echt versus ersatz

Baritone Christopher Maltman interviews Eliza Carthy, Georgina Boyes, Tim Healey, Julius Drake and Thomas Allen about why opera singers singing traditional songs in recital puts the folkies in a twist. Myself included, about 75% of the time, simply because opera singers seem to have a knack for letting their training get in the way of the material. I sit quietly in the audience and cast my eyes heavenward. There are exceptions, of course, and Thomas Allen is one of them. Bryn Terfel, also.

One of the interesting questions raised by Georgina Boyes is one of style. She's right, an opera singer who trills an 'r' and hyper-enunciates in a traditional song (with certain exceptions) sounds plain weird. I am reminded of a video I saw once where a vocal coach was teaching tenor Jerry Hadley how not to sing a Broadway showtune as if it were something out of a Handel oratorio. If an opera singer can grasp that showtunes are not sung like opera arias, then it should be even plainer that trad songs are not sung like opera arias. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that rule holds true for a situation where a composer like Britten or Grainger has made an Arrangement with a capital A. And on the other hand of that, that's probably why I don't find their versions all that interesting.

And version is the key word, because the bottom line is it's traditional music, by definition it survives by people putting their hands and voices to it, in whatever fashion and with whatever aesthetic result. Not to mention the fact that traditional music has a long history of appropriation itself. Consider the borderland of Pills to Purge Melancholy, or certain features of Scottish fiddle tunes, or any O'Carolan tune you'd care to name. Meanwhile, in the other direction, there are still loads of musos out there following in the Fairport/Steeleye Span tradition of rocking out The English & Scottish Popular Ballads. (Or the Warner Collection, as the case may be.) Everybody's lived so far.


More on this, possibly, after dinner on Wednesday, if the right people turn up. But meantime here's all of Eliza Carthy & the Ratcatchers' version of The Gallant Hussar, which is pretty spiff and raises a few questions of its own about performativity (if there is such a word) and the nature of audience.