Talented (And Adorable) Nick Phan Talks About Gay Britten

(Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

"Grecchinois, the name of Nicholas Phan’s engaging blog, reflects the Greek and Chinese heritage of this 34-year-old American tenor, who has fast made a name for himself as an expressive interpreter of the British composer Benjamin Britten. Raised Greek Orthodox in Ann Arbor, Mich., Mr. Phan, who initially studied the violin and played in a youth orchestra, discovered Britten when he played his 'Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.' In college, as a gay man, he became fascinated with the relationship between Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, who lived together at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain. He cites an experience performing Britten in a recital at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., around early 2006 as proof that the music, with its 'beautiful combination of head and heart,' speaks to audiences everywhere." Read the entire article by clicking here.

Interview with Tenor Nick Phan About His New CD - Part 2

If you missed Part 1 of the interview with tenor Nick Phan about his new recording, Winter Words featuring the music of Benjamin Britten, click here to read it in full. Opera Fresh would like to thank Mr. Phan for the generosity of his time and willingness to discuss his feelings about the recording. Here now is the second and final part of the interview:

Of all the poems, why did Britten focus on these eight of Hardy and seven of Michelangelo?
Britten would often pull books of poetry down from the shelf and peruse them, collecting various poems in his head over time. So the poetry that he would choose to set were often poems he had been ruminating on over a long period of time. I think in the end it came back to the importance of theme for him.

Does Britten's setting of Winter Words hold up to other great song cycles like Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel or Winterreise of Schubert?
Totally. While there isn't a narrative to Winter Words that links the cycle together as there is in both Winterreise and Songs of Travel, the thematic link between the songs is incredibly strong. Also, structurally, he works a bit of genius – the cycle is structured like a palindrome. Both the first and eighth song reminisce about times past, the second and seventh songs both deal with a young boy in a train station, the third and sixth songs both deal with young birds, while the fourth and fifth songs provide the center around which the other songs are reflected. It's pretty brilliant, because it provides this amazing cohesion between the songs.

Do you feel there is a more intimate immediacy in communicating text of songs in recital with piano versus performing full-costumed operas with orchestra?
Yes, definitely. When a singer is alone with a piano, you are the most naked and vulnerable you could possibly be. There is nothing to hide behind – it's just you and the audience. I love that about songs – I think that is what makes them so powerful. There is the possibility for real intimacy and an incredibly deep and direct level of communication.

How much influence do you think Britten's life partner, tenor Peter Pears, had on the composition of Winter Words and Seven Sonnets?
A huge influence – Pears and Britten worked very closely on much of his composition, and these songs were most definitely tailor-made for Pears' voice and technique.

The music for Winter Words was written in 1954 when Britten was 41 and Pears was 44. Do you think Winter Words is a song cycle that perhaps gets more poignant as you perform it at different stages of your own life?
Definitely – the thematic material makes it much that way. The whole cycle is about viewing innocence through that lens of experience. I think that as we get older, the layers through which look back only deepen, and so the way we relate to it will become richer and richer as we age.

The Seven Sonnets was composed by Britten 14 years earlier than Winter Words. Can you distinguish the growth in the composer's writing?
A bit. Mostly, it is pretty clear that Britten knew the intricacies of Pears' voice and vocal technique by the time he wrote Winter Words. At the same time, it is a bit difficult – compositionally, Britten was going for a very specific effect in the Michelangelo sonnets, trying to give a nod to Italian music and vocalism – which is incredibly successful at. Winter Words has a much more British musical feel, and in that sense, it is a bit like trying to compare apples and oranges.

As Michelangelo's sonnets were largely dedicated to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, do you think that Benjamin Britten as a gay man was somewhat drawn to these works beyond their poetic nature?
I assume so – there are many homosexual themes to much of Britten's music, and it is evident that it was something that he wanted to explore in his work. Billy Budd, Death in Venice, and his first Canticle all have heavy homosexual overtones. Still, in my research, I didn't encounter much written about that particular subject when it came to Britten's composition of the Michelangelo Sonnets.

Were there any specific translations that you sought out for the Italian sonnets?
In addition to my own translation work, I worked between Pears' translations at the front of the score, James Saslow's translations from his book The Poetry of Michelangelo (which provided really helpful biographical and historical annotations), and Carl Johengen's translations which are used in the liner notes.

As you perform these two different song cycles, do you feel that Britten succeeds in composing for the Italian language just as well as his native English? Are there any detectable differences in his writing to accommodate the language?
I do feel that is equally successful in both languages – his setting of the Italian is really impressive and colorful. Both cycles are incredibly colorful and full of texture in the realizations of the texts, and I think both show off his exceptionally virtuosic skill at setting text to music.

Three Britten songs are tagged on at the end of the recording. Do they hold special significance for you?
We included Britten's folksongs much like Britten and Pears included them on their programs. The material of this album is incredibly intense, and we felt that it needed some "lighter" music to break up the intensity and provide a bit of breathing room in the program. I love all of the folksongs on the album – I think Britten was a master at making you hear something so familiar and rooted into our western cultural consciousness as if you were hearing it for the first time. His arrangements of these folksongs are truly masterful.

Has interpreting the songs of Britten affected how you look at some of the composer's opera roles for tenor in Albert Herring, Peter Grimes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Death in Venice or Turn of the Screw?
I haven't had the chance to perform any of his operatic roles yet – but I am bursting at the seams to get the chance!

Given any choice of composer or repertoire, what would you like your next recording project to be?
For the next album, I'm planning on deepening my exploration of Britten's music. I'm particularly fascinated with Britten's relationships with some of the other musicians he collaborated with in addition to Peter Pears. I explored a lot of the music he composed for these musicians in great detail during my summers at Marlboro, and I'd really like to take some of that music into the recording studio now . Down the road, other composers I would really like to explore in the recording studio would be Schumann, Bach, Handel and Mozart, but for now I'm mostly focused on trying to explore Britten. He wrote so much for the tenor voice, and especially as the centenary of his birth approaches in 2013, it seems really timely that my fascination with his music and life is blossoming now.

Check out these sources for more information about Nick Phan and Winter Words:
http://www.nicholas-phan.com/
http://www.avie-records.com/album_detail.php?id=547
http://www.opus3artists.com/artists/nicholas-phan

Interview with Tenor Nick Phan About His New CD - Part 1

"Winter Words is the solo debut release by American tenor Nicholas Phan. The recording was made in the wake of a recital tour in 2010-11 which culminated in his Carnegie debut at Weill Hall. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera studio Nick has performed with the opera companies of Los Angeles and Seattle, symphony orchestras of Atlanta, St. Louis and San Francisco, and the Marlboro, Ravinia and Edinburgh Festivals, among others. He sang in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez which was nominated for a Grammy Award." [Source]

Opera Fresh had an opportunity to ask Nick some questions about the recording and his personal thoughts on the composer Benjamin Britten. Here now is the first installment of a two-part interview. Be sure to check out a full biography of the tenor and a tracklisting for the CD after the jump. Part two of the interview will be published next week.

How did this project for your first solo recording come about and whose idea was it to go with Benjamin Britten for the repertoire?
I've been exploring Britten's music extensively over the past few years in recital programs, concerts with various orchestras, and my summers at the Marlboro Music Festival, and when Carnegie Hall presented me and Myra with the opportunity to have a debut recital in Weill Recital Hall last season, we both naturally drifted to Britten at first. Winter Words had become a favorite cycle of ours to program on recitals over the past few years, and that eventually led to us programming an entire recital of his music. We both collaborate on our programming, although it is definitely my fascination with Britten and his music that drew our programming towards him. As we rehearsed in preparation for the Carnegie recital, we realized that we both really wanted to record all of this music. Your first encounter with the composer was through orchestral music. What about the first vocal music you heard of Britten? My first encounter of Britten's vocal music was during my senior year at the University of Michigan. While I was looking for music to sing on my senior recital, I discovered a recording of his Purcell realizations, which then led me to his cycle, On This Island – I was drawn to it, because the first song sounds so Purcell-ian (Baroque music is my favorite music to listen to, if I had to choose a favorite). Also in that year, the University Chamber Choir performed Britten's Cantata Misericordium, which I also fell in love with at our first reading. Before that, I hadn't really listened to much of Britten's vocal music. Why does this composer resonate with you? He resonates with me for a lot of reasons, actually. Firstly, the heavy influences of Purcell on his vocal music were the initial draw because of my love of Purcell's music. Then there are the themes that resonate throughout his music: the plight of the outsider, the loss of innocence, pacifism, which are all themes that I am fascinate with. After I started to learn more about who he was and his life story, the fact that he was a gay man living pretty much openly in a relationship with Peter Pears made him even more of an idol for me. During that last year at U-Mich, I started to read more about him, including a lot of his correspondence with Pears. I was fascinated by how completely entwined their lives were – their relationship was the spark that created not only the some of the greatest repertoire for the tenor voice from the last century, but also some of the greatest music and opera of the last century. It was a complete union of souls – both personally and artistically. I find that fascinating.

How did these works grow for you musically or emotionally when you toured? Taking the music out in front of audiences always changes things – you find more nuance and new levels of details when you put it out in front of people. it's like when you prepare a speech and then finally take it out into public. It changes things when you are actually talking TO people as opposed to yourself. Performance of this particular material really drove home how emotionally powerful this music is. I write a bit about this in the liner notes, but it was my first performance of Winter Words in a small, midwestern town that made me realize that this music is really meant to touch everyone. As academic as it looks with all of Britten's copious and detailed markings on the page, this music is meant to be performed and experienced. It's meant to move people. What was it about Thomas Hardy's poetry that English composers like Britten, Finzi and Holst, felt compelled to set it to music? While Hardy's poetry is quite musical both in terms or theme ('The Choirmaster's Burial' and 'At the Railstation, Upway' for instance) and in his evocation of sound ('The Little Old Table', for example), I think it's also the thematic material that drew Britten to his poetry. There are these juxtapositions in Hardy's poetry of innocence versus experience, which provides the central theme to Winter Words. This theme was one that was central to much of Britten's work. Pieces like Winter Words, his second Canticle (about the Abraham and Isaac story), and Turn of the Screw are just some of his works that explore this theme in some form or another.

Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres was published posthumously in 1928, the year Thomas Hardy died. In some ways, does Britten's composition "memorialize" the poet? In the sense that Britten chose to set his poetry after Hardy's death, yes, it does. But I think that the Winter Words goes much further, using Hardy's poetry to create a a meditation on a theme that is universally experienced by any human.

Did you read the poetry first or play through Britten's music for this disc? I read the music first – as important as I think text is to the singer's art, I was a violinist first as a musician. As a result, it's always, always the music that draws me to a piece or a composer first and foremost.

What went into the studying the historical context of the poetry for the recording? I did a lot of research with regards to Michelangelo's poetry. His poetry was quite difficult for me to understand without the historical and biographical context in which it was written. Michelangelo used poetry as a means of meditating on the events of his life. Without knowing what was going on, I felt that I was missing a certain level of understanding and comprehension.

Nick Phan Wants His Verizon iPhone

"No, it's not official yet, but after years of rumors and gossip, it appears that a Verizon Wireless iPhone will be a reality early next year. It would be an understatement to say this would be a very big deal--not only to Apple and Verizon, but also to AT&T, which would lose its exclusive hold on Apple's device."