Interview, Huw Montague Rendall on Contemplation

The son of two eminent opera-singers, young British baritone Huw Montague Rendall has been making waves of his own across Europe and the US over the past couple of years in roles including Debussy's Pelléas, Mozart's Papageno and Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet. The latter two characters feature on his debut album on Erato (which was released earlier this month and received five stars in The Guardian) alongside snapshots of Britten's Billy Budd, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Gounod's Valentin and Rodgers & Hammerstein's Billy Bigelow plus Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

In between rehearsals for the revival of David McVicar's production of Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden last month, Huw spoke to me about getting under Count Almaviva's skin as a relatively young singer, the joys of sharing a profession with his parents (mezzo Diana Montague and tenor David Rendall), preparing to sing his first Billy Budd in Vienna this autumn, and how he carves out time and space for contemplation amid his busy schedule - often with the assistance of a four-legged friend...

You’ve been spending a lot of time with Count Almaviva of late (with more to come next season at Glyndebourne): have different productions emphasised different elements of his character?

Absolutely. In a previous production, the Count was very brutal, dark and aggressive, and didn’t really have any redeeming qualities or light and shade. It was all black, which was very difficult to play because I’m not that kind of singer: I really had to think about gaining those vocal colours and going with the concept. It was a complete contrast with this David McVicar production, which portrays the character in a million different lights – at the end of the day he’s human, and you need to show not just the anger but also his tenderness and sweetness. Those emotions are all there, but they’re shrouded by this cloak of masculinity and pride that’s constantly being stabbed by people he views as beneath him.

I think it’s important to remember that this is someone who’s been born into power, who hasn’t had any choice about what his life will be like. He’s learned how to manipulate people (probably from his father), and he has to rule over his constituency because that’s his destiny. Because my Count is quite young, I’m playing him as someone who’s had this responsibility thrown onto him fairly recently: he wasn’t entirely ready, and the power’s gone to his head.

David is directing this revival himself, and he’s made lots of changes because of my age and physicality: the Count isn’t an older lothario, he’s a rapscallion wielding power which he doesn’t yet know how to handle. And he won’t handle it with grace, because he still thinks from his trousers… The reason he hates Cherubino so much is because he’s a reflection of himself: Cherubino’s already out there doing the things the Count wants to do, and getting in the way of him sowing his wild oats. He goes to Barbarina’s room and he’s there…then he goes to Susanna’s room and he’s there again!

Do you see much kinship between the Count and Don Giovanni (who also makes an appearance on the album)?

I’ve not done Don Giovanni in a staged production yet, but I sang him in a concertised version in Rouen last summer. I find that I can’t see Don Giovanni as a person so much as a kind of phantom which passes through other people. There are very few moments in the opera where he has his own themes - he’s usually copying other people’s feelings and emotions, because he’s a psychopath! And on the few occasions when you do see him on his own, it’s just a blank slate: ‘Deh, vieni’ is fake, and ‘Fin ch'han dal vino’ is kind of fake as well because he’s in hyperactive mode. It’s not his normal state, and we don’t get to see him in that normal state, because he never lets the mask slip.

Another character who famously puts on an ‘antic disposition’ is of course Hamlet, whom we also meet in the course of your programme - where did you start when it came to getting a handle on such an endlessly complex figure?

Ambroise Thomas’s opera is textually problematic, because it’s taken from Alexandre Dumas’s novelisation of Shakespeare’s play: it’s a bastardised version of a bastardised version! The original version of the opera follows Dumas in that Hamlet doesn’t die at the end: he gets to play the king instead. When the opera was staged in London, people were up in arms about that, and the producers decided they had to make an alternative ending for the English…So now we have a choice of endings: you either die after the fight with Laertes, or you get to survive and play the king.

Nonetheless, the original play definitely helped me a lot in terms of subtext: it was so helpful to mentally weave in lines from Shakespeare which aren’t included in the libretto, just to make my thought processes clear. You can’t do that for many operas based on Shakespeare, but it works so well here. One oddity with the opera is that instead of killing Polonius in the closet-scene, you just let him go! That’s difficult to navigate, but I think of it as the character somehow becoming dead to Hamlet - as does everyone of his kin, because in his eyes they all become complicit in the death of his father.

It’s a shame we don’t get to see the opera much in the UK…

I think it’s a really important piece of French grand opera, and we should do it more over here - especially as it’s a French version of an English play. Part of the reason it’s overlooked is that it’s expensive to put on: it has a big cast, and you need good singers because it’s very technically difficult. It's a long, dramatic evening, but it’s so much fun when you’re on stage!

When I did it in Berlin last year I had amazing colleagues from the Komische Oper, who are just as much actors as they are singers: that’s the ethos behind that theatre. Being on stage in the accusation-scene with Karolina Gumos as my mother in the third act was just wonderful, although the scene itself is horrific: at the end when he says ‘I see before my eyes violent blood’ he tries to strangle her to death, then his father appears as a ghost but Gertrude can’t see it. We did that scene on a bed, which was present on stage but might only exist in Hamlet’s imagination: the following scene opens with him lying on the floor asleep, so you don’t know if anything’s actually happened or if he really is mad…

That sounds quite similar to Robert Icke’s recent staging, with Andrew Scott as Hamlet - did you see that production?

I watched it a lot online, and absolutely love it. Andrew Scott has this amazing tic where he’s wearing his father’s watch and playing with it constantly, and we did a similar thing in our production: at the very beginning the gravediggers give me a letter containing my father’s signet ring, and I just can’t let it go…

Have you ever sung Hamlet with your real-life mother as Gertrude?!

No, but I’d love to! We’ve only sung together professionally once, in Peter Grimes. I was Ned Keene and Mum was Mrs Sedley, so I got to bully her mercilessly and supply her with drugs: ‘If the old dear takes much more laudanum/She’ll land herself one day in Bedlam!’. We did it in Romania, and I loved being able to travel and work together: I trust Mum’s ears more than anyone’s, so to have her there in the theatre giving advice was absolutely wonderful.

Did you ever have any anxiety around entering the same profession as your parents?

Honestly, no. My dad taught me in the beginning, and if I’m learning something new we still try and find time to go through it together. Any tension generally came from other people implying that nepotism had taken effect, which is not true at all. Yes, I was lucky to grow up around great singing and lovely singers, but the simple truth is that as soon as I started singing I fell in love with it: my parents were there to guide me (and they still are), but they didn’t force me in or open any doors.

But it’s nice that there are so many people in this industry who’ve known and worked with my parents. If I go to a new theatre, nine times out of ten Mum or Dad have sung there, and it’s wonderful to stand in their footsteps and feel their presence. In this production of Figaro, Mum did Marcellina in 2019 with Simon Keenlyside as the Count, and she must have sung about 900 Cherubinos at Covent Garden back in the day!

Do either of the Billies on the album (Budd and Bigelow) figure in your future on stage?

I’m doing my first Billy Budd next month, in Vienna. It’s the Willy Decker production, with Brindley Sherratt as Claggart and Gregory Kunde as Vere, and I’m so looking forward to meeting Gregory for the first time. His Vere is going to be fantastic, because he’ll have both colours: the maturity of the older character in the Prologue/Epilogue and the strength of the youthful Vere.

I would love to sing Billy Bigelow on stage. The Soliloquy was one of the first things I learned, and it’s one of my mum’s favourite pieces so I had to include it for her! Like a lot of the characters on the album Billy is an outsider, and here we see him contemplating a life that doesn’t happen in the end…A pivotal moment in many people’s lives is contemplating the idea of having children, and realising that you’re not a child yourself any more – I think Billy’s been a boy (or some sort of manchild!) up to this point, and in the Soliloquy it suddenly hits him that he’s grown up now. It’s been with me forever, and I couldn’t not have it on my debut album because I love it so much.

The title of your album is Contemplation: how do you personally carve out time to take stock of things and reset?

It comes down to trying to live each day as if it’s a normal day, and learning how to leave the spotlight. Singing is my passion and my life - but it’s also a job, so you need to learn how to disconnect that from your own private life. Of course the moment when you step onstage is always going to be nerve-wracking, but if you take that energy home then you start getting a bit neurotic…I use that word lightly, but it’s true: we have a tendency to be neurotic as singers because we carry around our instrument with us, and that can be incredibly tiring. If you can’t switch off after a performance and are thinking ‘Oh god, now I’ve got to be on form for tomorrow…’ then eventually that anxiety manifests physically, and you can’t actually do what you need to do.

In opera we schedule so far in advance, so whenever possible it’s good to have little breaks where you come home, sleep in your own bed, spend time with your family and go out for a beer…essentially be a normal human rather than a high-functioning bundle of nerves carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, because we don’t have to.

I share Hamlet’s tendency to overthink, and this album came at a time when I massively overthought everything - including my own existence. I suppose having an existential crisis once in a while is healthy in that it teaches you about yourself! And there’s one little guy who’s really taught me to reset myself this year: my puppy, Maurice! We got him in January, and he’s given me so much perspective on what’s actually important in life: I take him out every morning when I’m at home, and just watching him chasing the ball and living his little life has helped my stress-levels so much. I’ve stopped prioritising the wrong things, and I no longer feel on edge all the time.

The Count’s dog has a walk-on part in this production of Figaro…is Maurice making his Covent Garden debut?!

I would have loved that: Maurice was bred to hunt rabbits, and in the Beaumarchais play the Count is out hunting rabbits! But it really needs to be a bigger dog, and Maurice can be very vocal which would add to my stress-levels…We have a dog called Bonnie in this show, and she’s lovely!