Someone painted April Fool...

Several years ago, when I first started this diary, in fact, I was preparing for a recital that stretched me vocally in unexpected ways, mostly having to do with stamina. The first part consisted of lute songs (with my husband on lute), a genre that I used to be really good at. Renaissance and baroque performance practice generally demand a lighter, straighter sound than one expects from later vocal music, mostly because the instruments doing the accompanying are very delicate themselves. I have no idea what singers sounded like in the 17th and 18th centuries (no one does, no recordings having survived from that time), but the “purists” seem to think it was a simpler, less technically-developed sound than we have today. It’s true that with the advent of bigger and louder instruments, and especially the romantic orchestra, singers had to become more powerful to be heard over them. But this still gives us no indication of whether or not they were loud prior to this.

Anyway, to continue, the rest of the programme consisted of Rossini opera arias my husband had arranged for soprano and guitar, followed by the guitar solo piece Rossini had written which incorporated these same songs in a fantasy-like way. The composer wrote several of these compositions, but we chose just one to present at this concert. It is extremely virtuosic and demanded a great deal from my husband as a performer.

The arias themselves were also quite demanding. Only one of them was in the original key (“The Willow Song” from Otello), and that is more for mezzo than soprano, relying on the singer’s middle tessitura rather than dazzling upper. One other piece was for mezzo and the rest were for tenor. These he transcribed into more compatible guitar keys, and they also fit well into the soprano range. There were five in total.

To say they were difficult is an understatement. They were extremely difficult. It wasn’t just that each one was technically demanding, but there were five of them, one after another, with no respite in between. In a real opera, the singer delivers a blockbuster aria and then gets to rest for a while before delivering another. Not so in a recital situation. What happened was that I developed incredible muscle, what I called “Charles Atlas of the voice”, in order to have the stamina to pull this off.

What ended up happening was that the lute songs suffered. Instead of being delicate and renaissance sounding, they were heavy and loud and not at all in keeping with what we expect from that era. They sat firmly in the middle register and came out sounding beefy. Even the other voice teacher commented on how low they were. In fact, they weren’t low at all. It was just the quality of my voice that made them sound that way.

I bring this up because I am now working on a recital programme which is once more doing interesting things to my voice. This time, instead of singing Rossini and lute songs, I’m belting out blues tunes in my chest voice, pushing the limits of that register so that I sometimes feel I’m on the verge of screaming. This only happens in one song, actually, one of my husband’s compositions. I would love to sing it in full voice, but he likes the way it sounds in chest, and that’s where it has to be for this concert. Of the nine songs I’m singing, four are in full voice, four are in pure chest, and one is in a combination of the two. I wasn’t consulted as to the arrangement of these on the programme, so most of the chest ones end up in the first half, which I guess is not a bad thing.

The timbre of my middle voice is changing, not when I’m singing in my chest voice, but when I go into voix mixte. I can only attribute it to the techniques I’ve been developing so that I don’t tire singing the other. When teaching my tenor and bass students, I often sing along with them in their registers as much as I can, but I’ve never done it as consistently as I’m doing now.

It will be an interesting recital. Never before have I had to use so many different colours during the space of an evening. The audience won’t know what hit them. Those who only know me as a “classical” singer will be kind of shocked, I think. I just hope I can pull it off. At least I’ve got the dress for it.

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