Article about pianist Stephen Ralls and The Aldeburgh Connection
From Opera Canada, 22 March 2002
Twenty years on: Over two decades, The Aldeburgh Connection has been like a rite of passage for a new generation of Canadian singers. For co-founder Stephen Ralls, it’s a lifelong commitment.
Bruce Ubukata and Stephen Ralls
He has the walk of a much taller man. That is not at all what his appearance would lead you to expect. In repose, Stephen Ralls can seem rather, well, negligible. Sartorially unobtrusive, slight of stature, with jug ears the only anomaly on a visage that otherwise calls to mind nothing so much as a slightly dyspeptic basset, Ralls seems the kind of man, with neatly combed, greying hair, you might see every day on the subway train, always at a very particular hour, always in the same seat, and about whom you might think you could guess everything you’d want to know. And you would be wrong. Which becomes very clear the moment you see him move. He strides. As he’s doing now, across a rehearsal room in the basement of the Edward Johnson building at the University of Toronto–big, rangey steps, not at all comical because they are taken with such authority–into the middle of the room where he is about to do the “herding cats” routine of trying to get some 16 of this country’s best-known singers to stop chatting, hugging, air-kissing and joking and into line for a rehearsal, along with members of the University of Toronto Opera Chorus, of the closing ensemble from Verdi’s Falstaff “Tutto nel mondo burla”; all the world’s a joke.
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The voice helps. An assured, resonant baritone, it calls the room to order. The cats dutifully herd. Rehearsal begins. It is a particularly significant one–the following day’s performance will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Aldeburgh Connection, the concert series created by Ralls and co-artistic director (and life partner) Bruce Ubukata. A promotional brochure describes the singers as “a dazzling array of Aldeburgh alumni,” and it’s right on the money. There’s Gerald Finley. Russell Braun. Catherine Robbin. Michael Schade. Benjamin Butterfield. Rosemarie Landry. Mark Pedrotti. The names keep coming. And there are new voices too: Colin Ainsworth, a young tenor still in school at U of T, and Carla Huhtanen, who graduated just two years ago. Ubukata and Che Anne Loewen are on piano.
Ralls gives the upbeat, Finley, as Shakespeare’s fat, irrepressible scoundrel, is the first voice heard; then other voices enter, one after another, to build the rollicking fugue that Verdi chose as the capstone to his operatic career. Given the forces at work, it is about as zestful and thrilling an interpretation as you are likely to hear. At the end of it, even the perpetually solenm Ralls is smiling.
He has a lot to smile about. He and Ubukata have built The Aldeburgh Connection into the country’s most distinctive vocal series, and helped build the careers of dozens of distinguished singers in the process. A superb accompanist, he has five recordings to his credit, including the Juno Award-winning Songs of Travel, with Gerald Finley. Though he has been with the Opera Division at U of T since 1978, he has, since 1996, been its musical director and was responsible for the school’s 1998 production of the Canadian premiere of Britten’s rarely performed opera, Paul Bunyan. He has been conductor or assistant conductor since then of most of the school’s fully staged and costumed operas. He and Ubukata have, through the AC, commissioned new works by Canadian composers Derek Holman, John Beckwith, Timothy Sullivan, Harry Somers and John Greer (a new piece by whom premiered as part of the 20th anniversary program). Art song and opera have been the poles of his musical life–though his earliest memories of opera, od dly enough, were that it could be rather scary.
He was born July 1, 1944, outside London, England, to a keen, if amateur, musical family. The youngest of three children, he became passionate about music very early on, taking piano lessons from his mother by the time he was five. His parents introduced him to opera: he remembers being “quite scared” by a scene in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, “bowled over” by a Covent Garden Die Zauberflote and scared again during the torture scene in Tosca. By the time he reached college, he’d become “a little snooty about opera,” he says, and, offered a ticket to a performance of Tosca, declined it. Turns out he missed Callas’s final appearance at Covent Garden. In 1967, he graduated from Merton College, Oxford, with an honor’s degree in music, then did two years of post-graduate work at the Royal Academy of Music in London. During those years, he did a lot of accompanying; “anyone willing to work with singers,” he says, “was welcomed with open arms.” His first job after the Academy was with a group called Opera for A ll, one of those bring-culture-to-the-masses schemes that took him and six singers on a six-month tour of the small towns of Britain, performing everywhere from sea-side resorts to Welsh mining towns, where, he says, “you had to wipe the coal dust off the piano keys before you could play.”
He was on the dole in London for a while after that. And then, a lucky break. In 1972, he got a call from Stuart Bedford, an acquaintance from his Oxford days. Bedford was repetiteur for the English Opera Group at Aldeburgh, but couldn’t continue because he had to take over conducting duties from a very ill Benjamin Britten. Could Stephen do the job? Stephen could.
Britten was composing his final opera, Death in Venice, at the time. Ralls recalls that when the score finally came through, “we looked at it, and it seemed awfully skimpy, awfully thin. But at rehearsal, the power of it came through. Often it has that late-Romantic, Germanic cast to it–Mahlerian, without sounding a bit like Mahler.” There is a part for piano in the score. Ralls was the pianist for the first performances and for the Decca recording. He was also the pianist when the opera toured to Edinburgh in 1973. In the audience one of those evenings was a young Canadian pianist, Bruce Ubukata.
They didn’t meet that night. They met in 1977, in Aldeburgh, where Ubukata, on a visit from Canada, had taken over for an absent accompanist. Five years younger than Ralls, Ubukata recalls being “terribly impressed by his musical abilities, by his resonant speaking voice, by his deep kindness to me–a brash, young colleague–and by the perfectly organized way he read the Times, by folding it in that special way.” A magic combination, it seems. They were soon personally involved, and by the fall of 1978, bad moved to Canada, Ralls having accepted a contract at U of T.
Ubukata is the sprightly, comic foil to Ralls’s graver, more musicianly persona. When I visit them at their downtown Toronto home, Ubukata responds to my admiration of their lavishly ancien-regime dining room by noting dryly that he was actually building his very own Petit Trianon to help him cope with a mid-life crisis. He also takes over the conversation (”I’m a dreadful nag”) when it appears that Ralls, in his modest Brit way, appears about to undervalue his own accomplishments. Ubukata is particularly animated on the subject of the positive changes at the opera school since Ralls’s tenure there. The faculty now has an endowed production fund–thanks to Ralls’s fundraising efforts–which allows for two full productions a year. As well, the twice-yearly Sunday afternoon Opera Teas, which Ubukata says used to be just a potpourri of arias, are now only somewhat abridged versions of works in the standard repertoire. They have even, Ralls proudly notes, done a Rosenkavalier.
Baritone Mark Pedrotti shares Ubukata’s assessment He’s known Ralls practically since his arrival at U of T, and says, “He’s made a huge change in the atmosphere of the school. It’s much more relaxed today; there’s much more of a sense of camaraderie–it’s like one big family now.”
Singers generally tend to champ eagerly at the bit when the opportunity arises to talk about Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata (though the two have quite distinct personalities, their professional lives are so utterly entwined, it’s impossible to talk about one without the other). Tenor Michael Schade says, “I would not have an international career today without those two. They introduced me to the joy of singing lieder, and of incorporating my opera and oratorio experience into the miniature drama that is the lied.” Finley adds that Ralls is “a wonderful pianist–very sensitive musically. He plays deeply into the piano. Singers, you know, are generally unprepared and chaotic–and some accompanists are too. But Stephen is always completely prepared. He is completely unflappable. And his composure provides the kind of security which allows a singer to be ‘artistic’.” Ainsworth talks of the insight Ralls conveys to the finest details of performance: “When I was singing the lead in Albert Herring, he showed me that I couldn’t just ‘hic’ during Albert’s drunk scene. It had to be a C-flat ‘hic’ because the C-flat completed the Tristan chord the orchestra was playing and completed the musical joke.”
Ainsworth is a young singer–you could almost joke he’s on the cast list for Aldeburgh: The Next Generation–and at this stage in his career, he’s taking the equivalent of baby steps. Luckily for him–as most of his singing colleagues would undoubtedly have told him at that extraordinary Saturday rehearsal-he’s taking them in the company of a man whose entire career has been devoted to teaching young students how to stride.
Gerald Hannon is a Toronto writer who made his opera debut this spring, singing the Sacristan in Tosca and Frank in Die Fledermaus.