Susan Bickley
Mezzosoprano
“The outstanding reading comes from Susan Bickley as Waltraute, her narration providing the most completely moving part of the whole occasion. She colours her words beautifully...and her involvement reaches out as only a major artist can.” Opera, November 2010
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Susan Bickley (credit: Julie Kim) |
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Susan Bickley (credit: Julie Kim) |
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Susan Bickley (credit: Julie Kim) |
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Susan Bickley (credit: Julie Kim) |
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Susan Bickley (credit: Julie Kim) |
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Bickley sings Kabanicha in ENO’s new Katya Kabanova this month
Hilary Finch, Opera, March 2010
When Marfa Ignatevna in English National Opera’s new production of Katya Kabanova strides out of the church of Kalinovo, relentlessly nagging her son Tichon, Susan Bickley will be retracing steps that she has not taken for seven years. And that was at Glyndebourne, in a role she made very much her own. All of 20 years ago, Bickley made her first acquaintance with the role in somewhat disturbing circumstances. At the Opéra de Paris, Felicity Palmer had injured her knee, and Bickley – at very short notice, and with a six-week-old son in tow – took over the part. She seems to remember that the director didn’t like her very much, and thought her far too young for the part.
But Bickley has never been one to pass up a challenge. While preparing for David Alden’s new production of Katya at the Coliseum, she has also been learning an entirely new role: that of Babulenka in Richard Jones’s production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler for Covent Garden. ‘They’ve threatened to dress me entirely in red fur for that!’, she exclaims. Something of a gamble, then? Bickley views both Babulenka and her first Kabanicha for ENO with huge enthusiasm, and swigs down a second pot of tea.
It all seems quite relaxed compared with the year just behind her. ‘2009 was an exceptionally busy one for me: absolutely everything was back to back. I’m not complaining, of course – but it was a lot of new music, and a lot of learning.’ This time last year, Bickley found herself preparing for and performing in three almost overlapping shows: Theodora for the London Handel Festival; Katie Mitchell’s multi-media After Dido for ENO; and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio. In the Benjamin, Bickley and Claire Booth were narrating the parts of Mother, Child and Prime Minister. And the lights went out. ‘Yes – we ended up performing it in the bar – and that really was the making of it. It was rather wonderful to take the work out of its staging, and rediscover the intimacy of true story-telling, with the audience sitting in a circle all round us. In fact what we learned from that experience informed all the subsequent performances. George is so clever at writing for the voice: he’s so precise, that you’re never off the hook for a moment.’ Bickley has lived with Benjamin’s Upon Silence for many years, recording it with both Fretwork and the London Sinfonietta – and plans to perform it this year around England and Spain. The year continued with Ligeti, Berio, a new recording of Ivor Gurney’s songs, and Bickley’s first encounter with Sibelius, in a recital given in tandem with Jonathan Dove’s Swanhunter, based on the mythology of the Finnish Kalevala. It was Bickley’s first foray into Nordic song, and she now longs to do more. ‘There’s a sense of darkness there, of mysticism, to which I’m very attracted, and which suits the mezzo voice wonderfully. The trouble is learning the languages. I sang the German settings this time, but they didn’t seem to match the music properly somehow. But I love Sibelius’s songs so much that I’m willing to spend time learning enough Swedish and Finnish to perform some of the others too.’ Bickley even included an Icelandic song in her programme, on a tip-off from the tenor Eyolf Eyolfsson. Before that she hadn’t heard of Iceland’s Bartók-figure, Jón Leifs; now she’s determined to do more research there as well.
As one role tumbled over another, 2009 alone seemed a potent emblem of Bickley’s omnivorous vocal appetite – and of her curiosity, determination and stamina. ‘I do get a bit tired of people assuming that I must be able to learn quickly. I can’t, actually. I just spend a lot of time at the piano, note-bashing. It’s jolly hard work! And I do it on my own – I prefer it that way. I might go to a specialist coach towards the end of my studying in some particular circumstances. But on the whole I’m on my own: I don’t want to waste someone else’s time...’ And despite the sheer breadth and difficulty of much of her repertoire, Bickley is, of all singers I’ve ever met, the most laid-back and down to earth about The Voice. ‘I was once warned by a certain management that I shouldn’t be doing Birtwistle and Handel at the same time. For me, if you’re singing, you’re singing. I just apply what I have to the job in hand. I don’t spend time worrying about vocal health. I just don’t think about it. I don’t get bothered about air-conditioning, no – but I do try not to travel on the Underground …’
So what were the highlights of the past year for Bickley? Her first thought is the Katie Mitchell Dido at ENO, in which she sang both Dido and the Sorceress – roles she has worked with for many years. But singing them again wasn’t going to be enough. She was in it for the challenge, and Mitchell had her singers setting up and moving six cameras, six sets of lights, a sound-effects table, and three sets for three modem Dido stories. It gave Mitchell the idea for the hands-on Winterreise suffered last year by Mark Padmore as electrician, stage-manager and sound-effects. Wasn’t it hard not to be distracted from the score itself? ‘Well, we just had to work harder in order not to be distracted. Katie is usually insistent on every singer preparing the thought processes of every character long in advance – and this was the first time I’d both done this and, at the same time, had to switch in and out of character as well.’ Rupert Christiansen acclaimed Bickley’s ‘impeccable poise and clarity’ in the production. So how was it for Bickley? No hesitation. ‘We all just found it immensely rewarding.’
This show was running almost parallel with Bickley’s Irene in Theodora: as a Handelian mezzo, too, she is much sought after, and totally in her element. Her recording of Theodora with Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort is highly prized – this year she has worked on the opera with both Laurence Cummings and Trevor Pinnock. Andrew Clements has described her Irene as ‘heart-stoppingly direct, seamlessly expressive, and perfectly even in tone ... a marvel in every respect’.
And then, in Salzburg in August, there was Luigi Nono’s Al gran sole carico d’amore. This is not so much an opera as a collage of speeches, anecdotes and writings from women famed for their work in the cause of Communism. Katie Mitchell again: more film, more multi-media. ‘It rained for eight weeks; the rain was even pouring down the inside walls of the Felsenreitschule.’ But again, it was an experience she would not have missed for the world. In the first half, she didn’t sing at all, instead silently acting out the part of Louise Mitchell, the first woman on the barricades in Paris to fire a gun. Hugh Canning declared it ‘a personal triumph as both actor and singer’, and thought Bickley’s singing as the Russian mother in the second half of the work ‘among the most beautiful sounds to be heard in this uneven but fascinating score’.
ENO’s controversial Production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, by Alex Olle and Valentina Carrasco of the Fura dels Baus, is something over which Bickley would prefer to draw a veil. ‘I look forward to going to work every single day of my life – so it comes as a bit of a shock when I don’t enjoy myself. No, I can’t say it was my favourite project of the year.’ She cherishes, on the other hand, memories of her Waltraute in a remarkable concert performance of Götterdämmerung with the Hallé and Mark Elder, which Michael Tanner described as ‘the most moving and eloquent account of Waltraute’s narrative that I have ever witnessed in a concert hall or theatre’. Bickley longs to do more Wagner: a Fricka, in both Das Rheingold and in Die Walküre (something she has already sung in concert performance); a Brangaene, a Kundry, perhaps. And she also has her eyes set on one particular Strauss role: Klytemnestra. ‘I’d love to have a go at that. Some time in the future when the consequences won’t matter!’
Going back to 2004 in Amsterdam, Bickley speaks with particular passion of her creation of the role of Maria Thins in Louis Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer. Here, the challenge lay in the dancing. ‘We had to move and work with professional dancers at the same time as learning a fiendishly difficult score.’ Was dancing something in which Bickley had been trained as an opera singer? ‘Far from it. In fact I never had any operatic training at all! I didn’t want to do opera originally.’ So, born in Liverpool, her father a church organist and amateur opera conductor, what had Bickley really wanted to do? She dutifully sang in the church choir, but simply sold raffle tickets for the opera society. ‘I really wanted to be an actress. We had a very active group at school, which included people like Jude Kelly, the film-maker Clive Barker, and the impressionist Les Dennis. They all moved down to London eventually, and so did I. I applied for places at drama companies such as the Central School – but then wasn’t sure that the acting thing would really work out.’ So, at the age of 22, Bickley decided to read music at City University. ‘Everyone was expected to do a sandwich course and, as part of my time there, I was given a year at the Guildhall, with one singing lesson a week. Noelle Barker was head of singing then, and she was about the only one really passionate about contemporary music – and that was what interested me. She took me on.’
But Bickley did not worship divos or divas, and had seen virtually no opera – except for a performance of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage when WNO visited Liverpool, and that she never forgot. But all she really wanted to do while at university was to join the Swingle Singers. 'And I did – for two years. That was absolutely as far as I wanted to go.’ But she was persuaded to audition for Opera 80 (now English Touring opera), and from contacts there she found herself with an offer to audition for Roger Norrington’s Monteverdi at the Maggio Musicale in Florence. She was cast as Proserpina in Orfeo. ‘We spent two or three weeks in London, learning Baroque movement – and found ourselves in Florence for three weeks. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. And I thought, if this is what the business is all about, I’m sticking with it.’
What followed was more work with Opera 80, no end of sessions with the London Sinfonietta Voices, covering at Glyndebourne, touring with Glyndebourne – and then Glyndebourne for the main summer festival. That – in the now iconic Nikolaus Lehnhoff productions - was where she discovered her deep kinship with the Janáček roles of the Kostelnička and Kabanicha. For Bickley, Kostelnička is her favourite role of all time. ‘If I could sing that every month of my life, I’d be thrilled to bits. It really is my desert island role.’ And for Bickley, Katya’s Kabanicha is irresistible precisely because the role is not as complex and as multi-faceted as that of the Kostelnička. When we spoke just before Christmas, Bickley was musing on working with David Alden on the character. ‘It’ll be so interesting to see if David wants his Kabanicha to have any other thoughts than simply being horrid to her daughter-in-law. My feeling is that there must be some humanity in the woman, somewhere ... but then I’m not so sure.’ I mention that, in spite of Kabanicha’s constantly insulting behaviour, her emasculating of her son Tichon, her apparent rejection of all emotion, Max Brod, who translated the opera into German in 1921, thought of the woman as evil but not hypocritical. For him, she had voluntarily subjugated herself to the old order, to the Tsarist idea of absolute authority and obedience. For Brod, ‘her morality is honest in intent’. Bickley pauses. ‘Well, I’m really not so sure about that, you know. The scene with the drunken Dikoj is surely there to show that she’s not the pillar of moral rectitude that she seems. There is certainly a seedy, grimy side to her. And, that being the case, she has no right to be judgemental of others.’ And what does Bickley make of the gracious thanks offered to all by Kabanicha as the curtain falls? What does Janáček’s music tell us about that extraordinary and disturbing moment? A long pause. ‘Very difficult. I think it leaves us with a sense of irony – and of eternal ambivalence ...’
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