Guildhall Questions: John Ramster answers

This feast of five contrasting short operatic works, conducted by Chad Kelly, offers the chance to enjoy three new chamber operas – The Apothecary; I’m Cleaning, I’m Cleaning and Eintänzer – and two 17th-century pieces: Charpentier’s cantata Orphée descendant aux enfers and Carissimi’s Judicium Salomonis.

In this interview, director John Ramster talks about the hopeful meaning behind this production, what it’s been like to direct operas during a pandemic, and his top tips for aspiring opera singers.

Could you tell us about Beginnings: New and Early Opera? Why were these five pieces chosen?

Every year Guildhall School's famous Opera Makers course (the MA in Opera Making & Writing) stages three new short chamber operas in collaboration with the singers of our Opera programme. Last year we had to film the three new pieces remotely – everyone working in the isolation of the first lockdown – but we have honoured the commitment to the composers and librettists to stage their pieces live and on Guildhall’s largest stage no less, in conjunction with two brief and Baroque dramatic oratorios. This is a great showcase for some excellent pieces of new writing that could easily have slipped through the lockdown net.

The contrasts and the surprising similarities between the pieces make for a rich, varied and challenging evening – a lovely way for people to return to live operatic performance. Some of the new pieces have been rewritten for new cast members, and all the composition teams had a valuable and rare chance to revisit and revise their work.

How have you approached this production, what ideas/inspirations did you have in mind?

I took a while to find the umbrella connection through five such varied pieces and I ended up calling our evening "Beginnings" – as our world wakes up again, as our culture begins again, we are introduced to new work from new talents and work from when opera itself was new. The two Baroque pieces are real rarities so will be, in effect, as new for many in audience as these mini chamber operas written last year.

Having seen a few runs of the pieces now, I can tell you we have found a moving arc through the evening. With the three new pieces, I'm trying to give as full, direct, human and vivid a rendition of the story as I can – with a world premiere I really believe that is a director's duty. I've interpreted the Baroque pieces a little more obliquely, exploring the whole notion of the return to live performance, and using the Charpentier especially to thread the five pieces together, and to find some hope in our current moment, that we can see a light at the end of this very dark pandemic tunnel. We need hope right now, and we especially need the hope that live music can give us – whether creating it, making it, or listening to it – and who better to be the deliverer of that hope than Orpheus, opera's first hero and the god of Music?"

How have you found the experience of directing operas during the pandemic?

It's been a strange time with opera directors suddenly having to be film directors as well, and then having to try to make the Covid staging restrictions as unnoticeable as possible, in a world where suddenly two people holding hands on stage is not only positively shocking but forbidden, almost in a Jane Austen kind of way. But our stage work needs to look like the "old normal" as much as it can, it cannot look stilted or awkward, even when staging what is meant to be a three-person orgy!

Creativity went online for so many of us – I directed three little opera films of these new pieces in Beginnings last summer, as well as three animations of the same works; I wrote a screenplay for Bergen National Opera for a film about Bizet's Carmen as well as a libretto for a short opera about the Spanish Flu for Opera Harmony. Then suddenly we found that some live performance was allowed – so last August I found myself in floods of tears as I heard four-part harmony live for the first time in months while rehearsing for some semi-staged outdoor concerts. As Orpheus demonstrates in tonight's Charpentier oratorio, music does come along to take away our pain.

What are you most enjoying about working with Guildhall singers, instrumentalists and production artists?

Having worked virtually on these pieces with many of the stage managers and production artists last summer, it has been great to actually meet some of those people one year on! Most of the principals and chorus I already knew, having directed and taught many of them as they progressed through the school – it has been wonderful to catch up with them and see people's undimmed enthusiasm for live performance, how they have continued to progress and develop in tough and isolated circumstances.

For many of the first-year production artists on our stage management team and crew, this is their first live experience of the year, a chance to put all their theoretical lessons into practice – a really big reason why all of our scene changes in the show are choreographed and in full view – to give them a real work-out!

Who have been some of your biggest inspirations in your career?

I obsess about narrative – I am told I'm very much in that British tradition of directing – and I train my students to be storytellers as well. Clear narrative is so hard, and some of the fabulous directors I assisted back in the day taught me a lot about that: Clare Venables, Trevor Nunn, Deborah Warner, Peter Hall, Peter Sellars, Graham Vick. I owe them all a lot.

But I also devour a lot of narrative myself, absorbing as much from movies and TV about the logic of narrative as from the stage work I see (not that there has been much of that lately!) – I love Joseph Campbell's many works on character types. I've written novels and screenplays alongside my directing and teaching, and in the end it all becomes about character and story – anything else is a distraction.

I also get a lot of inspiration from the generation of dramatic theorists that came after Stanislavski: people like Demidov, Michael Chekhov and Vakhtangov who absorbed everything Stanislavski taught then brought back in elements of theatricality and grotesqueness – and they in turn influenced Stanislavski in his later years.

What would be your top tips for young opera singers?

A top tip would be to read someone I should have included as one of my main inspirations: Declan Donnellan's The Actor and the Target is by far the best book out there to turn a young singer into a young singer-actor – it activates the eyes and forces the performer to look outside of themselves.

Now that the world is waking up again, go and see all the shows you can – companies big and small. See the experimental work, see the traditional work, take the best from all of them. And get on stage as much as you can, put your training into practice and learn by doing. Primarily, young singers have to find their best ways of getting into character – nothing good or meaningful can happen unless they are singing from a character viewpoint, so a lot of my work is all about exactly that. And that thought applies to lieder as much as opera, as much to recitals as fully-staged performances.

Learn to speak German – the majority of our global industry's work will occur in Germany for the next few years, so find ways to get there and to be useful to that marketplace.

I'm confident that our industry will bounce back and that our audiences will return so let's be ready for that and for all the changes that are coming our way – for example, now that we have let cameras in they will not be going away. We need to be as accustomed to cameras as the live stage – usually happening simultaneously – and that will be a constant spur for us to always be bringing our "A game". This is a great time to be training – get ready for the industry to be ready for you!
 

Beginnings: New and Early Opera will be live-streamed via Guildhall School's website on Friday 28 May and Tuesday 1, Thursday 3 and Monday 7 June 2021 at 7pm. Watch online for free.