Kobie van Rensburg studied singing in Potchefstroom under Werner Nel. His international career as a tenor took him to all the world’s major opera centres, including the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden, the Bavarian State Opera, the Opéra National du Rhin, the Opéra de Montpellier, the Teatro Sao Carlos Lisbon, the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, the opera houses in Madrid, Montpellier, Basel, Lucerne, Stuttgart, Graz and the Prince Regent Theatre in Munich. He has sung at the Metropolitan Opera several times, including with Renée Fleming and Magdalena Koczena. He gave his directorial debut in 2006 at the Opernhaus Halle with Monteverdi‘s L’Orfeo. Since 2011 van Rensburg has collaborated with different emsembles for Ancient and New Music.

He is currently in South Africa at the invitation of Umculo for a series of master classes in partnership with the South African College of Music. In this interview, he talks to Shirley Apthorp, founder and director of Umculo and music critic for the Financial Times, about why he is back in South Africa, and how cancer made him move from singing to stage direction.

Shirley Apthorp: What are you doing in Cape Town at the moment?

Kobie van Rensburg: Something I enjoy very much - sharing my love of music and the knowledge and the experience that I have gained over the last 25 years with people who desperately deserve to have more exposure to that to which I’ve been exposed.  I discovered historically informed performance practice early in my career, and couldn’t find any teaching in it in South Africa.  In Europe I was learning by doing, being thrown in at the deep end, and having wonderful opportunities to work with conductors who took me by the hand and showed me where to go and find the necessary information.  For example Rene Jacobs, who was adamant that you cannot have an opinion about things until you have read the old treatises. It really inspired me, and I found that my career grew hugely all of a sudden. Very quickly you start to have references between two points, and that reference framework grows all the time.  But because South Africa unfortunately has no historically informed performance practice tradition and no ensembles playing on period instruments, it has been a big gap in education. 

SA: In what ways did your training in South Africa equip you for your career in Europe?

KVr: I benefitted from a very good vocal training in South Africa, from a system which in Europe is not prevalent, i.e. that one teacher would not only train your instrument, but he would also be responsible for your musical education in many ways -how you interpret art song, opera, and oratorio, all coming from one source. That can be a very positive influence if that source (the mentor/teacher) is up to the job. I was very lucky that I had an excellent teacher, Werner Nel. I benefitted from that, but it was a VOCAL training - a training that was open to different styles, and was sensitive enough to the possibilities that those styles offer, and to a certain extent also to the requirements of those different styles. The moment I went to Europe I realised that I was indeed capable of singing on the European market and compete with those singers,  but I lacked skills.

SA: Somebody had introduced you to Palestrina at some point in your youth?

KvR: Yes, it was Sonia van der Walt. At that time she was the conductor of the East Rand Youth Choir.  I was immediately hooked on the idea. It’s a very interesting thing that in South Africa singers have always had some form of contact with historically informed performance practice, simply because the instrument that they use - the voice - is a period instrument. For the last 400 years voices have not changed. The styles in which we sing, and the styles in which our ears are accustomed to hearing us sing, have changed, but certainly not the physical constitution of human voices.  And I had a kind of epiphany with the music of Palestrina, in the same way I had with listening to Domingo sing a pop song on the radio with John Denver.  It was actually what got me into classical music in the first instance. I was very lucky to have Sonia van der Walt as my guiding light in my very early years. Through her I discovered choral singing and the wonders of singing with people, and making music together.

SA: Was your family supportive?

KvR: My family supported things that I did simply because they loved me, but their hearts were never in classical music.

SA: So where does it come from?

KvR: I honestly don’t know. Music is an international language, and I think that it’s something which, if we share it, multiplies. That’s also why I’m here.

SA: How did you become aware of performance practice?  Had you already discovered it before you left for Europe?

KvR: Yes, certainly I was aware of it and that it was something I needed to know more about. I took part in the class of a South African singer who recently passed away, Elizabeth Connell. There was a part in the programme where you could choose music of your own liking, and I wanted to do Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.  And nobody that I knew of in South Africa could actually help me.  My singing teacher was very supportive in trying to understand the style.  There were recordings, at least, that I could listen to. I saw that the people conducting these recordings gave master classes at the Dartington International Summer School (in the UK), and had a summer academy there. Mimi Coertse was very kind. I had sung in Debut with Mimi and also won the Mimi Coertse bursary to get some extra funds to go and do a master class in Dartington, where I could have some contact with that world.

SA: So you knew it was what you wanted?

KvR: Yes, definitely. When I heard Monteverdi it struck like a bolt of lightning into my being. I remember listening to a recording of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and time just stood still. The communicative power of that music, and the clarity of that communicative power gripped me, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.

SA: I first heard you sing in the title role in L’Orfeo in Stuttgart. And you’ve just finished directing it in Passau. So it has run like a thread through your life.

KvR: It certainly has. It’s one of the first operas, and it is a masterpiece at the beginning of a genre, something unbelievably perfect in its way of looking forward, while not throwing away the past. It is a story that every artist actually carries in his heart.  And the main topic of that opera is: What should I accept, and what should I not accept and endeavour to change?  Orfeo has the problem that he cannot accept his fate - the fact that Euridice is gone - and he endeavours to change it with his fantastic, almost superhuman ability. But as the chorus actually sings in the opera, Orfeo can subdue the forces of nature and he can change the natural laws, but he is conquered by his own emotions - because he’s human. Monteverdi actually wrote in a letter much later that we aren’t interested in the story of Orfeo because he’s a half-God - we’re interested in the story because he’s human, because he’s a man.

SA: And his fault is hubris, isn’t it?

KvR: Absolutely. Unlike other composers who tell the story as if it’s the power of music or the power of everlasting love, Monteverdi’s piece is about hubris. Our whole life will become miserable if we can’t accept what we cannot change. And that’s what an artist does every day.  You’re unhappy with the status quo, and you want to change it, and you endeavour it through your industry and through your love, to change the status quo.

SA: So you’re saying all artists are revolutionaries?

KvR: I think all artists suffer. Revolutionary is a label applied from outside.  Monteverdi identified a gap which he wanted to fill. In his small treatise on Seconda Pratica he said, “All the emotions of human beings must be able to be expressed in music,” and he endeavoured to do that. In order to do that, he had to break the rules which have been the guiding corset of music-making of his time, and it heralded a new era. It was the start of this wonderful thing which is a high art and often neglected.

His interpretation of recitative - it’s a very high art and the core of any operatic communication - and it sets a high yardstick. There are many elements that need to come together for effective recitative singing. Language skills can play a part, the sense of harmonics and the way in which chords progress certainly play an important part as well. But most of all it requires the wish to communicate, and the wish to communicate effectively. And that’s why I’m in South Africa right now.  To help singers see the benefits of historically informed performance practice in everything that they sing.  Because if they sing Monteverdi well, they will sing Tchaikovsky even better. You’ll sing Mozart well and your Verdi will also benefit. 

There’s also a huge difference that a singer can make in the hearing experience of an audience in so-called early music. If in 17th century music a singer changes the inflection of his voice, or changes the way a certain phrase is being inflected or embellishes something, the hearing experience of the audience changes completely.  So the singer has a huge amount of control in the total communicative package that’s being delivered. In 19th century music, that’s not always the case. The singer is limited to the timbre of his voice; sometimes he can be expressive through the power of his vocal line and the expression he can create with that. So therefore it’s wonderful for students to practise the communication embedded in 17th and 18th century music. And it will certainly benefit their whole repertoire.

SA: Is L’Orfeo your favourite role?

KvR: It was my favourite role as a singer, together with Mozart’s Idomeneo and his Tito.  I also like very much the Handel tenor parts, because sometimes they were the villain.  And I enjoyed that particularly. But Orfeo certainly was my favourite part to sing. It was a huge challenge. The role is not easy.  It’s a long sing, with very intricate coloratura, very delicate singing in the middle, and then towards the end also low-lying parts that you have to negotiate as a tenor - but I enjoyed it very, very much. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to direct the piece twice now, and I’m sure that it will not be my last. 

SA: You talked about accepting things that you can’t change. You’ve made the transition from being a singer to being a stage director and a teacher. Why?

KvR: It unfortunately was something that I tried to change, but couldn’t. I was diagnosed with malignant tumours in various parts of my respiratory apparatus between 2002 and 2005.  I had many operations to remove them, and am very happy and lucky that they could be removed and that at this moment I am completely free from any form of malignant growth.  But in the process of those operations taking place, I lost some nerve tissue and I lost some possibilities of having my vocal chords vibrate with complete synchronicity, which was the very basis of any vocal line. And unfortunately, to put it bluntly, I cannot sing any more. Not even under the shower.  Perhaps that’s the part of singing that I miss the most. And it was a very bitter pill for me to swallow. It’s something that still every day I have to try and cope with. But in giving my love of music a different avenue of expression, in teaching and in directing, which is not that different from teaching in many ways, I have an avenue that I can still communicate my love of music, and share that with other people.  And to me that’s a great joy.

SA: Have you talked about it to any press before?

KvR: No, this is the first time I’ve come out with it.  Between 2005 and 2011, while I was struggling with the idea that I had to stop singing but didn’t want to, I didn’t give any interviews. I think the time is right now. There’s this wonderful poem by Herman Hesse which is called “Steps”, and the last sentence is, “Mein Herz, nimm Abschied und genese.”  Part of healing is to let go. 

SA: You lost something, but did you find something else?

KvR: To be honest, I think I obviously had some talent as a singer, and I had opportunities to develop that talent to make it something worthwhile, and to make a very promising career out of it. As a director, I think that I actually have more to give.  I have a great love of philosophy. I am an avid researcher. I studied law, which was also based on a love of research. And I like to make arguments. I like to see references between different aspects of things, and try and think about things a lot, and think about life in a way that’s based on principled decision.  That, together with my great love of graphic arts, and of animation and video techniques and photography, gives me a wonderful opportunity to now devise concepts based on visual ideas; sometimes, that’s in complete synchronicity with the music. 

Directing is a job in which there are not a lot of objective criteria. Very subjective criteria apply as to whether one gets to be hired as a director, exactly as they do to whether the production is successful with the public. But I think that I have many benefits, including more than 20 years of international stage experience, my extreme love of the music, the way I can understand and read the score, the way I can try to somehow see behind the obvious communicative moments in a piece and find the subtext and share that with colleagues. I understand what they need to do on stage to be effective in their communication, and combine all of that, and I honestly think I’m a better director than I ever was a singer.  And I look forward to what I hope will be a long career in developing that.

SA: What more could you have wished for yourself as a singer?

KvR: I was very lucky in that my dreams come true. I could sing Idomeneo, one of my title parts, at the Met, and I had a wonderful innings. I sang with the conductors that I respected and that I wished to work with. When I was a student in South Africa, I dreamt of working with people like John Eliot Gardiner, Rene Jacobs, and Christopher Hogwood. And I was able to realise all of those dreams. And I never thought that I’d be able to make my debut at the Met in a Handel opera. But that’s a very important part, also, of what I’m teaching here, that pre-classical music - music of the 18th and 17th century - now forms a huge part of the repertoire of any self-respecting opera theatre in the world.  And that’s also one of the reasons why it’s so important that South African students come into closer contact with historically informed performance practice. 

I am very happy with the level of vocal tuition that the students here, for example at UCT, have had. I was very surprised, for example, about the fantastic tenors they have here. So obviously the teachers here and the management of the school here are doing things right, and are doing it in a wonderful fashion. However, no matter how vigilant and how valiant their efforts are, in South Africa, students just don’t have enough exposure to music of the 18th and 17th century, because there are no period instrument orchestras. I’m very happy that friends of mine are doing a lot with consort music, as much as they can with the limited means that they have, to start things, for example the Cape Consort. I really respect people like Hans Huyssen, and I’m proud of people now progressing in that way and trying to make that style their own. Music is very much abou learning by doing.

Opera cannot be fully appreciated or experienced on You Tube or on television or on DVD. It MUST be experienced live. It must be shared.  I’m so, so glad to be part of the mission of Umculo, because their vision of getting to young people at an early very age and showing them that self-expression through music and opera is something that not only can change their lives, but can also change the lives of the society around them. And that’s why I’m here.

SA: Why does South Africa need opera?

KvR: Good question. Opera is an extremely effective communicative tool.  It communicates human emotions so effectively. It’s 400 years after some of this music has been written and a great amount of people all over the world choose to listen to this music, even if they don’t understand the language. So there must be something quite special about it - and truly, there is!

The more we communicate effectively as singers, the more the appreciation of the art form will grow. In addition, modern technology, like projection of text into a performance space, gives people access to a language that they don’t understand on a one-to-one basis, which was the aim of the composers of the opera. This really opens up wider audience participation for opera.  And the fantastic thing about music is that it’s two-way communication.  When you as an artist are standing on stage and you are singing, you feel the audience actually participating in your communication. It’s not somebody just sitting in front of the television or hitting the play button on the DVD player.  That’s communication happening in one direction - and consumerism, actually.  Whereas people making music on their own - even if it’s music at home, one brother playing an instrument, a sister playing another, and somebody singing - that’s already a step in the right direction.

SA: South Africans sing, and there’s an incredibly well-developed network of choirs around this country. A lot of teenagers are singing opera already - far more than in Germany, where you live. Is that important?

KvR: Singing is unbelievably important - singing with others even more so.  I would be cautious as far as repertoire is concerned, because it’s very important that the repertoire that they sing fits not only the voices of the young people singing it, but also fits their emotional world.  We want to communicate something through singing. We must be able to understand the emotions of what this piece is about and then communicate it effectively. That’s why pop singers communicate so well. They sing horribly, and often the music that they sing is not composed well, but they reach an audience and communicate effectively. The difference between composition and the moment of actual performance is very short.  If we want to communicate through opera, and we want to do it 300 years after the fact, we have to invest a lot of research into finding out what the original intention of communication was, and see whether it’s possible for us to say something to an audience through this music today.  I’m absolutely convinced that the music of Monteverdi is as actual today as it was 400 years ago, and I will wager all I have that in 400 years from now, it will be present, modern, and actual as well. Why? Because it is concerned with human emotions, and human emotions being communicated through the language of music.

SA: So do you think it is appropriate for high school girls to be singing Barbarina, not Donna Anna?

KvR: Certainly that would be a good application. Barbarina was written for a very young woman to sing. But instead of just singing Barbarina, they could sing folk songs with a good accompaniment; we could commission composers to compose things that are fitting to what they want to say. But there’s a wealth of repertoire for young voices out there. In the 18th century, more operas were composed than ever after, and through modern technology and the internet, we have the scores of those things at our disposal. 

Another plus point is that the scores often call for a smaller orchestra.  An orchestra takes a huge chunk of the money that’s available for any opera endeavour and if we can make original music without having to somehow dilute parts of it by rearranging things for smaller ensembles - if we can do, as we say in Afrikaans, “die ware Jakob”, just with the instruments for which it was composed, a smaller amount of them, we can be more effective by performing in more venues, in venues which are closer to the people.  For example, with students from the North West University, I directed the first South African performance of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, using performance practice ideas with an original period instrument band, in iKageng.  I think it was the first opera ever performed in iKageng, and I believe it was also the first South African performance of a baroque opera with baroque instruments - I was very very proud of that, and I enjoyed the response of the public in iKageng very much. It showed me that the music of Handel, about young people experiencing love, spoke to South Africans in the same way as it does to people all around the world. And South Africans, with our rich cultural heritage and the diversity that we have in our culture, have a lot to say. The music of the 17th and 18th century is just another avenue of expression.

It’s sad that South Africans are not really able to participate fully in that aspect of music-making.  South Africans certainly deserve to.  And the South Africans that are in it at the moment, even though we may start with a backlog, certainly make an impact. 

SA: Pretty Yende is at La Scala, Sunnyboy Dladla is in Zurich, Pumeza Matshikiza is in Stuttgart, Luthando Quave is at the Met - they all did fine without historically informed performance practice training.

KvR: That’s not quite true. I’ve never met Pretty Yende, but her teachers tell me about the fact that she studied Monteverdi’s La Musica and had the opportunity to work with a specialist.  What I’m saying is not that it’s impossible. I’m saying that if we have the possibility to do it more often, more people will be interested in it, and there will be a broader base of practice in it. There will be a broader base of understanding, and therefore the overall level will rise greatly. Excellence is a thing that you can never put a lid on.  If somebody really has the drive and talent and is genuinely interested in something, they will rise above whatever their circumstances are, and I truly commend the South Africans who make the jump of 9000 km to go and work in Europe, having to learn a strange language and live in a cultural environment that’s not theirs in order to ply their trade - to ply their art, actually, because that’s what opera singing is. There’s a certain amount of trade involved, skills that you have to learn, and on top of that there’s this completely artful art of communication. But I also like the idea of being inclusive in endeavours that we undertake, not to be exclusive, not to exclude anybody, but to give people opportunities and knowledge and exposure to style is an opportunity that all South Africans actually deserve.

Open master classes with Kobie van Rensburg, in partnership with the Umculo and University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music run until 9 April 2013.  Classes are open to the public free of charge.  They continue today, 8 April, from 11-13h, 14-15h, and 19-21h at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music in room C6; and tomorrow, 9 April, from 10h30 - 12h30.  On 9 April there will be a final concert and lecture from 13h to 14h45 in room C7.

Interview by Shirley Apthorp
Published 08.04.2013