Interview With Countertenor Hugh Cutting

Searching for the ‘Multiplicity of Meaning in Music’

Joni Mitchell, the Smiths, Bach, Handel and Hammerstein: just a few of the influences that shaped rising star countertenor Hugh Cutting’s early musical experiences. Hugh was the first countertenor to win the prestigious Kathleen Ferrier Award as well as being a BBC New Generation Artist from 2022-24, and recently made operatic debuts in the US (Dallas Opera) and Australia (Pinchgut Opera) while maintaining a busy recital and concert schedule alongside his work on the opera stage.

The day after finishing a recent run of George Benjamin’s modern masterpiece Written on Skin in Berlin, Hugh got a last-minute call to replace a singer taken ill in a performance of the same work in Rome. I catch Hugh just after he returns from Italy, on the morning of rehearsals for Handel’s Rodelinda at Garsington Opera this summer, and we chat about his recent dash to Rome, along with his eclectic musical upbringing and personal and professional influences both old and new.

Nico Muhly: Searching for lambs

How was the last-minute Italian jump-in?

Everyone at some point does the jump-in thing, especially when you’re young. I’d just done the opera in Berlin literally the night before, so it was completely in my brain. It was like I was just carrying on the contract that I’d had in Germany!

What is it like singing one of the great contemporary countertenor roles?

Written on Skin is the only contemporary opera I’ve done, other than something at Grange Park last year. There will always be part of your brain thinking about the counting and the technicality of it, but I love that piece so much.

I guess the thing that helps to get away from that technical side is that it’s such a good story. On the surface, it’s the story of an affair, but it’s so much more than that. It’s about the liberation of Agnès, the woman, and this meta thing of the angels wanting to know what it’s like to be a human being.

The way the music unfolds, with George Benjamin’s music, at least in this piece, is like it’s playing in psychological time. All the gaps in between characters don’t feel like we’re waiting for the other person to speak. It feels like a natural progression of thoughts, how your thoughts go through one lens and get the filter put on. It unfolds very naturally, almost like a play.

George Benjamin’s music is renowned for being at times fiendishly tricky yet ultimately well-written for the performers. Has this been your experience with Written on Skin?

It’s incredibly well-written. I was lucky to do it for the first time with Benjamin in a concert last year, which was very cool. I drilled it to within an inch of its life because I knew that he was very specific about what he wanted.

As a child, how did you find your way to singing?

My parents are musicians. My mum is a violinist, my dad is a trumpet player, and my brother is a singer as well, a tenor. It’s a cliché to say that music was always in the house, but it obviously was!

I was a boy chorister at a college in Oxford, which was probably the biggest influence on anything before I went to music college. Life as a chorister meant performing most days, and we had a particular choirmaster, Edward Higginbottom, who was known for his choir training.

I think he really believed in the rigour that could be applied to children, and so I had a slightly hard-edged training as a chorister, which informed so much. I started as a chorister when I was 8, and that was the beginning of my ‘formal’ training. I’d seen a performance by Iestyn Davies also when I was 8, with James Gilchrist and Claire Booth, these great British singers, and I decided that day that I wanted to be a singer.

As a child, I was also obsessed with doing impressions of actors all the time. My brother and I were encouraged to just enjoy it – my dad was into things like Monty Python, that slightly off-the-wall sense of humour.

From that, I really wanted to be an actor for a long time. I remember looking online when the Harry Potter films were being filmed to find out if there was a way of playing one of these little characters in the background, because I was obsessed with this idea of acting.

I did loads of plays and musicals at school when my voice had broken, and I think that was as big a part as any in terms of my interest in being on stage. I went to a school where there was a great drama department, and so that, plus the church stuff, were the two strands of it, really.

And when did you decide to become a countertenor specifically?

My voice started breaking quite early, when I was about 12, but I still had a year left of singing in the choir as a chorister, so I found a way to sing falsetto.

My brother had been a tenor, so I wanted to be a tenor, of course, as we all do! However, when I was about 15, my dad told me that my falsetto was a bit more individual-sounding, or special, or whatever the word is. I decided then that I wanted to be a countertenor ‘officially’.

Do you think your time as a chorister has influenced your approach to work and self-discipline today?

Opera singing now is in lots of ways so far away from that chorister stuff, in how you actually sing, but actually as a chorister, there’s a sense of occasion and ritual that is so amazing to have as a child. I can’t think of many other situations as a young child where you’d come across that possibility, that opportunity.

What else influenced you musically when you were growing up?

Along with all of that training and what I was doing with the acting at school, I saw my parents both playing classically but also in pits for shows. We grew up as teenagers playing a lot of musicals, lots of Wicked, Rogers and Hammerstein, Sweeney Todd or whatever, and I remember my mum would bring my brother to the pits of the shows she was playing in, and that would be really amazing.

It’s interesting because that definitely rubbed off on us. We developed an interest in lighter music in that respect, and the music we had on at dinnertime was often stuff like Barbara Streisand, Joni Mitchell, Stacey Kent, as well as stuff like the Smiths or Sting or the Police.

Again it’s a cliché to say we were surrounded by lots of different music, but I think that the fact that our mum was so plugged in to pop music was a big part of it. The musical theatre thing was so important as well.

It’s a big part of my mission now, that immediacy of expression. You don’t have that in earlier operas, and there are good reasons for that, but as time goes on, we’re getting closer to that more immediate type of communication on opera house stages now, which is cool.

I’m not bashing traditional opera at all – I think there’s room for everything – but I think for me, that formed a lot of my interest in song, for example, and those more intimate mediums.

In that sense, do you feel a big difference between singing more traditional opera versus song?

It’s all music. With any type of song, the composer or the songwriter has a text that they want to get across. There’s a reason that things are set in a particular way. It’s actually very simple in terms of interpretation.

I had an amazing English teacher in my sixth form who reminded us that literature is construction, that it doesn’t just come out of thin air. An author decides things about how a plot’s going to unfold, the framing device, the narrative, and we have the exact same in music. Things are set for a reason, and that’s why it’s so important that it’s intentional.

How do you go about finding the intention in your own performances?

If you look back at Bach’s music and say ‘he meant this thing by using this key’, for which there is a lot of scholarship to suggest that’s correct, it’s great, but there are no absolutes in interpretation.

My dad is a baroque trumpet player and so spends a lot of time doing historical performances, but it doesn’t mean that there’s not a way of playing Handel or Bach with modern instruments, with a modern take.

We find meaning in things, and there’s a multiplicity of meaning in music, and the narrative side of it is that you have to find your reading of something. If you’ve thought about it enough, then it’s correct.

People might not like it, but if you’ve put in the rigour of the work, then you’ve earned that right to produce it in a particular way. It might mean that it’s rubbish, but it doesn’t mean that it’s inauthentic!

Hugh Cutting performs Bach: St Matthew Passion, “Erbarme dich mein Gott”

How do you strive for authenticity in your work?

There’s a great video of Joyce DiDonato and Janet Baker talking about ‘clear glass’. Janet Baker says you have to un-fog the glass as much as possible in a performance, to get rid of all of the singer’s ‘ticks’ or behaviours, those sort of classical stereotypes, clichés, with the idea that you then get through to a performer’s soul.

What does that mean, really? I think it means that the audience needs to see a human being on the stage, otherwise it’s not very interesting.

For whatever reason there’s this class thing around opera and classical music – elitism, dressing up to go to the opera, all the rest of it. I think there is an element of opera that works for that, the kind of experiential thing like at Glyndebourne, where people enjoy dressing up and seeing opera, but the ‘clear glass’ aspect of performing is interesting because it gets rid of all of that.

Often in opera, the plots are bizarre, farcical, whatever, and while the plots don’t have to be based in realism necessarily, they have to be clear for an audience to understand. That un-fogging is a big part of that, so I guess that’s what I try to do with my singing as much as possible.

What place do opera and song hold in our society today, for you?

It’s funny now how modern society, because of social media, has made things very black and white in terms of right and wrong. Politically, you’re left or right, Leave or Remain [in reference to Brexit], but away from politics, we also have ‘you’re depressed’ or ‘you’re not depressed’. We have more of these absolutes than ever, and I think because of the culture of reels online, we have this narrowing of people’s perspectives more and more.

I love a reel as much as the next person, but there’s something about the way that it’s propagated through these trending audios, clips and phrases. I don’t think it’s necessarily harmful in itself, but because there’s so much of it, I feel like we’re being encouraged (also because of the echo chamber system) to think more and more ‘this is what I believe in’ and ‘this is right and wrong’.

Art is so great because it can fill in all the grey areas in between. A song might happen over three minutes, and there’s something about the unravelling of that time and music and sound which I think makes us more empathetic.

A great story can be told about what you think is an evil person, but actually, there’s a whole context to them, and we’re all from our contexts. That’s not to be brushed aside; that’s to be celebrated.

Art is important for that because we need to make sure that we stay open to the fact that life isn’t simple; it’s complicated, and feelings are complicated.

Issues are complex, but it’s ok to have different opinions and talk to people amicably – and we should laugh at ourselves for being too serious, I think. People are complex, and we need to allow that to be the case and not be a cookie-cutter society.

What do you do in your spare time?

I’m quite busy in my head for better or worse, so I look for things that can take me out of that in terms of music. I’m very audio-based, so I listen to a lot of podcasts. I always go to bed listening to a podcast. It could be about politics or Harry Potter fan fiction.

My brother and I did a lot of sports growing up, and I try to do some of that when I can. I play tennis quite a lot. They’re quite active things, but I also like gaming and things that take me out of my head.

I grew up in churches as a boy, so I do love to be in ancient spaces, like ruins or churches, which I guess makes sense. I’m obsessed with this idea of time, generally, how time is sort of everywhere and nowhere and how we are such a manifestation of all our families’ time.

I live now near a canal in Oxford, and I’ve been really into trying to find that more zen side of things, away from the input of podcasts or sports or activities. I suppose that’s become a hobby really, trying to force myself to be a bit more still, to have a really tangible feeling of the world around you and not get so obsessed with talking about art all the time, basically!

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