Ian Bostridge

A decade ago, Ian Bostridge was spending more time in the halls of academia than on a concert stage.But the desire to make music, rather than do research, exerted an irresistible pull on the London native.Lucky for Bostridge and others, music won.

Today, the British tenor is admired as one of the finest interpreters of art songs, a realm in which only a select number of singers excel.He also performs opera and orchestral concerts; in fact, he'll be a soloist in Britten's War Requiem with the Cleveland Orchestra during the 2003-04 season under Franz Welser-M?t.

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"I like the life," said Bostridge in a phone interview last week."I found the academic life too inward looking.I like being gregarious.I'm not a naturally extroverted person, but it makes me happy to be in a job that makes me more extroverted.It does sort of help."

Turning point
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Yet the turning point for Bostridge came in high school, when a German teacher introduced him to recordings by German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, one of the great practitioners of the German art of lieder.
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"I fell in love with the music and the whole way of singing it," Bostridge said.
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Bostridge gave his first recital at 17, singing nothing less than Schumann's sublime song cycle, "Dichterliebe," and continued giving concerts while studying philosophy and history at Cambridge and Oxford.But he never thought he actually could become a lieder singer.

"I didn't have proper lessons," he said."It seemed like coals to Newcastle or, as the Viennese say, pouring water into the Danube.How could a non-German singer do that?"

Bostridge persisted, however, even while working for a television company after college and then returning to Oxford on a fellowship.He became known by managers and conductors, including Welser-M?t, who hired him to sing the young sailor in a concert performance of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" with the London Philharmonic.

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"I got a lot of press," Bostridge said."Everybody thought, 'He's doing so much singing, he needs to make up his mind.' I had a very sympathetic boss [at Oxford] who said, 'Let's work it out.' I finished my book and fellowship.I became a singer."

A question of spaces

Bostridge did so full time in 1995, soon receiving a push from a big recording company, EMI Classics, which has released many of his performances in lieder, concert works and opera.On his newest recording, he sings the title role in Mozart's "Idomeneo" under Mackerras.

Although opera and art song seem worlds apart, Bostridge considers them complementary.

"It's really more a question of spaces, I suppose," he said."A good space can support any weight of voice.But what you need [in opera] is a good acoustic for the voice to carry in.Opera is good for a lieder singer in terms of thinking of a recital as a form of theater, thinking about body language and communication and acting."

On the other hand, "concentration on word painting and color is something one ought to use in the opera house.That's the problem with singing opera if the orchestra is too loud.
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Bostridge never met either man, but he has sung many Britten works - he was a rat in the one-act "Noye's Fludde" when he was 8 - and he admires Pears' interpretive depth, though he sounds nothing like him.

"I have a Britten aesthetic of singing," said Bostridge."Sometimes it's important to make a beautiful noise, but I think expressivity comes first.