Lieder in Pembroke: Interview with Joseph

Middleton (Part 1)
The Sir Arthur Bliss Song series is a series of performances of Lieder Music
held in the Old Library.
This term we have so far heard stunning performances from Kathryn
Rudge and Jennifer Johnston, and can look forward to the final concert of
term from Ashley Riches. All the artists are accompanied by College
Musician and highly-acclaimed Lieder musician Joseph Middleton. In this
two-part blog, he talked to Kit Smart about Lieder and music in Pembroke.
You can read part 2 for more about the Bliss series, and the intense
intellectual and musical work required to be a top-class Lieder musician.

I wondered if you could explains, for the uninitiated, what Lieder music is and
why it works so well in the Old Library?

Lieder is just the German word for songs, and it was born in the late 18thcentury and
had its hey-day in the 19th century with composers like Schubert, Schumann, Brahms,
Wolf, and Strauss. It’s a very intimate thoughtful art form. It obviously involves
voices, but unlike opera where you have a set and lighting and lots of other characters,
with Lieder you tend to just have one voice, no set, nothing at all, just a voice trying
to convey poetry set to music, in its most refined form I think. The voice is often
accompanied by just the piano, and the piano part is of equal importance to the voice,
often commenting on the subtext of the poem.

Lieder works brilliantly here because Pembroke has a stunning venue, the Old
Library, which is the perfect size for this type of art form. Most Lieder by composers
such as Schubert and Schumann were written for the home, and would have been
performed for perhaps 12 or so people, and for this reason it lends itself to quite small
venues where singers don’t have to push their voices, they can sing comfortably and
with their primary concern being for the clarity of text. So it works brilliantly here
because the Old Library is just the right size and it suits voices really well. Voices
can sing as softly as they like and the room helps it still to speak, and they can sing
really full and it doesn’t get overblown. It’s a really good space and I find when I
travel all over the world doing concerts, and particularly in the states where they love
a large concert hall, for instance the Lincoln Centre, trying to play a song written for a
group of 12 people to a two and a half thousand seater room, it takes on a completely
different life. It’s not necessarily better or worse but its certainly different. I suspect
most singers who enjoy singing Lieder would prefer to sing in a room like the Old
Library. It just feels closer to the composer’s intentions.

There’s a Pembroke Lieder scheme, what is that about?

So every year we audition singers and pianists who are perhaps looking to go to a
music college for postgraduate study, and the Lieder scheme is meant to be something
of a bridge. It introduces them to the type of work they might do if they end up doing
a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall. So if they get
onto the scheme they get coaching from me twice each term, and I also invite in
highly respected singers to work with them, so it’s a great way for them to meet
internationally acclaimed stars at the top of their game, and work with them in a small
space where it feels very safe for them to explore different ways of singing, different
interpretations. As part of the scheme we also have a public masterclass in the spring
term and a final concert as well. It’s heartening because this is the third or the fourth
year we’ve run the scheme, and every year all of the singers and pianists on the
scheme who wanted to go to a music college got in and got full scholarships. It’s a
great form of musical training and there’s nothing else like it in Cambridge.

Of course the University offers the highly successful instrumental awards scheme, and
there’s also much provision for people who want to study organ and choral singing
but there’s nothing like this, and I think it’s a really vital thing that we do here.

Yes, that was your original task I believe, to do the non-chapel music

Yes, and it’s been great. It’s something I love doing and I know from the feedback
we’ve had that the students get a lot out of it as well. Cambridge is such an amazing
place for doing a lot of things, and occasionally it feels like people are spread too
thinly. The point of the Lieder scheme is that, rather than picking a lot of songs, they
perhaps pick ten or so songs and we really work on them in depth over the course of
an academic year. In an hour’s coaching we might do one page of one song and really
talk about the text, where it was from, why it was written, why the composer was
inspired to take this text down off his shelf and set it. So it’s working a lot with
imagination.

You’ve said before that if it’s in a different language you’ll ask the singer to read
through in English so that they really engage with the text, and I think even to an
untrained ear you can absolutely hear the difference that makes.

I think it’s really vital that singers and pianists know every single word of what
they’re singing. That sounds really obvious, but it’s surprising how many times - and
I do this as well – you get an English text, and if you speak English as your first
language, you get a general gist but don’t really dig deep into it and engage with what
it’s really about. We spend a lot of time on that, a lot of time translating the likes of
Goethe and Verlaine. I think our job as performers is to put across in the best possible
light these scores, and as clearly as we can.
Lieder in Pembroke: Interview with Joseph
Middleton (Part 2)
So coming back to the Bliss series, a lot of the people involved you’ve worked
with in the past, but who do you look for to do these recitals?

Well they’re all firstly outstanding singers with great reputations. Often I tie it in with
other concerts we’re doing elsewhere. For example Jennifer Johnston, an ex-Caius
lawyer, is coming next week. I’m doing a week of radio 3 lunchtime concerts and
Jennifer is doing one of those for me. It’s a great way for audiences here to see artists
they’d otherwise have to travel to London or Amsterdam or another major city in
order to see. Here, they can just roll out of their front door. It’s great for the artists as
well to present repertoire they might be about to perform in a really big venue
elsewhere. Often I’ve invited singers to do a concert here the week before we’re
about to do a disk or big recording.

Tying into that, this has been going for a few years now, when you started what
did you want to achieve and is it achieving it? Are you happy with the process of
the series?

I really am. Every singer who comes here asks to come back, which is really nice,
and these are not singers who need to ask for work, so it’s really lovely when you
invited someone like Sir Thomas Allen, he loved it here and was really keen to come
back. Dame Felicity Lott was also really keen to come back. I sometimes get told
when I’m doing concerts that Lieder is a hard sell for audiences because it’s an art
form that perhaps people come to later in life or need to grow into, it’s very
thoughtful and its certainly an art form you get more out of if you invest some time in
knowing what the texts mean. This is why we always have translations at concerts.

So yes, I really wanted there to be an outlet in Cambridge where people could hear the
finest artists without travelling to London, and the Old Library seemed a perfect space
for what we do.

The Pembroke Lieder scheme has been great; it’s been an awesome part of my job.
As a rule singers on that scheme haven’t worked like this before. They all have
workable voices and reasonably good piano technique but none of them have been
coached in the way that we work and a lot of them find it revelatory that this is the
way people Sarah Connolly, who worked with them last year, this is how she works,
this is how John Mark Ainsley works, in this much depth in this much thoughtful
detail, and working that much with imagination.
You’ve touched on this already, but for the completely new to this work, what
does it take for an artist to get to the point of performing in the Bliss series?

Well we have many different stages of artists coming. Kathryn Rudge, for example, is
still young, but she’s singing major roles in English National Opera, she’s on the BBC
New Generation artist scheme so she’s doing really well, but she’s at a different stage
to someone like Thomas Allen who came and is something like 70. But they all have
in common that they have extraordinary voices, that are really individual. They have
trained like athletes for years and years and years to get to the point where they can
sing, without a microphone, the most complex music and project it with seemingly no
effort. They’re often fluent in French, German, Italian, sometimes Russian, Spanish
as well. And yeah I think people don’t realise how much work goes in. They come
along and they seem so polished and poised but the amount of intellectual work that
goes in is immense. Singing the right notes, rhythms and words is a miniscule part of
the work that goes in. A lot of it is time not singing, its thinking time, getting to grips
with the character of each song, working with a pianist. We spend a lot of time
talking instead of just singing. Discussing a duo interpretation of each piece.

When you hear someone sing it seems effortless, and people don’t necessarily
realise what goes on

No I don’t think they do realise , and they don’t realise that a voice – because it’s part
of your body -is changing the whole time. It’s not like you learn to sing and then
that’s it. It’s shifting everyday so you’re always juggling and re-evaluating how your
body responds to your voice and how you use different resonating spaces, how you
support the sound with very highly trained muscles that know exactly how tense they
need to be for the sound to be supported but how free they need to be for the breath to
be free. It’s a remarkable thing that a human can do, to produce a sound with vocal
chords that are the size of a 5p piece, singing in these huge venues completely
unaided by any microphones. It’s really an amazing human feat. And then you look
past the sound they all have which is astounding, to the intellectual vigour they are
pouring into what the words mean - it’s an amazing art form.

People won’t know this because you don’t see this, it’s like watching the
Olympics you don’t realise how highly trained they are.

You can most easily compare it to being an Olympic athlete because it’s that level of
training and dedication. If you do well in it it’s the most amazing job ever but the
sacrifices are huge. There are opera singers I know who are away from home maybe
ten months of every year. I travel a lot and so every week I’m doing two or three
concerts, lots of trains and planes. It’s brilliant fun but it’s a huge amount of work.

So coming back to you as college musician, what would you hope, for a
Pembroke student, for them to get out of their time here, musically speaking?
Pembroke is going through an amazing period musically. It’s an incredibly rich place
to be. There are four of members of staff directly involved in college music, which
for a college of this size is amazing. There’s nowhere else in Cambridge that boasts
an international song series like this, so I just hope they would relish the chance to
throw themselves into all the different music making that’s laid on for them. The
great joy of chapel singing, hearing brilliant artists sing, for free, almost under their
bedrooms, the fact that they have people here with links to the outside world who can
offer great advice. There’s just so much here, but I think everybody who comes here
is so thirsty for this type of environment that they just lap it up

I want to then ask an open ended question, which is what does your work mean
to you?

It’s a great privilege to do something you love every day. That sounds cheesy but I
really do love it. It’s an amazingly privileged thing to wake up every day and choose
who you work with, what you play. Obviously there’s a huge amount of work that’s
gone into music-making to get to that point, but it’s wonderful to spend your life with
amazing music that really is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the pinnacles of human
endeavour. It’s an amazing thing to me that someone who wrote a piece some 300
years ago, can affect us emotionally today even though we never met them and may
not even be from the same country. It’s a remarkable human achievement. I’m very,
very lucky that the colleagues I work with are all similarly minded. The role of the
accompanist is an interesting one because you work with a lot of different people and
come into contact with outstanding people at different points in their lives. I work
with people in their 70s and 80s who have travelled the world and become extremely
acclaimed in what they do, to learn from them and draw from what they know is
fascinating. But then also working with singers your own age where you can learn
side by side is great. The travel is something I love; it’s amazing someone is paying
me to go to New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam. It’s pretty fun. It is a lot of hard
work, there are a lot of suitcases and ironing shirts, but it’s brilliant.

The actual art form, the music, is an amazing human achievement.