Joseph is singing in the festival’s first of two concerts on Saturday 15 March in Petersfield Festival Hall, featuring Haydn’s Creation Mass.
What are you looking most forward to when performing at the Petersfield Musical Festival this year?
The Haydn is a new piece for me. It’s always exciting to get to try out new repertoire.
I was a chorister when I was younger and then sang in the College Chapel choir at St John’s in Cambridge. So I’ve been lucky enough to sing lots of the choral repertoire, but this is a piece that until now had had passed me by. I’m looking forward to adding a new piece to my repertoire and joining the festival for the first time as well.
Who and/or what have been the most important influences on your musical career or interest in music?
My whole childhood I spent singing in Chapel. I was a chorister at New College, and learnt an enormous amount from Edward Higginbottom, who was the Director of Music whilst I was a chorister there. It’s amazing to be immersed in that kind of music all the time.
When I was an undergraduate at Saint John’s Cambridge, I sang in the choir there, and that’s really one of the best student choirs probably in the world, so I was very fortunate to to have experienced that musical culture, as well as to have worked with Andrew Nethsingha in his final years with the choir. I then experienced the choir under new leadership firstly with Stephen Darlington and then Chris Gray. It’s really interesting to have sung for lots of different people and to have had a different experience of the same institution and choir. And I’ve learnt many different valuable things from all these music directors.
After I graduated, I sang as a scholar with Voces8. This was a different type of singing to the kind of solo singing that I do in the festivals like at Petersfield. It was great to learn about singing as an ensemble rather than individuals, creating something that’s greater than the sum of the parts as you do in a choir, but in a kind of different, more intense way. In that type of consort there’s only eight voices. I learnt a lot from the group, particularly from Katie Jeffries-Harris, who ran the course, and Barney Smith.
I also got a chance to do lots of interesting educational work with Voces8, which I am still doing. At the moment I’m working on a project in a school in Bethnal Green. We go into schools and offer children a taste of singing and how to use their voices to make music together. And I have found this aspect of the programme enormously rewarding, trying to get children to love singing and to love music.
It’s great that I can keep doing that alongside my studying at the Academy and other professional work. It’s very fulfilling and enriching to be able to do that. And we sing all kinds of music – from Katy Perry through to songs about cakes and hot chocolate. Then later in the day I can be back at the Academy rehearsing a new student-written opera or singing Bach and Handel.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
I think the variety of music that I get to sing is very stimulating, enjoyable and enriching, but also brings its own challenges. It’s a challenge to be to be versatile enough to deal with different styles of music making and different styles of singing. You can’t go into a year three classroom and present yourself in the same way as you would appear on the concert stage.
Vocally there are different demands made by different kinds of music, and being adaptable and versatile I think is important for a musician.
What is your postgraduate study about?
The course is a Masters degree in Vocal Performance, which involves a really wide variety of music making, from operatic repertoire, through oratorio and song. We also have drama and movement classes, and of course have the opportunity to learn with some of the best musicians in the world.
Are there any composers for which you have a particular affinity?
I love singing music by Bach. I was a scholar with the Oxford Bach Soloists during my Lower 6th year, and I think that’s probably when I really fell in love with his music. I’ve done the part of the Evangelist in the John Passion and the Christmas Oratorio which is a brilliantly challenging role. I love the storytelling aspect of that, and having the opportunity to lead the narrative of such an extraordinary work.
Lots of the kinds of concert repertoire that I get to sing is by composers like Haydn, Mozart, Handel and Bach. It’s great to be able to sing lots of music by these amazing composers.
At the other end of the spectrum, I’m very lucky to be able to work on student-written operas and on music by people who are right at the forefront of composition at the moment. Students at the Academy are writing chamber operas, which we’re putting on at the end of this term. It’s very exciting to be working on music with the composers as it gets written and seeing different drafts and edits coming together. The Opera Makers project culminates in a premiere performance of four short new operas on 13 March. https://www.ram.ac.uk/whats-on/operamakers.
Are there any memorable concert experiences, either as a performer or listener?
When I was a chorister on tour in France doing a concert where we collaborated with the local singers, we did Spem in Alium, that extraordinary 40-part choral piece by Tallis as the final piece of the programme. It feels like a marathon to sing that piece, it actually only takes about 10 minutes or something. At the end of that Edward Higginbottom (our Director of Music) announced to the audience that we couldn’t possibly go home after only having sung at once, and so as the encore we did the whole thing again.
Is there any advice you’d give to anybody considering embarking on a career in music?
I’m not sure that I’ve had a long enough career in music to really be giving advice, but a nice bit of advice that someone gave me is to aim to sing music that you like singing and that you want to sing rather than music that you think people want you to sing. Someone else said to me recently, before a bit of a nerve-wracking concert, that I just had to keep smiling. That’s nice too!
What do you think you’d like to be doing in five years’ time?
To still to be singing a wide variety of music. I’ve only really discovered some of the operatic repertoire since coming to the Academy. I hope that in 5 years what I will be doing will still be as varied, interesting and stimulating as it is at the moment. I also hope I can keep on travelling for tours as well. I’ve never been to Asia and I’d love to go back to the USA. Travelling can be a nice exciting perk of being a singer.
Tell me about your connection to the Josephine Baker Trust
It’s a fantastic scheme that supports young professional singers at the Royal Academy Music, the Royal College of Music, the Guildhall and Birmingham Conservatoire. It connects those singers who are on the scheme with choirs which need soloists for their concerts, and offers some financial assistance too. Hopefully everybody wins: the young professional singers from music colleges get great opportunities to sing good choral works, in a professional capacity. And the choirs get soloists from these conservatoires who are (hopefully!) exciting to listen to. https://josephinebakertrust.org
About Joseph
Joseph is a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studies with Mark Wildman and Janet Haney. He is the recent winner of the Flora Nielsen Prize for French song at the Royal Academy of Music Vocal Recital Prize day, where he was also Highly Commended in the Michael Head Prize.
Joseph began singing as a Chorister at New College Oxford, under the direction of Edward Higginbottom. He then sang as a Choral Scholar and Lay Clerk in the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, directed by Andrew Nethsingha and Christopher Gray. In recent years he has been a member of the Sir Arthur Bliss Lieder Scheme at Pembroke College, studying with Joseph Middleton, and a Scholar with vocal ensemble Voces8, with whom he continues to work as a member of their Education Team, delivering singing workshops in schools across the country.
Recent performances include Britten’s Male Chorus in ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ and the title role in ‘St Nicolas’, the Evangelist role in Bach’s ‘St John Passion’, San Giovanni in Handel’s ‘La Resurrezione’, Nettuno and Pastore in Caccini’s ‘La liberazione di Ruggiero’, Prince Charming in Viardot’s ‘Cendrillon’, and Opera Scenes at the Royal Academy of Music, alongside freelance choral work.
https://www.josephhancocktenor.com
Image credit: Andrew Wilkinson
