I’ve been singing in North America—starting in the cold north (Montreal) and ending in the palm-fringed south (Miami Beach). Mid-tour, I found myself once again in New York, for the first time since Covid stopped play. Last time I was there for a recital at Carnegie Hall with the jazz pianist and composer Brad Mehldau, a weird and wonderful mixture of Schumann’s uber-Romantic song cycle Dichterliebe; Brad’s own inquisitive cycle, The Folly of Desire (my first time singing the f-word in those hallowed halls); and a set of jazz standards including one of my father’s favourite songs and a Sinatra warhorse, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”. This time it was Schubert’s Winterreise with Julius Drake at the 92nd street Y, the Jewish cultural centre on the Upper East Side, founded in 1874 as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and now a major site for all sorts of musical and literary activities including (heaven be praised) song recitals, which are my meat and drink.
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I first came to Manhattan some 30 years ago and, as a performer, my visits coincided with an equilibrium in the city’s history between the scary disorder of the 1970s (I remember the story of a friend’s father who had been mugged at pistol-point on the subway) and the New York of today, where the rent-controlled intelligentsia are disappearing and (as in so many global cities) the young are being priced out. It was professionally thrilling. A debut at the Frick Collection, reviewed with a tantalising air of mystery in the New York Times (“This was not singing but being… I don’t think I want to hear this voice again”). A residency at Carnegie Hall with Lieder recitals on the iconic big stage before the new chamber hall was built. Theatre projects backed by the legendary Jane Moss of the Lincoln Center: Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Vanished, translated by Seamus Heaney and directed by Deborah Warner; Britten’s Curlew River staged by Netia Jones uptown in the Chapter House of St John the Divine; Hans Zender’s orchestral interpretation of Winterreise in the Rose Theatre (Jones again). The possibilities seemed endless.
But—perhaps shamefully, I don’t know—I was seized by the glamour of the place. It grips you as soon as you catch sight of the glistening towers from your yellow cab—Oz, Babel, the cathedrals of capital. Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, with its jazz pianists and murals by the aforementioned Bemelmans. More murals, louche ones of bathing ladies, in the Café des Artistes. Performing Noël Coward at the Carnegie Club with Dick Avedon in the audience telling me how Fred Astaire would have appreciated my fancy footwork (others might have called it fidgeting). Lunch with the king of jazz recording, the master of Blue Note, Bruce Lundvall. Buckets of caviar with Avedon at Petrossian. From cocktails at the Windows on the World (the bar at the top of the Twin Towers) to a ride on the Staten Island Ferry with views of the Statue of Liberty and back towards Manhattan itself.
We live in a different world now, in which possibilities are constrained, in which the unselfconscious, celebratory glamour of the US has lost much of its naive allure. I’m older. So is America.
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I travelled to Florida this year not to perform in the Mar-a-Lago Lieder festival (a fantasy I occasionally entertain) but to engage in another surreal collision of worlds, Britten’s War Requiem in Miami Beach. The last time Florida experienced war was in the early 19th century, as the US gradually absorbed what had been Spanish territory and undertook three brutal campaigns against the Seminole who had settled in the area in the early 18th century.
Surrounded by the bluest of oceans, the whitest of sand, Art Deco hotels galore and a spirit of indulgence in the air, the brutal conflicts of the old world seemed a million miles away. I rewatched Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder’s comic masterpiece in which a bewigged and befrocked Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon flee from a gangster hit to sunny Florida (it was actually filmed in California) in the company of Marilyn Monroe. I cycled all the way to the legendary Fontainebleau Hotel, where Frank sang (gangsters not far away) and where one of the cinematic memories that lurks from my childhood was filmed—an oh-so-glamorous early scene from the third Bond film, Goldfinger. The necessary antidote to this overdose of glamour was to watch that lowering, grim condemnation of postwar corruption, John Huston’s Key Largo (south of Miami Beach), with the towering gangster villainy of Edward G Robinson’s Johnny Rocco.
It was good to bring Britten to Miami Beach, with an extraordinary orchestra of young musicians, the New World Symphony—both to re-embody the witness against war upon which the Requiem insists, and to experience the possibilities which those young musicians necessarily embody. But, re-reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby earlier on my travels, those most famous of words stuck with me somehow: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
