Classical Music

The tenor Ian Bostridge cuts an elegant figure in his pale linen suit, easily recognisable as he strides across the leafy Swain’s Lane, next to Hampstead Heath, to join me at a table outside one of his favourite locations – the chic café Kalendar. As we sit drinking coffee, he is disarmingly frank, honest and quietly intellectual.

Tall, gaunt and pale, he evokes the image of an otherworldly Romantic poet. He has long been the wan poster boy of German lieder singing, springing to national attention at Christmas in 1997, when he starred in an expressionist video of the bleak ‘Winterreise’. And it is Schubert’s song cycle that he performs on Tuesday, with pianist and long-time collaborator Mitsuko Uchida. Feature continues

He hasn’t come far today, living just down the road on the border with Kentish Town. ‘I never tell people I am from Highgate,’ he says, perhaps atavistically betraying working-class roots. Born in Balham, he grew up in Streatham. His great-grandfather, John ‘Tiny’ Joyce, played football for Tottenham Hotspur and then Millwall.

Fortunately, despite his appearance, the 43-year-old singer is not downbeat in personality, but rather good fun, albeit clearly reflective. He is married to the writer Lucasta Miller and seems as much pre-occupied with bringing up his children (Oliver, eight years, and Ottilie, 21 months) as with his singing career. An academic by background, he was reading for a PhD in history (on witchcraft) at Oxford, when he turned his extra-curricular hobby of singing into a starry profession. ‘I was very lucky that it happened so quickly,’ he admits, though qualifying his and his wife’s career successes with, ‘We were both going to be academics; it just didn’t work out.’

He happily admits that he did not receive any formal musical training. ‘I think I learned lots of bad habits because I used to learn things by singing along to records of [baritone] Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and so I was singing in the wrong key… I’ve learnt on the job, which has been quite scary.’ But he has no regrets. ‘Maybe if I had been at conservatoire, I wouldn’t have been allowed to do what I have been doing because I have a weird vocal technique: I am a light tenor but I sing lieder and so tend to sing in the middle of my voice, which is the sound I like to make.’ He is, therefore, a genuinely unfinished article – unconservatoired, with a haunting voice and a manner unspoiled by polishing, he gets straight to the melancholic heart of Schubert.

So where does this sensibility come from? He thinks for a moment, then smiles. ‘I was a very nostalgic child. I remember leaving my first school and when I went home from boarding school to visit my mum in the holidays, I used to wander around it remembering the wonderful old times. And that is a lieder singer’s attitude.’ This carried on into his adolescence. ‘And when I was first in love with a girl, she wasn’t in love with me, and I used to get the bus and walk up and down outside her house not daring to speak to her; then I saw her with another boy playing tennis, and I couldn’t play tennis – it was just like ‘Die Schöne Mullerin’. I was born to be a lieder singer in that sense.’ Then he laughs. ‘Basically, I have chosen this rather strange bohemian life and yet I am deeply conventional and bourgeois.’

This month, he comes to the Barbican with his Homeward Bound series. In Barbican terms, 2008 has been a great year. Bostridge has curated a series of events that reflect his career, which has so far seen him perform his favourite composers in Britten’s ‘Billy Budd’, Bach’s ‘St John Passion’ and Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’. ‘The only disconcerting thing is that it was very nice of them to put a photo of me on the front of everyone’s programmes, but when I am standing on stage there are all these people sitting out there with my face.’

At last he gets up and sets off for Hampstead Heath, to clear his head before the day ahead, which involves editing a Schubert recording and, as he casually mentions, a meeting about his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’. So, it’s official, then. He really has come a long way from home.

Ian Bostridge sings ‘The Holy Sonnets of John Donne’ at LSO St Luke’s on Oct 18; and ‘Winterreise’ at the Barbican on Oct 21.