Sir Thomas Allen reflects on his career

The beloved British baritone Sir Thomas Allen received Gramophone's Lifetime Achievement Award last night, and was greeted by a standing ovation from the room (as well as a warm hug from fellow singer Gerald Finley, who presented him with the prize). Sir Thomas made his final operatic appearance earlier this year in Glyndebourne's production of The Merry Widow, closing the curtain on a five-decade career which included definitive interpretations of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Count Almaviva and Don Alfonso, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and (in a rare foray into Wagner) Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger.

Sir Thomas was kind enough to take time out from celebrating his eighty-first birthday last month and speak to me about his earliest musical experiences in his native County Durham, abandoning medicine for music in his teens, the culture-shock of relocating to London, his parallel (and ongoing) career as a stage-director, and just a few of the great recordings which he's made over the years...

What was musical life like in the North-East during your childhood?

I’ve been away for a long time, but my memory hasn’t faded! I heard very little professional music-making because there basically wasn’t any - but my dad was very involved at an amateur level, and I saw all the am-dram classics at a local cinema which served as a theatre. The first fully professional concert I attended was when the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester came to Newcastle; I heard the Tannhäuser overture for the first time and thought it was wonderful. I think it was Konwitschny conducting - one of the big German ‘K’s, anyway!

Our local church and chapel choirs had a tradition of performing full-scale oratorios, and that was very formative for me; I heard my first Messiah and Creation in Seaham when I was quite young, and I was aware of some major singers coming and going (Emmie Tillett was the main agent in London, and she would farm out people like Isobel Baillie and Kathleen Ferrier). We also had some seriously good homegrown soloists, but nobody from our area expected that classical singing could be a full-time career back then. I used to look at newsreels and see the likes of Callas and Gigli arriving in London for the season, but they were from another planet. 

Was there a specific moment when you realised you had real potential as a professional singer?

I’m still waiting for it! I took a wrong turn when I was about thirteen and decided I was going to concentrate on the sciences, with a view to eventually becoming a doctor; that meant largely abandoning anything artistic, because in those days you couldn’t have your cake and eat it (perhaps you still can’t…).

By the time I was fifteen I realised I didn’t belong in the chemistry lab and would have been much happier in the arts studio next door. I was already singing in local concerts as a soloist, and when I eventually started falling behind with my chosen subjects the headmaster stepped in (no careers advisors in those days) and suggested we got some advice from Arthur Hutchings at Durham University. I went along and sang for him in my school blazer, and he contacted the Royal College of Music, who took me in. (I also had a good golf handicap, which impressed the Director of Admissions!)

What did you make of London when you first arrived?

I thought it was horrible! I was only nineteen, and quite immature for my age: I’d never been away from home apart from a choral week in York, and suddenly I was stuck in a dingy house-share in Stockwell with people I didn’t know. It’s even worse these days, but the noise, the traffic and the general pace of life were so different from what I was used to – people didn’t acknowledge you on the street, and it felt very hard to make friends. I’d have jumped on a bus home at the drop of a hat, but my parents didn’t give in even though I gave them hell! 

I used to leave my digs and wander round the city for hours, trying to familiarise myself with what London was - and I loved listening to the likes of Donald Soper on Tower Hill and Speakers’ Corner, preaching about everything under the sun. Then slowly but surely people on the musical scene recognised that I had something about me and I started to feel like I belonged there, but it was a long process.

What advice do you have for emerging artists today, and how much has the landscape changed since you were embarking on your own career?

I’m out of the business and a technophobe anyhow, but the whole culture of self-promotion is alien to me – when I was starting out it was just not cricket to engage a publicist, unless you were off to do a recital-tour in American where nobody knew who the hell you were! In this era of social media, you can create your own Saatchi & Saatchi from your kitchen table and you’re off and running, but setting all of that up wasn’t acceptable back then. You forged your way ethically and correctly, in a very fair manner. Nowadays you can’t give that advice to young singers, and they all know how to operate within that world anyway: it’s just how things are now.

I usually work with young artists who are already gifted with what an American colleague of mine calls the ‘golden throat’, so my main pearl of wisdom is simply to be curious: about everything in life, not just music. If I’m meeting young singers or judging a competition, I’m looking for someone who brings individuality to the table – not just the equivalent of a tennis-player with a powerful serve who can sustain a volley for hours and looks the part. 

I remember sitting in on a rehearsal at Glyndebourne with Jani Strasser, who was the head coach there for many years and a founder musical member. There was a young, rather strident baritone doing a good job singing Ford [in Verdi's Falstaff], and Jani turned to us and said: ‘It’s all very well, my dears, but you get sick of double cream eventually!’ That’s what I want: a dash of sourness in the cream, and some meat alongside it. Line and beauty of tone is great, but you’ll never engage with an audience if you don’t bring character to the table as well. 

Was forging a parallel career as a stage director always part of your plan?

I’ve never planned anything in my career: serendipity has played a big part! Someone would suggest I look at a role, then somehow an offer would magically materialise. That happened with Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, which was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in my life: a German colleague mentioned that it might suit me, then a few weeks later Peter Katona approached me about singing it at Covent Garden…

It was similar with directing. An American colleague (whom we lost during the pandemic) invited me out to the States to direct an opera and asked me what I might like to do…I’d never considered it, but I suggested Albert Herring. The characters are so well observed that I thought I could have a crack at that…

That project never materialised, but a little while later Neil Mackie invited me to make my directorial debut at the Royal College of Music and we did Herring there. Then Scottish Opera arrived on the scene, and I’ve been going back and forth ever since. I’ve done a number of things in different houses in the US now – Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, and down in Arizona.  

As I see it, my job as a director is to come to the table as a working performer. I don’t say ‘Do it like that, because that’s what I do’ - I try to understand what their problem might be at a particular moment, and suggest various options. When I’m working with students (for example at the RCM), I find myself in a teacher’s role as well as a director’s role. It’s time-consuming but very rewarding, because at the end of it all you've gone through an organic process of creating some new ideas in an emerging artist, and the results are often very interesting…

Have any directors prompted you to radically rethink a role you knew well?

The one that’s uppermost in my mind here is Don Giovanni. I first sang it at Glyndebourne in Peter Hall’s production, which provided the foundation for the rest of my career in that role, but I always scrubbed the board of anything I knew about it, and it varied over time with one’s development and the ageing process. 

When Johannes Schaaf came to direct it in a very dark production at Covent Garden in the 1990s for the bicentenary, I felt absolutely incompetent for those first few days in the rehearsal room. I knew it would come back eventually, but it’s far better to go through that crisis of confidence rather than turn up and say: ‘This is me, and this is how I play Don Giovanni’. I’ve never used those words about a role, although I have heard them said…

I wanted to continue playing Don Giovanni into my sixties – there’s a lot to be said for portraying him as a much older man, not least because it makes those 2000-plus notches on his bedpost more feasible! But naturally there are younger singers itching to get their teeth into the role, and audiences who are itching to see them…

Were there any roles you’d have liked to sing which never came your way?

Not really! I’ve been very lucky, and if something didn’t come my way it was generally because it wasn’t right for me. When I was a student, my teacher used to mutter about Wotan figuring in my future, but it didn’t turn out that way. In recent years people asked me if Amfortas would ever come into the equation, but it wasn’t for me and nor was Orest in Elektra – they’re dramatic baritone roles, and I just wasn’t suited to them. I always remember my beloved colleague Edita Gruberová saying ‘I can only sing what I sing’, and that stuck with me: you can’t force yourself into a pigeonhole where you don’t belong.

One role I did always wonder about was Wozzeck...it cropped up on a couple of occasions, and I felt I had a lot to bring to the character, but maybe I would’ve been better suited to the play than the opera. And Falstaff kept coming and going – Franco Zeffirelli wanted me for a production, but I had an inkling that it wasn’t quite right. I sang most of it in concert in New York about twenty years ago and enjoyed it a lot, but overall I was just happier as Ford.

Of the hundreds of recordings you’ve made over the years, can you pick out three or four which are special on a personal level?

I knew you’d ask, and it gave me a sleepless night because there are so many I could choose! I sang Don Giovanni many times with that pragmatic self-deprecating Dutchman Bernard Haitink, and it was a joy to record it together in 1984. We had a cast who knew each other very well from staged productions, and the recording really gelled because we knew one another’s timings and requirements.

There was also a Nozze di Figaro with Solti which we recorded in Kingsway Hall, with an absolute dream of a cast: Lucia Popp, Kiri, Sam Ramey, Frederica von Stade, and no less a person than Kurt Moll as Bartolo. Keeping that kind of company really ups your game! I have such happy memories of that recording, and I think people still regard it as a decent take on the piece. ;-)

I remember something very significant happening when we were recording Britten’s War Requiem in Birmingham with Simon Rattle, Bob Tear, myself and Elisabeth Söderström. On the last day we still had that wonderful setting of Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Meeting’ to do in just one session. I told Simon that I’d really like to do it in one take, burps and all…It went well, but we decided to do another to iron out a few little things – and EMI ended up issuing the first one! But that sort of thing really forces you to concentrate. 

My last choice is the Eugene Onegin with Jimmy Levine and the Staatskapelle Dresden orchestra which we recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in Dresden because it was so cheap. It was quite an unsettling experience doing a Russian opera in Communist East Germany, and it’s amazing to think how different things are now. When you went through Checkpoint Charlie heading East, it was like day going into night. There was nothing on the Autobahn – I remember being driven along this long flat road down to Dresden and realising it was an emergency airstrip.

As with the War Requiem, we got to the final day of recording and still had an essential section to cover: that entire last scene where I burst in and abase myself to Tatyana, pleading with her to come with me and start a life together… Mirella and I were getting quite tense because we had a deadline to get out of East Germany – you were funnelled towards Checkpoint Charlie, watched by armed guards on motorcycles all the way. 

I remember we’d both kicked off our shoes partway through the session: I usually find shoes quite grounding, but we’d got a bit pantheistic that afternoon and were standing there like we were on the beach! Once we got it in the can we scrambled back into our shoes, jumped in the cars and got back to West Berlin in the nick of time.

You gave your final staged performance this summer, as Baron Zeta in The Merry Widow – what’s next?

I’ll be carrying on with directing work: I’m back at Scottish Opera in March for a revival of my Figaro production. Technically I’m retired from singing, but John Wilson twisted my arm to play the role of the Salvation Army leader Arvide Abernathy on his recording of Guys & Dolls; Abernathy has a lovely little song called ‘More I Cannot Wish You’ which was cut from the film, so we included that and the recording will come out next year. I think that will be my last outing, but you never know…