Back in Ottawa to sing a recital this month, I thought again of what I had written on my last visit at the end of 2023. Ottawa, I had learnt, was chosen to be the Canadian capital city in the late 1840s partly because of its location “far from the border with the United States and surrounded by impenetrable forest”. “This most peaceable and peace-loving of capitals,” I burbled on, “was born out of thoughts of a future war which now seems utterly unthinkable.” The war of 1812—in which British forces had burnt down the White House—was a living, if distant, memory, and tensions had rumbled on through the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. These days, no one is, of course, really thinking about a war between Canada and its mighty neighbour, but the geopolitical order we all (sort of) took for granted as recently as 2023 has been upended. It has been a Canadian statesman, Mark Carney, who has drawn the lessons. “The middle powers,” as he put it, “must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Fee-fi-fo-fum.
I flew west across the prairies, over the snowcovered Rockies, to Vancouver, beautiful Vancouver, bathed in sunlight and garlanded with flowers. Vancouver’s name has a jumble of associations. George Vancouver—his father was Dutch—had sailed with James Cook on his second and third voyages, searching for the fabled Terra Australis and the longed-for Northwest Passage. He became one of the first Europeans to see Hawaii where, notoriously, Cook was killed by angry islanders, his body ritually dismembered and distributed to local chiefs in a mark of gruesome respect.
Vancouver went on to mount his own expedition to the Pacific Northwest. There, he explored the possibilities for colonisation and settled a dispute with the Spanish which ended with Vancouver and his interlocutor, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, agreeing to “name some port or island after us both in commemoration of our meeting and friendly intercourse that on that occasion had taken place”. Hence the Island of Quadra and Vancouver. As Spanish influence waned, the Quadra was eventually dropped, and it was known just as plain old Vancouver Island. When the railway reached the Canadian Pacific coast in 1886, railway bosses decided to borrow the name Vancouver for the newly incorporated city on the mainland. Vancouver is justly celebrated for its incredible location between the Pacific Ocean and those snowy peaks. The food is to die for.
Vancouver is celebrated in my world for the VRS, the Vancouver Recital Society, founded on a hope and a prayer and 10,000 Canadian dollars by the South African émigrée Leila Getz. Since then, it has grown into one of the major North American presenters, introducing the likes of Bryn Terfel, Cecilia Bartoli and Yuja Wang to that continent’s listeners. I’ve sung for Leila three times, but this time I was arriving to collaborate with a new Vancouver venture, Nebula Performances. It’s the brainchild of pianist Wenwen Du and entrepreneur Alice Chee and aims, in the first place, to help young musicians bridge the intimidating gap between conservatoire and performance. Nebula also aims to nurture the love of chamber music and song in a world where possibilities sometimes seem to have narrowed since Covid-19.
The late, great baritone Ben Luxon told me, in his mid-fifties, that he’d only just worked out what ‘support’ was
I came to sing, with Du, a very challenging programme—challenging for performers and for the audience. Settings by Hugo Wolf of the most metaphysical and melancholic poems of Goethe; and Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, full of sin and love and death, the composer’s response to his visit to Belsen in the summer of 1945. No lollipops here and, in a packed Vancouver Playhouse (just a little bit bigger than London’s Wigmore Hall), the music seized an audience that was unusually young for a Lieder crowd.
I also came to teach. I’m not really a “voice” teacher but, in coaching repertoire as I do, you can’t really avoid engaging with the technical side of things—with breath, the diaphragm and the “mask” and the “passaggio” (the awkward bridge between registers, between “chest” and “head”, which classical singers have to manage in order to create a convincingly seamless sound without great clunky gear changes or vocal strain). I never used to find this stuff interesting, and I remember the late, great baritone Ben Luxon telling me, in his mid-fifties and after a glorious career, that he’d only just worked out what “support” was. It remains a bit of a mystery, different things to different people, and I won’t join the controversy here. Suffice it to say that, after 30 years of professional singing—and people are usually surprised to hear this—I still have a teacher, the miracle-working David Pollard, who helps me to find new sounds and colours and approaches. All through our lives, as our bodies change, the voice changes too, and a singer has to negotiate the ever-shifting possibilities.
The other surprise is how much teaching teaches the teacher. This is true in so many areas of endeavour, of course; but it’s nice to feel, quite palpably, that a bout of teaching makes me sing better.
