Volume 22 Issue 7 - April 2017

PODCASTING at THE WHOLENOTE
Russell Braun: 17.03.02
Russell Braun dropped by
our studio on March 2,
just back in town after
his umpteenth Mendelssohn
Elijah in Ottawa (around
two and a half decades after
a prescient Robert Cooper
first picked him out of a
University of Toronto student
lineup to perform the role).
“No-one in their 20s should
do it,” he says now, with a laugh. Unsurprisingly for those who know
him, with rehearsals for Louis Riel due to start March 19, he wasn’t
exactly planning to rest up. Both of his sons, he told me, are heavily
involved in baseball so he’s heading off the next day on a side trip
to their respective spring-training camps in Florida, “en route” to
London for a March 13 performance of Senza Sangue (Without Blood),
a one-act opera by Peter Eötvös, based on a novella of the same
name by Alessandro Baricco. His character in Senza is in his 70s, he
informed us.
“In the last few years,” he mused, “my operatic career has tranformed
a little bit from playing basically passionate adolescents to
richly, fully developed adults.”
The upcoming role in Louis Riel, by contrast, requires him to play
a character who goes from his late 20s to his late 30s. But Riel is no
typical 30-year-old, and Braun has been immersing himself in preparation
for the role for a couple of years now.
“I like to really do 90 percent of the work on my own with the
opera, whether it’s Mozart or Debussy or Somers or Eötvös. I love the
interaction between the score and the piano; luckily I can play the
piano well enough to really establish a relationship with the score
before I open my mouth.
“This particular score is rhythmically very, very challenging. Very
often if you are a competent musician you can read through a score,
and then on second, third, fourth reading master more and more.
The Louis Riel score…it almost requires a mathematical analytical
approach before you can even open your mouth and utter a word.…
whenever a composer notates in a particular way I ask myself why.
You know, whether it’s Bach, which is almost devoid of notation
sometimes, or Hugo Wolf, which is extremely specifically notated, or
Massenet, a French composer, also very specifically notated in terms
of interpretation…I always ask myself ‘What is it that this composer
compels me to do?’”
In the case of Somers, he says, “The end result that I think he wants
is to eventually find a natural flow of quasi-recitative and speech
again, and it’s very, very busily notated but you can reach a level
of saturation quite quickly unless you have this goal in mind - that
basically the result [he desires] is a natural rhythmic flow of speech:
now, it looks on the score like it’s a septuplet on a triplet that has a
dotted eighth and a sixteenth note underneath the triplet, within the
septuplet which is actually a five-sixteenth bar [laughs]. But with
difficult music the effort it takes to learn it pays off in the understanding
of it.”
Interestingly, too, at the time we spoke he hadn’t permitted himself
to view or listen to the one available recording of the work, featuring
Bernard Turgeon as Riel, and a cast of performers who have inhabited
Braun’s world, as teachers, mentors and family friends, some for as
long as he can remember.
For him, there are no shortcuts to finding his character. “I need to
make my own mistakes,” he says.
To hear the full conversation with Russell Braun, or any of our other
podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app,
or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts.
16 | April 1, 2017 - May 7, 2017 thewholenote.com