Ian Bostridge

Ian Bostridge

MAD DOGS AND ENGLISH TENORS

Ian Bostridge on the Songs of Noël Coward
Ian Bostridge's repertoire is exceptionally broad, a fact that is reflected in the wide variety of music he has recorded, from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion to Mozart's Idomeneo, Schubert's songs, and Britten's The Turn of the Screw. What these all have in common, besides the Oxford-trained tenor's rich voice, is the studious intensity Bostridge brings to everything he sings. So it comes as something of a surprise that he would record a CD of songs by the great British playwright and wit Noël Coward. What's not surprising, however, is that Bostridge has thought deeply about Coward and his music and that he makes Coward's songs entirely his own. He shares those thoughts -- and his feelings on singers from Fischer-Dieskau to Dylan to Frank Sinatra -- with Barnes & Noble.com's Andrew Farach-Colton.

Barnes & Noble.com: How did you first come to Coward's songs, and why did you decide to record them?

Ian Bostridge: I knew about Coward's songs a little bit because I've worked with the pianist Graham Johnson, who's really into Coward and showed me wonderful footage of Coward from the 1950s doing "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." And as a child I saw on television a terrible film called Star, with Julie Andrews, a bio-pic about Gertrude Lawrence. That's where I first heard "Parisian Pierrot," which is on the record.

But the idea for the album came initially from the record company [EMI]. I was slightly wary of the whole idea of anything that you might call crossover, so at first I thought "maybe" and then "maybe not," and various ideas were tried out. Then, two things clinched it for me. One was going to meet and work through some songs with [the conductor] Jeffrey Tate, who loves these songs. And he helped to convince me that they were worth doing, partly by pointing out the interesting musical things about them, and partly by giving me the sense that I could be quite free with them. It was important for me to be working with a different pianist -- someone that I didn't do Schubert or Wölf with, somebody whom I could feel a bit freer with. The other thing was that a great friend of mine, the soprano Sophie Daneman, had also enthused about Coward to me. She said, "You must do Coward," and I always said, "You must be joking." Well, she agreed to be on the disc, and that also convinced me it was a great thing to do.

B&N.com: I've read some reviews that say you don't sing the songs the way Coward himself did. But I didn't expect you to, because you always seem to sing everything in a very individual and personal way. I'm curious, however -- did you listen a lot to Coward's own records to get a sense of the style?

IB: I listened a lot to his singing, but really not to get the style -- just to get to know the songs. But I am one of those singers who listens to other singers. I've listened to Fischer-Dieskau all my life. I've listened to Peter Pears singing Britten. And I think you always end up singing things differently because you've got different material to work with in your vocal chords.

B&N.com: I found your comparison of Coward with Kurt Weill (in the CD booklet note) to be rather intriguing. One usually thinks of Coward as the height of elegance and suavity and Weill as sharper-edged and more pointedly ironic.

IB: Well, Coward was definitely influenced by Weimar cabaret, and I think he learned a lot from Weill, and he even seems to have learned Brechtian technique. [Take] the placing of "Twentieth Century Blues" within Cavalcade, which is a sort of ghastly patriotic show all about trying to redeem the First World War. It seems to say: We've come through this terrible time, and now we're all British and everything's jolly good. Then at the end there is this scene of total chaos, and this song "Twentieth Century Blues," which is succeeded by a succession of T. S. Eliot–like broken images, a crescendo of noise, and then the lights come up and it breaks into "God Save the King." And that particular moment seems to be a sort of brilliant adoption of Brechtian technique -- but in reverse. Instead of having cynicism with little bits of sentimentality, you have lashings of sentimentality with this tiny bit of cynicism.

B&N.com: Your repertoire is so broad, but what about outside the classical realm? What do you like to listen to for fun or relaxation?

IB: I listen to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and that's it, really. I mean, I listened to the pop music of my youth. I was at boarding school, so I had to listen to lots. But I really love Bob Dylan. He's the one person I find really fantastic, both as a singer of songs and a user of words -- and I mean not just as a writer of words, but as a putter-across of words.

Billie Holiday is wonderful, as well. I've got a double album of hers I play for my son all the time. She does such subtle things -- weird, non-vocal things, like little catches in the voice which are so brilliant -- things you long to do in classical song. I listen to Frank Sinatra, too, because it's the model of how to sing that style of music -- with a subtlety that's like Fischer-Dieskau's [in lieder]. But I find Sinatra's whole persona very difficult to relate to. He could be such a bully, and I can't get away from that -- which is stupid, because he's an artist.

October, 2002 Andrew Farach-Colton