Countertenor Bejun Mehta (Photo by Marco Borgreve)
(Jan. 10, 2010) - The words "masculine" and "countertenor" aren't often juxtaposed together, but American singer Bejun Mehta would very much like to steer popular perception away from the idea that a man singing art music in what, at first blush, sounds like a woman’s range is something peculiar, a bit of exotica best left to a dusty corner of history.
Granted, countertenors are generally associated with the era of Handel, who wrote for the castratos: 18th-century male singers whose voices never changed due to surgery of a quite unpleasant sort that was performed before pubescence, thereby preventing the typical voice-deepening that goes along with adolescence. (After such castrations declined in popularity and eventually outlawed, female singers began singing those “pants” roles.)
However, over the past few decades and in what seems like in ever-increasing numbers of very wonderful artists who deploy a falsetto that is the classical cousin to such performers as Prince or Smokey Robinson, the countertenor voice is experiencing a resurgence in acceptance and popularity.
But such a movement can’t build steam without some fabulous singers to drive it, and Mehta is very firmly one of the leaders, as evidenced in his exciting recital debut for Harmonia Mundi, Ombra cara.
His bold, brash, and yet astute performances have gained serious critical praise, and many writers have celebrated the fearlessness in Mehta’s performances. A writer for the London newspaper The Guardian called Mehta “a ballsy, risk-taking singer, [who] flings coloratura about like weaponry and pushes himself to his limits in his quest for musical and dramatic expression.”
I mention this quality to him, and Mehta laughs self-deprecatingly. “Just because I appear fearless, doesn’t mean that I am. It’s my job to make it seem that way! It’s impossible to try to communicate to people who don’t do it what it’s like…It’s always thrilling. But sometimes it’s hard to say whether it’s thrilling in a happy way or thrilling in the ‘oh-my-God’ way.”
“Let me put it this way,” Mehta continues. “Some singers are taught that you need to communicate to the audience that you’re working really hard, and that you’ll make the audience love you by letting them feel how hard you’re working for them. I really am not of the school. I believe that my feelings, my terrors, my nervousness, all that kind of stuff, are my business, and that my job is to release the audience from any cares they may have about me personally, so that they can go to whatever wonderful, cathartic place they want to go to. So I try very hard not to show my nervousness—of course I’m nervous, please! I sing a lot of music that’s really exposed and very difficult, and there’s just never any place to hide in this kind of music. So I’m very glad that people have that idea; it makes me feel that I’m doing my job right. But it’s certainly not actually true!” he laughs.
In 21st-century life, however, being a countertenor still means either shattering stereotypes or simply introducing listeners to a strange concept. "I want to leave a legacy, but one that's not about me," Mehta insists. "It's about the countertenor voice and where it is in the cultural imagination, and to help push that vision forward. Not too many years ago, countertenors weren't accepted on the main stages of the world, so people pushed through, from Russell Oberlin to Alfred Deller to Rene Jacobs--I'm skipping so many people!--to Brian Asawa, David Daniels, Andreas Scholl, me, and now there are younger ones coming along too. It's a voice type that's becoming more and more visible, and less and less pure Baroque. For many years, up until my generation, people have still viewed countertenors as Baroque monkeys: that's what we do, full stop. It's not easy, but I've been excited to be working in a time when my career can encompass things much larger than myself. I can help establish what the voice can do.”
Mehta asserts that this is a time of incredible positive transition for his vocal type. “When revolutions are actually happening, people tend to miss them,” he observes. “For example, when you look back at history, you’ll see that the modern tenor voice—the way that we’re used to hearing Rodolfo or Cavaradossi or such roles—back in Rossini’s day, that voice didn’t exist yet. The tenor was a marginalized figure. But the singers of Rossini’s time were beginning to figure out squillo, to bring the weight up higher, to uber-project. Rossini hated that sound. Today, we think it’s thrilling, and we accept it as totally normal. But in that time, it just wasn’t. And I maintain that a similar transformation is happening right now for countertenors.”
While his first album for Harmonia Mundi is a calling-card program of arias by Handel, Mehta’s upcoming projects go far beyond that limited “countertenor” paradigm. “Next,” he says, “is a gorgeous song recording. It's not that other countertenors haven't made lovely song records--they have--but it feels to me that there's very often a sense of weakness, or gentleness, to them: an album of all lullabies, for example. This is a full-on song record, with a program based on the weight of my voice, my character as a human being and a musician...but the idea is that it's a song record, just like any baritone or tenor or soprano would program. There's no allowance for 'oh, it's a countertenor record.' It's just a voice. What I would like to have left behind, when I'm done, are certain documents that show that this voice can do all these things, and that other people can then go out and do it too.”
Meanwhile, in another show of what a contemporary countertenor can sing, the British composer George Benjamin is currently writing a starring role for Mehta in his new opera with a libretto by playwright Martin Crimp. The opera will be touring Europe in 2012 and has been booked in a number of leading houses, including Covent Garden and La Scala.
Despite this rush of recent success, the beginning of Mehta’s career as one of the world’s leading countertenors was neither smooth nor easy. Born to a musically rich family as the son of two professional musicians (his father a pianist and his mother a singer who was his first voice teacher), and with international star conductor Zubin Mehta his cousin, Bejun Mehta experienced a fantastic rise as a boy soprano whose debut, eponymous recording in 1983 was hailed by Stereo Review Magazine as the Debut Recording of the Year—and about whom no less than Leonard Bernstein raved, “It is hard to believe the richness and maturity of musical understanding in this adolescent boy”—Mehta’s voice changed, and it seemed as though his meteoric rise was as over just as suddenly as it started.
After studying cello and trying out life as what he calls a “thoroughly mediocre” baritone, Mehta found himself adrift and depressed. While he was trying to sort out his next steps as an artist, and before he re-discovered his voice as a countertenor, he became a respected classical music producer and engineer, working on many notable reissue projects, including the digital reissuing of Janos Starker's iconic recording of Kodaly's Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello on Delos. He also worked for several years at Sony Classical as a reissue producer, including helping to reissue such titles as the Eileen Farrell Verdi recital album and create the Isaac Stern: A Life in Music edition.
Though such a career map didn’t seem clear to him at the time, Mehta says that all that work on the other side of the classical music business has served him very well in retrospect. "I am drawing on every single, last tiny shredling of experience I've had in the recording studio, either as a performer and recording artist myself when I was a boy and now as a singer again, from my production time and my time as an editor,” observes Mehta. “Every last shred goes into my work now. I feel very deeply fortunate to have that."
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We asked Bejun Mehta about some of the recordings that have meant the most to him, especially considering his unusual dual career as a recording artist and formerly as a reissue producer for what was then the Sony Classical label. His choices:
- "The Schubert B-Flat Piano Trio with Szeryng, Fournier and Rubinstein. That recording, performance strikes me as just about as great as you can get on every level."
- I’m nuts about Eileen Farrell’s recording of the Immolation Scene [from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung]. You just really just can’t believe it—you hear something happen. There are messinesses in it, sure, but it’s just—oh! Incredible."
- "I love the George Szell recording of the Dvorak Slavonic Dances with the Cleveland Orchestra. This sounds like I’m giving you all my own records, but look, I did hundreds! It's not like they became great because I worked on the reissues. It’s about the performances."
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
