VoxCarnyx

Once pipped for pop stardom, Iestyn Davies opted instead for success as a classical “yodeller”. The award-winning countertenor stars with Australian circus ensemble Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. KEN WALTON reports.

It’s 30 years since the blistering Summer of Britpop, when Blur and Oasis led a hungry pack battling for pole position in the charts. Iestyn Davies was 15 that year, a musically-gifted pupil at the specialist Wells Cathedral School. He and three school pals – collectively the wannabe Britpop band Cage – were faced with a tempting offer to sign up for a record deal they were assured could easily lead to chart-topping success.

“Yes, the pop world lost out,” says the now 45-year-old Davies, who eschewed pop fame to become one of the world’s leading classical countertenors. He’s currently in Scotland to sing the male title role in director Yaron Lifschitz’s circus-led production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh International Festival.

“We were huge fans of Blur then and all the other bands with one-syllable names, and were actually about to be victims of what would become a kind of Britain’s Got Talent thing, where the A&R people wanted to manufacture something cool rather than just let us do our own thing. 

“It was a big deal,” Davies recalls. “Atlantic Records, a branch of Sony, came to our school, we got selected, and against thousands of other bands got down to the last two. They said we’re really interested in you guys because you’re all really good musicians. We played songs to the A&R guy in our studio at school and he said with the right financial backing we could go to number one. Sure, we’d have made lots of money, but in the end it wasn’t for us.” In time, the constituent members of Cage went their separate ways to pursue careers in classical music.

For York-born Davies, there was an undeniable logic to his choice. By the age of eight, he’d experienced the hothouse choir school environment of the Oxbridge chapel, at St John’s College, Cambridge. It was a baptism of fire, he recalls, “a bit like being taught to swim. You’re thrown in at this early age to perform daily in this thing called choral evensong, initially imitating the boy next to you to pick things up. But the musicality I picked up there was invaluable: the ability to learn music quickly, sight read, be a good team player, be a professional musician. It’s why I’m doing what I do now.” 

It stood him in good stead when, on leaving secondary school, he took up a choral scholarship at Cambridge, studying archeology and anthropology, before honing his singing technique – he once compared the rarefied countertenor voice to “yodelling” – at the Royal Academy of Music. Prestigious awards followed in a career that has combined leading opera appearances (the New York Met and Covent Garden included) to acclaimed worldwide concert performances and prize-winning recordings. 

He’s no stranger, either, to the Edinburgh International Festival, though one previous visit lingers painfully in his memory. “I woke up the morning of a Queen’s Hall concert with absolutely no voice, nothing,” he recalls. He struggled in to the pre-concert run through, managing to squeeze out a sound. “The old chorister mentality hit in: if you can still sing a bit you’re doing it.” A friend who’d attended the same programme a few weeks earlier, and having heard the Edinburgh live broadcast, called him up to say it was even better than the York performance. “It just goes to show, you can never second guess the audience!”

Did Davies ever envisage having to perform his first ever staged production of Gluck’s seminal opera Orpheus and Eurydice engaging so physically with a fully-functioning circus troupe? That’s the challenge facing him in this week’s unconventional Gluck production, unveiled with its original cast in Brisbane in 2019, now restaged for a European premiere at Edinburgh Playhouse that draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings.

When we spoke, Davies’s only inkling of the task in hand was via a video of an earlier Australian performance. “I saw immediately how amazing Circa are. You can hear the audience gasp right at the beginning as they do this tumbling thing from a great height. What’s amazing is that their acrobatics are as fluid as dancing. The hardest thing that I have to do physically comes late in the show, when I stand on someone’s shoulders, surrounded by three or four people who are anchoring my ankles. I can tell from the performer on the video – whom I know, and who’s very athletic – that it’s a scary moment.”  

Davies has since come to realise that, for his part, the physically of his role comes mostly in a more concentrated, more conducive form. “Yes, I have to carry quite a lot of the drama in my body, but a lot of that can be done standing still,” he explains. “Until I meet Eurydice in the underworld it’s just me and the chorus, but not in dialogue. Under such prolonged spotlight you have to find ways to project energy through stillness, which in itself is such a high-pressured thing because its very easy to slip unintentionally into concert mode. 

“This is such a psychological piece – really, it’s about what’s going on in Orpheus’s head – which is what Yaron is particularly trying to demonstrate in his production,” Davies says. “I asked him why he has conflated the two female roles of Eurydice and Amore, played by the same singer [Australian soprano Samatha Clarke], and the answer I got was that Orpheus has murdered Eurydice and wakes up in this fractured state, maybe in a prison, maybe an asylum.” 

This, Davies reckons, is where the “unworldliness” of the countertenor voice can really work its magic, closer in character to the castrato that Gluck originally intended than later tendencies to cast a female mezzo soprano in the role. Think Janet Baker, for whom this became a signature role. 

“There is something disembodied about the countertenor that is close to the castrato in terms of pitch, and of course we’re seeing a man play the hero,” Davies explains. “But equally it stretches the countertenor’s capabilities beyond that of the choral world, presented with a meaty chunk of singing, on stage for an hour and a quarter. It feels very different from singing even a Handel role where you’re one of five or six characters. You’re on stage all night; that challenges you to be interesting with your voice. You can’t rely on just ethereal beauty. There has to be pain, anger, melancholy, all range of emotions. That is what Gluck is asking. That’s the challenge to me.”

Whatever the physical demands placed on him, Davies is readying himself. “I’m generally very conscious of trying to stay healthy and fit at the moment anyway,” he says. Besides addressing “the odd creak on the knee or shoulder”, that means looking good too. “I’m playing David in [Handel’s] Saul at Glyndebourne at the moment. At the beginning I’ve just defeated Goliath and the whole show opens with me covered in blood, half-naked with a sling and a shot. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week, and trying not to enjoy myself too much. It’s a real pain, but in the long run it’s good to keep on top of these things.”

As for his relationship with Gluck’s most famous opera, it is dominating his working life at the moment. Davies previously sang the Orpheus role In a 2018 Edinburgh Festival concert performance with The English Consort, later recording it with La Nuovo Musica for Pentatone. “I was originally booked to debut in this current production with Circa in Melbourne in November/December, but that was before the Edinburgh dates came up; and now, between those, in September/October I’ll be performing in a Robert Carsen production with Canadian Opera in Toronto. It’s full on up to Christmas, but I doubt I’ll be sick of it.”

Nor can he get too much of the Edinburgh Festival. “I love coming to Edinburgh. It’s the most worthwhile place to sing in Britain, a great set-up and great audiences. They let me do things I want to do.” Including, perhaps, his new circus repertoire?

Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 13, 15 & 16 August. Full information at www.eif.co.uk