TEN YEARS ago, I asked Dame Janet Baker who, among the new generation of young singers, she would single out as the brightest rising star. Would she, I wondered, nominate the tenor Ian Bostridge? The mezzo Alice Coote? The baritone Simon Keenlyside? She replied, firmly and without hesitation: “Gerald Finley”.
At that time the Canadian baritone was making his mark at Glyndebourne but was hardly a household name. Yet within the past decade he has conquered the Royal Opera as Don Giovanni, the Met, the Opéra de Paris, made his Salzburg debut, and created the lead role in three of the most important new operas at the turn of our new century.
When I met him, Finley had just completed two weeks of rock-climbing and kayaking in Wales with his family, the mezzo Louise Winter and their sons Daniel, 12, and Steven, 8. And he was on his way to Edinburgh to perform two Mahler song cycles with the Rambert dance company. He had double-packed, ready to go straight on to Helsinki for the Finnish premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin.
Tumbling out of his briefcase were scores of scores, including a new work by Mark-Anthony Turnage: a compilation of First World War poems he’d set in a new song cycle called The Torn Fields. He will perform it with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in its London premiere on October 6.
It is Wilfred Owen’s Disabled survivor who haunts the heart of the cycle, and sets up immediate resonances with Harry Heegan, the hero of Turnage’s opera The Silver Tassie.Finley sang Heegan at English National Opera when the opera had its big success there. He remembers: “During rehearsals of the Tassie, Mark-Anthony came up to me and said he was writing a piece for ensemble and baritone, and he’d really love me to do it.”
The Torn Fields was premiered at the Berlin Festival in September 2002. “People were stunned by it,” Finley remembers. “Mark has an uncanny sense of knowing the time, sensing the pulse. This cycle coincided with the upsurge of interest in First World War literature in the 1990s. He wanted to invest in the knowledge and the sensitivity that people were acquiring, and to offer a new end-of-the-century view.”
The poems pack such an emotional punch that Finley wondered how Turnage would handle the text without allowing the music to overwhelm it. “He just let the poems flow through the vocal lines. He has incredible confidence in allowing lyrical communication to deliver the text, without any need for melodic or rhythmic distortions.”
And there was more Turnage poking out of Finley’s bag: a score called When I Wake. “That’s a setting of Dylan Thomas — and, I have to say, it was originally intended for another singer.”
A peek at the title page reveals a dedication to Bryn Terfel. “That performance never occurred. But the London Philharmonic wanted to do some new Turnage, and I’m so excited that it’s fallen to me.”
So how did the choirboy from Ottawa become one of the world’s most wanted baritones? You could put it down to rock-solid training, combined with being in one or two significant places at the right time. And with a rare sense of ballasted self-awareness.
The first conjunction happened when he was singing with an Ottawa church choir at a choral conference visited by Sir David Willcocks, grand old man of King’s, Cambridge, and of the Royal College of Music. Finley had an uncle who was once the organist of Westminster Abbey and who knew Willcocks. Finley was auditioned there and then, and invited to the Royal College.
“I arrived in London too early for the RCM term. I was just in time for the Oxbridge choral trials.” But Finley failed miserably the trials for the music course at Oxford, and ended up reading modern languages at Cambridge. And singing in King’s College Choir.
“Suddenly every dream I ever had was realised. In Philip Ledger’s last year as music director there, he was generous enough to give me the solo bass part in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and I found myself sitting in a row with Ian Partridge and Janet Baker. For a 21-year-old, how could it get better?”
Well, it did. Finley turned down an offer to join the Kings Singers, and took up a three-year opera course at the RCM, just at the time that the college’s Britten Theatre was being built. He was cast as Bottom in the opening production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That same year he was invited to join the Glyndebourne chorus, and he began to be offered solo roles.
And then things jarred. “I resisted a lot. I realised I just couldn’t sing. I had very big problems. I started a desperate search for help but no one had what I needed. Then my agent, Tom Graham, said, ‘Well, who do you really like?’ My hero was then Samuel Ramey. So he said I should simply go off to New York and study with Sam’s teacher.”
Finley slept on a cousin’s floor and trained like a footballer. “Hours a day on one or two notes. I was so excited — learning to use the vocal muscles and my bodily frame in a way I could always rely on. And it happened. I found a new strength, solidity, reliability.”
After a series of Mozart roles at Glyndebourne, Finley was itching to turn to contemporary repertoire. In 1998 he went to Los Angeles for Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Then came Saariaho and Turnage. But what about those Romantic roles at the centre of any opera singer’s repertoire?
“Tony Pappano at the Royal Opera asked me why I wasn’t doing Verdi.” Now Finley will sing his first Germont at Covent Garden in the new year’s La traviata. And he’s also singing Eugene Onegin at English National Opera and Letzky in The Queen of Spades at the Royal Opera.
“My next adventure will be with Peter Sellars and John Adams in Dr Atomic: that’s my focus for next year. I’m only frustrated that there isn’t more space in my life to be able to do everything I want to do.”
