Claire Booth on interpreting Oliver Knussen's music

‘It’s very athletic – you’re there backstage panting while you’re waiting to go on,’ so says the soprano Claire Booth of her role in Oliver Knussen’s 60th birthday celebrations at the Barbican this weekend. But then, as she adds, ‘I do have quite a lot of energy.’

Which is just as well. A long-time advocate of Knussen’s music, Booth is one of the most featured performers of the Total Immersion festival (at the Barbican this weekend). Her opening gambit is on Saturday as Max, the naughty little boy who journeys to the land of the beasties in Where the Wild Things Are, staged – by Netia Jones – in a double bill with Knussen’s other fantasy opera Higglety Pigglety Pop! Then on Sunday Booth performs the Whitman Settings as well as the Requiem: Songs for Sue, composed by Knussen in memory of his late wife. ‘Assuming I’ve had enough preparation and sleep I’ll be fine,’ says Booth.

When we meet, though, ‘sleep’ seems to be the last thing on the agenda. I catch Booth in a flurry of activity: it is half term so she has brought her five year old son – also called Max – who intermittently looks up from his play dough to remind us of their impending appointment at the toyshop. Having a young son, Booth says, was a big help when reinventing herself as a small boy in Wild Things. And Max has his own verdict on the operas (‘noisy’) having already seen Netia Jones’s production when it premiered at the Aldeburgh festival in June.

Which inspires my next question. Does Booth consider Wild Things to be a children’s opera? ‘The category is difficult,’ she says. ‘On the one hand, it’s only 45 minutes long, and so clearly based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book. On the other, by saying it’s a children’s opera you’re inviting criticism of the musical style, which is uncompromising.’ As she reminds me, Sendak himself, who died earlier this year, avoided rigidly categorising his fiction. ‘I think he said, ‘I just write stories. People call them children’s stories.’ He was fairly strident in his views about not talking down to children. And Olly (Knussen) so perfectly understands Sendak’s world.’

For Booth, the power of Knussen’s music, derives from his ‘innate lushness of orchestration’ and ‘filigree writing,’ with an overall effect ‘that never sounds laboured. He has a very strong sense of line and writes incredibly easily for the voice.’ Both man and his music are by now well known to Booth: she first met Knussen a decade ago as a student at Aldeburgh’s Britten-Pears school. The following June she was asked to sing at his 50th birthday celebration at the Southbank Centre and has been performing his works since then. Although Knussen, she says, ‘doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has very high standards, I guess he believed that as a musical colleague I could meet his expectations.’  

So much so, that he wrote one of his most deeply personal works, the Requiem: Songs for Sue , especially for Booth to premiere in 2006. Did that, I ask, put an extra pressure on her performance? ‘It’s a very emotional setting for a work as it’s written in memory of somebody else, and I wanted to get it right for Olly. But I think I put pressure on myself anyway,’ says Booth. 

This doesn’t surprise. A double-first graduate in History from Oxford, Booth is not one to shy away from challenges: in opera too, she has tackled emotionally difficult, even draining roles such as Elle in La Voix Humaine, Poulenc’s rarely staged opera for one singer which charts a woman’s disintegration during a telephone conversation with her separated lover. ‘I quite like getting into big characters on my own, without anybody else there to act against’ she says. This, for her, is one advantage of Wild Things: ‘although it’s not a monologue, apart from one scene with his mother, Max is pretty much the only one on stage.’ Booth likens the experience to that of ‘reading a book: it’s your interpretation that matters.You’re quite free to be in control. Perhaps there’s something quite selfish in that, but it’s nice when you’re working with exactly the right director.’

Interesting then, that Booth has worked with the same director – Netia Jones – on both La Voix Humaine and Wild Things. Known for integrating video and film into her productions, Jones is used to adapting digitalised visuals to the action on stage: ‘the great thing is that Netia is manipulating images live, so she’s watching and responding to me,’ says Booth. ‘It’s very intricate what she does, and it makes you work better, collaborating with people you respect.’

A similar attitude governs Booth’s repertoire choices. Over the course of her career, she has carved out a reputation for herself as a champion of contemporary music, regularly working with the likes of – in addition to Knussen – Harrison Birtwistle, George Benjamin, Eliott Carter and Pierre Boulez: ‘I’m lucky in that the stronger pieces have come in my direction.’ Nevertheless, contemporary music was something that Booth had to discover for herself:  ‘I had all my training looking at modern works outside music college, with friends and colleagues. At college, it was a bit like "well if you want to do it then I’m not going to stop you but I can’t help you. I don’t know who you can see for that." And it’s a shame because some of this music is seminal.’ 

According to Booth, it’s a self-perpetuating problem. As far as programmes are concerned, contemporary music ‘remains the add-on piece: the modern encore, or the work you do before Beethoven’s Seventh. And if the public isn’t exposed to it, then they’ll never want to listen to it.’ She maintains that a gear-shift in the education system is what’s needed, ‘rather than just programming into the week one lesson on a piece that’s post 1970.’ Nor does she consider prior knowledge of the classical canon to be a pre-requisite for appreciating its contemporary counterpart: ‘Friends of mine who are less interested in music seem to cope much better with modern opera, than people, probably my parents’ age, who have quite a good interest in opera and have heard a lot of classical repertoire.’ Plus ‘the younger you are, the more you soak up.’

On this basis, does she encourage Max to listen to new music? ‘He hears me practising and I hope he’ll be exposed to it,’ she says, adding with a laugh, ‘but I don’t need him to be a soapbox revolutionary about it.’ Hearing his name mentioned, Max turns around. His orange juice is drunk and there’s nothing left for him here. ‘Come on, Mummy. I want to go to the toyshop. Now, now, now.’ Our time, it seems, is up.

Claire Booth performs at the Barbican’s Total Immersion: Oliver Knussen at 60 weekend on November 3-4. Visit the Barbican's website for more information

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