Interview, Brindley Sherratt on Fear No More

Tomorrow brings the debut recital-recording of veteran British bass Brindley Sherratt, whose forty-year career has seen him triumphing in roles including Mozart's Sarastro, Wagner's Gurnemanz, Strauss's Baron Ochs and Britten's John Claggart at many of the world's major opera-houses. Released on Delphian, Fear No More sees him joining forces with the outstanding song-pianist Julius Drake for a programme which includes Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, a sequence of death-haunted Schubert Lieder, Strauss's Im Spätboot, and songs by Ireland, Finzi, Gurney & Warlock.

We spoke last month about his 'upside-down' singing career and early training as a brass-player, overcoming his anxieties about song-recitals, and why a certain Dame insisted that he pack away his trumpet for good...

Several decades into an illustrious operatic career, this is your debut recital-recording: is song repertoire you’ve only recently begun to explore?

My dear friend and incredible singer Alice Coote said to me about six years ago ‘Brindley, you need to do some song recitals’, and I pulled a bit of a face - I liked my audiences in the dark, with the front row about eighty feet away! She said she’d talk to Julius [Drake] about it, and a bit later he came and chatted to me at a party after the Royal Opera House’s Ring Cycle; he invited me over to his house just to go through some repertoire and see what felt good. I was still a bit trepidant, but I went round one Saturday morning and we spent three hours trying things out – including Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which I’d already done with orchestra. Eventually we put a programme together, and Julius arranged for us to do two recitals back-to-back: one at Oxford Lieder and another at Middle Temple.

Two weeks beforehand, the impostor syndrome kicked in: I kept thinking ‘But I’m an opera-singer, nobody’s going to come!’. But the place was absolutely packed on both nights, and the audiences were so enthusiastic. All the things I’d dreaded – the intimacy, remembering my words and seeing the whites of people’s eyes – turned out to be the things I loved. Seeing the whites of people’s eyes means that you can see if they’re really enjoying it. And that revealed another thing which is particular to basses: if I go down to a really low note at the end of a song (like in 'Death and the Maiden'), you see the excitement on their faces!

And I liked the flexibility of just having the two of us. Julius let me be myself, and he encouraged me to find different colours in my voice: I’d never needed to find soft colours before at all, so that was a voyage of discovery for me. Then we decided to put these songs down on disc - so here I am pushing sixty, singing the heaviest, longest roles in the biggest opera-houses alongside recitals. It’s a bit bonkers, but I quite like it!

I enjoyed the recording process as well, once I’d got past my own mental baggage…I’ve been singing professionally for nearly forty years, so inevitably my voice sounds lived-in: I’m not a fresh-voiced thirty-something on the way up, but I think a lot of these songs work well with a more mature voice. I’ve always taken huge risks with my career anyway, and this was something I really wanted to do just because I’d never done it before.

Have you revisited the orchestral version of the Mussorgsky since making this recording, and if so how did it feel?

I sang them again with orchestra in Madrid last October, and it’s actually much more exhausting because even the soft passages have to be on a larger scale when you’re in a big hall with a big orchestra: the Shostakovich orchestration is very heavy, so I had to big everything up to bring the text out. They’re exhausting songs to sing anyway because they’re pretty relentless, particular the last one: it was originally written for tenor, but whatever key you do it in it’s just going to kill you!

How much Russian repertoire did you have under your belt before making this album?

Not a huge amount, actually. I’ve sung Prince Gremin [in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin] everywhere for years, and the longest role I’ve done in Russian was Pimen in Boris Godunov, which I’ve done in four or five productions. I’ve had several offers to sing Dosefei in Khovanshchina, but I’ve never been free – it’s like I’m fated not to sing the damn thing, and I really want to! But I feel very comfortable in the language: whatever you’re singing just sounds very dramatic, and if you’re a dark voice you feel like you’re in home territory.

The biggest danger is trying too hard to sound Russian: when I started out, I was trying to emulate people like Ghiaurov and Christoff and (although it’s a different voice-type) Hvorostovsky, and I really screwed myself over! Russian singers just seem to be built differently to the rest of us (I think they have an extra vocal chamber back there!), and once I got away from that and made it my own it was vocally healthier.

Strauss's 'Im Spätboot' was a lovely discovery to me: what’s the story behind it?

It was originally an orchestral song: one of three which Strauss wrote for the chap who created Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier, which is why I recorded it. (The other two were slightly too long to fit on the album, but they’re great too). I chose the Schubert songs because he wrote them in the bass clef for the bass voice: I didn’t have to transpose them down, which is what we nearly always have to do to make things work. I did transpose some of the English songs, but the Schubert and the Strauss fit straight off the peg rather than being hand-me-downs from baritones!

Did you always sing as a bass, or did your voice-type shift over the course of your career?

My singing career is so upside-down, because I came to singing late anyway, then I didn’t start doing opera till I was 37. When I first started singing lessons I was definitely more bass-baritone than bass: the top came relatively easily at that stage but I couldn’t sing very low. Someone said that I could have a decent career as a bass-baritone and that kind of excited me, but having tried it for a while things settled down and then I joined the BBC Singers, so you're either a first or second bass! Now I’m definitely a bass and the voice has got heavier and more powerful over the years.

As a late starter, do you feel you missed out on any of the more youthful roles in the bass repertoire?

Definitely: I'm slightly envious of young basses who do all the young star-building roles that show you off without pushing the voice too hard. At the time when I was the ideal age to be singing young bass roles like Nick Shadow and Figaro I wasn’t really doing opera. I probably could still have sung a decent Figaro when I started out, but it just didn’t go that way: there wasn’t that buzz of ‘Oh, here’s an exciting young bass!’. And I don’t think I knew how to act a role like Figaro back then, because I just didn’t have the skills or stage-experience.

I have a lot of young basses coming to me now who complain about how boring it is until you hit middle-age, and I always say ‘Well, it’s going to be like that for about ten years…so sing lots of songs, sing Handel and do lots of concerts, because operatically it’s going to be a bit dull if you just do Sixth Gatekeeper or Fourth Spearman’. As a bass, you want to be singing your best in your mid-forties, because that’s when you get cast as all the dads, kings, priests, hermits and psychopaths! If you think of any other voice-type, starting out in opera at 38 is bonkers but thank god we can go on: I’ve never been busier in my life, and I’ve no plans to slacken off just yet.

Are there any dream-roles left on your wish-list?

I’ve only got one, and that’s Boris Godunov; I’ve always been asked to sing Pimen, which is a wonderful role, but I’d love a crack at Boris. It’s rarely done because it’s so expensive, and also it’s often cast with a much younger bass these days. 

There are also some roles from earlier in my career that I’d like to revisit, because I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time: I’d like to do another Filippo [in Don Carlos] and another Fiesco [in Simon Boccanegra]. But at the moment the role that feels like home to me is Gurnemanz: I’m in a very happy place when I sing that. I was in Munich last week doing Fidelio, and they were rehearsing Parsifal in the next studio; I popped my head round the door while they were doing his monologue and the singer wasn’t there, so I just stood there and sang it!

Having sung Pogner in Die Meistersinger, could you ever see yourself taking on Hans Sachs?

As a character, it’s just me - and the lyrical writing is just me. I would worry about Act Three, because he suddenly becomes a baritone, but John Tomlinson told me off about that: he said ‘If I can sing it, you can sing it!’. I don’t think the chance will ever come up now: I tried to sing some of these bigger Wagner roles about ten years ago (which would’ve been the ideal time) but I just didn’t have the stamina or strength to get through them, whereas now I can sing for days! It’s a tricky one, but if somebody asked me to do it now I’d seriously consider it...

You originally trained as a trumpet-player: what prompted you to switch to singing?

I chose singing as a second study when I came to the Royal Academy of Music to do trumpet, because I was so terrible at the piano! The guy who prepared me for auditions in Manchester asked me if I sang at all; my parents and sister had sung, and I’d been in choirs, so I said ‘A bit’. I had a half-hour lesson a week at college, and my teacher said it would be good experience for me to go up against the real singers for whatever operatic prize was coming up…and I won it! It was a big shock to the whole room, me included.

I won another singing prize a few weeks later, and I couldn’t believe it: I’d been slogging away at the trumpet for ten years and suddenly I was having money thrown at me for singing a couple of arias. The Academy said they could probably find me some funding if I wanted to stay on for a few years as a singer: Janet Baker was on the panel for the funding audition, and I remember her peering over her glasses and saying ‘Brindley, if we give you this money you will stop playing the trumpet, won’t you?’!

The Academy wanted me to be an opera-singer, but instead I joined the choir of St George’s Chapel Windsor; I got married, then forgot all about opera and joined the BBC Singers for thirteen years and I think some people thought I’d thrown it all away. My background as a trumpeter was very useful, because obviously I was a musician first and foremost; plus I knew how to take a breath, and I had a strong lower body. I had to do something slightly different with the air-pressure, but generally speaking I think it was a huge help: brass-players and singers both need that lower ballast, which is the source of everything we do.

Do you ever pick up the trumpet these days, purely for pleasure?

I can remember everything as clear as yesterday, but the lip’s gone: a classic case of 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak'!