Ian Bostridge (Tenor) 伊安．伯催吉斯 (男高音） - 达人(bachianas)

2006/06/16 | Ian Bostridge (Tenor) 伊安．伯催吉斯 (男高音）
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Ian Bostridge (Tenor)

Born: December 25, 1964 - London, England

The English tenor, Ian (Charles) Bostridge, studied history and philosophy at both Cambridge and Oxford, where he received his doctorate in 1990. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, before embarking on a career as a singer, having won the 1991 National Federation of Music Societies/Esso Award and support from the Young Concert Artists Trust.

Ian Bostridge made his Wigmore Hall (London) debut in 1993; his Purcell Room debut (an acclaimed Winterreise) and his Aldeburgh Festival debut in 1994. In 1995 he gave his first solo recital in Wigmore Hall (winning the Royal Philharmonic Society's Debut Award). He continues to be much in demand as an interpreter of German lieder. He has recorded a series of award-winning recordings in the genre of lieder, including a recording of Schubert Die schöne Müllerin which won the Gramophone Solo Vocal Award for 1996. He has also made a film of Schubert's Winterreise directed by David Alden. On the concert platform Ian Bostridge has appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis and Rostropovich, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Sir Charles Mackerras, and the City of Birmingham Symphony under Sir Simon Rattle. His concert repertory ranges from Purcell to Stravinsky.

Ian Bostridge operatic roles have included Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Australian Opera at the Edinburgh Festival, Tamino in The Magic Flute with the English National Opera, Quint in Deborah Warner's production of The Turn of the Screw under Sir Colin Davis for the Royal Opera, Vasek in The Bartered Bride under Bernard Haitink for the Royal Opera and Nerone in L'Incoronazione di Poppea at the Münich Festival.

Despite his great success as a singer, Ian Bostridge still finds time to engage in scholarly pursuits. In 1997, he published a book entitled Witchcraft and its Transformations, 1650-1750. In 1999, he published his second book, on music and singing. He has written on music for The Times Literary Supplement, Opernwelt, BBC Music Magazine, Opera Now and The Independent.

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以下是他的一个访谈，提及他尊敬的前辈歌手——迪斯考。

Ian Bostridge

By Nina Large

The tenor talks about art song vs. opera, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the magic of mezza voce.

Ian Bostridge didn't set out to be a singer. He studied philosophy and history at Cambridge and Oxford Universities; everything was pointing to a career in academia, but he soon realized that his voice was something he could not ignore. In the years since his formal London debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1993, he has grown into one of the world's finest tenors, renowned for his intelligent, expressive singing and respect for language and text.

Yet Bostridge has said that if it were not for Schubert, he wouldn't be a singer at all. As he tells andante's Nina Large, it all goes back to German classes at school ...

Nina Large: You were introduced to German and to Lieder as quite a young boy. Can you describe what effect that discovery had on you?

Ian Bostridge: I had a German teacher who thought that the best way of learning German was to get to love the language, and one of the best ways to love the language was to sing the poetry aloud. So he'd bring in tapes of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing "Erlk?nig" or other songs, and we'd all sing together in class. Even though I didn't really understand German at that stage, it was just extraordinary — the strength of the story being communicated was so dramatic.

NL: What is it about Lieder, as opposed to, say, French mélodies, that really captivates you?

IB: I love French song as well, but I suppose German song is very harmonically strong — it's about storytelling through harmony and melody, whereas French song is, on the whole, looser and more atmospheric. I love the storytelling aspect of the German tradition.

NL: Do you think your understanding of Lieder affects the way you approach other music — particularly other art songs, such as those you perform by Henze, Britten, Vaughan Williams and so on?

IB: Probably yes — plus it's just the sort of voice I've got. It allowed me to do the Janácek [Diary of One Who Disappeared] even though the recorded tradition is of much heavier, very big Czech tenors. [That experience of Lieder] made me feel that, in a way, [Diary] is just a Czech version of the normal German song cycle. That was quite liberating in terms of opening up repertoire.

NL: It was obviously a seminal moment when you discovered Fischer-Dieskau. What is it about his style that you are most drawn to?

IB: I think there are two things. Firstly the sheer beauty of line and his honeyed mezza voce — the way he finds such beautiful colors as if he is half singing-half speaking to you. He's not afraid to sing really quietly. Secondly, he really means everything that he sings. You never feel that he is preening himself over his voice: he's always trying to tell you something really urgent.

NL: Do you feel that ego sometimes gets in the way with other singers?

IB: Yes! I won't say who, but I think that it can. In spite of the fact that Fischer-Dieskau has a beautiful voice, you always feel that the voice is at the service of the music.

NL: You have been compared to British tenor Peter Pears — do you like the idea of following in that tradition, or indeed in any other (such as Fischer-Dieskau), or do you prefer to carve your own path?

IB: I'm the sort of person who likes the idea of having traditions to work within. I feel that Fischer-Dieskau taught me most of what I know about Lieder singing, but naturally I do something different because I am who I am. With Peter Pears it's more complicated. In some sense he's created my career, in that 70 percent of what I sing is repertoire that he sang — the Britten operas, the Evangelist in the Bach Passions, Lieder, mélodie — so I am following in his footsteps in that sense. It's difficult to be objective about your own voice, but I don't think I sound anything like him at all. He's got a much heavier voice than me — it's all placed totally differently, nothing like a light tenor.

NL: Your longtime pianist is Julius Drake, though you have worked with many others, including Leif Ove Andsnes on your new Schubert disc and Jeffrey Tate on the Noel Coward disc. What are the benefits, if there are any, of working with different accompanists?

IB: I think it's important to have both things. I talk about my relationship with Julius as a bit like being married: we know each other incredibly well and can respond to each other's mood very quickly. We have a language that has developed over the ten years we have been working together and I think performances can be very free because of that. At the same time, I think it is really good to work with other people because then you get different approaches and a freshness which maybe you don't get if you always work with the same person. I'm really glad I've had the opportunity to work with all these people — and I'm looking forward to others such as [Daniel] Barenboim and Tony Pappano.

NL: Have you got plans with them that you can divulge?

IB: I think so, yes. There is a plan afoot to do some performances of Schwanengesang with Barenboim and I'm talking about doing some song repertoire with Tony Pappano.

NL: How did you find it working with Leif Ove on this new Schubert disc?

IB: I met him at his Ris?r Festival in 2000 and found him an incredibly easy person to be with — we were just on the same wavelength. We did Dichterliebe and didn't really have to rehearse very much: he read what I wanted to do and I read what he wanted to do — it just happened, really.

NL: Is it not always that easy?

IB: I think it was a particularly good collaboration — we didn't really have to talk about things, but at the same time I didn't feel like I was having just to give in to somebody else's view of the piece. It was more organic than that.

NL: Do you feel that there has to be a strong give and take between the singer and his accompanist? Or is it ultimately the singer who has the last say since he is the one presenting the text?

IB: It's difficult to say. The singer is the front man who does the theater; the contribution of the pianist to the theater isn't quite the same. There are the singer things like saying "Well, I can't do it like that because I don't have enough breath," and so on. But there are different relationships with people and different ways of reaching a balance.

NL: What are the similarities or differences in your approach to song and to opera?

IB: I try to bring a sense of theater to what I do on a Lieder stage — it's really like a minimalist, monologue theater. It's more difficult [to take an approach from Lieder] on the opera stage because a lot of opera becomes overblown in the process of putting it into a big house with a big orchestra. So you need a very sympathetic conductor — too often orchestras play too loudly and don't observe the dynamics written in the score.

Also, I think a lot of opera singers think that what one does in Lieder recitals is a bit fancy-schmancy, so they sing full on and never use mezza voce. That's definitely not what composers wanted — you only have to look at what they wrote in correspondences and what they wrote in the score. The whole idea of piano or pianissimo that is so quiet that you have to strain to hear it is foreign to the opera house on the whole — and it needs not to be. There are conductors like Daniel Harding or Tony Pappano who really understand that, but then there are others who maybe don't quite so well.

NL: You tend not to repeat operatic roles. Why is this?

IB: It's just the way it has worked out. I don't do very much opera, one or two a year, so it's nice to find different interesting projects. I've been so lucky with a lot of the productions that I've done; I've felt very committed to them and not wanted to do them in another way. I was offered Peter Quint [in Britten's Turn of the Screw] somewhere else, but having done Deborah [Warner]'s production, I didn't want to do it.

NL: The new disc of Coward songs is quite a departure for you artistically. How did that come about?

IB: It had been talked about for a long time, but I wasn't really sure; it was really Jeffrey [Tate] who made it possible by going through songs with me and making me realize how good they were. And also, they said that if I didn't like it we could bin it!

NL: Did your enjoyment of acting and the dramatic song affect your performance of the Coward?

IB: In a funny way it didn't, actually, because they were less theatrical than a lot of the Lieder repertoire that I do. They were much more of a café style. The main thing was not over-characterizing them and finding a lightness of touch. The thing I can't bear is opera singers singing pop music and making it overblown.

NL: Are there any plans to do the Coward in recital?

IB: Not at the moment ... I might do some as encores, though.

NL: Are there any particular works you are really burning to learn and perform or record?

IB: Most of the things I want to do are there at the moment. I was very keen to do Monteverdi's Orfeo and that's happening with Emmanuelle Ha?m in January 2003. With the Lieder stuff, I can do what I want, really — I am going to do some Brahms next year, something which I haven't done so far.

NL: What about in the longer scheme — is there anything that you are particularly waiting to do?

IB: I suppose I'm waiting to do [Captain Vere in] Billy Budd; I've talked with Daniel Harding about doing it together at some point. I really want to do Zauberfl?te in German — I've done it at the ENO — and again that might happen with Daniel Harding. In terms of Handel operas, Tamerlano is planned with Emmanuelle Ha?m — [Bajazet] is a fantastic role for a tenor.

NL: Do you find your academic background, the natural scholarly inquiry, informs your approach to new works?

IB: It depends. If I'm interested in the genesis of the piece and I want to know about the period that it's written in, then I will read around it. But sometimes I'll just learn the music, fall in love with the tune and get on with that.

With the Janácek Diary of One Who Disappeared I actually did less research, since we did it first as a theater piece in English and most of what I developed about the piece came out of the process of rehearsal — and I'm actually very loath to turn that into an intellectual process. I've always had a tendency to treat theater too intellectually, to think that if we find out the intention of the dramatist or composer then we solve the problems. What you really need to do is find the internal logic of the work that's actually written into the piece.

NL: Do you have to consciously turn your mind off, then?

IB: Sometimes. You can't sing intellectually; you have to sing with your body. Learning to sing over the past years has largely been a matter of trusting the physical side of things and realizing that a lot of it is athletic rather than intellectual. I don't think singing is ever really an intellectual thing.

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Steve Pyke

www.pyke-eye.com/main.html; 0

http://bachianas.5d.cn/

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