One of life's many cliches that borders on irritating vapidity, depending on the context, goes roughly:
"When one door closes, another opens."
That principle kind of applies to the St. Louis Symphony's concerts this weekend, where one work on the program is the song cycle
Les Illuminations by Benjamin Britten. Originally, when the 2013-2014 season was announced, the scheduled vocal soloist for the Britten work was soprano Christine Brewer, a local gal (Lebanon, IL) made good in classical music-land and a very popular and much-loved guest artist with the orchestra.
However, this weekend, the soloist is not Brewer, but the tenor Nicholas Phan. Thereby hangs a bit of a tale, with 2 (maybe 3) potential losers involved. Also, if you paid attention, you might think it odd that a tenor is subbing for a soprano in a song cycle. But more on that, and elsewhere, below the flip.....
The announcement that Brewer was pulling out of her scheduled 2013-2014 SLSO dates came back last July, in this post by Post-Dispatch classical critic Sarah Bryan Miller on her "Culture Club" blog on the P-D's site. Miller noted:
"....Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced a spring 2014 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music with real singers in leading roles.
Two of them have been announced so far: [Christine] Brewer, one of the world's great dramatic sopranos, will sing the role of Mother Abbess, and the splendid American soprano Elizabeth Futral will portray the Countess.
The bad news is that the LOC gig created a conflict for Brewer with her previously announced date with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra May 9 through 11. She has withdrawn from performing Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations; tenor Andrew Kennedy will take her place."Now, this is a fairly innocuous announcement in of itself, as these kind of changes and conflicts happen all the time. About the door cliche thing, the situation here would be that Brewer's withdrawal created an opening for Kennedy, who is a very fine British tenor and appeared with the SLSO once before, also in a Britten work, his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.
However, that in principle, this double-booking could have been mitigated, had the right people made the right moves, per this later blog post by Miller a few months later, in early September. It turns out that apparently Brewer's agent at the time, Alison Pybus, is the loser in this one, according to Brewer:
'"My agent multi-booked me," said Brewer in an interview last week. “It makes me look like a big jerk.”
Brewer said that she told her agent, Alison Pybus, now vice president of the vocal division at IMG Artists, that "I have a really long-term relationship with the St. Louis Symphony, and that's very important to me. I sing there every year. (Music director) David (Robertson) lets me bring sixth graders to closed rehearsals. It's a big, big deal for me. I asked her to talk to people and find a way to make it work, but she just let the ball drop."'
Brewer then took action, per Miller:
"It wasn't the first time there had been problems, but this was too big a ball, and, for Brewer, one dropped sphere too many. As a result, Brewer....is no longer represented by Pybus."
Had Pybus listened to Brewer and done her job, what Pybus could and should have done was to find another singer to sing the part of the Abbess in place of Brewer at Lyric Opera for those dates that conflicted with the SLSO gig. This is nothing novel or unheard-of in opera-land, where multiple singers can sing in a given role on different days.
According to Brewer, the root of the problem was money, or at least one agent's perception thereof:
'".....Pybus clearly didn't understand the soprano's most essential priorities. She said, 'But you'll make more money at Lyric,' as if that was the most important thing."
But as Miller concluded in that post:
"But don't weep for Pybus. Under the rules of the trade, Brewer's ex-agent 'will still get 20 percent of what I’m making until those contracts are up,' several years from now."
So after all this, we were supposed to get Andrew Kennedy as the vocal soloist for the Britten, where, to addres the double-take that you may have had (but probably didn't), the reason why a tenor can fill in for a soprano is explained on the Boosey & Hawkes music publisher
page on
Les Illuminations:
"Britten, Benjamin: Les Illuminations op. 18 (1939) 21'
for high voice and strings
In principle, "high voice" could mean either a soprano, or a tenor. (Or maybe even a countertenor; now there's a thought. Wonder if that's ever been done.) So no problems, yes? Well, one more change of artist, again per Miller's blog at
this post late last month:
"Tenor Andrew Kennedy, originally engaged when soprano Christine Brewer had to drop out due to her then-agent's double-booking her, has now himself dropped out.
Tenor Nicholas Phan is now scheduled to perform Les Illuminations with the orchestra. for its season finale."
No indication as to why Kennedy himself had to bail (schedule conflict, visa problems, illness, whatever). But fortunately for the SLSO audience, no matter, since Phan seems to have done quite well, judging from Miller's
review of the concert last night:
"Phan has a gorgeous instrument, intelligently and effectively used. Singing from memory, he conveyed dramatic meaning, in what was effectively an operatic scene for one. He was brilliantly partnered by Robertson and the orchestra throughout; the solo passages for violin were exquisitely performed by concertmaster David Halen."
In fact, as if SNLC regulars couldn't guess, I'm there tonight, most probably as you read this. If you want, you can listen to the concert from the
St. Louis Public radio page. (The announcers aren't the most optimal, as from the few times I've heard them, they sound more than a bit stiff and 'scripted', and they have the habit of starting to talk again too soon after the work has stopped and the applause has begun, rather than letting the applause sink in before resuming their on-air talk.) BTW, Phan also occasionally blogs, and he has
this blog post related to the recent 100th anniversary celebrations of the birth of Benjamin Britten, and Britten's music. You can also watch this clip of him singing a selection from
Les Illuminations:
So you can the various degrees of loserness in this story, distributed among a number of folks. With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....