Interview,
Joseph Middleton on Mahler
In the run-up to the release-date, we spoke about Joseph's love for the strong sense of place and spirituality in Mahler's music, why he 'doesn't get much pleasure' from taking to the stage alone, and how 'there was never a grand plan' for this to be his career...
What was your first experience of Mahler’s music as a performer?
I think it was actually at university: I was playing second violin in Symphony No. 4 and I remember sitting in rehearsals thinking ‘I just do not get this at all!’. Then in the concert itself the penny dropped, and I thought it was absolutely extraordinary: No. 4 obviously isn’t one of the bigger symphonies, but even so I just couldn’t get over the chamber vibe that emanated from these massed forces on stage. So many melodic lines begin in one instrument and then get passed to another. It’s very contrapuntal, horizontal writing.
And of course it’s so evocative of the place where it was written. Location is woven into the very body of these works. If you’ve ever spent any time in those open hills of Austria, Mahler's music transports you straight there: your lungs feel clean and full of green. You get the feeling nothing’s changed there since Mahler was alive, and when you look out at these vast panoramas you feel how much the expanse of mists and dark trees is woven into the body of pretty much every piece he ever wrote. You can practically still hear the street songs of his day, the dance tunes and folk melodies, not to mention the military bands that find their way into so much of his music.
How much of a challenge is it to translate that quality through the keyboard?
Obviously you have these great orchestral soundscapes in your mind’s ear and that’s very inspiring, but I treat the piano versions on their own terms. I’m not trying to imitate the sound of the flute, I’m trying to give a kind of energy or colour that is appropriate for that particular line - and because a lot of this music is so contrapuntal, a lot of my energy is focused on trying to voice things so the structure of the music is clear for the audience. It’s all too easy for this music to get thick and claggy.
It’s all about perspective, about building up textures that are transparent enough that you hear different things. And I do think that the piano versions offer a special intimacy and immediacy of their own. Some of the textures are very sparse: so often in Kindertotenlieder I’m just playing two lines: the opening has an almost Bachian, contrapuntal quality. 'Um Mitternacht' in particular is quite a journey, because you start out with two notes in the piano, but by the end you’re playing fistfuls of roulades!
The other great thing about the piano versions is that the singer can put the text first, because they’re not concerned with just making enough noise to carry over a large orchestra. And the words for 'Ich bin der Welt' in particular are so extraordinary: regardless of whether you're religious or not, there’s something very spiritual about playing it with just two of you on stage. If you’re in a hall where the audience is all on-side there’s this very special connection, and Mahler writes enough space into the music for you to really lean into it: to do it justice you need to resist the temptation to fill that space and have the confidence to just be in front of your audience. It’s meditative, deeply spiritual music.
How did your working relationship with Sarah Connolly start?
We go back a long way, but I still can’t believe that I get to play with her! Sarah’s reputation precedes her, but I think people would be astonished if they really understood how much care and time she takes over literally every bar…She’s got this amazing ability to seem completely free and in the moment when she’s in recital, and all the while she’s engaging every single fibre of her being in each phrase and this comes about thanks to the very serious study she does.
Our work together began when I was pretty green and unknown, with Sarah messaging me on Facebook asking if I’d like to perform with her to raise money for the stained-glass window she was having made to commemorate Ivor Gurney at Gloucester Cathedral. She knew I was a Gloucestershire lad too and thought the subject-matter might appeal. I thought it was a joke at first, but of course I said yes! She’s a great artist who’s become a great friend.
Sarah’s influenced me enormously in this repertoire, because she has such an immediate connection to Mahler’s sound-world and has so many insights to share. Fairly early on in our partnership we did things like the Rückert-Lieder together in tours to the USA, and that wealth of experience that she’s got from having sung so much Mahler with great conductors certainly rubbed off on me.
Were there other singers, pianists or conductors who particularly shaped your approach to this music?
One of my first big gigs out of conservatoire was with Christopher Maltman, which was another game-changer: we did some of the very large Mahler songs in some pretty big venues including in San Francisco and Vienna, and figuring out how to cultivate a really rich orchestral sound that would frame a voice of that size was such a thrill. Des Knaben Wunderhorn includes massive songs like 'Revelge', and if you’re playing for a voice of ample size you want to make a generous sound that isn’t in any way harsh (unless you consciously want it to be, for example in some of the military songs). Some of those Wunderhorn songs are pretty awkward to play: a lot of the time you’re thinking ‘Yes Mahler, I know the effect that you want, but I only have ten fingers!’ It was a real challenge to master them, but also something that I really enjoyed.
The singers who gravitate towards song-repertoire tend to be the non-egotistical musos: they’re the ones who need their own intellectual output, another outlet that isn’t singing the same handful of operatic roles over and over again. That’s how I've ended up with the likes of Sarah, Carolyn [Sampson], Louise Alder, Fatma Said and Thomas Allen to name just a few - people who know the piano parts so well that they could probably play them better than me! These artists listen so intently when you’re on stage with them: they are accompanying you as much you accompanying them, and they really notice every single thing that you do and offer you something back, and that opens a door to so many interpretative possibilities.
When did you realise that being a collaborative pianist was your vocation?
There was never a grand plan for this to be my job: the thing I loved from a very young age was just mucking around with other musicians, and chamber music has been central to my life since as far back as I can remember. My idea of a fun time has always been playing through music with somebody else, and I could always sight-read pretty well – I’m still not a great practiser, if I’m honest! Part of that love for reading music quickly is down to how a lot of us here are taught when we’re kids - trundling along and singing in the church choir every week is such a great way to learn. When you’re eight you don’t think ‘Oh, I’m really honing my musicianship here’ - you just do it by being dragged along by more experienced musicians! Being able to read quickly is part of British musical culture, I think: there’s probably a downside to that (!), but being able to stagger through a piece and get something out of it was instilled early on.
At school I played anything I could get my mitts on, so I did past Grade 8 on flute, organ, piano, and violin, I conducted, I composed…I was a joint-study violinist and pianist until I was 21, and even as a violinist I always enjoyed playing Haydn string quartets or Beethoven piano trios more than solo repertoire. In my last year at university I had to choose one instrument for my final recital and I went with piano: I ended up winning things like the concerto prize and I did enjoy doing all of that, but ultimately I just don’t get much pleasure out of being on stage by myself.
So at what point did song recitals become your main focus, and what do you find most satisfying about that repertoire?
I enrolled on an MPhil with the vague idea of turning it into a PhD, but halfway through the course I thought ‘This isn’t for me - I think I’m done with academia’. On a whim, I decided to see if I could get into postgraduate music college as a pianist, and was slightly surprised to get entrance scholarships to all the London colleges. I chose the Royal Academy of Music and in the first year I was in a piano trio that was doing pretty well: we won a big prize in Linz and toured a bit, but that petered out and I started playing for the odd singer here and there. I remember playing for Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton in the first few terms and thinking ‘wow, the standard of singing here is pretty good…!’.
I got hooked pretty quickly once I clocked that being a song pianist combines the three things that I love most: playing the piano, working with words, and building mental images. I think the thing that’s most important for a song pianist is to have a really good imagination, and that for me has always been super-easy – I just read a text and immediately I’m seeing pictures. If I hadn’t pursued music, I’d have done something to do with art, and as soon as I registered that our job is to draw pictures with sound then I was away. (On tour I spend a great deal of time in art galleries, and in my spare time I enjoy pottery, drawing and painting).
I came to it pretty late, so there was some catching up to do: in my first year at the Academy it seemed like everyone else had played every song known to mankind and I was totally new to the whole thing! In my final year I had a string of success with things like the Wigmore Hall Song Prize, the Kathleen Ferrier Award, the Royal Overseas League, the Richard Tauber Competition…Competition…without sounding disingenuous it was a case of right singer at right time getting to the semis or finals of these competitions which meant I could win all of them in a row. A lot of exposure on the BBC New Generation Artist Scheme helped early on, as did some record labels and famous singers taking a punt on me (Felicity Lott and Amanda Roocroft on Champs Hill for instance). And that was that, really: once you get known for one thing, nobody asks you to do anything else and the song career has evolved fairly organically. On balance I’m fine with that – I’m sure I’ll have a grand old time playing string chamber music again in my old age, but right now there just isn’t time.
How did you build your technical understanding of how voices work? Is that something you learn on the job, or was it a formal element of your postgraduate degree?
When I was at the Academy I played for a brilliant teacher called Noelle Barker – observing how she would build a voice was so instructive, and I ended up playing for her lessons every week for years after I graduated. Noelle taught some great artists, so you’d have some pretty famous faces coming through her studio as well as first-year postgraduate students; she had this amazing ability to work out what each individual artist would need and build it from the ground up.
She could speak all the major European languages and played the piano very well, so she was a great coach too, and she definitely had one foot in the old school – she’d been taught by Hans Hotter, and every so often she’d bring out a score and go ’Oh, dear Ben [Britten!] marked this up!’, or a cycle she’d sung for Tippett or Messiaen. She left me all these scores, which I now find very inspiring.
She also happened to be good friends with Janet Baker, and she’d bring her in occasionally: I spent an incredible week with Janet coaching Christianne Stotijn on Britten’s Phaedra, frantically making notes and absorbing it all! I played for Noelle once a week until I was about 28, and it was a great way to learn how breath works: I couldn’t teach somebody to sing, but I do know what’s what and I'm endlessly fascinated in the process.
Sarah Connolly (mezzo), Joseph Middleton (piano)
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Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
