Ivan’s home in London means that he does a lot of flying from Stansted for rehearsals since Alan now lives in Greenock, Jamie has a home in Port of Menteith and Michael is from Glasgow. But for performers used to the International Opera Circuit, this is but a hop, skip and a jump. Alan was principal tenor with the State Opera, Stuttgart from 1996 to 2002, and has also sung principal tenor roles for Lyric Opera Dublin, the Carl Rosa Opera and English National Opera. Ivan has worked freelance for a number of opera companies including the Welsh National, English National and Carl Rosa. Jamie has become Scotland’s voice of classical music presenting “Grace Notes” for BBC Radio Scotland while his singing career has seen him perform at festivals such as the Edinburgh International, Salzburg, Perth, Australia and Aldeburgh.

With Caledon becoming more and more established, they are now ready to step down from some of these commitments, as Alan explains: “We’ve not abandoned our solo careers entirely but opera requires six weeks of rehearsals, it takes four weeks to get to know others in the cast and by that time it’s only a few days before the stage and orchestra week comes along and then you can’t go out because you need to preserve your voice. The next thing you know everyone’s moving on to the next job. It’s a fairly lonely life.”

“Financially, it doesn’t pay all that well either,” Jamie adds, “and it can be hard on family life.”

By contrast, on a Caledon tour, the four can socialise together and have even taken their families with them on a recent German tour. Although singing together is good for them socially, they rebut the idea that there’s any inherent musical advantage in three tenors joining forces.

“The three tenors thing is more of a marketing ploy,” Alan says. “There are now the Three Irish Tenors, the Three Canadian Tenors . . . but more important than having three tenors is to have three musicians singing together. A lot of tenors only discover they can sing at the age of 16 or 17 and so they haven’t necessarily had any musical training beyond that. In our case Ivan plays the French horn, Jamie plays violin and I play piano.”

For this reason, choosing and arranging the music in their own distinctive style is a collaborative effort. All four get together to arrange how a song is going to be structured — how many verses will be sung and in which keys; which verses will have harmonies and which solo lines. As Jamie remarks, “We’re not three solo singers who just happen to sing side by side. One of the most exciting things about singing with other people is the ability to produce beautiful harmonic lines.”

For some concert tours, Michael will accompany the trio on the piano. However, for albums and concerts with orchestras like the SNO or Scottish Fiddle Orchestra, he’s the one who scores the pieces for instruments. A double graduate in music from Glasgow University, he is an experienced concert performer and MD, equally at home in the “pit” orchestra as the stage.

...continued in Part 3

Esther Read

copyright 2007 The Scots Magazine