No: I am not about to embark on discussion of the famous pamphlet of this title by Lenin! I’m still reflecting on my experience during the past week at the Cardiff Singer off the World competition, from which we returned home today. No doubt I will continue to find food for thought in it for some time to come.
A remarkable feature of the final evening was the disparity between the assessment of finalists by the panel of judges, and that of the audience. As a consequence of this I was thinking during our drive home today about the ways in which it might be possible to bring quite different criteria to bear in evaluating a singer’s performance. The incident that really set me thinking was the inclusion by the American finalist Patrick Guetti is his final programme of a comic American folk song. Surely, I began by asking myself, this was not expected to be a clincher with the judges, although it was hilarious to watch and memorable because of its difference from anything else in the entire competition. Then the penny dropped. There is more than one way of putting together a programme for this kind of competition.
Given the technical brilliance of the entire panel of finalists I wondered whether Guetti might have been adopting quite a different strategy. He could really have been underlining deliberately his tremendous versatility. Perhaps not expecting to win the competition, he could have been aware that the audience would include (directly or indirectly) senior people from opera houses all over the world. What he was offering them was evidence that he could do absolutely anything likely to appear in the repertoire of an operatic bass. He had already offered us the majestic but gothic horror of Wagner, and the romantic sorrow of Mozart. What Guetti was also doing was saying to those who are in the market for new members of an opera company, “It doesn’t matter what your programme might be for the coming season, you can rely on my ability to fit in and make a significant contribution. Just try me! There is nothing I will not attempt, and nothing I could not do with conviction.”
This was, in fact, a noteworthy contrast to the approach of some other competitors. Most notable in this respect was the brilliant Korean soprano Sooyeon Lee, who many of the audience expected to win. She offered us an absolutely brilliant romantic coloratura, but that was the only thing she appeared to excel at. Lovely as she was, I have to ask myself how many other singers might be around who are competing in this specific but crowded field. A recruiting director is going to want to ask, “OK: What else do you do?”
The interest of the line of enquiry for me doesn’t remain with singing. It has its resonance also in painting. There are many painters out there who have settled upon both a style and a subject-matter for which they are known. Year after year they go on working what has turned out for them to be a successful line of material. They do appear, however, to be “one-trick ponies”. Often I have wondered whether I ought to work in order to refine and develop a specific niche of this kind, but have never managed to find one in which I feel completely at home. Constantly I am wanting to experiment with different materials, new subject-matter and novel styles. Now I am asking myself whether this is a weakness or an advantage. Is it better for me to aspire to be a painterly Patrick Guetti, comic songs and all? Perhaps so! After all, my commissions have included a memorial window and a climbing wall, and the pieces I have sold or exhibited successfully have ranged over reflections on T.S. Eliot and images of Almscliff Crag.