Well hello I'm Steven Devine. I'm 
one of the principal keyboard players
for the Orchestra the Age of
Enlightenment and I'm currently sitting
in my kitchen in deepest, darkest Kent.
Across Skype, I am absolutely
thrilled to be discussing life the
universe and everything with the tenor
writer and general all round intellectual
thinker of music and life
Ian Bostridge! So, good afternoon Ian.
Hello - what a nice introduction. I'm
sitting in my sitting room - which is
where you're supposed to sit - in darkest
Kentish Town. Darkest Kentish Town - very
nice. As you'll probably have seen by the
time this goes out - by the way for those
that think that all this is seamless
technology -  this is the second attempt
we've had of this since our first
attempt which sort of went slightly
wrong due to the vagaries of the
internet which I'm sure is a problem
that everybody across the world is
having at this precise moment as the
world struggles to do meetings on Zoom.
But we also have input from our
principal horn player Roger Montgomery
who can't join us for this but really
wanted to put certain things in place so
he very kindly has recorded the prologue
and the epilogue to the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and
Strings and we'll see him around. Anyway
so yeah so here we are in lockdown again
How weird is it for you? I mean do
you have lots of things that you can be
getting on with or is life stopped for
you or how does it work? Well I've got
lots to be getting on with and I mean at
the beginning of the whole process I
thought 'well this is a jolly good thing'
because I get to spend more time with my
family and I can go for walks on Hampstead Heath with my children and I can write
the lectures that I hadn't been
spending enough time writing but as time
goes on and it becomes more and more of
a question how we're going to start up
again, it slightly gets to
one but I mean you know people are
coming up with good ideas. I mean
somebody this morning said to me
maybe we'll have repeat concerts with
half full halls. It means
maybe the concerts are a bit shorter and
you have a six o'clock concert and an
eight thirty concert and you do the same
program twice
but then you've still got to clamber over people
haven't you - I don't know. But actually you
know, there's a lot of the music that you
do, I'd imagine the Lieder aspect of it,
and a lot of the music that I do,
particularly on the quieter end of the keyboard spectrum the clavichords and the
harpsichords, actually it might
suit a smaller venue doing
something twice that's not a bad idea.
Just rethink
concert going thing I like that.
I think I might do that anyway - I think
it sounds a really great thing. So I mean
you mentioned lectures you've obviously
written books in the past.
Is this the next thing for you? Writing
lectures and will these be published?
I've done some lectures before
I did a lecture at the the
Center for the Study of Dance - bizarrely
because I know nothing about dance - in New
York but I found out something and try
to relate dance to what I do because
they wanted to have a non-dancer talking
about dance.  I gave a
lecture in at the University of Trondheim,
the inaugural Nicholas Breakspear
lecture. Nicholas Breakspear was the
only English pope, Adrian
the Fourth, and they wanted for me to
to talk about the importance
of Latin. But I managed something
but I also discovered the Nicholas Breakspear was a very good singer and that
was one of the things people found
particularly attractive about his
spirituality. It was mediated
through his voice so that was nice.
But these lectures are for the
University of Chicago - a series sponsored
by a family called the Berlin family and
they are they're going to be about three
different pieces of music which
sort of somehow relate to the themes of
race, gender and death. So the first piece
is the Chansons Madécasses of Ravel, the
second piece is Frauen-Liebe und Leben of
Robert Schumann and the third piece is
the Holy Sonnets of John Donne by
Benjamin Britten. With the first two
it's partly an issue of, you know, an
issue of how identity is
mediated through song.
How worked up do we get about 
colorblind casting or  - we seem to get
less worried about it in say, an
opera, because there just aren't that
many people who can sing Othello. I
mean, you'd never cast nowadays - unless it
was as a gimmick, with an all-black cast - 
 maybe
you'd cast a white Othello,  but in a
play generally you would cast somebody
black or Moorish or whatever - you
wouldn't go for colorblind casting but
in Othello, because there are very
few people in the world who can sing Othello
you have to take what you can
get. That has been an
issue I think in the
sense of how do you present the role in
that context. Anyway Chansons madécasses is
a song, a set of songs, based
on poems - prose poems - by Évariste de Parny who
wrote them in the 1780s and
he said he was just translating
them from the Malagasy which he probably
wasn't but he certainly knew a lot
about Malagasy culture but
they are about Malagasy life and they're
also in the second song
they're a sort of protest against
against attempts at colonization and
they're very fierce and in a sense very
political and anti-slavery, anti-
colonization. They almost have a taste of
of the famous political thinker of the
1960s, Frantz Fanon. They're that
sort of violent.  But at the same time the
agency is afforded to these opinions
through the medium of a Creole but
nevertheless white, colonial poet.
Ravel, a Frenchman who was
semi implicated in colonialism simply
by being part of that society and
who can or should - should we
sing them shouldn't we sing them - who
should sing them? What's going on? And I
want to sort of explore those issues in
a way that doesn't offend anyone. Because
I mean it's one of
those areas where - I mean it's the same with
gender  - with Frauen-Liebe und Leben
the first
performance of Frauen-Liebe und Leben was by a
man actually. The poems are
by a man, the music's by a man.
They make people
feel a bit queasy because they seem to
be very sexist but if you explore them
more
you can find out that they're not in the
context of the times unduly sexist.
There's some quite interesting
things going on with them and also
I will probably
at the beginning of the lecture sing one
of them and is that weird?  And people
do sing them now. Matthias Goerne has sung them
To sing a song about being
pregnant is  interesting as a
man.  But it happens when all the
women sing men's songs from
Schubert and things like. I mean you
you get the same slightly odd
crossover. Somehow the gender
displacement of women singing a man's song
because of this eighteenth century
tradition of men playing women
on the stage, it doesn't feel quite so
weird.  I don't quite know where I'm going with that one
I've often wanted to reclaim a lot of
repertoire that's usually sung by
women. It's usually repertoire
sung by women in the voice of a man
so I've sung Scheherazade,
Les nuits d'été which is very often sung
by - but you mentioned the other day -
Silete vente is usually sung by a soprano but
it's really nice to - I mean I found it
really incredibly fun to sing it -
And with these lectures are on incredible subjects  - is this
something that you've been thinking
about for an awfully long time or is
this something that you've been
commissioned to think about or
just where does your interest in
particularly the Ravel, where does that
come from? I got to
know the Ravel a long time ago when a
great, wonderful singer a friend of mine - Ruby Philogene whose parents
are Afro-Caribbean -  and this was 20, 25
years ago, gave the most incredible
performance of these songs in the
Wigmore Hall and to
have Ruby stand up in the middle of this
very very - certainly at that time -  very,  I
mean there was a time when John Burt
said the BBC was hideously white and
there was a, there's a real sense that that time the
Wigmore Hall was a very middle
class, white -  I mean it now
works incredibly hard to reach out as an institution
it was very shocking to
have
somebody stand up and sing 'beware of
the white people, habitants of the
shores.' She's such an
amazing singer. It's such an incredible
performance and that lodged in my brain
I suppose. We then, around that time,
were going on to do a staging by
Deborah Warner of Diary of One Who
Vanished by Janacek which has in the
figure of the gypsy, a sort of racial
element going on, because one of the
things that's shocking for the people
for whom this piece came out in the
early 20th century, was the sort of
relationship between pure
racial Czech peasant boy or Wallachian peasant boy and a gypsy who had dark
skin.
Race isn't something you often
confront -  certainly in the  Lieder
repertoire - not really much in the
Baroque repertoire.You do a lot in
nineteenth-century opera because
exoticism and colonialism are a huge part
of 19th century opera
I didn't perform
them for ages and then
about two years ago at this wonderful
festival in Italy called La Foce I had
got the opportunity to do them with
Christian Volterra playing cello and an
Emmanuel Pahud and we did this
performance and I just loved the pieces
but then I thought to myself what
does it mean for me what did he mean
when the poems are written in the 1780s
for this slave - basically this man
from a slave owning family to write
these poems. What did it mean for Ravel
in the middle of the 1920s, commissioned
by a social reformer Winnaretta Singer,
Princesse de Polignac
commissioned so much chamber music also
in the middle of you know the phase of
Parisian culture called 'negrophilia'
where you know Josephine Baker was
dancing and people were going crazy
for African American jazz and for
Afro-Caribbean, African American,
French African people on stage - maybe it's a reaction
against that, the movement in the 1930s
called Negritude which was the first big
movement of  blackness as a
political issue - different from
Fanon who I mentioned before
I got asked to
do these lectures and I was rather
intimidated by the idea because the
other people who'd given them -  I mean the
first one was was Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and then after that there were sort of
people who worked on issues that
connected very much with politics
and global warming and I was
thinking God am I just going to give
another lecture about Winterreise and
then I suddenly thought about about Chansons madécasses and I thought it's
quite a
dangerous subject in a way
and then the other things came out of
that I think  - brilliant well, sounds
amazing
absolutely what a thing and and did you
say in the last conversation that these
will probably be published at some point?
Yes these will be published by Faber and
University of Chicago Press next
year assuming that anything is happening next year
We're obviously talking on here 
because we were due to be performing
together with the orchestra - a really
fascinating program of Restoration Music
in the first half and in the second half
Warlock's Capriol suite and Britten's
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. In
your experience, do you sort of like this
juxtaposition of two different genres or do you
have to put your brain somewhere
else in the interval? I like it because
I feel in one sense - I feel I'm
aware of style but on the other hand I
feel I sing the same whatever I sing.
I mean it's all about projecting
emotion through text and music and I've
always been interested in the idea about
mixing these things up. I
did a season at the Wigmore
some years ago called Ancient and Modern
where we had early music and
so-called modern music  in
the same program and you know I even
tried to sort of break down
the barriers by getting the modern music
to be played but on early instruments
and trying to get the same
players to play in both halves but in the end
the Union rules were too
strict
They aren't really Union rules but you
know what I mean it's all it's more
complicated than you think they're gonna
be. Even the practicalities are more
difficult
That's the thing isn't it - shifting the
stage - I
mean I wanted to
have a modern piece and an ancient piece
in each half but of course we couldn't
do that because it was too complicated
in terms of shifting everything around
so yeah I love
that idea of mixing mixing it up
There's
obviously a big crossover with things
like Britten really you know being such
a passionate advocate for Purcell's
music.
What do you think of the
Britten realizations? I mean how does
that sit in your repertoire, being
such a sort of experienced singer with
period instruments and with someone
like Julius Drake?  Well I've always
loved one particular realization - The
Queen's Epicedium I'm which I was
introduced to years ago by Graham
Johnson when he did a complete recording
of the Purcell realizations and at the
same time I was singing the Holy Sonnets
of John Donne a lot and it
really seemed to connect with
the force of them and the weight of
them and the gravity and it's
funny going back then and singing with
more delicate forces
In some sense it's a
different piece
but I love some of them and some of them
I find a bit tricky. 'Music
for a While' I like the Tippett because I
think it's a bit more true to the
material somehow. I know that from my
experience as a keyboard player that
having played a million auditions when
the Tippett and Britten
realizations come onto the piano, I know
that the thing I find interesting is
that it changes the relationship between
the keyboard player and the singer
because as a continuo player on the
harpsichord I'm used to sort of just giving
the singer what they want and reacting
so if you change something
on the spur of the moment I can but obviously
if you've got a written down realization
whatever quality you've got
to play it so you're gonna have to wait
for my little flourish here to
support that. So that's the only thing
that I find tricky about them but I must
say that the artistry, I think,
and it's actually the Queen's Epicedium
is the one that I do think is the
most successful because the composition
is such -  it's not a verse song, it's a
through composed, very complex, very
speech rhythm based piece. I
think that's where he really excels so
it's absolutely amazing really 
No, I think it was
fascinating talking to Roger Montgomery
our principal horn player about this
because he told me of course as we
did when we first spoke about this that
one of the fascinating things is that
this is a period of Benjamin Britten
that we actually have recordings for of
course. We've got not only
documentary evidence we've even got the
pictures and the TV program to prove it
and we can see what happened. Roger was
saying that one of the interesting
things is that the the actual horns that
we used during Britten's lifetime have
changed and actually I think we've got a
clip about Roger talking about the horns
which is probably a good time
to do now. One of the interesting
things about playing this piece is not
only do we know so much about the
performers but we have recordings and
can even see and play some of the
instruments that were used for these
recordings and they told quite a story.
Dennis Brain, the virtuoso horn player
for whom Benjamin Britten wrote the horn
part originally played an old 19th
century French piston horn that was
largely superseded in Europe and was
becoming obsolete in England but the
next time he recorded the work he was
using a rotary valve German horn
essentially a modern horn. These
instruments can be seen and occasionally
played in the libraries
of the Royal College of Music and the
Royal Academy of Music respectively but
it does raise the interesting
question in original instrument
performance which is - which one is
actually appropriate for the piece? It's
not a question that's easy to resolve
given that the composer and endorsed
recordings using both of these
instruments. Sadly this performance won't
be going ahead on Friday but it does
spare me having to make the
choice between a modern instrument or
modern style instrument and the old
instrument.
However I have recorded the prologue and
epilogue on one of each so you can hear
the difference hopefully.
Another advantage of having recordings
is that what might ordinarily be a moot
point of interpretation can easily be
settled. For example, in the prologue and
epilogue the horn plays using the
uncorrected natural harmonics of the
horn in F. Two of these in particular are
hauntingly out of tune.
That's the written F which is easily
interpreted as the eleventh harmonic
thus -
And a bit later
Now the next one that he writes is
written as an A and that's a little bit
harder to interpret on the face of it
because there is no harmonic that
relates directly to A in a harmonic
series and in choosing whether it's the
note below it or the note higher
it in the harmonic series you can easily
make the wrong choice. It'd be more
natural to pick this note - than this one - which everyone
who knows the Britten Serenade knows is the
right way to play it. But that's not what
Britten actually wrote and there are
very few interpretations of this work on
record where people pick the lower
option.
Roger's been doing a lot of work
about what instruments to use
and we were starting to explore - before
unfortunately the concert had to
be postponed -  although I do think we get
to do it next year I think  - the same
thing - in the far east at least, let's keep
our fingers crossed with that one.
Korea seems to
have dealt with it very well so maybe
I mean it's so
wonderful in Korea - that enthusiasm for
so-called classical music is so huge
I think this is the
latest that the OAE has ever gone
forward in terms of repertoire and
performance practice of course - working
out kind of what are we trying to do
with this.
Because we have this documentary
evidence I mean, you must feel it really
strongly that we've got Peter Pears
obviously with such a distinctive style
of performance and such a
strong association with the work for
many people as much as anything else. Do
you feel that weight? Do you have Peter
Pears on your shoulder thinking 'I've
got to do this because he does it all'?
How does that affect you? I think I
did when I started doing the piece and I
did it an enormous amount in my early
years. It was one of the first pieces
I did - before I became a professional
singer - that I did in public- I mean a
full-time professional singer - so I
I did it a lot and I
listened to Pears a lot and I always
loved particularly the recording
from - the studio recording from the
forties with Dennis Brain - and not so much
the later one because I thought the
voice was a bit more - I don't
know - weird. A bit more of that curdled
quality that he sometimes has. There's this
incredible freshness about the first
recording but the more you
sing a piece and also the older you get
it's
one of the things about interpretation
actually - I mean- people talk about
interpretation. Some people are
singing teachers - I've never
been a singing teacher because I
wouldn't really know how to teach
technique but you give master classes if
you're someone like me and master
classes are supposed to be about
interpretation but of course such a huge
amount of what you do with the piece is
down to physical - I mean they're to do
with who you work with obviously but
there are two physical factors which
really affect what becomes available to
you interpretatively. The first of which
is the basic feeling and basic
sound of your voice and what it's doing
and then actually acoustic and you
often find you come up with new
interpretations in different acoustics
because it allows you to-  you feel you
can do different things.
It's what you get back from the
room.
Even now I'm relearning how to sing
the Britten Serenade because it got
quite easy 
but certain moments were a bit
scary at the beginning but listening
back to old recordings and moments that
I thought was scary were actually
perfectly okay and so as I got older the
voice has got heavier - it's become
more anxiety ridden and now I'm working
on it again and
finding new ways of singing it with
what's essentially a slightly different
instrument.
That's always a thing with singers isn't
it - as you get older,  female and
male singers,  that as you get older the
actual instrument changes because
physically you change and so
that must be quite an interesting
thing I mean -  I would imagine scary
because I know what a harpsichord
feels like - it's been the same one for
15 years in here but you guys
I suppose you've got to
rework with it all the time and see whats
it's gonna do. And you don't want to lose
the things that you know
that you do well. Like - you know
soft
mezza-voce singing 
but on the other hand if the voice is
getting bigger you've got to cope with
that. But the nice thing is
about the voice is you know sometimes
you can think 'oh god -  it's just a
slow decline from here on in' but I always
remember one of my earliest singing
teachers saying 'oh yeah the voice
gets better and better until you're in
your 50s' and then my new singing
teacher the other day said 'oh yeah your
voice just gets bigger and bigger until
at least 65' so you know you just feel
new possibilities are offered as long as you engage with
it. I've been sort of backing off it I think a bit and
thinking 'oh well this is the way it is'
and it's really nice to find -
again it's one of the nice things about
lockdown - as long as there's some work
after we finish - that I found new things
and new ways of using my voice. And are there
things already that you feel you can do
better or even at all that you couldn't
do when you were younger? Well I had
this thing the
other month where I sang Schwanengesang in an opera house and the
Intendant of the opera house was 
 going to another opera
house and planning
Lohengrin in three years time, said
would you sing Lohengrin and 
basically I was sort of polite and then I
went and asked various people and they
said - 'No you're right - no'
Then I went to this new teacher
and I sang a lot to him
and he said 'Well if you'd asked me cold I
would have said
how ridiculous but your voice has changed.'
Maybe I will never sing
Lohengrin but there are
possibilities out there -
different things for me to do because
the voice is a bit different.
Well it's very exciting. Have we heard
something that's a
possibility for Bostridge of the future
here? Well maybe what about OAE doing Wagner? Have you done Wagner? We've
done Wagner, yes we did Rheingold- 
a very, very well received Rheingold
with Rattle at the Proms a number of
years ago and there's bits and bobs
coming up in the season. I'll let
them put it on the screen if I'm missing
something terribly important. It's the
thing of not being briefed properly
isn't it but - there we
go we'll stick that in the mix
This could be exciting! Your
association with the orchestra goes back
a number of years and actually our association goes back for
the same degree. We've done some
very happy collaborations which I'm very
proud of. We've done some Bach, we've
done some Handel - the aeforementioned
Silete venti - I think I
remember the very
first concert I did with the orchestra
which again was before I
became a full-time singer.  I had
to stand under the stage in the Queen
Elizabeth Hall and sing a bit of Zaida
with - would it have been Adam Fisher or
Ivan Fisher? Probably Ivan at this
stage. So that must have
been like 30 years ago
singing in the dark. Before my time definitely!
We did a very happy concert in Poland in
Katowice didn't we last year and
just before you went for a major surgery
I seem to remember. Yes, I went under the
knife or under the extremely vicious
electric saw which opened up -
gave me - what do they call it - 
anyway they opened up my ribcage and
fiddled around with my aorta and
wrapped it up with something.
It was very good because
they didn't have to do any of the things
they used to do like stop your heart or
put a new valve in or or give me
warfarin so I'm as good as new except I
have a
have a very interesting scar on my chest
which could be good for Parsifal actually -
 I like this fishing
for work - I think it's great. So have you
been back full strength since then? Yes.
That's amazing.
It all started up again in September slowly
then very busy from October and then
suddenly in March everything went
kersplat. Somebody's looking out for you - giving you a
rest in the middle of it all.
Don't overdo it too early.
Great news that you're better -  I'm really
pleased to hear it
I think we were about five/six days
before you are going into it
Terrifying - well you wouldn't
have known for our concert anyway
The thing I remember about that and was
looking forward to and I'm still looking
forward to is that when we did the Handel
and particularly Handel,  I seem to remember,  we
talked quite a lot about
expression and ways of expression and
phrasing and how we did things and it
was really interesting but
when we did Purcell together we kind of
just got on with it. We just did it. 
Very little discussion. Is that
because you and I think the same way
about it or do you think it's just the
actual nature of the music is much more -  I
hesitate to say prescriptive -  but I don't
know? I think maybe it is but I think
also there's being
used to performing with each other and feeling breath and phrasing
and in the same way. I can see
what you mean about Purcell being more
prescriptive.
All the repertoire we did for
that -The Queen's Epicedium -
Purcell is so precise
about his notation in some ways and
it's quite easy to over
interpret it which actually that's
something that doesn't seem to happen
here which is rather wonderful
It was a very happy
collaboration I look forward to quite a
lot a lot more of those 
Well Ian thank you so much
for talking to me.  I hope that we all
meet again very soon in the flesh as it
were. I look forward to performing
together - I hope we get to do this
concert which is a wonderful program.
Thanks so much
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
