David Webb and John Andrews on Arthur Sullivan

As a lifelong Gilbert & Sullivan enthusiast I've spent many happy hours over the past month enjoying a terrific new anthology of excerpts from the duo's Savoy Operas and from Sullivan's lesser-known sacred works, courtesy of tenor David Webb, conductor John Andrews and the Academy of Ancient Music. The album is the first to present Sullivan's music on period instruments, in a mixture of the original orchestrations and Andrews's own astute arrangements.

With the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival in Buxton poised to kick off in just over a week, it seemed like the perfect time to sit down with David and John to discuss the many and varied tenors in Sullivan's life, why his music is still so under-represented on record despite its enduring popularity in the theatre, the thought-process behind some of the ingenious reorchestrations on the album, and their respective (and rather unconventional!) paths to falling in love with this music...

How much do we know about the singers who created these roles?

JA I did quite a bit of research on this for the booklet-notes, and it’s interesting that Sullivan seems to have got through tenors quite quickly! He had his three core baritones and a contralto who did almost everything, whereas the tenor situation was more fluid: I don’t think any one person created more than two or three roles. The main players were George Power, Courtice Pounds and Durward Lely, and I think they were all probably more actors than singers - but Sullivan gives them material which is incredibly cleverly written and brimming with dramatic opportunities.

DW It seems like they all had slightly different sounds: I’m currently learning Ralph Rackstraw [a George Power role], which feels different to Nanki-Poo [written for Lely] and certainly very different to Fairfax [created by Pounds]. They’re all great arias but some of them seem to fit me better vocally and dramatically, so that was the driving force behind choosing the repertoire. 

Every time I’m asked to do a role I go back and listen to other singers, and I really enjoyed hearing the tenors of previous generations doing their stuff. There’s an amazing Charles Mackerras recording of The Mikado with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Nanki-Poo, but on the D’Oyly Carte recordings in particular all the tenors have a very distinct sound - there’s nothing wrong with it but it’s not the soundworld I want to hear today, and that was part of the impetus behind this project.

Do either of you have any theories as to why there have been so few commercial recordings of the Savoy Operas?

JA They’re a victim of their own success. It’s a peculiar paradox in that if the D’Oyly Carte hadn’t been touring for the first half of the twentieth century and these things had only been rediscovered recently, we’d treat them more seriously than we do now. If there had been no performances after Sullivan’s death, then companies like Opera Rara would be all over it!

Part of the problem has also been that it was difficult to access the full scores until recently. There’s been a lot of work done over the past decade to make sure that good critical editions are available, but so many people only know this music from piano reductions - which means that the quality and beauty of Sullivan’s orchestral writing have been underappreciated for a long time. Historically, that’s been a big problem in the reception of this music.

The G&S scholar Marc Shepherd has just unearthed three cut songs from Iolanthe which have never seen the light of day. That’s fantastic in itself, but it’s also illustrative of how negligent previous generations have been about this material: Mark found them hiding in plain sight. And it shows just how ruthless Gilbert and Sullivan were - if something wasn’t working, it was scrapped before opening night. These three discarded numbers form a little sequence in the first act, and we’re going to do them in concert this summer at Buxton.

DW I completely agree with John about the quality of the orchestration: when we did The Yeomen of the Guard together, I remember thinking that the entr’acte sounded like Mascagni! The orchestral score comes alive in ways that you’d never expect from hearing it on the piano. And it's a testament to John’s skill with the arrangements he’s done for this recording that he’s managed to keep Sullivan’s soundworld intact while bringing it to life in a different way.

At what stage did you decide to use period instruments for the recording?

JA It all goes back to 2021, when we did Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master at Buxton; we’d already recorded the piece, but David stepped into the principal tenor role for the performances. The following year we got back together for Yeomen and Pirates, and the idea for this album started to germinate. 

We hadn’t yet secured funding, but we started by thinking about what our dream scenario might be. We originally thought about mixing the standard orchestrations with new ones because G&S has been updated in lots of different ways over the decades: there have been jazz, rock and swing versions, so we wondered if we might commission some funky new arrangements. We were very aware that this would be a project built around one singer and one composer, so we wanted to incorporate as much variety as possible.

Meanwhile, I’d been talking to the Academy of Ancient Music about other projects, and it suddenly came to me that I didn’t know of any recordings of this music on original instruments…One of the oratorios was done about ten years ago, and John Wilson did Princess Ida with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in concert but it wasn’t recorded. So we decided that to reproduce the size and the sound of the Savoy orchestra would be radical in its own way.

DW One of the lovely things about the recording was that the players so obviously enjoyed the music, and the passion behind their playing really lifted the sessions in itself. I don’t think I changed anything fundamental about my technique in response, but there were a couple of arias where new possibilities opened up: in Fairfax’s ‘Free From His Fetters Grim’ the beauty and sheen of the sound meant that I could essentially croon it in a way I couldn't in an opera house. It offered the opportunity to perform the music as it might’ve been heard in salons and bandstands – I loved that, and it certainly brought new ideas when performing it.

John, what sources did you draw on for your new arrangements?

JA There were a couple of inspirations – we know that brass bands were playing this music at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Gilbert & Sullivan had issues with copyright during their lifetimes. That bandstand image fired something in my brain, and I thought ‘Nanki-Poo is a second trombonist in his town band, he needs his crew behind him!’. 

That fired a memory or hearing an early twentieth-century recording of ‘Is Life A Boon?’ arranged for brass band, and that makes sense too because Colonel Fairfax is a soldier; likewise, the Major-General should have his honour guard of military musicians supporting him! Then we got talking about ‘Take A Pair of Sparkling Eyes’, and I remembered sitting on a piazza in Venice and hearing that kind of café band which Sullivan seems to be conjuring up, so I’ve tried to reverse-engineer it. 

The oratorios received grandiose performances back in the day but very few people would have got to the Three Choirs Festival, and they must’ve been heard in more modest settings. I can’t say hand-on-heart how they were done in churches, but I could just imagine a fairly conservative Director of Music looking at the score and saying ‘I’ll work with what I’ve got here…’ and this is how I imagined it sounding on a Sunday morning at a well-supported suburban church.

How did you both come to know and love G&S?

DW John and I both came to it by pretty strange routes, but mine has to be the weirdest! When I was a choral scholar at Truro Cathedral they did a pantomime in the chapter house with the congregation every year, and the two wonderfully eccentric ladies who organised it asked me and two other scholars if we’d get involved. I think it was The Golden Goose, but it involved the three of us dressing up in drag and singing ‘Three Little Maids From School’ at pitch…I’m sure there’s photographic evidence somewhere! Then somehow I skipped all the usual routes of community productions, because the next time I did any G&S was when I made my main stage debut at ENO as Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance!

JA There’s a peculiar gap for me too. The first G&S I saw was also ‘Three Little Maids’, sung by Hinge and Bracket as part of the gala scene in Die Fledermaus at the Royal Opera House! Then I didn’t give G&S a second thought for decades, until I conducted Trial by Jury and Yeomen at university; I was very focused on traditional Austro-German repertoire at that point, so I was tempted by Yeomen because it’s the most serious of the Savoy Operas. I enjoyed it, but it was the lightest end of what I could imagine myself doing. 

I ended up coming at the rest of Sullivan’s music sideways, which has been a great route – I’ve always been interested in lesser-known English music, and through my work in that area I got booked by the English Music Festival to conduct Sullivan’s incidental music for Macbeth. So I discovered Sullivan’s serious side before I went anywhere near the operettas: I got to know him as the Leipzig-trained Mendelssohn scholar, and I edged back to the Savoy Operas through that and bel canto.

I spent many happy years as David Parry’s assistant at Garsington where I came to love the Rossini and Donizetti comedies, and I still view the Savoy operas through that lens. It raised a few eyebrows when I was conducting at the Buxton International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in 2022 and started my introduction by saying ‘I’m not a G&S fan…’ But the point was that although it wasn’t part of my blood growing up, I now come at it with a profound respect for them as nineteenth-century writers of comic opera – with the same perspective as I come at Rossini, Donizetti, or Fledermaus. This is brilliantly constructed, delightfully orchestrated, incredibly concise writing that stands up alongside all of them.

DW Seconded! These pieces are gems, and I think every music college should be doing one of them each season – there are lots of roles, the music’s beautiful, and this repertoire is being performed everywhere all the time. When you’re fresh out of college there’s always going to be a local company looking to cast young leads, and you learn so much about stagecraft and delivering dialogue from doing these shows at grass-roots level.

David, do you have a favourite among these roles?

DW There was a lot of Marco [from The Gondoliers] in me back when I was a flirty cheeky chappy (people might say I’m still like that now!), but I feel a special connection with Frederic. The last time I did Pirates there was a moment in Act Two which hit deep: it’s the scene where he’s been dragged back into the pirates’ world and is begging them to show him the same sort of mercy which he granted them earlier, and it tapped into a childhood memory of begging to be allowed this one thing I wanted because I’d done everything that was asked of me. We’re getting into core wounds and inner child stuff here, which might seem a bit strange for G&S, but that idea of doing your best and not being heard is so relatable. 

I love Pirates, and I’ve been privileged to do it with some incredible colleagues: for one production I had the great John Tomlinson as my Sergeant of Police! People might wonder what the Major-General is doing on an album called ‘Songs for Tenor’: the short answer is ‘because he’s awesome!’, and I’ve learned so much about the patter-roles from sharing the stage with comic legends like Simon Butteriss and Richard Suart. I’m never going to become a baritone, but I can’t imagine not singing these operas. I think I have a few more Frederics in me, but eventually the time will come when casting directors say ‘Come on David, you can’t get away with that anymore!’. So that track’s on there as my retirement plan!