A SINGING LESSON ON THE 45TH FLOOR

           Recently, I was asked to answer one of those questionaires….happiest moment, most inspiring person  etc. One question was “With whom would you most like to be trapped in an elevator?” I hardly had to think. A singer, of course.

          Much as I love music, I can’t sing a note or carry a tune. What an opportunity, to get some coaching from a woman – it would have to be a woman – who could explain why the most banal words, when set to music, can cause one to transcend pain, age, despair.

           Films seldom convey what Thomas Hardy called “an aesthetic transport” – the effect by which some sound or sight transcends the physical world. Tom Hanks achieved it playing the young lawyer dying of AIDS in the film Philadelphia, where he tries to convey to his lawyer Denzel Washington the effect on him of the soprano Maria Callas.

          For my elevator lessons, however, Callas wouldn’t be my choice. I suspect she’d rather stay silent than lower herself to coach an amateur. Also, a new voice has recently tempted me away from the great sopranos of the past, partly because she lives in Paris and I’ve been able to hear her sing in person. Her name is Barbara Hannigan. She’s Canadian, but spends most of her working life in Germany and Holland. These days, she mostly conducts, sometimes combining this with singing, as she does here, in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915¸a setting of a passage from A Death in the Family by James Agee – a bonus, since he’s one of my favourite writers.         

          But who, if not her? Her partner is the actor Mathieu Amalric, who probably wouldn’t favour having her spend long periods with me, even trapped in a box on the 45^th floor. In that case, I’d hope for another of the younger, more adventurous sopranos whom I’ve also seen live. Diane Damrau is German, with a Teutonic fury in her voice and her body language, particularly in one of her most famous roles, that of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute. The London production from which this clip comes is one I’m sorry I missed. Her performance so impressed me that I put a few bars onto my phone as the ring tone – until a bus driver nearly ran off the road when it went off next to his ear. How would it sound in an  elevator? I would really like to find out.