The Don of all Giovannis

Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 16 May 2010

Gerald Finley has made the Mozart part his own, and this summer Glyndebourne will feel the full force of his demonic charms

Grey skies, plummeting temperatures, belated April showers. Yes, it’s time to get out our picnic hampers, rugs and brollies. Glyndebourne opens on Thursday with a new production of Britten’s nautical tragedy Billy Budd by the Donmar Theatre’s Michael Grandage, directing opera for the first time.

The season’s hottest ticket, however, opening, let’s hope, in warmer weather seven weeks hence, is Glyndebourne’s first new staging in a decade of one of the staples of the festival’s repertoire: Don Giovanni. Leading the cast is the Canadian-born, British-resident Gerald Finley, who has spent the best part of the decade singing Mozart’s “philanderer of Seville”. This is his eighth production since 2001.

Click the 2010 Glyndebourne Festival cover for details of Don Giovanni

Finley is one of those rare singers who ranges freely between bass and baritone. He’s a Glyndebourne “baby” who did a stint in the chorus before landing the lyric baritone role of Papageno on the Glyndebourne tour – a classic training ground for young British singers when Finley was setting out on his career – but when the new Glyndebourne opera house opened in 1994, he was assigned the more bassy role of Figaro. When you meet him, his rich, gravelly speaking voice, with its distinctive Canadian burr, immediately suggests a bass, but nowadays he sings Count Almaviva in Figaro and has chosen the title role of Don Giovanni rather than the bassier role of Leporello.

“In fact, before I first sang Don Giovanni,” he says in the bar of a quiet hotel in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, “[the Austrian conductor] Nikolaus Harnoncourt wanted me to do Leporello, and there was a chance at the time of a recording, but I didn’t want that to be my first encounter with Don Giovanni. I wanted stage experience first.”

Figaro to Leporello seems a logical progression, but Finley’s career can hardly be described as typical. Don Giovanni is usually a young man’s role, but Finley was in his early forties when he first sang it, and is now 50. If Don Giovanni ever wore tights, doublet and hose these days, Finley might be forgiven for thinking of sending them to the Oxfam shop, but he has looked after himself and his voice. He looks and sounds in his prime, at least 10 years younger than he is.

The reason Finley is singing so well into his fifties is that he is the singing world’s Mr Cautious. He has paced himself with exemplary self-knowledge and care, but it is characteristic of his self-effacing personality that he gives others the credit for his success. His route to the world’s leading opera houses and concert halls has been an unusual one. Born in Montreal in 1960, he came to Britain at the age of 19, enrolled at the Royal College of Music, but immediately auditioned for King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar for three years. By way of the RCM postgraduate opera school and the National Opera studio, he wound up in the Glyndebourne chorus at 28 and his progress has been inexorable ever since.

He doesn’t have an archetypal “King’s” sound, I remark. “Oh, well, that’s because I have taken my time. I was a keen chorister back then. I loved it. My ambition was to be a choral conductor, to come to London to get experience of the choral world. After that, I was going to go back to Canada. I was eligible for a British passport because my mother’s grandfather was a Scot, which meant I could live and work here. I’ve had a wonderful training here, and I owe a lot to Glyndebourne. They did exactly what it said in the synopsis – chorus, understudying on tour, small roles on tour, big roles on tour, small roles then big ones at the festival. Over seven years, that’s just what happened.”

Although he hasn’t sung at Glyndebourne since 2002, the Sussex festival has clearly had a huge impact on both Finley’s work and life. He met his ex-wife, the mezzo-soprano Louise Winter, there (they have two boys still at school), but now he lives in a village near Tunbridge Wells with Heulwen Keyte, who used to work for his management company. On the day we met, they had just returned from a volcano-ash-extended holiday with the boys and Finley’s mother in Florida, and were in the middle of moving house.

He divides his work equally between opera, song recitals and concert work, which means he rarely does more than three operas a year. His operatic repertoire is wide, embracing Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Debussy and Puccini as well as his Mozart staples, but he has also created roles in high-profile new operas – Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie (2000) and John Adams’s Dr Atomic (2005) – and he will co-star in Turnage’s new Royal Opera commission, an opera about Anna Nicole Smith, the American celebrity victim, in February 2011.

Rehearsals for Don Giovanni begin this week, and, even though he has discussed the production with the director, Jonathan Kent, Finley is not giving much away. Attitudes to Don Giovanni have changed over the years: the demonic charmer has been transformed by directors into an egotistical murderer, rapist and sex maniac. We’ve all become rather censorious about him, yet Mozart and his librettist, Da Ponte, clearly admired him. Even the Victorian era adored him, but the 21st century doesn’t like his Olympic-standard sexual athleticism at all. Few admit they do, anyway.

“It’s fascinating how tastes change,” Finley says. “I’ve done very different styles of production – romantic, uber-baroque, modern-dress. I’ve covered the gamut, which makes the role interesting. Don Giovanni is ageless. He needs to have a bit of life experience. I think he’s enchanted by his own bravura.”

If Finley is enchanted with his own bravura, you would never guess it from his self-deprecating manner and unpushy style. It’s a token of his vocal and physical fitness that his next assignment at Glyndebourne, in 2011, is his first Hans Sachs in Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. It’s a huge leap in vocal terms – and Finley will be a youthful presence in that role – but this Don Giovanni marks a watershed in his career.

“Well, I just turned 50, and I have to link my voice with my age. I don’t want to sound old, but I want to find a new maturity that will allow me to sing for another 20 years in suitable roles. I feel like I’ve reached the first plateau.”