‘I count the ethnic minorities in the audience… It doesn’t take long.’ Roderick Williams on opera’s diversity problem This week, Roderick Williams will be the first BAME British baritone to sing the title role in ‘Eugene Onegin’. He talks […]

This week, Roderick Williams will be the first BAME British baritone to sing the title role in

‘Eugene Onegin’. He talks to Claudia Pritchard

The baritone Roderick Williams plays a game when he sits and looks out across the auditorium from the concert platform, between solos. “The game often doesn’t last long,” says the popular and sought-after singer. “I count the ethnic minorities. But I might get as far as my mother and stop there.” And although he laughs as he explains this secret challenge, London-born, with a Jamaican mother and Welsh father, he is serious about the lack of diversity, be it in colour, age or class – not so much of artists like him, but of the audience they are facing.

“I came away from the pianist Roger Vignoles’s 70th-birthday recital at Wigmore Hall, and as sometime happens when there’s something big on, my train home to Warwickshire stopped at Wembley. Suddenly it was jammed and I asked what had been happening. It was an Ed Sheeran concert: he had sold out Wembley Stadium. That’s maybe more people in one evening than I appear before in a whole year.

I suspect that I have been given one or two jobs because of the colour of my skin

“A man with a guitar, writing songs in his bedroom – just like Schubert. And if I had sung an Ed Sheeran song in that railway carriage, everyone would have been able to join in. People own the songs – it’s on the iPod, it’s in the bath. We have to find a way of helping all people feel that they own classical music that way too.”

To this end, he often works with schools, and has appeared with the London-based orchestra Chineke!, for musicians from ethnic minorities. He never feels that his career has been affected by his ethnic background – his mother settled here in the Sixties and Roderick was born in 1965 – and while he admits that you don’t know about the opportunities that don’t come your way, he is amused that his “otherness” may even have been an advantage. “I suspect that I have been given one or two jobs because of the colour of my skin,” he says, laughing, ignoring the fact that his is one of the loveliest and most reliable voices on the scene today.

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Playing Eugene Onegin

Nevertheless it has taken until the age of 50 to sing the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. The production for Garsington Opera, which opens the Oxfordshire opera house season this weekend, has the advantage of being directed by a Russian speaker, Michael Boyd. When Williams and I meet during rehearsals in a south London studio, he explains that the whole company is focused on the original text, taken from Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem.

This is the story of a jaded man of the world who becomes the object of a romantic young girl’s first love. She writes an impassioned letter to him, and is crushed when he rejects her, in a scene that traditionally repels audiences that sympathise with the humiliated Tatyana – to be played at Garsington by Natalya Romaniw. But Williams finds more to admire in the apparently callous man of means.

“The words that flash up most often are ‘arrogant’ and ‘cold’. But Onegin is not cold: the way he speaks to Tatyana is very careful; he’s even tender towards her. What would you do if your next-door neighbour’s daughter sent you a letter like that – especially in today’s climate?

“Onegin doesn’t go to her mother, which would have been humiliating for her. He doesn’t tell his best friend, Lensky [engaged to Tatyana’s sister Olga]. But in trying to handle the situation himself he is discreet, and that blows up in his face.”

It is only years later that Onegin, seeing the now mature and married Tatyana, realises his loss, and writes his own, equally unsuccessful, love letter – but unlike Tatyana, Onegin does not get a great “letter aria” to sing. I suggest that Williams, an accomplished composer in his own right, pens one.

A North London boy done good

He certainly has the right track record: one of his most recent pieces took as its inspiration William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus. Commissioned by the new a cappella choir Ora, this ethereal homage was impeccably sung for the first time earlier this year, at the launch of Ora, within the Tower of London, in the Royal Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.

“Riffing” on other composers’ work appeals to him: another Williams composition “unpacked” the slow movement of a Bach suite for cello – Williams’s own instrument, alongside the piano, until he went to the Guildhall, and concentrated on the voice. A cathedral chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, after prep school there he went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Hertfordshire. “I think of myself as a north London boy,” he says, although today, married with three grown-up children, home is near Stratford-upon-Avon.

If I had sung an Ed Sheeran song in my railway carriage, everyone would have been able to join in. People own the songs – it’s on the iPod, it’s in the bath. We have to find a way of helping all people feel that they own classical music that way too

While getting to grips with Russian in such a way as to point up to a non-Russian audience the many pivotal moments of Eugene Onegin, he is also currently working on an unusual project to present in English some of the best-known songs of Schubert, the master setter of German texts. In November, he will perform the composer’s great odyssey, Die Winterreise, in a new translation by Jeremy Sams, at Wigmore Hall. “I can’t wait to see how people experience something when one of the barriers has been removed.”

Tackling Britten

Many of Williams’s early roles were with Opera North, and it is with the Leeds-based company that he performs another career first later this year, making his debut in the title role of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. The director will be his sister-in-law Orpha Phelan, and they are working in a full-scale opera together for the first time, although Williams appeared in her semi-staged performance of Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream at the Barbican in 2012. Irish-born Phelan met Williams’s younger brother on a production of Britten’s Albert Herring – and the singer speaks admiringly of her reading of Billy Budd, in which the life of the eager young seaman of the title is ultimately in the hands of his commanding officer, Captain Vere, to be sung for Opera North by Alan Oke.

If you get seduced by the trappings of opera, then you miss a theatrical trick: we could all be wearing black, we could just go, ‘La, la, la’. With the music alone you can see people hurting and experiencing joy

“You know, we talk about the ‘title role’, but the opera is about Vere, just as half of Onegin is about Tatyana. Billy stands for something in Vere’s universe. Billy changes people by being in the room: he humanises people, he keeps seeing the best in people, and then they show him their best.”

The same, you feel, can be said for Williams, a really popular figure with fellow artists and audiences alike (he is named singer of the year in the Royal Philharmonic Society awards a few days after we meet). But the rehearsal is restarting and the moment has come for him to be fitted with a pair of slighty villainous, possibly 19th-century, sideburns.

This clue to the opera’s staging, with design by Tom Piper, and much discussion about the dances at key points in the opera, indicate that Garsington’s version may be a “traditional” Onegin.

Williams laughs without malice at the audience’s preference for frocks and smocks, but warns: “If you get seduced by the trappings of opera, then you miss a theatrical trick: we could all be wearing black, we could just go, ‘La, la, la’. With the music alone you can see people hurting and experiencing joy.”

‘Eugene Onegin,’ Garsington Opera, Oxfordshire, from 3 June until 7 July in rep (01865 361636). The production will also be screened in coastal communities, including Skegness (2 July), Ramsgate (23 July), Bridgewater (20 August) and Grimsby (30 September). For details, visit operaforall.org