IN November 2002, the once great American soprano Kathleen Battle toured Australia. Eight years before shehad been fired by the Metropolitan Opera in New York for "unprofessional actions", but she continued to terrorise her piano accompanists in recital concerts. When the pianist for her Australian tour resigned, Sharolyn Kimmorley stepped in.
Pianist Piers Lane and singers Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright
Kimmorley is a vastly experienced accompanist and opera coach, and no stranger to diva antics. "I knew what her reputation was, which is why her accompanist walked," she recalls. "But some innocent part of me believed that nobody could treat a colleague like that."
Battle could. The soprano, it seems, regarded Kimmorley not as a colleague but hired help. She alternately ignored and bullied her on stage, stamping her feet, beating time, sighing extravagantly. "Whatever I did was wrong," Kimmorley says. "It was a hideous experience. And it got worse as the tour progressed, as it became clearer that the audience was sympathising with me. I did my yoga breathing and tried to get on with it, but it was vile."
Audiences watched, aghast, as Battle's behaviour completely overshadowed her singing. The stage had become a gladiatorial arena, but the fascination was more than that.
Battle was an anachronism, an exotic visitor from a distant past. The classical music world has lost its tolerance for diva petulance, as accompanists have carried on a quiet campaign for civil rights. Seeing a singer treat an accompanist as Battle did was like realising that the male chauvinist still existed, dinosaur that you imagined he was.
The great visionary of the accompanist's cause was English pianist Gerald Moore (1899-1987). At the beginning of his career, Moore found that the accompanist was considered "a cipher of little importance, contributing no more to the success of the concert than the cloakroom attendant at the other end of the hall". He made it his life's work to address this, firing off letters of complaint when concert presenters failed to acknowledge him in the billing, thundering "in Johnsonian style" when a bystander inquired whether he belonged to the singer or the hall: "Sir, I belong to myself."
He not only elevated the art to a new level of professionalism but repeatedly told everyone how professional he was. On an Australian tour in 1953, he was so voluble on the subject that a stranger phoned him in his hotel room, saying Moore "ought to be ashamed of myself, that everybody was getting sick of the sight and the sound of my name".
Moore continued talking and playing, undeterred, and wrote a definitive text, The Unashamed Accompanist, alongside numerous entertaining memoirs. He elevated the status of the accompanist and paved the way for those who followed, including the great Australian pianist Geoffrey Parsons (1929-95).
Parsons is generally recognised to have been a superior pianist to Moore. (Worn down by a lifetime of comparisons, he could not help acknowledging this occasionally, remarking that "Uncle Gerald's fingers do let him down sometimes".) But as Moore's anointed successor, Parsons was grateful for his achievements. "The idea that an accompanist is like a mindless piece of blotting paper who just soaks up whatever is directed to him is a thing of the past," Parsons said. "Gerald Moore saw to that."
This month, Australian audiences have several opportunities to witness the accompanist as neither cipher nor blotting paper. London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane is on tour with singers Peter Coleman-Wright and Cheryl Barker for Musica Viva.
And Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau is visiting Adelaide for the Festival of Accompanists, held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Accompanists' Guild of South Australia.
The guild was established in 1983 by pianist Diana Harris, who found that despite Moore's good efforts, the word accompanist was still "almost a term of derision: you were better seen and hardly heard".
A similar view was expressed by English pianist and composer Harold Craxton in a 1960 article for Time magazine, in which he declared that the greatest praise for an accompanist was: "You must have been good tonight, I did not notice you were there!"
Such a remark suggests that the ideal accompanist is a type of musical butler, discreet and invisible, and that the intricate piano parts of the great lieder tradition exist only as background, to flatter the singer or point them in the right tonal direction.
Never mind the psychological complexity of Hugo Wolf's lieder, realised harmonically in the piano parts; or the songs of Franz Schubert, in which the pianist creates the rustle of linden trees or the whirr of a spinning wheel; or the beginning of Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, in which the singer supplies the words and the piano the ambivalence.
There is little danger that Lane will remain unnoticed on stage, performing songs by Richard Strauss, Wolf, Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn with Barker and Coleman-Wright. Lane is a fine accompanist and chamber musician, but he is best known as a soloist.
"Piers is still a concert pianist first and foremost, and the songs we have chosen for this tour reflect that," Coleman-Wright says. "They are very big piano pieces and are very much about the counterpoint between the voice and the piano. He has such an extraordinary technique that whatever you throw at him, he will be able to manage it."
Moore used to get territorial about piano soloists venturing into accompaniment; Parsons was more open-minded.
When Lane began his career, his manager urged him to cut out accompanying, and pianist Graham Johnson warned him that trying to play solo and accompany was "like bisexuality: perfectly possible, but other people find it hard to cope with". Parsons told him there was no reason he could not do both, which came as a relief to the young Lane, who was "greedy for a little of everything".
"A totally solo life can be a bit isolating," he admits. "I have always enjoyed the social aspect of making music with other musicians and friends. And I love poetry and words and languages, so song accompaniment indulges that passion in the nicest possible way."
Melbourne pianist Stephen McIntyre is taking part in the Festival of Accompanists this month alongside Martineau and confesses to a similar passion. Although McIntyre has enjoyed a versatile career as a pianist, he harbours a fantasy of "lots of captive singers and 10 years of doing only vocal accompanying. The piano and vocal parts are so interesting; the meaning of the words is fascinating."
It does sound a delicious use of a decade: imbibing large quantities of poetry and music each day, performing with that most flexible and thrilling of sounds, the human voice, to whose condition man-made instruments only aspire.
In his memoirs, Moore remembers an early word of advice from Landon Ronald, erstwhile accompanist to Nellie Melba: "Stick to accompanying, it is one of the most delightful of all tasks in music."
And Moore did have a delightful life, as he performed with the 20th century's most important singers, from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Kathleen Ferrier. Of Fischer-Dieskau, he writes that "we are musical intimates with a complete understanding, and in the course of our preparation each is vividly alive to the reactions of the other". Such a vision of musical paradise reveals the closeness at the heart of these relationships, in which much remains unsaid. A great accompanist's intuition sometimes approaches the telepathic.
"You have to second-guess the singer, know in advance their mechanism, how they breathe, how their minds work," Kimmorley explains. "You have to be one step ahead."
Coleman-Wright speaks of a similar intimacy with Lane. "You have to have a good friendship with your accompanist, so you get to know people's idiosyncracies and strengths," he says. "With someone like Piers, who we have been singing with for such a long time, we know each other so intimately: he knows our voices, we know his instrument. It's very collaborative."
Coleman-Wright has also worked with Martineau, whom he describes as "a different sort of accompanist. Malcolm is also a wonderful pianist, with a huge knowledge of the repertoire, but has chosen to specialise as an accompanist. He is happy to be in the background but, nonetheless, you have this incredibly strong support."
At the Festival of Accompanists, Martineau performs with New Zealand bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu and judges the Geoffrey Parsons Award, a $6000 prize for young accompanists.
"To be an accompanist requires a combination of flexibility and integrity," Martineau says. "You must be versatile but must not lose what you want to do or your sense of the musical truth. If the singer has done their preparation, and is committed and emotionally honest, then there is always a way through. Most singers do have an instinctive truth."
At the festival, Martineau will be joined by McIntyre and Sydney-based David Miller for a series of masterclasses on the accompanist's art. Many of the skills of the accompanist can be taught, such as pianism, style and balance. Others are more difficult to convey, including diplomacy, intuition and empathy.
Parsons claimed to belong to the "old school that believes consideration for the singer is one of the most important things an accompanist has to do. Their instrument is prey to all sorts of ills so they sometimes get a bit edgy and need reassurance." Martineau makes a similar point: "You have to understand that it is a dangerous thing to be a singer, and be tolerant and aware of that."
Lane considers it the accompanist's job "to provide a calm centre during the storms of the singer's various neuroses".
All of these accompanists are great charmers; alongside their exemplary musicianship, they have the ability to make a singer feel loved and safe on stage.
It is a rare singer who cannot be placated by these versatile artists, gifted at the interpersonal and the musical, as Kimmorley found to her astonishment. Still recovering from her battle with Battle, six years later, she cannot subdue the empathy of her calling.
"Finally, I feel sorry for her," she says. "She was clearly not a well person." Her unforgivable sin was only that Battle noticed she was there.
The classical music world has lost its tolerance for bad behaviour from petulant divas, as accompanists have carried on a quiet campaign for recognition, writes Anna Goldsworthy | May 24, 2008
Article from: The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23729929-16947,00.html
Grandma with the newest member of the Yong family - Baby Duncan!
