WORLD-renowned tenor Ian Storey, who, when he’s not performing in the world’s most prestigious opera houses, lives in Herefordshire, has recently released his first solo CD, Ian Storey Sings.

 

“I haven’t listened to it myself,” he says. “I have live DVDs and various things recorded over the years and I haven’t even watched myself as Tristan” – the role in which he opened the 2007 La Scala season in Milan and the biggest role of his career to date at the time. “I’ll probably listen to it when I’m about 75.

“It came out of the blue,” Ian says of the new CD, on which he’s accompanied by Sinfonia Musicisti, under the baton of Howard Burrell, who had given him his first three roles with Opera East. “My first role was singing the male chorus in Rape of Lucretia, playing to audiences of just 34 in places like Horsham.

To go from that to singing in front of a worldwide audience of 10 million at La Scala ... “I hadn’t spoken to Howard for a while when he rang to propose the recording and it was a very different experience. When he suggested it, I agreed with two provisos: one was that I only sang stuff that I do on stage. I wanted it to be representative of my career.” The other condition he made was, he says, that he “wanted it to be done as live as possible”.

He didn’t, he explains, want it to be like one recording he knew of that was tweaked so much that one section was actually impossible: “There was a page and a half without a breath taken.”

“It was also such a joy working with a British orchestra because I’d forgotten how good they were.

I’ve worked with some of the best orchestras in the world and they will all take a British musician whenever they can.”

Although Ian Storey Sings is his first solo recording, he has been involved with other recordings, including songs for the Northumbria Anthology. “I was learning songs as they came out of the fax machine,” he says of his contributions to an anthology that includes songs and poems of the north east, contributed by many of the big names to have emerged from the area, from Sting and Kevin Whately to Lindisfarne and Ian himself.

“Essentially I am a live performer, not a recording artist. Most of the stuff on the CD was done in one take. We did the whole CD in 12 hours and most of that time was spent rehearsing the orchestra. It was all stuff I knew so it was just a matter of scheduling the time to do it, then turning up and saying ‘I feel like a bit of Tannhauser today’.

“It was really fun to do, a little bit of an alien environment for me as I’m usually on stage without a microphone in front of me.

“Once I’d done my bit, I left it to them. Howard knew I had no experience of how the recording business works.”

When operas have been recorded for DVD, he says, it is a different process. “All I was aware of with them was some cameras, but then I got on with my job.”

Explaining why he is unlikely to listen to the CD, Ian says: “I am never really happy with what I do. I’m always hypercritical of everything, even at the end of a performance. I always wonder if I could have done it a little better. I’m always striving to do my best.

“I studied with Carlo Cossutta and there were things he said to me that helped me enormously, and one of them was that if you ever decide that that’s it and that there’s nothing better you can do, it’s time to retire.

“The fun thing about doing what I do is that I do really difficult stuff that few people can do and every single night is a challenge”

Ian sang Tristan for the 50th time in Venice before Christmas last year “Not many can say they’ve got to 50,” he says, adding that the first tenor who ever did it died after just three performances.

It also “claimed” the lives of two conductors, but it’s “superstitious hogwash", says Ian.

“The fact is that, every time I look at the piece I see something new in it. The physical and mental challenges of the role mean that you’ve got to be really on the ball to do it, but I love a challenge.”

Ian spends at least 70 per cent of his working life abroad, and appearances in this country are rare – his last was a charity concert for the Teenage Cancer Trust last December. “But I do want to try and organise another concert for Acorns Children’s Hospice,” he says.

In the meantime, though, in the year that marks the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth and the 130th anniversary of his death, Ian Storey will be found singing Siegfried in Gotterdammerung with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatsoper in March and April and then at La Scala in May and June.

Ian Storey Sings is released on the newly formed Artist Recording (ARC) label.