a soloist, and that was the beginning of my breaking the countertenor mold by accident! When I was thirteen, a cantor in our neighbourhood needed someone to cantor for the high holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and asked me if I was interested in being trained up to do it. They were offering 100 dollars a day, which was a big salary for a kid at the time…I thought ‘600 dollars for a week’s work? I’m in!’

This was a big, beautiful traditional synagogue in Brooklyn – the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel was filmed there about ten years later! The synagogue I’d grown up in was a lot more progressive, with a lot of communal singing, whereas this one was all about having the cantor at the helm and the congregation listening. So at thirteen I was taught all of these ancient musical modes, different scales and ways of chanting - and there’s no sheet-music, so it’s up to you to set the text in a way that brings it to life. 

At the beginning I was just trying to copy what the cantor was teaching but over the next seven years I really honed my artistry, learning ways of shaping text and bringing meaning. In the first year when my voice had just dropped I was still singing countertenor in the choir; I sang the whole service in my ‘man voice’ and just did my favourite prayer in falsetto. Afterwards everybody came up to me and said ‘Wow, more of that please!’. I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to do that, because we tend to associate cantors with this robust tenor timbre, but they gave me the green light and I ran with it. I had no idea at the time how much that work would serve me, but it taught me so much.

I carry a lot of that music with me to this day; it’s part of my musical soul or ‘neshama’ as we say! There are two things that it feels very important to me to present in every recital programme: the first is songs by Black American composers who are still underappreciated and the other is songs from my Jewish heritage, so we’ll be including both on the recital tour to promote this album.

How do you see your operatic repertoire developing over the next decade or so? 

My range has really opened up over the last few years: I can sing up to a G sharp and an A quite comfortably these days. The roles which Handel composed for Senesino and Carestini are the staples of my operatic repertoire, and I’m happy singing low-lying roles like Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo as well as things like Ruggiero and Sesto which sit quite a bit higher. I’m still only thirty, so who knows what it’ll be like when I’m forty-five, but for now I have the flexibility to shift between those different tessituras. One of the things I love about being a singer is that voices are always changing - part of the challenge lies in exploring the possibilities which might open up, and figuring out new ways to navigate technical challenges as the voice evolves. It’s the work of a lifetime, and I never get tired of it.