Roger Vignoles

Piano Accompanist

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By Matthew Gurewitsch
Published on 30 March 2008

For Star Singers, a Worthy Partner

IN late November the British accompanist Roger Vignoles visited the Juilliard School for his first New York master class. It was not the sort of public star turn often marketed under that name, but an internal, properly educational affair. Five students sang, accompanied by five student pianists preparing for careers as collaborative artists. Mr. Vignoles scrutinized singers and pianists alike with the same eagle intensity.

The song recital, many have said, is a dying form. Seeing Mr. Vignoles, 62, in the classroom suggested that it may instead be enjoying a golden age, driven to a great extent by accompanists who are interpreters and virtuosos in their own right.

For he is not alone. These days discriminating singers have many distinctive and accomplished personalities to choose from, including Continental Europeans like Helmut Deutsch, Wolfram Rieger and Justus Zeyen and Americans like Warren Jones, Craig Rutenberg, Steven Blier and Brian Zeger. But the flame may burn brightest of all in Britain, where Mr. Vignoles leads the field with colleagues like Graham Johnson, Malcolm Martineau and Julius Drake.

The British tradition goes back to Gerald Moore, the only superstar accompanist classical music has produced. By the time of Moore’s tart memoir, “Am I Too Loud?” (1962), he had been performing and recording for some four decades with greats like Feodor Chaliapin, Kathleen Ferrier, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Yehudi Menuhin and Pablo Casals.

The book’s title, of course, drips with irony. Throughout, Moore asserts the parity of “soloist” and pianist. At the same time he enumerates the indignities of his calling: anonymity, low pay, the caprices of divas and more. In the end this is a self-portrait of a happy man, fulfilled in collaborations with the most thrilling artists of his time. Yet there was no denying the glass ceiling. It is still in place. “A well-known singer will sell the hall, whoever is playing the piano,” Mr. Vignoles said recently, “whereas an unknown singer won’t sell it even with the greatest accompanist in the world.”

The Vignoles discography — typical for an accompanist at the top echelon — ranges from Schubert to Britten, Haydn to Hahn, Purcell to Cole Porter, played for a roll call of singers that has included Thomas Allen, Susan Graham, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Kiri Te Kanawa and more.

Yet the British soprano Kate Royal, a rising star who makes her New York recital debut with Mr. Vignoles at the Frick Collection on Sunday afternoon, said she feels that the prestige of the pianists she has worked with — even as a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where Mr. Vignoles and Mr. Johnson are frequent guests — has greatly enhanced her own. Without them, she said in a recent e-mail message, she would not have been asked to sing in the likes of Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Konzerthaus in Vienna.

“I have been utterly spoilt from the word go,” she added.

The greatest accompanist of all, in Moore’s view, was the composer Benjamin Britten. Mr. Martineau concurs.

“The singer tells the story, but we make the context, setting, background and often the psychology of the text,” Mr. Martineau said in an e-mail message. “Britten had the composer’s ear for texture and for the pictorial side of what we do. If I ever make as many colors as Britten did, I shall be thrilled.”

Then there are the “real” pianists, like Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel, Mitsuko Uchida and Leif Ove Andsnes, who occasionally collaborate with marquee singers in, say, a program of Schubert. Can any accompanist compare?

“Just because someone has spent a lot of their life playing Schubert sonatas doesn’t mean they have something to say about ‘Winterreise,’ ” Mr. Vignoles said, referring to Schubert’s 70-minute song cycle of love and loss, “or that they’re offering something on a higher plane than people who have devoted their lives to examining works like ‘Winterreise.’ The technical demands are very much less than in something like Liszt’s ‘Années de Pèlerinage’ in terms of running around the keyboard or doing two extraordinary things with two hands at once. But ‘Winterreise’ requires a finesse to create color, vary articulation, and to do all that while thinking on someone else’s feet.”

There is also the matter of versatility. The Vignoles discography — typical for an accompanist at the top echelon — ranges from Schubert to Britten, Haydn to Hahn, Purcell to Cole Porter, played for a roll call of singers that has included Thomas Allen, Susan Graham, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Kiri Te Kanawa and more.

As his Juilliard master class showed, Mr. Vignoles looks beyond fine points of text and music to the secret bond between the two. “A lot of the students have gotten the message that the song is as much about the text as the music,” Mr. Vignoles said after the class. “But sometimes they interpret the text by itself, not realizing that the composer has interpreted it in another way.”

He illustrated with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” set to a monologue from Goethe’s “Faust.” Gretchen sits at her spinning wheel, aflame with guilty passion. Commentary often focuses on the piano, ominously evoking the hypnotic whirring of the wheel. Mr. Vignoles made a different point.

“You can understand very easily the implications of the song and exactly what Gretchen is saying without noticing what Schubert has done in the vocal line to make it more vivid,” he said. “He takes all these short words and makes them long. Rhythmically it makes nonsense of the poem, but it’s an incredibly expressive rendering of what she’s actually saying. If you just concentrate on enacting the emotions of an abandoned, sexually frustrated girl, you can easily miss the tools Schubert gave you to do it.” The teacher Mr. Vignoles credits with setting him on his course was the Austrian-born pianist Paul Hamburger, whom he went to privately after studies at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music in London. Mr. Vignoles introduced himself with “Schlagende Herzen,” a Richard Strauss song with a showy piano part.

“Pianistically and technically and from the point of view of being touched by the muse,” Mr. Allen said recently from London, “Roger is more touched than most, an absolute poet at the piano.”

“This was a piece I thought I really knew how to play,” Mr. Vignoles said. “So I played it, and Paul said: ‘These staccato chords. How do you want to play them?’ I said, ‘Staccato.’ And Paul said: ‘Yes, staccato. But into the keys? Out of the keys? From the shoulders? From the elbows? From the wrists? Just with the fingers?’ ‘You can do all that?’ I asked. ‘Of course you can,’ Paul said. Then he showed me. Suddenly I could see window upon window opening up in my mind.”

Today Mr. Vignoles can surprise his partner with a single chord, as the young Austrian baritone Florian Boesch discovered last October when called in to replace an ailing colleague in “Winterreise” at the Leeds Lieder+ festival in England. Mr. Boesch flew in from Germany on one day’s notice (having sung the villain in Handel’s “Radamisto” the night before), rehearsed with Mr. Vignoles for 50 minutes, rested up and went on. The concert was broadcast live.

Fifty minutes’ rehearsal for a piece that runs 70? “You can tell right away whether you’re on the same page,” Mr. Boesch said recently from San Francisco, where he was recording Bach cantatas. “Only 25 percent of Roger’s concentration is on the piano. The other 75 percent is on the singer. He listens. He’s open. He feels what you’re doing. He anticipates where you’re going.”

The introduction of the cycle’s last song, “Der Leiermann,” evokes the hollow sounds of a broken hurdy-gurdy in the hands of a half-frozen madman. Mr. Boesch’s specific request was that Mr. Vignoles play it more slowly than he ever had before. But when Mr. Vignoles struck the keys, what surprised him was the intensity of the mood. “It was uncanny,” Mr. Boesch said. “It had an awesome dimension.”

So preparation may be a fine thing, but spontaneity is of the essence. Recording the first recital in the Hyperion series of the complete songs of Richard Strauss, Mr. Vignoles and the American soprano Christine Brewer discovered that the disc was not quite filled. On the spot they added the elegiac “Allerseelen,” which Ms. Brewer has been singing since her early 20s. “All the stars were lined up right,” Ms. Brewer said in a recent e-mail message. “It was the best I had ever sung that song. It was that way all week.”

The veteran British baritone Thomas Allen, who has known Mr. Vignoles since their student days more than 40 years ago, has the perspective for a longer view. “Pianistically and technically and from the point of view of being touched by the muse,” Mr. Allen said recently from London, “Roger is more touched than most, an absolute poet at the piano.”

In direct comparisons classic recordings of Moore’s may strike listeners today as strangely recessive, inarticulate, flat. Is it heresy to suggest that his standard has been surpassed?

“My memory of Gerald’s playing is in a way very different from how it sounds to me now,” Mr. Vignoles said when asked to comment. “Perhaps it’s inevitable. One of the first recordings I had and listened to over and over was an early ‘Winterreise’ with Fischer-Dieskau. I was absolutely captivated by the sound of the piano part, which was of course greatly to do with Schubert. That goes without saying. My memory was that Gerald had this wonderful voicing of the chords and sense of rhythm and of light and shade. But maybe we’ve all gone further in the 50 years since.”

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