In Their Own Right

When it’s done well, accompanying a singer looks so easy, it’s not surprising that even music students underestimate the job.

“You have to be better than a solo pianist,” UC Irvine music lecturer Rosemary Hyler said recently.

“Students seem to think you don’t need either good technique or that it’s second-class music, or that you can sight-read it and not spend as much time as they do on their solo piano work.

“I try to emphasize: You need to spend more time.”

Accompanists must master technique and learn a whole new repertory, plus study languages and poetry.

“Lots of skills are involved,” she said, “not just those involved in playing the piano.”

Hyler, a faculty member at UCI for 18 years, teaches accompaniment as well as vocal technique and coaching classes. She invites eminent accompanists to give master classes to students.

Two accompanists--Martin Katz and Graham Johnson--are scheduled to be at UCI over the next three weeks. Johnson also will accompany young German baritone Matthias Goerne on Sunday in a Philharmonic Society-sponsored recital at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

A native of Los Angeles, Katz, 52, said “the question about being ‘second banana’ comes up in every interview. I’ve even had people come up to me after [Schubert’s] ‘Winterreise,’ a work of excruciating difficulty, and ask, ‘When are you going to perform?’ They don’t mean to be ignorant, but they are ignorant.

“The job is so full of challenges and needs for imagination and psychology and everything you can imagine. I wish it were easy. I’d like to have those people try it sometime and see if they could stay on the horse.”

Neither Katz nor Johnson dreamed of making accompaniment a career when he began learning piano.

“No pianist actually sets out to be an accompanist,” Johnson, 47, said. “In my case, I was brought up in Zimbabwe, which was called Rhodesia in those days. It had a reasonably thriving piano tradition but had very little singing. It was after I arrived at the Royal Academy of Music [in London] that I discovered . . . chamber music, which became a passion in my teens and early 20s.

“Knowing I was into chamber music, I was contacted by a headhunter for a few singers. I liked the repertory very much. You know, singers are the wild side of town in every conservatory. They’re the least controllable of people but also the most amusing and actually, in a sense that is required for song delivery, the most life-enhancing. They have to be that way, or they won’t make it.”

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Johnson quickly abandoned the idea of making a solo career, especially as he began working with composer Benjamin Britten and baritone Peter Pears. He calls a performance of a Wolf song by Pears, accompanied by Britten, “my Damascus conversion.”

“Suddenly, my life all fit together,” he said. “My love of story, my love of words and languages, my love of companionship. I always felt lonely as a soloist. All these things suddenly seemed to make blinding sense. At the age of 21, I became obsessively an accompanist, and I have been that for 27 years.”

The long list of singers Johnson has worked with includes Dame Janet Baker, Victoria de Los Angeles, Peter Schreier and Felicity Lott, whom he met when both were students at the London academy.

“It’s a very subtle creative process, entirely different from [working with] a conductor,” Johnson said. “What’s very important for me as an accompanist, as I’m getting slightly older than some of the younger singers, is not to play the role of patronizing elder statesman. A lot of people try that. You’ve actually got to refresh yourself every time.

“Young singers will have their own sensibility. The last thing they want to hear about is the past. It’s totally irrelevant. The better they are, the less they care. Of course, they’ve listened to everything on records, taken everything in, digested it. But it’s up to them and the accompanist to create something unique.”

Both Johnson and Katz have encountered major singers with whom the right chemistry couldn’t be found. Neither would mention names.

“I regard it as a defeat and a sadness,” Johnson said. “I feel I would like to be clever enough for a breakdown of relationship not to happen. A lot of the skills of an accompanist are diplomatic--diplomacy that doesn’t obscure one’s own right to be an artist to be taken seriously, not slavish diplomacy or flattery. . . . Still, the first thing you have to learn, one can’t please everyone.”

Said Katz: “I’ve also been disengaged, without realizing it would happen. That hurts a lot. I think, maybe I’m too challenging or not challenging enough. [But] being an accompanist means being discreet.”

Musical America, an international resource directory, recently named Katz its first “accompanist of the year.” He too started out planning to be a solo pianist but felt it a lonely pursuit. Everything changed when his high school choir director brought him in to accompany the chorus.

“Suddenly, I had 80 personal friends. Now I was equating music with happiness, rather than solitude.”

Katz won a piano scholarship to USC and began working with pedagogue Gwendolyn Koldofsky. Soon he was accompanying students of famed soprano Lotte Lehmann and serving as the accompanist in Jascha Heifetz’s violin classes.

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Katz also has compiled a dazzling list of singers he’s worked with, such as Renata Tebaldi, Cesare Siepi, Marilyn Horne and Frederica von Stade.

He said he has never regretted his decision to abandon a solo career. “Even now I never go to piano concerts,” he said. “It’s just not my thing. I like instruments and voices.”

Katz described his first upcoming UCI workshop as “a video fast-forward through song repertory.”

“All you can do is hit the highlights of the various major currents stylistically,” he said. “There’s such an infinitely large amount of material. If you really wanted to hear 100 Schubert songs, which is only one-sixth of the songs Schubert wrote, you need a week just for that. So you have to restrict yourself from going too deeply into any one aspect.”

He will focus on distinguishing elements of individual styles. “There are some introductions that are four bars long and could have been written by anybody--Schubert, Mendelssohn, Poulenc, Sondheim,” he said. “It’s how we play it and how we relate to the voice part that shows our understanding of the style.”

An opera workshop will follow. “People coming up in college who want to do recitals need to learn that you don’t get asked to do them until you’ve made a name for yourself in opera. So they need to learn how to audition, how to stand still in street clothes and make an audience believe their arias when they should be wearing a clown suit or sitting on a trapeze.”

Pianists have lessons to learn too. “Opera is crucial for any pianist who wants to earn a living these days,” Katz said. “Leaving opera out of your diet, you can’t survive.

“The first thing I do is have a reality check with the students so that they don’t think they will have the same life even as I had. Yes, there are opportunities, as long as they don’t want to have the same life as [famed accompanist] Gerald Moore had.

“It’s not possible for any of us to just play recitals of Schubert songs and pay their rent these days, at least for an American. We do a little coaching, song-recital playing, some other playing, arranging folk songs, ornamenting some Baroque arias--a patchwork of wonderful things. That’s what I’ve always found interesting about my life. It’s different.

“My career had more recital work than is available today. I hope that turns around. But someone, somewhere in all of this, there will be a young singer and a pianist who will not be discouraged. You can tell that person, as was told to me, ‘This is a very hard road. But if you really like what you’re doing, you’ll do it anyway.’ These weeklong things can goad and prod that interest.”

* Graham Johnson will accompany German baritone Matthias Goerne in his Southern California debut Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Goerne will sing lieder by Schumann and Schubert. $10 for Philharmonic Society members; $18 for nonmembers. (949) 553-2422.

Goerne will also sing selections from Hanns Eisler’s “Hollywood Songbook” (Hollywooder Liederbuch), with texts mostly by Bertolt Brecht, Tuesday at 8 p.m. at Temple Israel of Hollywood, 7300 Hollywood Blvd. The recital is sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. $15 to $25. (213) 850-2000.