Alfie Read online

  We’d end up going to the local village pub after the show for a couple of pints, then the following day we’d drive to the next venue. We were living in bed and breakfasts. Meeting the villagers in beautiful little places like Glenuig with a loch right in the middle. You never knew what to expect, driving through that country. You’d go around a corner in this big white minibus and you’d be faced with half a dozen highland cattle blocking the road, and you’d have to manoeuvre through them really slowly. It was brilliant. And everybody got on because we were doing something really fun, really productive, and you never knew what you would be greeted with from one night to the next. The driver, David Monroe, was also the pianist, and we became really good mates, partied a lot. At one point, we stopped off at a petrol station and I bought a tape of the Royal Scots Guards Highland Bagpipe band. It was the only music we had for the van. Well I thought it was funny. After 13 hours of this bagpipe music all the way from Thurso to Glenuig, David finally whipped out the tape and threw it out the window. A couple of guys didn’t get on and had a fight at one point, but when you’re living on a bus for three months that’s gonna happen. On the whole it was one big party, I have very fond memories of that time. And after I finished I signed up for another Scottish Opera job, another two months on the road, doing an opera gala concert. And that was fun too. And then I went on to Glyndebourne, to do La Bohème for the first time.

  I’ve done La Bohème four times now, and in some ways I’ve connected to it more than anything else. I’m a firm believer in the notion that those roles find you, it’s not something you can calculate. You know when the right one comes along.

  The first time I’d heard La Bohème I was 7 or 8. My brother Michael, who was in his early 20s, had bought a highlights album of the Thomas Beecham production, an old 33, with Jussi Björling and Victoria de los Ángeles. Michael was a big opera fan, he was the only one in our family who was really. He’s a sign language interpreter now, but he’d gone off to the seminary to be a priest when he was about 19, and it was there that he discovered he could sing, because he joined the choir. And he brought his passion for opera into the family – a lot of Maria Callas, but I specifically remember him playing me this La Bohème record. It didn’t quite compete with my burgeoning love of Elvis but I really enjoyed listening to it, I loved the singing. Then later, when I was in the D’Oyly Carte and had to study ‘Che Gelida Manina’ to get into the Royal College of Music, I bought a specific La Bohème CD that somebody had recommended. It was exactly the same recording Michael had played me, it transported me right back to our living room.

  La Bohème happened for me. My voice was suited to the role, I identified with the character, and with that bohemian existence. At the time, when I got the job at Glyndebourne, I was a pretty poor young student, living in that Miss Havisham attic in Barnes, which was very Bohème. Rodolfo actually comes from wealth – he talks about his millionaire uncle; if he’s struggling for money he knows he can write a letter and get some sent from his family. But I could certainly identify with that bohemian life those guys live, trying to make do with stuff, nicking food. During the third year of Royal College, me and my flatmate Simon would go into the supermarket on the way home, and shoplift basically, because we were broke. We stole a whole chicken once. Rodolfo and his friends like their wine, and they get excited about a big fish for dinner. We had beer and a big chicken.

  At Glyndebourne, David McVicar moved the story from 1840s Paris to a contemporary London bedsit – it was a great new interpretation of the piece. I have a lot of respect for David for doing that, taking that risk, because it was relatively early in his career as a director. In the scene with the fish dinner, he had everyone snorting coke as well, just to make it a bit more relevant to today’s students. Rather than just everyone going crazy for a bit of fish. Colline comes back with some coke, and everyone has a line and they all burst into this ecstatic dance – the music tells the story. So they’re all wired up, and Musetta walks in and tells them Mimì has collapsed and is dying. And it heightens the tragedy, instantly flipping from excitement and joy, this crazy release of energy, to absolute disaster. And during rehearsals, the singers in the show, you could tell they’d not really had any experience with coke because they didn’t know how to react after supposedly snorting it. A couple of them acted like they were stoned.

  I’d done coke once or twice so I had more of a clue. There was one ridiculous night with a friend of mine a few months earlier, during our National Opera Studio days. It was the last day of the football season, and we drank ourselves silly in Soho, ended up in someone’s flat in Walthamstow, slept on the floor, and the next day we went to this dodgy old pub to play pool. My friend had some coke and I snorted a line on the top of this toilet cistern, then came back to the table and said, ‘Do you know what mate, this doesn’t really do anything for me. It really doesn’t do anything for me at all, it doesn’t affect me, I mean I’d rather just drink beer, I’d rather have a pint, a pint makes me feel more excited than this, this doesn’t do anything for me, I can’t see the fascination at all . . .’ And I just carried on talking like this all the time, a million miles an hour, ‘This is rubbish, it has nothing to do with me, I can take it or leave it,’ it just went on and on and on. We were there all night. We got a tube to White City to go home to my friend’s flat, came up the stairs, sat on the pavement for a bit and just crashed out. We woke up there on our backs, the BBC studios across the road looming over us. All a little surreal. So I knew something about coke, but I didn’t say anything in the rehearsal, just danced erratically on stage on my own, which was kind of bizarre, and David McVicar told the rest of them to stop acting stoned.

  I played Rodolfo very subtly in that production, quite youthful. The audience could watch the beginning without assuming the story would go down his path. Marcello was played as a boisterous sort of rocker, Schaunard was a complete clown, and Colline was very suave and sophisticated and brash, the guy who played him was pretty muscular too. My Rodolfo was more submissive, a little timid, a studious, shy and retiring sort of guy, hiding behind these three dominant characters. I’ve not played it like that since. That’s the beauty of La Bohème, the beauty of the writing, and the beauty of working with a good flexible director. You can do so many different things with La Bohème, you can set it in so many different time periods, in so many different arenas. You can do it in a bohemian flat, you can do it in a travelling circus, you could do it as a rock band on tour. Each time I’ve performed it differently. The second time, for Baz Luhrmann’s production on Broadway, I played him pretty rocky, quite wild, scruffy, messy. And years later for the ENO, I’d aged and played him stronger, more dominant. Also of course it depends on who you’re playing with, it depends on everyone else’s interpretation, how you react to their portrayal of their characters, all of that. You read that when you’re just rehearsing with somebody, you develop it and you find your character.

  I’d love to do a La Bohème movie. Everyone thought Baz would do one, but Moulin Rouge was a sort of homage to it anyway. There was a silent one in the 1920s, and there have been films of the opera, but the story is so strong and the music is so good, you could actually do it with the orchestration and have the dialogue translated and spoken as well, maybe some songs here and there. ‘Musetta’s Waltz’ would bring the house down, there’s a lot you could do with that cinematically. I’ve been working on a script with Sarah. Still a lot of work to do on it, a lot to rethink, but I know where I want the production to go, that’s what I’ve been concentrating on. It’s set in contemporary London. With the recession wreaking havoc, people out of work, the immigration issue – to me it all fits with La Bohème.

  So I’ve always connected to La Bohème, and doing it on Broadway changed my life. But working with David McVicar on that first one was great, he was really supportive, and Glyndebourne went fantastically well – it was my first real major role in an opera, and what a role to do. I learnt it inside out and had a lot of
coaching on it, a lot of training. Glyndebourne’s quite an event, it’s beautiful. You make a whole day of it, get your spot in the field, middle of the countryside, watch an opera, and then there’s a 90-minute interval where you have a picnic and then come back drunk to see the second half of the performance, inevitably making for a more wired atmosphere. The Christie family, who run it, are wonderful. I’ve played there three times I think, and it’s always a good time, it’s like being on a holiday camp. I loved that production. I felt I was really starting to make a name for myself, and to work for Glyndebourne on that level was immense. It was also filmed for Channel 4, it went out on Christmas Day, which was even a bigger deal than I knew. Because, unbeknownst to me, Baz Luhrmann’s people were watching, and they were making plans.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

  At the time I thought my Rodolfo was a good performance, but in retrospect it was pretty juvenile, my voice hadn’t yet grown enough to suit that repertoire. Technically, structurally, emotionally. Add to that the fact that I was a nervous wreck because it was the first big thing I ever did, and because I just wanted to do it correctly all I was really singing was an imitation of what I’d heard on the CD. More or less. Now I feel I’ve made it my own, I can sing it my own way. When I did Jonathan Miller’s production in 2009 my voice was in a completely different place. That’s just how the voice works, how it grows, which is why opera singers are invariably older than the characters they play, and keep singing into their 70s, because their voices need time to mature for the music. I found a great singing teacher while I was working in New York later on, Bill Schuman – he’s been an incredible help. He was giving me lessons every week while I was there and he seriously turned my voice around, he made singing easier for me, with little techniques and tips I hadn’t had before. It was really nice to have these little suggestions which unlocked certain doors in the voice that I’d been working on for years. He just had a different way of explaining things, and he gave me challenges, to reach certain goals by certain times, practising scales and exercises for specific ways of singing. Stuff I’d wanted to learn at college. Bill just knew the voice inside out. He developed a sound and a technique for me, it was really eye-opening. Whenever I go to New York now I call him up and get a lesson. He has his opinions on what I should be doing career-wise – ‘Why you doing Les Mis?’, he was saying last year. But didn’t they all.

  The assistant to the conductor for David McVicar’s La Bohème, David Gowland, took me through the opera, he kind of took me under his wing, I’d meet him for half an hour at 10am every day before rehearsals. During that period he was appointed to run a two-year course at the Royal Opera House called the Vilar Young Artists Programme, and he asked me if I’d be interested in joining it. The way he explained it to me, I’d get to study roles and perform principal roles on stage at the Opera House, which would be a fantastic foot in the door for me, to be staff there, a house singer. I’d always wanted to work at the Royal Opera House. He did say he wasn’t entirely sure what it was going to consist of, there wasn’t much in the way of a plan yet, but it was an exciting opportunity and I auditioned, got in. It turned out to be absolutely disastrous, and one of the most traumatic periods of my life.

  There were eight of us. We had our induction week, where we presented ourselves to the company, to the house, got to sing to some of the house singers, to introduce ourselves as singers. But they had us doing master classes with people, language classes with movement, and it was like going back to college. Not what I thought it was going to be at all, it was a real step back. Because I’d done all that, I’d done the Royal College of Music, I’d done the National Opera Studio. I’d been on the road as a singer. I’d played in opera houses in Belgium, I’d done Bohème in Glyndebourne . . . and this was back to the drawing board.

  The person running the programme with David Gowland was an Australian woman, Tisi Dutton, who was really hard, really tough with the girls. And they said their intention with the programme was to break down these young singers, strip them of the techniques they’d learnt in the past, and over the two years rebuild them and mould them into an idealistic image of what an opera singer should supposedly be like. David Gowland told me that. Instead of realising what abilities we had, and working with those abilities and nurturing them, it seemed to me like they basically wanted to slam us on the floor. I’d worked too damn hard to get to where I was for that to happen to me. I’d done a lot of training and a lot of studying and a lot of work to develop myself as an operatic artist, and I wasn’t going to wreck it all for the sake of their programme and their egos.

  They wanted to put everybody in their place. They told us how to act, how to hold ourselves, to come in every day in shirts and ties. Utterly unnecessary. I rebelled against that as a matter of principle, jeans, T-shirts, hoodies. Another guy, Grant Doyle, did the same. They didn’t say anything about it. I wasn’t trying to rock the establishment or be a troublemaker or even be awkward, I just wanted to sing without anybody getting on my back. A lot of people want you to fit in with the idealistic world of opera singing, more so in this country than anywhere else, possibly with the exception of America. Europe seems to be much more relaxed and open to classical music, because it’s something they’ve grown up with. It’s mainstream. In Italy, operatic songs and classical Neapolitan songs have been played to kids from a very early age, it’s ingrained in their culture. It’s party music for them and it’s treated as such, all the festivals blast out Aida’s ‘March’, everybody dancing to it down the street. There’s food, the wine’s flowing, and everybody’s having a good time, everybody, everybody, not just the rich geezers who can pay for seats at the opera houses – the farm workers, the fishermen, the townspeople are all out there having a laugh. Yes you have the establishments like La Scala, Verona. But even then Verona doesn’t just attract a rich crowd, it attracts everybody. It’s a spectacular venue, and sitting in an old amphitheatre in the middle of the summer is incredible.

  The attitude they wanted to drum into us on the Vilar programme didn’t sit well with me at all. Really bureaucratic, people trying to change, or at least hide, who we actually were as people, for the sake of their establishment’s image. I really don’t like it, I think it’s a low blow to the common man. You should be able to stand there as who you are, where you’re from, who your ancestors were. I auditioned for New York City Opera in 2009. I sang my heart out that day, and I sang really well. People who were listening in the wings were very flattering. The pianist said it was the best audition he’d heard in a long time, and the feedback we got from the company later on said yes, I had a very fine voice but I’d auditioned in jeans and a T-shirt. They said I wasn’t dressed correctly. I don’t get it. If I get a gig, obviously they’re gonna shove me in a costume. Why should I dress like a prima donna for an audition? They can hear my voice whatever I’m wearing. I don’t know, maybe I just didn’t appeal to them on that day, but the fact that they’d given me such positive feedback about my voice, it’s just weird. They said they’d looked into my work history and I wasn’t right for them. I’m not sure what exactly, my fallings out with teachers at the Royal College, or the fact that some of my work had been mainstream, performing on Broadway, making albums. Albums are a big deal, because once you start singing songs that aren’t classical, or you’re making records that appeal to a mainstream audience, they look down their noses at you. Until their theatres are empty and they want you to sell seats for them.

  In that induction week at the Opera House, the BBC came in and interviewed us about the new programme, and we were all told to turn up smartly dressed. I turned up wearing a sweatshirt with a Duffer logo on it. Didn’t shave, had a few beers the night before, just to make a point. The BBC certainly didn’t have a problem with it. And at the end of the week David Gowland said to me, ‘Alf, I want to let you know, I’m gonna flip my lid and shout at everybody, because I think everybody’s been really rude, really obnoxious,
really arrogant about this whole programme. But it’s not aimed at you.’ That automatically put me in an awkward position. I was part of the group, so as far as I was concerned, it was for me too. And he brought us all into a room and we stood in a line, and he and Tisi Dutton asked us what we thought of the induction week. A couple of people commented on what they thought was negative about the programme and what they thought could be improved. They were asked for their opinions and they gave their opinions, commented constructively on what was wrong. Because some things were wrong. And these singers were adults, they weren’t kids, they can say what they damn well like. But Tisi Dutton and David Gowland took it badly.

  David slammed his piano lid down and he said, ‘RIGHT! I want to say something. Every single one of you singers in this room, every single one of you is arrogant and spoilt, and none of you are capable of being here, none of you are capable of getting up on that operatic stage and being in the Royal Opera House. And until you are, you know where the doors are.’

  Well, thanks. Welcome to the Royal Opera House, this is you for two years. And from that moment I thought, ‘I’m not gonna do this. I’m not gonna work in this environment.’ I wanted to be a junior principal singer there, and I would have been satisfied if I could have had that opportunity, not even to do major roles. I would have been happy with second and third tenor roles. I wanted to develop myself as a singer, as an artist. But I wasn’t being given that opportunity. The list of roles was distributed between us all, between eight singers for the next two years of productions, whatever David Gowland deemed appropriate for us all at the time. And I got grave-digger, spear-carrier, soldier on the left. With one line to sing here or there. I couldn’t spend two years doing that. It was so frustrating, a total waste of time. The only role I was looking forward to was Pong in Turandot. There are three clowns, you work as a trio, it’s a great little role and I would have enjoyed that, but that was really it.