Fresh-faced Nicky Spence makes his stage debut with ETO this season, touring 1,000 seater venues from Truro to Perth. But this is something of a departure from Spence’s usual territory: he’s more used to singing to audiences of 12,000 in Wembley Arena and to Lorraine Kelly on GMTV.
You see, Spence, 23, is “the Scottish Tenor”, a one-time tattie boy at a chip shop in Dumfries who signed a £1 million, five-album recording deal with Universal Classics and Jazz while still a student at the Guildhall School of Music. His crossover credentials are impeccable: the debut Spence album, My First Love, is a deft mix of Verdi, Handel, Braveheart and Robbie Burns, and it scurried up the classical and pop charts.
Now Spence wants to take the serious opera stage. Why? “I want to have a long career as a tenor,” he begins. “And I want people to know that I’m a proper singer, that I don’t just sing with Katherine Jenkins on the TV.”
To succeed, Spence will need to bridge two hitherto exclusive worlds: crossover and core classical. And he is not alone – others are crossing the bridge in the other direction. EMI is pushing two artists from operatic backgrounds. The soprano Natasha Marsh, 32, has had rave reviews at Holland Park Opera and created the title role in Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre in 2000. But this year “The Voice of Romance”, as she is known, released the Amour album: Monteverdi meets the theme from Il Postino.
Alfie Boe, 33, came up through the Royal Opera’s Young Artists Programme and has sung at Glynde-bourne in a memorable Albert Herring and La Bohème. Next year, he sings in Strauss’s Elektra at Covent Garden. For now, though, he’s promoting Onward, an album of uplifting hymns and anthems.
The vocal demands of these two worlds are vastly different. Opera singers are not amplified; they rehearse a role for weeks, frequently mastering a foreign language libretto. Concert singers such as Jenkins and Russell Watson do not sing without a microphone. Their energy is spent on promotion and projecting their own personalities.
Nicky Spence still takes singing lessons at the Guildhall, but he gave up a place on the school’s respected opera course to devote time to his recording career. Instead of two years to refine his voice and dramatic instinct, Spence is learning on the job.
Clive Timms, head of opera at Guildhall, has lost other young singers to the “lure of instant fame”. Those operatic hunks G4, for instance, cut short their studies. “The question is, will Nicky develop, learn and achieve to the point he would have in full training?” asks Timms.
Already, Spence is finding ETO a stretch. He has taken on a heavy package of roles. Besides the lead in Spirit of Vienna (Johann Strauss), he is singing in the chorus of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and he understudies Belmonte, one of Mozart’s toughest tenor parts, in The Seraglio.
Even James Conway, ETO’s general director, was puzzled to see Spence auditioning. “I did think, he’s got this amplified career, a CD to promote; does he want to tour every night for ten weeks?”
The UK crossover market is huge. Total classical album sales were worth an estimated £65 million last year and crossover accounts for a huge chunk of that. Mark Wilkinson, general manager, marketing, at Universal Classics and Jazz, home to Katherine Jenkins, Andrea Bocelli and Bryn Terfel, says: “A core Mozart release by Bryn will sell in the high tens of thousands. A crossover album [for instance, Terfel’s Simple Gifts, which recently picked up a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album] easily sells one million.”
The record companies evidently believe that the serious opera world bestows kudos. And with kudos comes a longer shelf life. “We are stepping into the crossover world with integrity,” says Thomas Kaurich, head of EMI Classics UK.
How exactly? Kaurich assures me that Boe and Marsh were free to choose their album content. Nevertheless, Marsh’s Amour, with its bland arrangement of Gymnopedie 1, sounds like British Airways first class: comfort, familiarity. Boe’s Onward is all epic strings and massed choirs. Neither sounds a million miles from Russell Watson.
“Well, when is Russell Watson appearing at Covent Garden?” asks Kaurich. “Afie’s fans or Natasha’s fans can look forward to that.” This is especially odd given that Marsh is currently supporting Watson on his stadium tour. It reveals a kind of inverted snobbery: my crossover’s better than yours.
Besides, Boe has had to turn down roles because he’s busy promoting his album. Instead he’s supporting the Fron Male Voice Choir tour in a neat piece of cross-promo-tion. “I’m not making any trade-off,” asserts Boe, whose next stop is Kismet for ENO this summer. “I want to make records. As long as I’m singing good music and I’m legitimate to myself, I’ll do it.”
I can’t help thinking that serious opera houses might be reticent about employing crossover artists. Timms at the Guildhall agrees: “I imagine it is not something they’d put on their CV for a serious role.”
There’s a snooty undercurrent in the core world. Spence employs a separate agent to book his classical stuff. He has certainly got the determination. But I’m not convinced that the two worlds will ever truly meet. Before they find a new middle ground, Spence, Marsh and Boe face a mammoth juggling act.
“I pray that people can see that I’ve got integrity,” Spence says, as he heads back to ETO rehearsals. “And I pray that people don’t judge me.”
Nicky Spence sings with English Touring Opera, from Mar 15, www.enlishtouringopera.org.uk
Source: The Times online
