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Interview: Soprano Sandrine Piau came of age as singer during golden moment of interest in baroque opera

By John Terauds on January 31, 2013

piau

Tonight, French soprano Sandrine Piau, one of the great baroque-specialist singers of our time makes her long-overdue début in Toronto with Tafelmusik. Although she has a clean, vibrato-free sound that goes so well with the era, it is backed up with licking flames of fire, not the sweet smell of bluebells.

Piau sings a programme chosen from the core of her baroque repertoire: arias by George Frideric Handel and Antonio Vivaldi.

The Vivaldi selection is “In furore iustissimae irae,” RV 626, one of three sacred pieces he composed during a visit to Rome. It showcases everything we need to know about Piau’s voice and artistry. Here she is performing it with Accademia Bizantina on one of her many albums recorded for the Naïve label:

And here is Piau with “Se pieta” from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, another piece on the concert programme, which continues at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre until Sunday afternoon:

You’ll find all the programme details here.

It’s hard to imagine, but Piau had her musical start as a harp player.

She laughs as she recalls seeing Walt Disney’s The Aristocats as a little girl. Her favourite character was Duchess, and she was enamoured with all the trappings of being feminine and pincess-like. “So I asked my parents for harp lessons.”

Her parents also enrolled her in the country’s premier children’s chorus, La Maîtrise de Radio France, which operates like a choir school, with a half day of regular academic work and a half day of music. But singing was a peripheral interest.

Piau was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at age 18, and specialized in harp — until she found herself in a class with period-performance pioneer William Christie. The American expat led a revival of interest in baroque opera in France a generation ago.

“His class was called ‘Interpretation de la musique vocale ancienne,'” smiles Piau. “All of this was so mysterious because I was a specialist in modern and contemporary music as a harp player. Suddenly, this was a jump back by two centuries. It was a music so exciting and so modern somehow. For me the music of the 19th century is far more conformist than the music that came before and after.”

At the time, period-performance was very much a fringe activity in music schools. “I remember how people used to say that, as a singer if you can’t do anything else, you can sing baroque music and operetta,” laughs the soprano.

But Christie had big things in mind for this young student. “He told me, if you follow your heart, you’ll be a singer,” Piau recalls. “I hesitated for a long time.”

Her ultimate decision was clearly the right one, eventually leading to a career that now has her working on every continent.

She has never looked back. “Oh, the life of a harp player, it’s a vale of tears,” she says of all the under-employed harpists she knows.

Once in Christie’s orbit, Piau stepped into the world of baroque opera just as it was about to explode in the late-1980s.

The watershed moment, as far as she is concerned, was Christie’s revival of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1676 opera Atys in 1987 with Les Arts florissants. Each new production the group tackled would be recorded in studio.

As she blossomed and matured, Piau was picked up as a solo singer by the Naïve label for its ongoing series of recordings of the music of Antonio Vivaldi.

“It was a real adventure. Everything was open. Everything was possible. France was a privileged place to live with baroque music,” she recalls.

One job led to another. “You didn’t need an agent or to go to auditions,” Piau explains. “The conductors came to each other’s concerts, so, if they liked you, they’d say, come sing with me.”

She acknowledges that this wouldn’t be possible any more today. “Now so much is about finding the right way to market yourself,” she says.

Over the quarter century of her professional career, Piau has gone well beyond baroque repertoire, dipping her toes into French art song, Mozart opera and, most recently, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

For her, the secret to working beyond baroque is to keep her voice supple — “and to maintain endurance.” She practises yoga and limits how much time she spends in heavier vocal roles.  “You have to know that if you go too far in this direction, you can’t go back to something softer and very pure and very elastic,” she says.

She intended to record her most recent baroque album using the larger, more rounded voice she has developed over the years. She says it only took 10 minutes to realise that this wasn’t going to work — “I began singing like a castrato again, because it’s written like that.”

Throughout our chat, Piau’s eyes sparkle — nowhere more so than in speaking about the world of opera. “When you have a good conductor and a good director, and a sympathetic cast, you are like a family building something new together. It is a beautiful job.”

Just how beautiful? Check out her work with Jérôme Corréas and Les Paladins in her 2012 album, Le triomphe de l’amour, made up of 18th century French opera rarities:

John Terauds

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