Ten years ago I was working with a brilliantly talented tenor in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. He asked me what I was singing next – it's a terrible, boring habit amongst singers, asking each other what's coming up – and when I said Arbace in Mozart's Idomeneo he cringed. ‘Ugh. I HATE singing Mozart!' – which was a surprise, as I would have thought he'd be rather good at it. But then again, he was a tenor, and Mozart's tenor roles get decidedly mixed reviews, even among the very best of the species.

Mozart's tenor roles fall loosely into two types, ‘lyrical' and ‘character'. The lyric tenors get all the nice tunes and are invariably noblemen, the ‘star' roles. The character tenors tend to be servants or lackeys, usually comic, and the singers are booked more on their ability to hold the stage than the beauty of their voices. A lot of lyric tenors move on to character roles when they can no longer pass for handsome young princes. Or the beauty of their voice has diminished. Or they've developed a bit of a beer gut.

The trouble is, many of Mozart's lyric tenors are dreary characters – priggish and inclined to a rare brand of dull worthiness. And if there's a more tedious and difficult character trait to play on stage than worthiness, I've yet to meet it. Even weakness is more interesting. I call as my first witnesses the roles of Tamino, Don Ottavio and Belmonte. Young Tamino spends most of The Magic Flute telling Papageno – everyone's favourite character – to shut up, which doesn't earn him many Brownie points. Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni) keeps singing about how cross he is, while doing nothing, and Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio... I can't even remember what he does.

All of these roles require singing of the most exquisite persuasion, and here's the rub: when you're succeeding at singing Mozart, you're making it sound like the easiest thing in the world, despite almost certainly busting a gut to make it sound effortless. But I suppose that's showbiz for you.

Meanwhile, The Magic Flute's evil Monostatos and Belmonte's sidekick Pedrillo, unburdened by worries about wooing a forlorn princess (or the audience) with the beauty of their singing, are happily stealing the show from their more lyrical colleagues. As the great character tenor Graham Clark pointed out: ‘Who would you rather go to the pub with – Tamino or Monostatos?'

Idomeneo is a great role, but Philip Langridge spoiled it for me by being so bloody good at it that to even think of singing it comes with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. La Clemenza di Tito is a bit of a Marmite opera, I've always thought – you either love it or you hate it – and I confess to being someone who has never really got it. Sorry.

Ferrando, in Così fan tutte, is something of an enigma. It must be the longest of Mozart's roles – all those ensembles on top of two (or even three) tricky arias. Surprisingly, I loved singing it. It fitted in my happy vocal zone: at the end of three or so hours I used to feel as fresh as a daisy, ready to sing another three hours.

But the trouble with Così is that it's probably more fun to be in than to listen to. It's like playing the finest chamber music: if you're there in the middle of it, it's a joy, but sit the other end of a cavernous opera house and it can lose its charm. And again, if you're doing it well, no-one realises what a marathon it is. A good review for a Ferrando usually reads something like: ‘Ferrando and Guglielmo were a nicely-matched pair of soldiers.' That's it. After three or so hours solid of singing. I mean, really.

The Mozart tenor role I would happily sing year in, year out to the end of my days is Basilio in The Marriage of Figaro. Not because he has much to do; he doesn't. And I think doing his aria in Act 4 is a terrible mistake – it's dull, self-indulgent and holds up the denouement at a time when the audience's collective bum is becoming very numb.
You do, however, get to be in the most sublime opera ever composed. Curzio, who has the luxury of singing in the Act 3 sextet, will also do. But Basilio wins because you can also make people genuinely laugh, and in a Mozart tenor, that's a rare opportunity.

The last time I sang Basilio was in Los Angeles, with Plácido Domingo conducting. He himself had recorded Basilio's aria many years ago for a Mozart disc, which struck me as a curious thing to do, so in the pub after a show I asked him why. ‘I was supposed to record one of Tito's arias but I couldn't sing it,' he said. ‘So we decided to do Basilio's instead.'

Which rather proves my point – that not all Mozart works for all tenors.

With the unexpected departure of Kasper Holten as head of the Royal Opera, a power vacuum has emerged. Currently working in the United States, Sinfini Music blogger Chris Gillett turned to someone with power very much on his mind for some advice: Presidential hopeful, Donald Trumpet.

l never had you pegged as an arts-lover, Mr Trumpet...

Please, please, call me Donald. All my friends do. No, seriously, I'm a huge, huuuge lover of the arts. I have a collection of paintings by the Scotch painter, my good friend Jack Vettriano – they love me in Scotchland – have you been to my golf course? Beautiful. Anyway, they cost me millions, millions, and they hang on the walls of my big apartment in the Trumpet Tower. Andrea Bocelli, beautiful guy, lovely singer, performed at my third wedding in the Trumpet Cathedral, and André Rieu – my God has that guy got good hair, and I would know – played at the reception in the Trumpet Hotel. It was a classy, classy affair. And artists, they love me too. They do, they really do, I'm not kidding.

So, who do you think should run Covent Garden?

Well, me of course. I'm serious. I could do that, I could. Believe me.

And what would you do with the Royal Opera?

I'd make massive changes, massive. First of all, I'd tear down that terrible old building, awful, and put up something classy, something that says we mean business. I mean, it's called Covent Garden but there isn't even a garden. So, I'd build one. A huge one. Yeah, on the roof. And under that, a luxury hotel – all in the best taste like my other buildings. Pink marble, great brass fittings that don't come from China, I guarantee. Under that some luxury apartments and then a beautiful new, state-of-the-art theater with at-seat pizza delivery, my own vintage Trumpet wines on tap, a Trumpet Steakhouse... That kind of thing. Very classy. Very expensive, of course, of course, but I know people. Believe me. I know these guys. It's what they want. I promise.

And repertoire?

I love opera. I really do. And it loves me, it really does. I mean, just look at all those operas... Don Giovanni, Don Carlos. They can't get enough of me! And let me tell you, seriously, I have a beautiful singing voice. I could sing any of those roles. Ask anyone.

But there are some operas... I think we have to ask ourselves 'Do we really want to see this?' and I don't think we do. I know I don't. I would ban them, I would, until we know what the hell is going on. I mean The Abduction from the Seraglio, L’ltaliana in Algeri, Otello...there are characters in these that... well, I'm not going to say it, but somebody has to. They don't share our values, you know what I'm saying? I'm not sure we want to see that. I know I don't.

But let me tell you, I've seen all the operas. I've seen them all. I saw the very first night of La bohème. Yes, I was there, I saw it with my own eyes. It was widely reported.

What about casting?

We have to be careful. We have to be very careful. I mean, we have all these foreign guys coming over – Mexicans, Russians – and we have to ask ourselves if this is what we really want, whether it's good for the Royal Trumpet Opera.

But some of the world’s greatest singers are Hispanic or Russian. Domingo, Villazón, Netrebko, Hvorostovsky, to name but a few...

And these are great guys. I love them, I really do, and they love me.

And?

I don't really want to go into it at this moment in time. I'm finding your line of questioning hostile. This interview is over. Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. It's no wonder you and your friends are going down the toilet. Is there something wrong with you? Are you sick? I'm going to be boycotting Sinfini and I suggest anyone reading does the same. They'll lose millions, believe me.

Is there anything tackier than the classical celebrity Christmas album? That's a rhetorical question because the answer is, obviously, no.

Granted, it's sometimes difficult to get into the Yuletide spirit during August, when the recording sessions often take place. I seem to remember wearing shorts to record 'In the Bleak Midwinter' at the height of a Cambridge summer while a member of King's College Choir. Conversely, I also remember a freezing day in December when the men of the choir dashed down between carol services to Hatfield House. Costumed in blazers and boaters – even as the frost lay deep and crisp and even – we pretended to be Yale students enjoying a jolly summer romp, all while filming a TV special on Cole Porter with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. 'Steve and Eydie' were huge stars in America, but we'd never heard of them.

At least at King's we were never obliged by the recording company to make the sort of album that now seems to have become necessary to fill their Christmas stockings. The usual formula is to take one legit opera star and pair them with a succession of vocalists possessed of less impressive ability, but with inexplicable (to me at least) mass appeal. More often than not, the duettists never meet, the whole project being cobbled together with technical wizardry: a bargain-priced orchestra in eastern Europe puts down a backing track, a crossover starlet records her bits in one city, and the big star adds on their stuff in another, between performances of Puccini at the opera house.

And of course, every Christmas album has to have pictures of the title artist looking Christmassy – cue fake snow, a pile of presents, a woolly hat and scarf – to create the illusion that Christmas for the in-demand opera singer is spent roasting his chestnuts by the home hearth. In fact, the chances are that it's spent in a hotel or aeroplane, miles from home.

Still, never one to pass up the opportunity to make a few bob, I'm thinking ahead to next Christmas and my own compilation of sure-fire hits, including:

• Mariah Carey and Jackie Evancho duetting in 'O Mio Babbino Carol'.

• Plácido Domingo and a choir of over 50 celebrities (i.e. everyone who has ever duetted with him in 'White Christmas') in 'Tutto Quello Che Voglio Per Natale è Tu' ('All l want for Christmas is you').

• Renée Fleming singing 'Jingle Bells' accompanied by Cameron Carpenter, with full canon and mortar effects.

• Adele singing Handel ’s 'The Trumpet Shall Sound' with Donald Trump, trumpet.

• Jonas Kaufmann in Slade’s classic 'lch wünschte, es könnte jeden Tag Weihnachten sein!'

• The Coventry Carol, sung by Sting (vocals), with Sting (guitar), Sting (lute), Sting (theorbo), Sting (viola da gamba), Sting (organ), Sting (sackbutt), Sting (cello) and Yo-Yo Ma (ocarina).

Pre-order now to guarantee disappointment!

A lot of people are excited about Sunset Boulevard coming to ENO next year. It may not come as much of a surprise that I'm not one of them.

I'm not troubled by an opera company doing musicals. I know the arguments: West End theatres can't do justice to some of the big scores as they were originally composed, and many musicals are worthy of being taken seriously. Heck, given the choice between Donizetti's Don Pasquale or Bernstein's On The Town, for me it would be the Bernstein any day. South Pacific is a score that I'd like to hear with full orchestra and chorus. West Side Story, too.

But yet more Andrew Lloyd Webber in London? In a semi-staging? For let's make no mistake about this, the budget for these shows doesn't run to a full production with scenery - the sort of show that people are used to seeing in the West End. At the Coliseum, they're providing a dramatised concert version, something designed with only a temporary run in mind.

The main argument for ENO doing musicals is that it's supposed to make them a shedload of money in the long term. It's a bit of commercialism to pull in the crowds and help pay for the other stuff, the opera. They even claim it might encourage people to go to the Coliseum more regularly, but if anyone can prove that actually works, I'll be very surprised. The leap from Sweeney Todd to The Force of Destiny isn't one that's casually made.

The thing that exercises my mind the most is the business model. I have never understood it. When ENO and its co-producers on this scheme, Michael Grade and Michael Linnit, announced their joint venture, Grade said: 'We'll put the resources and creative energy into a show that would do a short season here and then it would go straight into the West End. It will hopefully have a long life beyond its launch at the Coliseum and offer a new source of revenue for ENO and new audiences as well.'

But - and this is the bit I don't get - a West End transfer surely is (and always was) out of the question. It certainly was for Sweeney Todd, ENO's last musical: that much was clear the moment it was announced. For starters, both Sweeney and Sunset are vehicles for big stars - Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel in the Sondheim, and Glenn Close in the Lloyd Webber - none of whom are surely interested in anything but a short run in a big theatre for a handsome fee.

Secondly, both shows follow the same model, with a full-sized orchestra on the stage and no scenery. It's a not a model that will transfer to a West End theatre, especially as no commercial theatre can afford the same orchestra that the publicly-subisidised ENO can provide.

A transfer with no big stars, no scenery, no big orchestra... it's hardly the stuff to draw coach parties from the suburbs and the tourists on whom musicals rely. Apart from the fact that no West End producer would touch it with a bargepole, how could a transfer have succeeded without dramatically and expensively changing the format around which the original show was planned? It would be a different show altogether.

Now it seems that the penny has dropped for ENO's chief executive, Cressida Pollock, who admitted last week that West End transfers are indeed an unlikely prospect. So, was Michael Grade telling a load of porky pies last year, or was the scheme just poorly- conceived by ENO's previous management?

If the shows have no life beyond the Coliseum, that's fine. Take the money and run. But then why have a couple of cigar-chomping producers involved in the process (and taking a cut of the box office) at all?

Even without the scenery, these shows are still costly to mount, requiring a larger cast than many operas all imported from outside the company. What do Grade and Linnit bring to the table that cannot be sourced more cheaply elsewhere or even in-house?

It will be interesting to see how much money ENO can make off Sunset Boulevard. As it's a commercial venture, financial profit really is the only reason to do this, for I defy anyone in the artistic management of ENO to stand up and make the artistic case for doing Lloyd Webber. I do wonder whether anyone at ENO has read Frank Rich's The Hot Seat, which notes that Sunset Boulevard once set the record for the most money lost by a theatrical endeavour in US history.

Let's just hope it doesn't do the same for English National Opera.

Ask any professional singer and they'll tell you about the singer's recurring nightmare – and I'm talking about an actual nightmare, not a teenager's description of a holiday with their parents. It's always a variation on the same theme: humiliation.

Mine is entirely typical. It goes something like this: I've agreed to sing a vaguely familiar (yet highly unsuitable) role at Covent Garden with no rehearsal. I can hear my cue, but I can't find my costume and I can't find my way to the stage. When I eventually make it, long past my cue, the audience is waiting silently for me to start. The band strikes up and the best I can come up with is: ‘La donna e mobile, lum dum di da di-da...' And so on and so on. Not a clue what I'm doing. It's a dream about being found wanting, about being exposed as a fraud.

In real life, I've just finished a production of Turandot in which my costume consisted solely of an adult disposable nappy (a 'diaper' for our American friends). Many people have said: ‘How could you do that? It must be so humiliating!' Curiously, I found it anything but humiliating. In the context of Calixto Bieito's brutal production, it made perfect sense. I enjoyed the theatricality of it and the opportunity (not usually provided by the role of Emperor Altoum) to go to a dark and difficult place, to do some proper acting, to play a man who was dying, demented and riddled with cancer.

No, the only time I was remotely embarrassed was when I had to take my curtain call. Now, I was no longer a character (the portrayal of whom meant a lifetime's struggle with doughnut addiction was suddenly something of a bonus) but back to being a flabby bloke called Chris, naked but for a nappy in front of hundreds of people. The Barihunks website certainly won't be bashing down NI Opera 's door for photos of that curtain call to share with its readers.

That isn't to say there aren't directors who seem to get a kick out of humiliating their singers. By all accounts, Bieito isn't one of them. I wouldn't know as I have only met him once, at the first night in Belfast, when he watched the performance from the prompt corner (an assistant revived our production, which originated in Nuremberg). Though someone did tell me he'd spotted Bieito playing Angry Birds on his phone during the show, which seems highly unlikely. I'd have thought Grand Theft Auto was more his thing.

Some directors and conductors – sorry, I can't name names or I'll never get work again – have a habit of zeroing in during rehearsals on whomsoever they perceive to be the weakest and making their lives a misery. I really don't know what they aim to achieve by this. Possibly they think that they can get the singer sacked and replaced with someone better, and that occasionally happens. Perhaps they think a climate of fear and division is good for the show (it's not, in my experience). Or maybe they're just self- absorbed megalomaniacs. Now we might be getting warmer.

Only once, as far as I can remember, has a director picked on me. It was clear from the moment this director clapped eyes on me that he thought I was miscast, too young and inexperienced. He had the look of a child who, expecting the latest top-of-the-range Xbox for his birthday, is given an Etch A Sketch. He spent the next three days trying to break me; he nearly succeeded and I toyed with asking to be released from the contract. But stubbornness got the better of me and I just continued to turn up to rehearse until he eventually ran out of new things to chuck at me. It was like breaking in a horse – although, to be honest, I'm not sure which of us was the horse. In the end, we got on just fine.

The very worst humiliation a director can impose on a singer is to leave them ‘out to dry'; in other words, to be so inept as to leave the cast floundering about, not knowing what to do, in a production bereft of ideas and skill. More often than not, it's the singers who end up rescuing the show in this situation, thus saving the director from the humiliation of being found wanting, of being exposed as a fraud.

I wonder what the director's recurring nightmare is. Huh. As my first experience in that field approaches, no doubt I'll soon find out.

Who in their right mind would hook up with an opera singer?

By turns over-confident and massively insecure – paranoid about their health, loud noise, air-conditioning, other people's perfume, cheese, agents, conductors, heat, cold, gluten, lillies, directors, coffee, planes, trains, money, reflux, handshakes and chocolate – singers can't be easy to live with. They're just so... singery.

Yes, OK. WE are so singery.

Knowing all this, you'd think the last person a singer would want to marry would be another singer. Yet, despite the innumerable people like me who said they'd never, ever do it, many of us do.

On the upside, if you're married to a singer with the same list of insecurities – someone who understands the beast you are trying to tame – the chances are that they feel an empathy with those insecurities.

Another singer knows that leaving home for months on end isn't necessarily your ideal, but it's something you feel compelled to do. They also know it isn't a rollicking picnic. They know how lonely and soul- destroying it can be. They recognise the thrill of being offered a job as opposed to the often-numbing reality of fulfilling the contract.

However, in spite of these advantages, so many singer marriages fail – especially, it would seem, the high-profile ones. The obvious conclusion is that the better your career progression, the worse the prospects for your relationship. And, I'm sorry to say, that conclusion is a fair one; not usually because anyone consciously makes a choice between one and the other, but because the task of being a successful opera singer on the road is simply too overwhelming. Career envy can play its part too, but I've rarely found that to be the real problem.

The latest high-profile casualties are Ailyn Pérez and Stephen Costello. Less than three years ago, they were plugging their album of love duets and talking about the challenges of being married singers,  and  now they're getting divorced. So too have other high-profile singer couples like Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott. And I think there's a good chance that it was the Colonel Being-a-singer who did it, in the opera house, with the candlestick.

So, as someone who has been happily married to another singer for almost 20 years, here are my top tips for making it work:

• Never make a CD of love duets together. The kiss of death.

• Take that even further – avoid working together at all. It's much easier to support each other from the outside. You each have your own crap to deal with when you're working. It's unfair to expect your partner to be burdened with your business when he or she has their own to manage. The best job we ever had was in Los Angeles. Lucy, my wife, was singing Hansel in Hansel and Gretel and at exactly the same time, I was singing Arnalta in The Coronation of Poppea. We got to live together and to be both working, but in different shows. The fact that she was playing a boy while I played a woman was also an intriguing twist. But it was luck rather than design that dropped these dream jobs in our laps.

• Don't think of working away from home as time you should spend pining miserably for your spouse. Instead, think of it as a time when you can enjoy some solitude (which we all need). And, at the risk of sounding a bit psycho-babbly, nurture the things that will make you a better person when you come home. Personally, I read and write so much more when I'm on the road. Enjoy the city you're in and share your enjoyment. Don't be a martyr to misery in the mistaken belief that this will make your other half feel better.

• Try to get as much boring stuff done as you can while you're apart. Use the time to do your taxes, defrag your hard drive, learn your next role, etc. etc.. That way, when you come home, you don't have to slouch off to your desk or the piano to spend yet more time away from your significant other.

• Ask yourself if you REALLY want to do that job in deepest nowhere for the sake of a full diary. Might it not be better to turn it down and spend some time with your spouse? Who needs a few more thousand in the bank when your marriage might be at stake?

• Expect the first 48 hours back to home to be difficult. Each of you has established a different rhythm to life. It's unfair to come home and expect it to be all champagne and roses. Life goes on, whether you're at home or not, and you need time to readjust. If you can't even remember which kitchen drawer holds the cutlery, how can you be expected to remember the more delicate nuances of life as a couple?

• If you have children... well, that's a whole other ballgame and I'm out of room.

Early this year, I got a surprising email: I had inherited a vast sum of money from an unknown relative in Nigeria.

Actually, it was from the baritone Nathan Gunn, head of the University of Illinois' Lyric Theatre – but it was still surprising because he was asking me to direct Britten's A Midsummer Night’s Dream this coming winter. Apart from something when I was at school, I've never directed before. But the Dream is an opera I've performed many, many times – more than any other. I've even written a book about singing it, which Nathan had read, called Who’s My

Bottom? I'm guessing that's why he thought I'd be a suitable choice.

I hesitated before I said yes, but once I'd figured out what my general concept would be, and when and where I would set it, I agreed. I'm not going to spill the beans here about the concept except to say that no, I'm not setting it in Greece, and absolutely no-one is wearing a toga. There are no inflatable sex dolls, nor Nazi uniforms, so on the Crazy-o-Meter it will be uncontroversial. However, while it would be considered fairly tame in Europe, it may raise a few eyebrows in the American Midwest. So that's good.

I've already had to explain to the faculty why I'm ‘not setting it in the period in which it is written'.

As it turns out, I'm discovering that having the concept in your head is the easiest part of the process. In my head, I can see the set, the costumes, the lighting. The hard part is getting everyone else to see what you're seeing. And the Fairies – ah, the Fairies. They give me sleepless night because they are A CHORUS and dealing with a chorus seems to be the most terrifying aspect of a director's work. My solution is to get a choreographer (tick) and she can choreograph the living daylights out of them. They say a good director knows how to delegate.

As the Lyric Theatre is part of the university, I have been assigned graduate students as my design team, and very good they are too. My first task has been to get them to realise what I'm after without me grabbing a sketchpad and saying: ‘THIS is what I want!' I have had to allow them the opportunity to come up with their own ideas. For a control freak, this is tough.

The very next thing I did after saying yes was to run out and buy notebooks. Directors always have notebooks. So far, they've been useful for those ‘Aha!' moments when you're in the shower and you think of something clever to do with, say, the Fairies. And no, I don't take the notebooks into the shower. My daughter, meanwhile, bought me for my birthday Frank Hauser's Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director’s Chair. So all I need now are riding boots, a crop, and a big silk scarf.

Rehearsals kick off in seven weeks. So far I've had loads of Skype meetings and two days at the university, finalising designs and budgets. Singers never have meetings (except with their agents) and it turns out they're rather fun. If that's work, I'll have a bit more of that in my life, thank you.

Long before rehearsals begin, I plan to do something unconventional: I'm going to let the cast know what the concept will be. You would think this is the norm, but far from it. As a singer-actor, I've never understood why we are always the very last people to hear the context in which we'll be working. It's always sprung on us at the first morning of rehearsals. ‘Hello everybody, we're doing The Marriage of Figaro as a play-within-a-play in a Victorian lunatic asylum; let's start the first scene.'

If the show is a revival (like the forthcoming Calixto Bieito Turandot in Belfast, in which I shall appear in my underwear, a quick Google search can give you an idea of what you'll be in for. If the show is to be directed by, say, one of the Alden twins, you can make an educated guess that you won't be seeing the inside of a powdered wig or hose. But otherwise, we are usually clueless. So, as I think the singers will be a lot more comfortable having some idea of what to expect when they hit the rehearsal studio, I think it's a good idea to tell them.

But the first day is weeks off yet. In the meantime, I'm going to go back to sleepless nights thinking up new gags for the Rustics, especially as I don't think I'll be allowed to use any of the rude ones I already have in mind. That's the Midwest for you.

I'll let you know how I get on.

l recently made a shocking discovery: l was once a pretty young man. l didn't think l was at the time. l thought l was scrawny and spotty, with receding hair. l certainly had no confidence about my appearance. But, it turns out – and l have heard this from a reliable source, i.e. a gay friend of many years' acquaintance – that in some quarters l was considered to be quite the English toffee in the eye-candy department.

On the one hand l find this very funny. On the other, l now find myself wondering how much of my early rise to the giddy heights of the second floor

can be attributed to someone taking a fancy to me, rather than through any talent l thought l had. l guess l'll never know, but it won't stop me wondering which jobs l got because a casting director or producer enjoyed the pertness of my bum.

Now that the bum is saggy, the hair is grey and sparse, and there's a wobbly, wrinkly flap of flesh where my chin used to be, l can be 100 per cent sure l don't have to worry about this any more – but l appreciate that there are lot of musicians who do. Only the other day l heard of a handsome young baritone to whom it was suggested that the opening of his shirt might help the panel assess whether he was suitable for a role. The man was a good singer, but far from ready to fill the roles that some producers breathlessly talk about, distracted no doubt by his good looks. lt certainly won't be long before he has been added to the rest of the beefcake on parade on the Barihunks website, where body worship is shamelessly celebrated and where the wearing of a shirt seems to be anathema.

So, does sexual harassment rear its ugly head in the classical music business? Almost certainly, but in complex and mysterious ways. We work in the entertainment industry, for heaven's sake: about as bipolar a bunch as it's possible to find when it comes to issues around appearance and how we should behave.

Only the other day, a bass friend pondered on Facebook whether the throwing of knickers at a singer (as happened to Jonas Kaufmann at the Last Night Of The Proms would have been found acceptable if the singer were a young woman and the adoring fans, men of a far superior age. The debate that followed became heated. The whole episode was probably staged anyway, which makes it even more confusing and contentious.

l don't think the casting couch is commonplace in opera. Though l did hear of an ambitious soprano who offered sexual favours to the boss of an ltalian house in return for a role, only to be told that he was gay. She reached for her wallet and a large bribe: 'l also come from one of the richest families in ltaly!'

l've also heard of a boss who made it subtly clear that a bit of hankypanky would pave the way to some tasty roles, without exactly saying it. Apart from the fact that this is simply unacceptable, the other serious side effect is the assumption that tends to be made by the rest of the industry: 'the only reason so-and-so has a career is because s/he slept with the boss'. A few singers spring to mind in this category, not least Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, of whom it was said that, during World War Two and the Allied occupation of Vienna, she could be seen on the arm of whichever general happened to be in charge at the time. That she later married the head of EMl, Walter Legge, didn't do her career any harm. See? lt's so easy to draw conclusions which may not be true.

So, pity the good-looking singer. They may actively play the sex-bomb, as some undoubtedly do, but they will always be dogged by a nagging doubt about their real ability. Not Schwarzkopf, mind you: l hear she was an awful person, completely vain and lacking in self-doubt. Whoops, there l go again.

A couple of years ago, I was at one of London's conservatoires adjudicating some singers as an external examiner: helping to decide whether they had cut the mustard for their diplomas and degrees, and to what extent – from a simple ‘Colman's Extra Mild' Pass up to an ‘Extra Spicy Meaux With Added Horseradish' Distinction.

One Japanese soprano wasn't very good. Having her parents (who had apparently flown in from Tokyo for the occasion) among the tiny audience clearly didn't help her nerves, but even allowing for that, her technique was poor and her command of languages inadequate. We gave her a scraped Pass, but I couldn't help but wonder what would happen to her next. I had no doubt that she couldn't make it as a professional singer: she simply wasn't good enough, even for chorus work. So what had we just done? Given her some recognition for the work she had accomplished, or false hope for what her expectations could now be?

Around the same time, I got an email from a complete stranger, a soprano on the Isle of Wight, asking if I could give her some tips for ‘making it' as a singer. Her email was long and in it she railed against the unfairness of it all, fuming that Katherine Jenkins was earning millions while she, with her singing diploma (she didn't say from where), was reduced to busking in Newport. I had little advice to give.

There's no doubt about it: more and more youngsters are training to be opera singers. What is truly remarkable is that they are undeterred by the ever-shrinking number of opportunities that await them once they are trained, or the sheer length of the training process itself and its absolutely astonishing cost. It is now pretty-well normal for a wannabe opera singer to spend nine years – yes, NINE – in higher education. That's four years as an undergraduate (now £9,000 a year in fees), two as a postgrad (about £10,000 per annum), another two on one of the conservatoire's opera courses (just under £24,000) and possibly yet another at the National Opera Studio (hopefully covered by a scholarship). That's over £80,000 ($122,000) in fees alone. After that, some will spend even longer on a young artists' programme, such as the Jette-Parker at the Royal Opera House.

For non-EU students like the Japanese soprano, the cost is staggering – roughly double. At the risk of sounding cynical, it is no surprise that conservatoires are reluctant to refuse diplomas to inadequate foreign singers, given the revenue those singers bring in. It is also no wonder that the singing profession is becoming increasingly gentrified, given its price-tag. You can become a lawyer in less than eight years – it probably costs less, and you have an infinitely greater prospect of earning a living when you're done. And you get to meet some dodgy criminals to boot. What do singers get landed with? Dodgy conductors.

Are students getting their money's worth? I really hope so. A long time ago, when I turned up at conservatoire for my first year as a post-graduate, I was handed my timetable. It said: ‘one singing lesson a week, to be arranged privately.' I was on a good-old grant (those were the days!) but had I been shelling out £9,000 on a student loan, I would have thought one lesson a week to be poor value for money.

In America, the training programmes seem to go on even longer. So long, in fact, that I can't help but think that opera students are now seen as cash cows, good for many years of milking. Is the same happening in Britain? Let's hope not, but there are worrying signs, and I (and many singers I talk to) can't help but think it's getting a bit too much. I certainly doubt I'd bother to start out again under the new regime.

Now comes the bit where I tell you what would happen if I ruled the world. It's very simple, of course, but it will never happen. I'd scrap all the opera programmes and just have lots of small-scale opera companies instead, and thus lots of opportunities for singers to go out and perform and grow on stage, in small venues, on tour, five days a week. I learned heaps more in ten weeks of touring with Opera 80 (now English Touring Opera) than I ever did in classes, and I'm sure it's true of any singer. Yes, keep up the singing lessons, but for the rest? I'm all for doing it, rather than being told how to do it. How would it be paid for? I have no idea. Public funding? Ha!

Of course, there's a downside to the Gillett Master Plan. A lot of the tired old farts like me who make a modest living dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom – teaching at conservatoires and universities, giving masterclasses and other dubious instruments of learning – might have to look elsewhere for ways to postpone digging into their pensions.

I suppose there might still be some adjudication work going, but I'd guess my chances of that are now looking a tad slim.

I have always liked compactness. I think it goes with the job. Back in the day, when I used to fill my suitcase for long opera jobs abroad with a printer, a fax machine, guide books, novels, a discman and CDs, I'd probably have slightly wet my knickers if I thought that one day I'd been able to swap them all for a tiny smartphone.

Like most of you, I got an iPod in 2006 and dutifully emptied all my CDs onto it via iTunes. Driven on by the whole compactness obsession, I reckoned that we could save acres of shelf space at home by throwing out all the CD jewel boxes and putting the discs in folders instead (alphabetised, of course). So I did, and still do, even though it is a continual sore point with the missus, for whom compactness is not such a thrill. But she's American, so compactness possibly isn't in her DNA, despite being properly compact herself. Don't mind me while I dig myself a hole...

iTunes, like so many technical advances, was so exciting at first. But it didn't take long to lose its charm. In those days, Wagner operas, composed in uninterrupted brilliance, played back with annoying pauses between tracks. Worse, whoever attached the so-called metadata to classical CDs didn't seem to give a toss whether, say, Mozart was the Composer or an Artist. Or who the conductor was. Or they thought that Tennstedt was the composer, Mahler, the Artist, and I was listening to The Complete Symphonies 1, 2 ,3, track six. Meaning what exactly?

Finding the music I wanted to listen to, in the right order, without a sudden interruption in a playback of Handel concertos by a James Taylor song (I'm just that hip) proved well-nigh impossible. Box sets were torn asunder when disc one was composed by Giacomo Puccini, and disc two by Puccini, G, half a mile down the screen.

Apple started to do other things that irritated me, like dropping Google Maps from their iPhones and rendering my perfectly good iPad obsolete with software updates. I rebelled. It suddenly all seemed a bit cult-like for my taste and I got rid of all things Apple, including iTunes. Besides, Apple was so expensive.

Google was my new way ahead. A couple of years ago, I uploaded my entire digital music library to Google Play Music. It took about a day and meant, in theory, that I could now listen to my entire library anywhere I was connected to the internet. And there it all is. But, like iTunes – and, I gather from the current storm of online comment around Apple Music and other streaming sites – it still doesn't really work with classical music.

For instance, Google has made some slapdash guesses about what some of my CDs are. The recording I bought of Rameau 's Dardanus is by John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists , but Google has given it the cover from a completely different recording by Jeanne Lamon and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, whoever they may be. My Carlos Kleiber Beethoven symphonies disc has a bizarre cover assigned to it with Ludwig van B dressed as Elvis. It's dispiriting and annoying.

Perversely, some record companies are now going too far in supplying metadata. I'm on a recording of Peter Grimes in which every single track, of which there are many, credits every single artist who is singing on that particular track, of which there also many. Perhaps it helps with handing it out royalties, but it makes a nightmare of finding anything by Artist.

And since when, Google, has a symphonic movement been a ‘song'?

And don't get me started on Spotify, where Haydn symphonies are interrupted by adverts for dog food, and an interest in opera prompts suggestions that I might want to listen to something by Jackie Evancho.

There's little more annoying than a technology that promises so much but which really doesn't do the job – and digital storage and music streaming for classical fans certainly fit into this category. They're like American dishwashers that only work if you handwash the dishes first, or robot vacuum cleaners, which are fine only if you want something for the cat to play with.

The recording companies have got to get their act together and sort out the metadata. They need to stop giving the job to some intern with a GCSE in typing and hand it over to a geek with a degree in music; because at the moment I'm just about ready to give up on all digital music and pack a good old-fashioned record player in my suitcase the next time I hit the road.

I'm doing Puccini's Turandot quite soon, playing the elderly Emperor Altoum. If you've ever seen Turandot you've probably seen him as he's usually played: long white hair, sitting on a throne looking regal, doddery. A Chinese version of Prince Philip. I've just discovered that in the production I'm doing, Altoum wanders around the stage in nothing but grubby y-fronts being completely bonkers. Much of the chorus is wrapped in clingfilm. The production is regietheater, the director the somewhat notorious Calixto Bieito who has ruffled many a traditionalist's feathers in the past at ENO. More surprisingly, this performances won't be happening in Germany, where they take this in their stride, but in Belfast, where I expect they might not. 

There’s a bunch of people who definitely don't take this style of direction in their stride and who are becoming increasingly vocal in their objection to regietheater - witness their loud objections at the opening of the Royal Opera's William Tell - and who are getting quite organised. I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. I quite enjoy the game of trying to work out what the opera is when you're faced with a photo of writhing naked girls, a crashed helicopter and lots of upturned chairs (Macbeth is a safe guess). But without seeing the performance, I'm not one to judge whether or not it worked. Just look at Glyndebourne's current production of Handel's Saul. It has regitheater written all over it, and yet by every account it is an absolutely extraordinary evening in the opera house and I'm cursing that I won't see it. absolutely. One in the eye for the naysayers, I'd say.

What is regietheater (literally "director theatre")? It depends who you ask. Some would say it is a movement that started in post-war Germany which chose to look for a deeper, psychological interpretation of classic operas, using the techniques of Freud and Jung, and which broke away from the endless traditional performances which presented everything at face value. Of the art forms, opera lent itself particularly well to this re-examination because it is not rooted in realism. People are singing to each other, the plots are often fantastic and strange, and the very fact that there's a wordless orchestra playing creates another level of explorable meaning.
Other people think regitheater is nothing more than egomaniac directors assuming they know what the composer meant better than the composer himself and messing up perfectly good masterpieces with their idiotic "vision".

As a European singer, I'm open to all ideas. If the director can convince me, I'm happy to try anything. American singers and audiences are schooled in a much more traditional approach and are often horrified by what goes on in Europe. "Eurotrash" is the general term they use. Put so much as a machine gun on stage in Salome (as Jürgen Flimm did at the Met) and you can expect a whole heap of abuse. A telephone in The Marriage of Figaro? "Are you crazy? There were no telephones in Mozart's time!"
I have been in productions where I really don't get it. A transvestite prostitute and two drunk sailors in the opening of A Midsummer Night's Dream... really? And I've seen some doozies. La Traviata in a tennis court, Giulio Cesare in fatigues, glugging his way through cans of beer... But I'm open to try anything as long as the director can explain it properly.
Sometimes we singers are asked "why on earth did you allow the director to make you do such things?" Clearly the people who ask these questions have no idea about the creative process. Quite aside from the fact that we worry about being replaced - like the soprano who asked the director why she had to sing her fiendish aria in a rowing machine: "because if you don’t, we will find a soprano who will!" - can you imagine the rehearsal room where all you heard were singers saying NO? Despite what you may think, singers are much more open to new and bizarre ideas than actors. I've been told this by countless directors. This could be because whereas actors often only ever play a role once, in one production, singers will sing roles over and over again in lots of different versions. We have to be flexible and we can afford the odd dud production. These days, it goes with the job.
So, when I think about the prospect of spending my evenings in Turandot in my knickers, I'm hugely looking forward to it. It's going to be much more interesting than wearing a ton of make-up, climbing into a big frock and sitting still for an age. And let's face it, Turandot may seem like like a lovely opera with a famous aria about football, but it's actually a ghastly story peopled with bizarre, selfish, bloodthirsty characters. It really should be grim and appalling. 

Bring on the y-fronts!

Booze and the opera house go pretty much hand-in-hand. As anyone who has worked at Glyndebourne will tell you, the audience is always much, much perkier after the long interval; its laughter (and the odd snore) far more raucous. There's no doubt that it's the alcohol that does it – you can even smell the boozy breath from stage. How many of the punters yelling their opinions during last month's first night of Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera were well-tanked when they let rip with their booing, I wonder?

There's no denying that most opera singers like a drink or two as well, but for the most part, boozing is left strictly until after the show. All that champagne we slosh about in party scenes on stage is just ginger ale, after all – backstage, most of us are glugging water by the litre, or tea.

According to the film The Great Caruso, the great tenor used to swallow a shot of scotch before hitting the stage. I'm told the wonderful Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagtsad used to swear by a cold pint of lager during a performance to relax her voice, and I've known a few German singers who advocate a cold beer for keeping the voice clear. But the modern wisdom is that alcohol and quality singing do not cohabit well. There's a myriad of reasons: alcohol dehydrates the vocal cords, it causes acid reflux, it can lead to vocal hemorrhaging... but most obviously, it just seems like a bad idea. You wouldn't drive a car when you've had a few drinks, so why would you risk damaging the tiny mechanism that earns you your livelihood – and your reputation too?

Just as modern professional cricketers have eschewed a pork pie and a couple of pints for their matchday lunch, so have most singers become very disciplined about their show-day drinking. It's not just the voice you have to worry about: there's the music and words to remember, and a potentially dangerous stage to negotiate as well. And it's not just the drinker's performance that alcohol affects: singing with a colleague who's not pulling their weight simply because they're befuddled by booze is rarely enjoyable. It's frustrating and invasive, and can affect your work as well as theirs.

What drives a singer to drink? The loneliness and boredom of long stints away from home (where socialising provides much needed relief from an otherwise hermit-like existence) can mean that the travelling singer finds himself reaching for the wine bottle (and the paracetamol in the morning) rather more than he might at home, and definitely more than he should. And there's another pitfall – singing while on painkillers is a risky business for the delicate vocal membranes.

There have been many singers who perform under the influence, and most of those have come to a dismal end. The tenor who operated a full bar in his dressing-room, the baritone whose cola bottle disguised a few shots of vodka... the usual rationalisation being that a little drink will calm the nerves. But there's more to it than that. The release provided by singing and by a good glass of wine can be pretty similar. For many of us, the need to be a singer is rooted in our psyche. It's not just about the voice. As a psychologist to whom I had just revealed my rather buttoned-up, emotionally-chilled upbringing said: ‘And you wonder why you became a singer?' The occasional drink might seem like a good idea if it helps unburden you from your personal demons and helps you express yourself, but it really isn't. Orchestral players often struggle with the same problem, so it's heartening to see the victims of addiction now forming a special orchestra.

I drank and performed once or twice, out in the regions, when I was very young – and I'm not proud to admit that. It was only messing up during a Marriage of Figaro in Weymouth that made me recognise the dangers. As anyone who has read my book Who’s My Bottom? may remember, my mother was an alcoholic. Booze killed her. Given the genetic triggers for alcoholism, it's something I often think about, but – perhaps ironically – it's singing that has saved me from her tragic inheritance. Had I been a city banker instead, I'm not sure my fate would be so happy.

Fortunately, not everyone has had my same, sobering experience and I hope they never will. But I really hope they realise on their own that singing and a lot of alcohol simply aren't happy bedfellows.

If you asked me why there's so much opera for children going on at the moment, I would honestly have to say I don't know. Usually, in the costly world I work in, it's a good idea to take the All The President’s Men lead and ‘follow the money' – so, my guess is that there's gold in them thar hills. Sorry, that sounds cynical. I'm sure the intention of getting young people into opera is absolutely sincere - and indeed it is praise-worthy – but I'll bet there's a tasty chunk of extra funding for it too.

Does putting on so-called 'children's opera' encourage them to stick with the tricky genre as they become adults? Difficult to say, but there's probably no harm in trying; though I don't understand the logic whereby a performance which is a bit of a trial for adults (I'm remembering a particularly third-rate Magic Flute I saw a couple of years ago) is supposed to be good enough for children. Festival goers in Edinburgh, on the other hand, should book the whole family in to see Barrie Kosky and 1927's production, because it's quite brilliant. Otherwise, Magic Flutes – like young noses – should be picked carefully.

Some of the current crop of youth-friendly operas have a lot of kids in them. But I tend to be rather dubious about the idea that an opera with lots of children in it is more likely to appeal to kids than one without. Even as a child, the bits I always found least interesting in any form of entertainment were the bits with kids in, and that includes Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. That hasn't changed as I've (supposedly) grown up. Much as I adore Britten's music, there's too often the de rigeur bit where some kids sing and I want it to be over as soon as possible; the chorus of midshipmen in Billy Budd being a cringe-worthy case in point.

I don't ever remember taking my own children – now in their 20s and still partial to a bit of opera – to a children's opera. They came to a few rehearsals and saw their dad doing all the usual things, like prancing around and being stabbed in the neck (‘and that, my little sausages, is what pays the mortgage...').

We also once saw a production of Carmen in Cologne that was pure regietheater and they didn't bat an eyelid. I don't think they became particularly interested when the children's chorus appeared (if anything, my adolescent son was more focused on the Carmen's cleavage, my teenage daughter, a handsome dancer with good legs). From a promoter's point of view, the main benefit of a child-heavy cast is the guarantee that you'll sell at least two tickets for every child in the show – a lot more if the grandparents come too.

This isn't to say there aren't some brilliant ‘children's operas' out there – Oliver Knussen's Where The Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop! being as outstanding as they are musically uncompromising – unlike some of Britten's (Let’s Make An Opera, for instance), which can be rather twee. Alice in Wonderland has now had so many operatic versions that I wonder if it's time to call a moratorium on any more for the next ten years. I'm not even sure it's a children's piece, as so much of it is baffling. I've sung in two versions and I'd struggle to explain the plot of either.

No, I'd say the winning formula for converting children to opera is to make sure it's properly done, to the very highest standard. Do it well and they'll get it. Don't do something with a trombone, a cello and a clown and expect it to produce masses of converts to classical music. It was a child, after all, who pointed at the Emperor and announced loudly that he was wearing no clothes.

When I'm wandering around art galleries – something we travelling singers do a lot – there's a thing I try to make myself do: I make a point of spending more time looking at pictures by less famous painters than the ones everyone knows about.

For one thing, it's a good way of avoiding people who treat pictures like celebrities and pose for selfies with them – don't get me started on those people – and it also means I can avoid paintings by Renoir. I can't get on with Renoir. Selfie-takers can happily stand in front of the Renoirs with all the selfie-

sticks in China for all I care.

Art, like opera, falls victim to a celebrity culture. For people who sell paintings, and operas, this is good news. But certainly in the world of opera, it often means that there are a relatively few big name operas – The Top Twenty, they get called in the States – that get performed an awful lot, and a whole bunch of good operas that don't get seen nearly enough.

Of course, that's not going to change any time soon – but just because an opera isn't famous, it doesn't mean it's not worth hearing. Indeed, if I had my way, some of The Top Twenty would be stuck in a cupboard and rested for a while. If I never saw another La traviata or Carmen, I could die happy. The Barber of Seville too.
Some opera companies go to enormous lengths to avoid popular operas, eschewing them altogether in favour of more obscure works. The Wexford Festival is a case in point. The theatre and film director Nicholas Hytner told me of a conversation he had with a Wexford patron many years ago. The patron asked the director what he had coming up:

'Oh, I'm going to be doing a new production soon of The Magic Flute at ENO.'

'The Magic Flute? Hmmm. Oh yes, Mozart! The same chap who wrote La Finta Giardiniera!'

Glyndebourne is doing Donizetti's Poliuto at the moment, and though I don't know it and am not a particular fan of Donizetti, I'm far more drawn to see it than I would be if they were doing his more famous Lucia di Lammermoor. There are loads of Donizetti operas that rarely see the light of day – he did write about 70 of the things – and I've always wanted to see Emilia di Liverpool, especially because I was always told it has a chorus of mountaineers who spend their days scaling the rugged, alpine landscape around Liverpool.

I've done my fair share of obscure operas. Grétry's Le Huron and Cimarosa's L’ltaliana in Londra saw the light of day at the Buxton Festival, Salieri's La Grotta di Trofonio in Batignano, Italy. They were good fun – some very interesting music and entertaining shows. Arthur Bliss's The Olympians (which originally premiered at Covent Garden) for the Chelsea Opera Group had its moments, but that wasn't staged. I'm not sure it ever will be, in my lifetime at least, and I'm not going to lose any sleep about it.

I also sang some operas which were obscure when we did them, but which are less so now. Verdi's Stiffelio – for which there was no printed score available at the time – has since enjoyed many outings. Not many people knew Handel's Ariodante when we did it in Buxton in 1986, and I remember thinking it should be as commonplace as Così fan tutte. Even my very first opera, Monterverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, had few devotees back in 1978, which seems extraordinary now. (But, then again, singing the same opera in Los Angeles almost 30 years later, it was as novel to Californians as a tub of Marmite.)

To return to the art gallery analogy, I read recently that until Kenneth Clark championed Piero della Francesca in the 1950s, the great Renaissance painter was almost unknown. And look at him now.
So, please, don't think: 'If I haven't heard of it it, it can't be any good.' Take yourself, say, to Opera Holland Park, and see Montemezzi's L’amore dei tre re, an opera I know nothing about apart from the fact it sounds absolutely fantastic. I bet you'll have a good time.

And who knows, you may be able to say to yourself: 'I was there when they rediscovered a masterpiece!'

A few years ago, l was queueing for a flight home from lsrael's Ben Gurion airport when l was pulled to one side for a security check. Rummaging through my bag, a security officer found my score of Bach's St Matthew Passion, which l was about to perform back home in England.

'How can you read this?' he asked aggressively, flicking through the pages. 

'Sorry?' l whimpered, while it dawned on me that St Matthew didn't exactly do the Jews many favours in his telling of the Easter story.

'This... THlS! What is it? How do you read it?'

Ah. l realised that to him, presumably a non-reader of music, my score looked like a load of gibberish, as legible as the Rosetta Stone. Worryingly, to him it probably looked like dodgy code.

'Um, well, this thing here is called a stave and this is a treble clef...' l was just beginning to picture myself spending a week or so in a sweaty, darkened room when a superior chimed in and l was allowed to board my flight.

Now, this is a problem that probably would never have faced Pavarotti, for three reasons:

1. He was Pavarotti and universally recognisable, not some poxy tenor from England.

2. The St Matthew Passion was hardly his bag.

3. A score was probably as intelligible to him as it was to the security guard because, by most accounts, he was very poor at reading music.

Years ago, this bothered me. Well, to be honest, it didn't bother me so much as make me feel unbearably smug. How could you possibly call yourself a musician and not be able to read music? And indeed a certain odour of prejudice still hangs around when it comes to the definition of Musician, especially against singers.

l don't know if this is true – it certainly has the ring of truth – but l was told that the Musicians Union once debated whether it would be acceptable to let singers join the union (singers tend to be represented by Equity) but the prevailing opinion was that in order to qualify, singers would first have to undergo a sight- reading test to prove their musicianship. (Meanwhile, a trumpeter friend of mine managed to enroll his cat in the MU, just because he could.)

l was well-schooled in sight-reading. When l was at Cambridge in the King's College Choir, an inability to learn a lot of music very rapidly would have seriously hindered the whole ensemble. Later, as a young soloist with a lot of new repertoire to perform, good sight-reading was very useful; the downside being that l could turn up and perform a piece without spending as much time practising it as l probably should.

But that was in the realm of concert work, where you use a score. Opera is a very different beast and singing from memory is an altogether different skill. And the very suggestion that Pavarotti was not a musical singer is patently absurd. l also think he was a rather lovely actor, certainly with his voice – you just wouldn't want him in your choir when something tricky like Herbert Howell's Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing is on the service sheet, with only ten minutes in which to rehearse it.

Now that Glyndebourne is up and running again and the various summer festivals are beginning to kick off, I thought it might be a good time to educate the opera newbie as to what to expect at the most important part of the evening.

No, I don't mean the picnic. I mean the curtain calls.

Curtain calls don't always bring out the best in opera singers, and this applies even before there's an audience in the auditorium to applaud

them. Indeed, some singers will go to astonishing lengths to ensure they take their call higher up the pecking order than the size of their role may suggest – I've seen many an indignant baritone whispering furiously into the ear of the director that they are NOT taking their call before the comedy tenor.

Personally, I have never understood this. Taking a bow later isn't going to improve an audience's opinion of your performance, so just shut up and go where you're told.

There are times, though, that I wish I'd cultivated the standard opera bows that are so beloved of some of my exalted colleagues.

My favourite would be The Exhausted Soprano. The stock-in-trade for Cio-Cio Sans and Violettas, The Exhausted Soprano comes out for her call after a noticeable and deliberate delay and drags herself slowly onto the stage as if it's all too much (clutching the curtain if she possibly can). When the audience erupts, she gives them a look of utter surprise as if to say 'What – moi?' – before sinking into a curtsey so deep you wonder if she will ever get up.

The Pants Role is the call employed by the perky mezzo who, curiously, is much livelier than The Exhausted Soprano, despite having been on stage a lot longer. She skips on stage like a puppy who has just drunk three Red Bulls and blows kisses at the orchestra, even though half of them have already left.

The Jolly Baritone looks like he's about to invite everyone to the pub. He may even applaud the audience.

The Famous Bass enters with the air of someone who believes that applause is beneath him. He knows he's good, thank you very much, and doesn't so much bow as slightly tilt his head, all the while fixing the audience with a look of mild contempt.

Then there's The Football Tenor. He comes bounding on as if he's just scored the winning goal, blows kisses to everyone in the crowd, holds his arms out in supplication to his own talent and probably puts a hand on his heart for good measure. He loves everybody (except The Exhausted Soprano, whom he loathes with a passion).

Franco Bonisolli, as barmy as a bag of bees, was a fan of The Football Tenor. The only time I sang with him, he insisted that we kept going out to bow over and over again, long after half the audience had left, while those remaining studied their watches and clapped out of politeness. 'It is our food!' he exclaimed as he dragged us on yet again.

But the only food I was interested in was the sandwich I would eventually get to eat on the train home.

Last year I went to see some friends star in HMS Pinafore in Bath's Theatre Royal. After the show we were all sipping pints in The Garrick's Head next door when a well-dressed couple in their early 30s approached my friends and praised their performances. They'd loved it, especially as they had 'never seen any Gilbert and Sullivan before.'

Never seen any G&S? How is this possible? When I was their age, everyone I knew had been in a G&S operetta, not just seen one. G&S was a fundamental part of growing up, like conkers and acne. At my all-boys school I played, in annual succession, a Sister/Cousin/Aunt in HMS Pinafore, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado and the Judge in Trial By Jury. At university it was Pinafore again, but this time I got to do Ralph Rackstraw and there were actual girls in the cast, which was a major bonus.

So, have Britain's most successful ever musical-theatricals slipped off their perch? Are they too fogeyish for the 21st century? Possibly. But it's worth pondering that no other librettist-composer partnership in history has ever been recognised solely by their initials, with a brand name no less: 'G&S'.

Apparently very few schools do G&S any more, and a quick email survey around the many university G&S societies revealed that the vast majority of students who join have had no previous experience of G&S at all. When schools perform music-theatre these days they do musicals, and a child with a penchant for the theatre will more likely pick up a microphone and belt out Lloyd Webber than pull on tights and sing some Sullivan. If children do know any G&S, it's more likely to be as a consequence of watching The Simpsons, or Family Guy (or, for grown-ups it could be Star Trek or The West Wing ). (There are clips on YouTube.)

I'm sure ENO is hoping Mike Leigh's new production of Pirates of Penzance will have a similar pull to that of The Mikado, which has been drawing full houses and making ENO a sizeable amount of money for nearly thirty years. The Mikado (returning yet again in November) has managed to find an identity of its own – so much so that many serious G&S fans have no time for it. (Its director Jonathan Miller's candid dismissal of G&S as 'boring, self-satisfied English drivel... UKIP set to music' probably hasn't helped). 

The fact is, there are no professional singers who can make a living any more doing just G&S. Not even my old friend Richard Suart (ENO's stalwart Ko-Ko), who told me: ‘In the old days, if you were a G&S singer, you did nothing but. We can't do that. I don't do that. I'm associated with G&S, but it's quite different from doing Birtwistle's Punch & Judy, which I also do. In 1988 I did the first performances of Turnage's Greek during the middle of a D'Oyly Carte tour of lolanthe. I sense that this is a black mark in certain G&S quarters.'

Meanwhile, hardcore G&S devotees continue to congregate every year in Harrogate at the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival , and its professional touring company – geared to the traditions of the old D'Oyly Carte Opera Company – hits the road this autumn.

I hope G&S can slough off its fusty image and survive the struggle for a happy place in the national conscience. It's far too good not to. With any luck, there'll come a generation of new directors and conductors who haven't had the off-putting experience of sitting through a terrible amateur production or a crusty professional one, and they'll breathe new life into it.

As Richard Suart says: ‘G&S is in intensive care, but it isn't dead.'

The polls are in, and key voter issues in the run-up to the 2015 UK general election include music education, air support for cellists, and highlighter pens. In a candid open letter to politicians of all parties, tenor Christopher Gillett explains just what it will take to secure his vote.

Dear politicians,

In order that you might address my demands more effectively, I have assembled them in list form.

• Don't promise a ton of money for the arts unless you can guarantee that

  1. 1. you will cough up the dosh, and

     2. you won't pour the money into consultancy and feasibility studies.

Musicians want to work, to play music. They're not interested in forging the ongoing development of socially-prescribed cultural and heritage infrastructure in the creative industries, nor do they have a clue what that sort of guff means. Stick on lots of concerts and operas and make the tickets cheap. Simple as that. You'll get your money back in VAT.

• For God's sake, just bring back proper music education in schools and stop worrying that you'll end up with a nation of artsy layabouts with no clue about science or how to fix a computer.

How many more studies will it take to prove to you that music education is simply brilliant for kids? That kids who learn a musical instrument are not only better-disciplined and more academically focused, but turn out to be more analytical and even better at maths, sciences and languages?

Are you really worried that having a population that has benefited from proper music education will lead to a nation that only wants to drop out and play in a band? And so what if they did? What else are they going to do – work in a call centre? Become politicians? I've yet to meet the piano-playing nuclear physicist (of whom there must be many) who thought of his music education: 'Ah, what wasted years, learning how to play Bach as a child! If only I'd spent all that time on the computer instead!'

Yes, middle-class kids will have their violin lessons no matter what the government provides. Just extend the same opportunity to the less fortunate. If you want a more equal society, universal music education is the way to get it done. I promise. And if you don't want a more equal society, I'm not interested.

• Simplify tax codes.

Every year I tot up my income and what I spent in earning it – travel, agents, hotels, paper clips, tonsorial care etc etc. – and it takes me days. And every year is exactly the same: my expenses come in at one third of my income. So, I tell you what, let me simply tot up what I earn – it won't take long – and let me pay tax on two thirds of that. Simpler for you, simpler for me.

• We need some sort of law defining what is and what most definitely ISN'T classical music.

While you're about it, you could make it illegal to call someone who has never sung an opera an 'opera singer'. Believe me, that one would be a real vote-winner. Oh, and no Puccini to be sung by anyone under the age of 21.

• Just make the airlines let musicians carry on their instruments, will you?!

At the same time, you might want to introduce compulsory check-in counters at airports that are solely dedicated to cellists. Anyone who has queued behind a cellist will know this is a good idea.

• UKIP: you might have a snowball's chance if your policies will keep out André Rieu and Andrea Bocelli.

Make that promise and we can talk. Oh and chuck in Lang Lang for good measure. Just saying.

• A cap on conductors' fees of £3,000.

Or less. I'm happy for it to be less. Anything over the cap, they have to divvy out to the players and singers.

• Something really needs to be done about viola players.

Failing that, about viola jokes.

• Free counselling for anyone married to a high soprano.

I don't need to spell out what that must be like.

• End VAT on highlighter pens.

Sincerely,

Christopher J Gillett

Tenor, Writer, Snot-nosed Limey Opera Fop

When Luca Salsi got the call that he was needed at the Met prontissimo to replace Plácido Domingo in the matinee of Ernani, he was pottering along Broadway. Given he was already due to sing in Lucia di Lammermoor that night, I imagine he'd just had a late breakfast and his plan for the day included no more than a stroll, some coffee, lunch, a nap, a few episodes of House of Cards on Netflix... the usual rhythm of a singer's performance day.

It's not clear if Salsi was the designated cover. It doesn't sound like it, or else he should already have been on standby, given that Domingo had a cold.

Whatever the circumstances, I hope he didn't have to hear a massive groan from the 4,000-strong audience when the announcement was made that Domingo was ill and wouldn't be singing, as so often happens when the star goes down. It's not exactly confidence-inspiring to witness the full force of an audience's collective disappointment just a few minutes before you step out and perform to them, especially as Domingo was standing in the wings at the time. (And why wasn't Domingo tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle and a Lemsip? Perhaps he felt the need to demonstrate he wasn't pulling a sickie.)

The last-minute call to arms is a regular feature of opera life, and every singer has their tale of being unexpectedly thrust into the limelight. Mine pre-dates the mobile phone. 

I was on tour in Plymouth with the late-lamented Kent Opera, singing Gaston and covering Alfredo in La Traviata on two nights of the week while singing Arnalta in The Coronation of Poppea on two other nights, both conducted by Ivan Fischer.

I booked a cottage on Dartmoor for the week and on the day of the first La Traviata, with nothing more strenuous than the small role of Gaston in prospect, I went for a long walk with the dog on the moor, stopping for a large lunch and pint in a remote pub. Verdi was a long way from my mind, as was my contractual obligation to find a pay-phone and ring the company manager by midday to say I was in the area and fine for tonight's Gaston. Eventually, at about four o'clock, I got back to the digs, found a phone and rang the company manager.

Before I could even murmur the words 'Oops' and 'Sorry', Jamie, the company manager, hailed me with 'WHERE THE &#*% ARE YOU?! I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND YOU ALL DAY, YOU PILLOCK! YOU'RE ON AS ALFREDO!'

My wife Lucy Schaufer's tale is even more colourful. She was covering Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, her very first job at the Met. Having been told that the ever-reliable mezzo doing the role was is in good health, Lucy decided she'd do what any self-respecting New Yorker might do with an empty day on their hands: she gave colonic irrigation a whirl. Fully irrigated, and just as she was paying for her treatment, Lucy's mobile rang. 'Hi, honey,' the company manager said, 'how would you like to make your Met debut and sing Suzuki tonight?' 

Now if it had been me – not that I'd be within a country mile of anyone offering to irrigate my colon – my first thought would be: 'Thank God I had that procedure BEFORE I got the call.'

But then Lucy has a calmer head than I. And a cleaner colon.

I've been trying to imagine what it would take to get me to be an understudy again. Some unusual contractual obligations and the words China, in, tea, the and all, I think. This is not because I'm far too grand to understudy, but because understudying can be so boring, frustrating and humiliating that I simply don't want to do it any more.

Actually, singers don't call it understudying. We call it covering.

Any singers reading this can skip the next bit. They all know how it goes because, bar a very select few, they will have covered at some point in their career. I've done my fair share, covering about 20 roles and 'going on' in five of them.

Not every opera house employs covers but those that do stump up a small fee for the cover to attend, say, the last two weeks of rehearsals, and an equally modest fee to be available on the performance dates. If they're lucky, the covers may get a few rehearsals with an assistant director in a space the size of a spare bedroom.

Sometimes though – at Glyndebourne for instance – the covers are meticulously rehearsed and prepared. The crucial factor at Glyndebourne is that if the lead singer is ill the cover will certainly get to go on, whereas at houses like the Met and the Royal Opera, the covers for leading roles very rarely go on. The management are more likely to see if any big names are within reach instead, much to the chagrin of the talented local who they've paid not to be singing somewhere else that night.

Covering at the Met, where they pay singers thousands of dollars every night simply to sit in the canteen and be on standby, can be very lucrative, if unsatisfying work. Some people even make a handsome living out of it, though they run the risk of becoming as gloomy as the subterranean canteen itself.

Perhaps the hardest bit about covering is that you have to know your role much better than the person you're covering, simply because they've had the luxury of several weeks of rehearsal in which to get it wrong and correct their mistakes

Of course, the knowing-it-better thing is rarely the case, and I've found myself 'going on' with the terrifying sensation of being unsure as to what exactly comes next, and all in front of a couple of thousand punters.

In Berio's toe-tapping Un re in ascolto at the Royal Opera House, I went on for the last night, a good three weeks after I'd last seen a rehearsal. My big moment came in a fiendishly difficult ensemble, the stage crowded with singers, after a gap of 24 utterly unintelligible bars. The only solution was to count them out like a fiend. So, I counted away under my breath, meanwhile climbing a ladder then descending it again for reasons I can't remember.

It all seemed to be going pretty well until I got downstage at the end of bar 23 and drew breath, expecting to catch the conductor's downbeat. He was on the third beat of a four bar when I thought he should really be on the first. Damn. I had miscounted and had no idea where I was. Oh well, in for a penny... I wailed my line, 'Calma! Calma!' – how ironic is that? – as confidently and loudly as I could.

It wasn't a total disaster, but whenever I think of it I imagine a tyre bursting on a big lorry, a juddering of brakes, the squeal of tortured rubber, freight flying across a crowded motorway... that sort of thing.
In Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, also at Covent Garden many years ago, I was cast as one of the masters, Moser. We spent a long time rehearsing the very difficult riot scene in which all hell breaks loose and the masters fight with each other. For one performance, a cover was on for the master with whom I was supposed to be exchanging blows. The cover knew where to stand (downstage left, just below the Royal Box) but he clearly didn't know when to sing. So while I hurled abuse at him, his sole response was to silently hop about a bit and look vaguely cross. Come the end of the scene, he hadn't sung a single note. But, to give him his due, he seemed remarkably un-bothered. I guess he was just grateful to have gone on at all.

Whether using a live orchestra six thousand miles away, or doing it completely by digital means, film soundtrack composers are bringing new meaning to the term virtual reality. Christopher Gillett reports on an industry struggling to balance Hollywood's competing concerns.

'I want a hundred-voice Russian choir and a full orchestra!'

'Fine,' says Joel Douek. 'Get me $500 per player, and we can talk.'

Music for a film is always the last piece of the creative puzzle, and even though the budget may have run dry, it's not unusual for the director to say he wants a big score. But orchestras are expensive, and in union towns like LA, players are entitled to a cut of the post-cinema profits on top of their session fees – a cost that dissuades many producers from recording there.

Douek is a film composer – one of hundreds living in Los Angeles. He's not a household name, perhaps, but he does have many big projects to his credit. In recent years he has scored mystery film The Tall Man and David Attenborough's IMAX documentary Galapagos 3D. While we look at the view of LA from his house in the Hollywood Hills, Douek explains the film music business to me.
It's facing a crisis. An increasing number of scores are being recorded in Eastern Europe because of cheaper prices, and in London, where ‘buy-outs' are now also possible. Depending on what the producer can afford, Douek will offer three options: a full orchestral score, a fully digital score that sounds very much like an orchestra, or a hybrid of the two – a digital orchestra with some real solo instruments added on top.

Whether he's composing for a digital or live orchestra, Douek writes on a computer, synchronising his composition with the movie as it plays on a large screen above his desk. For a live orchestra recording, parts are arranged and wired to, say, Prague. Before dawn on recording day, Douek and his team assemble in his Hollywood Hills studio.
Meanwhile, the Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra is sitting in a studio six thousand miles away. Using an internet hook-up, Douek runs the session as if he too were in Prague, but rather than seeing the band through the glass of a sound booth, he watches them on a large television monitor while the takes are uploaded to hard drives in Hollywood. When all the editing is finished, Douek hands everything over to the film's producer and the job is done.

In much the same way that CGI has replaced special effects and scenery in film, digital orchestras have become difficult to distinguish from the real thing. A lot of television 'orchestras' are now digital. Douek uses a library of samples made by players in Vienna and they sound extraordinary: you can hear the rosin on the strings and the breath flowing through a bassoon. It's then odd to think that the players laying down these samples must surely realise they're creating something that will eventually take away work from other musicians.

Peter Kent, a violinist who has had a steady job leading The Simpsons orchestra for over ten years, is one of only two hundred or so LA players who can still make a living entirely from session work. In LA, The Simpsons and Family Guy – which both use full orchestral scores – are prized gigs. Kent reckons that job opportunities have dropped by two thirds over the last few years. 'The loss of our work to Europe pales in comparison to what synthesised and sampled music has done to us. And because the business in LA has been dragged down so much, the competitive nature has made it less enjoyable than it used to be,' he says.

For a hybrid score, Joel Douek will call on the very best players to add some live colour to an otherwise digital score. His go-to flautist is David Weiss in New York. By night Weiss plays on Broadway in The Lion King – a job he's held since the show opened in 1997 – and by day he can be found in studios all over Manhattan, recording film scores and adverts (like the Coca Cola one below), playing a staggering array of exotic wind instruments. He has even turned one room of his rented Brooklyn apartment into a small studio where he can play, engineer and produce solo tracks that Douek and other composers send him. These are then emailed back to LA and mixed in as needed. Some players will even send in tracks recorded in a hotel room with just a laptop and a microphone while they are out on tour.

Both Weiss and Peter Kent know well the skill required to do this work. Weiss says: '98 per cent of it is sight-read so we have to be outstanding at that. Most of the people we get in a session are from the New York Philharmonic and the Met – you're not going to find better sight-readers than that. I have to do sight- transposition for a lot of my instruments too, and many of them are fairly primitive; they don't play in a chromatic system, and a lot of times I have to improvise.

'For The Alamo (2005) I had a really big solo all through the title credits. It colours the movie. The old John Wayne version was a big part of my childhood, and here I was working on a $100 million motion picture. That's a big deal!'

Violinist Peter Kent adds: 'Some of the music does get fairly complex, but your fingers and technique are usually not stretched on recording sessions. Though, I had a solo on the end credits of an episode a few years ago, based on The Simpsons theme, which was devilishly difficult – it had some fast runs in it – and I've been told they just did another one with Yo-Yo Ma doing almost exactly what I did!”

Utter incredulity was the reaction of the day when a YouTube video showed Stéphane Lissner, artistic director of the Paris Opera, unable to identify some of the most popular operas in the repertoire – Carmen and Madama Butterfly included.

But was the reaction of those who had viewed it truly incredulity – or was it, perhaps, resignation? I'm sure there are plenty more opera bosses who would have been equally stumped. I know I would have been too, had the questioner strayed into certain corners of the canon.

I think the surprising thing is that we expect the people who lead opera companies to have a background in opera, when experience should surely have taught us by now that this is rarely the case.

Sure, some of them will have worked in opera houses for quite a while, learning the ropes on their way up the greasy pole. But I bet I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of opera directors who are musicians in any shape or form. I've certainly met very few who can actually read a score.

Perhaps that isn't an absolute necessity. But then again, I wouldn't dream of applying to captain a cricket team because, the last time I checked, I had absolutely no cricketing skills whatsoever beyond shouting ‘Oh, well played!' from time to time.

It would be reassuring to know that the people who hire and fire you have at least some basic skills in your area of work, rather than garnering everything they know from CD booklets and PR handouts.

I've had first-hand experience of this. A casting director, now an intendant, had doubts that I might be suitable for a modern piece because he'd been told it was written for a Rossini tenor. I suggested we have a look at the score together – which was like reading Tolstoy with a toddler – and, surprise surprise, it revealed that the role was about as Rossinian as a bag of tadpoles.

Off the top of my head, I can count among prominent opera artistic leaders: a few stage directors, a lawyer, some PR managers, a couple of accountants, some TV executives, an ex-clarinettist, several ex- administrators and a record executive. There's one working singer, two ex-singers and a conductor.

That's all.

And I don't expect this to change any time soon, if ever. I'm sure someone can come up with myriad reasons why artistic policy is in the hands of so many non-artists. I'm not even trying to say that opera houses shouldn’t be run by people who are good at accountancy, wearing suits and staying in good hotels on expenses.

But before anybody insists it has to be this way, I would point out that, by contrast, straight theatres are almost exclusively run by practitioners of the art form: actors and directors.

So there.

Most musicians I know are wary of political promises about The Arts, especially with a general election around the corner. We're in the classical music business after all, about as politically sexy as train-spotters. Who can remember the last time a political candidate said "I love classical music so vote for me to keep Brahms in safe hands!"? No, it will be The Arctic Monkeys, or whomever their advisers think is politically expedient. Classical musicians are used to being ignored, accustomed to being the bride who is forever jilted at the altar of political necessity.
So, I’m rather surprised that George Osborne and Boris Johnson have thrown their weight behind Simon Rattle’s new concert hall. Oh, okay, Osborne is supposedly a Wagner fan but he tends to keep that under his hat, knowing it sounds as politically appealing as supporting Bayern Munich in the Champions League. And by the way, that’s probably the first and last time you’ll ever hear a football reference from me.

As a performer I’m a bit baffled by this call for a new hall, as are a lot of singers I’ve spoken to. I’m also not sure I'm the best qualified to voice my opinion on the acoustic qualities of the halls I work in because my personal happiness is not actually the point of the whole performing venture. It’s the audience’s that counts. Of course I like singing in a lovely acoustic. Given the means (and a very big van) I’d transport Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and its lovely, generous acoustics to every corner of the earth. But I’m not the one who is paying to listen to the concerts. 

Frankly, I’m not a diligent concert-goer, and if audience numbers are falling, I don’t honestly believe it’s because there has been a growing dissatisfaction with acoustics. Perhaps a spiffy new venue for the digital age could fix that. I honestly don’t know and I honestly don’t feel that strongly about it. At the moment it all sounds so fanciful, and I suspect that by next week George Osborne and Boris Johnson will be throwing their weight behind something else. Something related to sport probably.

If my opinion about acoustics really did matter then surely there’d be nothing to stop me pointing out before, say, a performance at the Royal Opera that any shortcoming in my tone quality could only be the fault of the rather tricky acoustic (which can feel at times like singing into a sock) because, frankly, in the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires or in the shower I sound shit hot. Well, to my ears at least. Ah, if only.

But because you might just be curious, here’s what I think of London’s current crop of halls: 

For a singer, the Barbican feels quite friendly, but I do know that the sound tends to drop off, to die in the auditorium. It feels better than it sounds.
The first time I sang in The Royal Festival Hall my heart sank, it felt so dry, but in the scheme of things it’s actually pretty good. It’s easy to hear what’s happening in the orchestra when you’re on the stage, which, ironically, isn’t always the case in the lovely Concertgebouw. There’s something lean about the sound in the RFH that is married to the time it was built. It’s like a vinyl record as opposed to a CD.

As for the other London halls, the QEH is great to sing in, as is St John’s Smith Square, the Cadogan less so, and the Wigmore is a marvel, almost so saucy it’s slutty. I’ve never sung in the Purcell Room or in King’s Place and almost certainly never will. 

Oh and the Royal Albert Hall is mildly ludicrous. You just have to go for it and hope for the best.

My, what a lot of halls. The nearest symphonic hall to where I live in north-west Wiltshire is the Colston Hall in Bristol and it’s just shy of awful.

Anyway, good luck to Sir Simon. I’m not going to stand in his way. He is, after all, a rather important arts leader and my opinion counts for nothing. I hope he gets his hall if it will secure his return to Britain. If he doesn’t, I hope he’ll come anyway. London will, I suspect, be more impoverished by his absence than by the lack of another concert hall.

Los Angeles is a soulless concrete jungle – a place where art goes to die. Right? Not at all, says temporary LA resident Christopher Gillett, who is discovering the rich classical music history buried beneath the city's burger joints and strip malls.

It's easy to write off Los Angeles as a town with no depth, a place where you're only as good as your last hit: a fashion-conscious city where they devote more energy brewing ridiculously-priced 'single estate' coffee than to tuning their ear to real art. Heck, I knock it all the time. But Los Angeles holds many surprises for the classical music lover. I'd even go so far as to say that, with a little searching and a car, it can almost rival Vienna for connections to music's past.

The last time I was in Vienna I went to see the house in Heiligenstadt where Beethoven wrote the famous Testament, the long letter to his family in which he bemoaned his increasing deafness. The house is something of a hallowed spot. I paid the entrance fee, walked through the door and spotted a sign which announced that historians were now certain that Beethoven had never set foot in the place. The house where he lived was probably somewhere else but this one would be a lot like the one in which he had lived. Wherever that was. Oh.

At least in LA you can be certain about these things. The problem is that they do have a tendency to knock buildings down. The Garden of Allah used to be a rather exotic and naughty hotel on Sunset Boulevard at the foot of the Hollywood hills. It's now a strip mall. In the late 1920s Harpo Marx checked into one of its many cabins.

'My little bungalow in the Garden of Allah was a peaceful retreat. It was the best place to practise I ever had – until a piano player moved into a bungalow across from mine and shattered the peace. I was looking forward to a solid weekend of practice, without interruptions, when my new neighbour started to

bang away. It only got more overpowering. This character was warming up for a solid weekend of practice too. I went to the office to register a complaint. One of us had to go, I said, and it wasn't going to be me because I was there first. But the management didn't see it my way. The new guest, whose playing was driving me nuts, was Sergei Rachmaninov.' 

Rachmaninov bought a house on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills, where he used to play duets with his old chum Vladimir Horowitz . His funeral in 1943 was held in the Russian Orthodox church just a few yards from where I'm writing this in Silver Lake, and where he was a regular celebrant. We've been living in this house for over a month and I had no idea until a couple of days ago.

Stravinsky lived longer at the foot of the Hollywood hills than he ever did in Russia. I took a picture of his house yesterday but I didn't linger for a good look, deterred by signs warning of armed security patrols. Igor often used to hang out with fellow émigrés Aldous Huxley and WH Auden at the Farmers' Market in West Hollywood, still a popular place to eat and shop.

If you walk through Hollywood you can buy maps claiming to show you 'The Homes of The Stars'. I was starting to think that someone should do the same for classical musicians when I stumbled upon a directory of classical Hollywood, from a concert series held by the LA Philharmonic in 2001. Such names! George Gerswhin, Alma Mahler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Brecht, Mann... I haven't yet been able to discover where Erich Korngold lived, but I'll keep working on that.

I'm very proud that I once had lunch in Schoenberg 's house in Brentwood, with nearly all of his children. We had Wiener Schnitzel and Sachertorte, expertly cooked by his daughter-in-law Barbara (daughter of the composer Eric Zeisl), around the same table where the great serialist used to eat his breakfast cereal. His music may seem difficult and obscure, but his family is warm and jovial – as was the great man himself, I'm told, who loved nothing more than a game of tennis in the California sunshine.
And as if to demonstrate how well the Schoenberg family assimilated with their Hollywood neighbours, Arnold's grandson Randy is now the subject of a movie, Woman in Gold, which tells the story of how he fought the Austrian government on behalf of the holocaust survivor Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) for the return of her family's painting, Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. It seems unlikely that Hollywood will ever make a film about his grandfather – surely one of its most important and culturally influential residents – but it's good to see the family name in lights. That's show business for you.

For a nation built on independence and social equality, America can be pretty obsessed with rank and hierarchy. Why else would they address even ordinary conductors as 'Maestro'? Briefly stationed in LA, Chris Gillett ponders on the difference in musical customs between the US and the UK.

'Hi guys, my name is Nasturtium and I'll be your server for this evening. What can I get ya?'

'Um, I'll have a cheeseburger please.'
'Awesome!'

I'm in America again – in Los Angeles, where people wear hats while they dine in fine restaurants and other people just put up with it. Where you never get to wear the just-in-case jacket and tie you packed for your trip. Where a plaid shirt counts as formal wear.

I love it. I also love that the waste disposal unit is called an 'Insinkerator'. I love it that in any supermarket, a fine shower of water sprays onto the fresh salads every few minutes and that you are warned by a rumble of fake tropical thunder.

I don't love that you have to wash all dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. I don't understand how Americans are happy to carry on buying machines that don't do what they're supposed to. You might as well buy a car which only works if it's pulled by a horse.

Besides a national inability to pronounce croissant correctly, another thing I don't understand is why American opera singers (my wife among them) are obsessed with calling conductors Maestro.

Aside from the level of respect it implies for someone who most singers actually want to take outside and show the business end of a length of two-by-four, it's so resolutely formal and old-fashioned. It gives the impression that there's only one guy in the room who is the master of his craft, when my experience has often been that the conductor is the least prepared person in the room and thus the least qualified to tell anyone else how the opera should go.

Back in England I think the only conductor I've ever called Maestro was Carlos Kleiber – someone who, I think we can all agree, deserved the epithet. Haitink and Davis were both, as I recall, Bernard and Colin to all and sundry at Covent Garden. And believe me, I was definitely sundry.

Besides, in England, if you're my age, it's difficult to hear Maestro and not remember the Austin Maestro; notoriously unreliable and thus the most aptly-named car in history.

I'm not singing in Los Angeles – my wife is doing that – but I have sung here a few times. The first time was in 2006 in a L’lncoronazione di Poppea conducted by Harry Bicket. All around me, my American colleagues were Maestro-ing like mad. 'Maestro? But he's Harry!' I wanted to say. It seemed odd that in a country which prides itself on a lack of aristocracy, people are so eager to ennoble, to become serfs beneath the yoke of a feudal lord. Where's their spirit of revolution, of the New World? What happened to the ideal of respect being earned rather than expected?

It's not just in rehearsals that they drop the Maestro bomb. The opera company will throw it into every possible communication. 'There will be a notes session afterwards with Maestro Tonedeaf!' an email will say. 'Maestro No-Upbeat would like to invite the cast to dine at a restaurant and tell you all what you should eat!' That sort of thing.

Still, on the plus side, you get a level of service in American opera houses unrivalled anywhere else in the world. My dresser used to walk me to the wings then wait there with a bottle of water and slippers (I was barefoot in the show) before walking me back again after my scenes. It was lovely and made me feel rather special.

A note to the novice, though: at the end of the run your are expected to tip your dresser and whoever does your make-up for their service. The basic rate is $10 each per show, in cash, in an envelope. You never know, you may well get an 'Awesome!' in return.

Recently l was studying some French Baroque music. As l worked on it, it occurred to me that everything l know about Baroque style has been dictated by rather condescending ‘specialists' (usually conductors), or by hearing other singers do the same repertoire and imitating their style.

l've just taken their word that this is the way it is done, respected their authority and left it at that. And while l've never exactly been a darling of the authentic movement, l've done my share of Baroque music with expert players and conductors.

l'm of a generation that sang Handel and Bach just before authenticity became fashionable. ln fact, ‘authenticity' was often sneered at: the ‘sandals and oatmeal brigade'. Early attempts at playing on ‘original instruments' were often terrible. That's all changed of course – the players are now top-notch – but when it comes to singing style, l'm left with a nagging doubt.

l heard a new CD of Messiah the other day and it was very good: phrased with originality and very cleanly sung. lt reminded me somehow of a very chic Michelin-starred restaurant in a beautifully restored old building. While l could enjoy it, l didn't believe for a moment that this was how Handel had heard it. lt was as if Heston Blumenthal had reinvented a steak-and-kidney pudding by doing something fancy with liquid nitrogen.

The current taste is for very bright, cleanly-projected voices. That's terrific, but you only have to listen to a recording from the middle of the 20th century to hear how fashions have changed. Gone are the hooty contraltos and the quivery sopranos. Gone are the tenors and basses with rather strange vowels and lots of rolled Rs. Heck, you only have to hear singers from the 1950s to wonder how they would fare in today's business. Would Peter Pears get booked these days for a St Matthew Passion? Kathleen Ferrier? Wouldn't their voices be dismissed as ‘old- fashioned'?

Recently l saw a countertenor's performance described by a critic as ‘sung with Baroque perfection'. That's all very well, but how could the critic possibly know? Did he mean that his singing sounded entirely in keeping with what we like to hear from singers in that repertoire?

So, as l carry on practising my Baroque trills, l'm fully aware that l'm not really attempting to recreate something from the 17th century; l'm trying to conform to what everybody today thinks is the best way to sing old music in the early part of the 21st century. All l'm really doing is keeping up with the vocal Zeitgeist.

When you think about it, it's a very odd way to make music.

The news that the 81-year-old diva Montserrat Caballé has been handed a suspended jail sentence and a €240,000 fine for tax evasion doesn't come as any great surprise. I'm not saying she's particularly mendacious; I think she lived through a time when top-earning opera singers were offered many creative ways of keeping their earnings out of the taxman's gaze, and some naughty habits got out of control.

Pavarotti, too, got into hot water over his claim to be a Monte Carlo resident when he was actually tucking into his spaghetti in Modena. His trial exposed the well-oiled practice of handing out thick wodges of undeclared 'expenses' in brown envelopes. For generations of singers, particularly in Europe, cash was the only acceptable method of payment. You didn't sing the second half of the show until your fee was in your sweaty hand.

In Paris, I was once handed a large concert fee in crisp francs during the interval and had to hide it above a ceiling tile in my dressing room while I went on to sing the second half. Italy used to allow travellers to take only very small amounts of lire out of the country. This posed a problem for the professional singer. You couldn't trust the fixer to wire you your fee (I lost two fees that way); the only way you could take cash home was by hiding it in your socks. It's hardly surprising that some singers turned a bit dodgy.

Thanks to these high-profile trials, there has been a clamp-down on cash. In Italy, it is now against the law to pay cash at all, even for reimbursing travel expenses, which has made life harder still for the jobbing singer. Whereas you used to be able to get some of your fee in cash to pay for your digs and living expenses, now you simply can't. And as many landlords demand the rent in cash, you find yourself making countless visits to cashpoint machines, emptying your bank account back home to fund the job for which you are yet to be paid. The only plus side is that it stops you blowing your fee before you've earned it.

Rehearsing at Covent Garden during the 1980s, I can well remember the company manager showing up most days to hand a famous Italian diva a thick envelope containing a cash advance on her fee, which the soprano would rapidly empty in London's smartest boutiques. 'Bye-bye! I go shopping!' she would trill as the rehearsal ended.

Caballé, I'm told, used to miss rehearsals at Covent Garden because she 'had to go to the dentist', omitting to mention that her dentist was in Barcelona. She was also responsible for a much-used catchphrase that was popular at the Royal Opera at the time, 'I go back to Barcelona!', exclaimed in a Catalan accent when anyone was feeling exasperated or just a little bored. It had sprung from the time when she was to sing Violetta in the famous Visconti black and white production of La traviata.

Despite being told repeatedly that Violetta's monochrome costumes, designed with Aubrey Beardsley in mind, were key to the concept, Caballé said she was going to wear her own, brightly-coloured frocks.

When the management insisted on the black-and-white dresses, Caballé took a breath and responded with a coy smile: 'I go back to Barcelona!'

It's a phrase that I've uttered many times in my career but, sadly, only ever in jest.

It's that time of year when hacks of all shapes and sizes fill their columns with lists of highlights from the last 12 months – followed by must-see lists for next year, lists of who should win which prize at which awards ceremony in the New Year, then a list of what they're listening to at the gym, because everybody goes to the gym in January. I'm taking all this from a list I made of the lists.

So, as I'm a hack of all shapes and sizes, here's my list of ten things you didn't see or hear in 2014, because they never happened. More's the pity.

1. Sir Harrison Birtwistle 's Bam-wam-de-baby, uh-huh in a scorching performance by Myleene Klass (piano) and the London Sinfonietta under Oliver Knussen at the Classical Brit Awards.

2. Terry Gilliam's back-to-basics production of Così fan tutte at Glyndebourne – so telling in its simplicity.

3. Berg's violin concerto in a stark, eviscerating reading by André Rieu and his orchestra, in the Drill Hall.

4. Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic 's soaring account of Take That Goes Classical, in Italian, at the BBC Proms.

5. Schumann 's Frauenliebe-und-leben at the Wigmore Hall, performed by Katherine Jenkins with Lang Lang, her subtle and translucent accompanist.
   
   

6. English National Opera's production of Thomas Arne's bucolic treasure, Ye Olde English Rose, directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Texan countertenor Dwayne Wrodsjinski, Californian bass Marco DiMaggio, and Lydia Lascivia, the dramatic soprano from Boston.

7. Annie at the Royal Festival Hall, with Bryn Terfel and the winsome Nina Stemme .

8. Karl Jenkins's completion of Britten's barely-sketched opera Tyco the Vegan, performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on the site of its original conception, a car park in Orford.

9. Philip Glass's complex, intriguing new work, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, at the QEH.

10. Turandot at Welsh National Opera, with composer Gary Barlow's completion of Puccini 's score in place of the traditional Alfano version.

The music world is abuzz with speculation about star mezzo Joyce DiDonato's recent split from her longterm agents at Intermusica. Christopher Gillett, a veteran agent- swapper himself, asks what Askonas Holt have that her old agents don't...

The news that Joyce DiDonato has changed agents is hardly headline-grabbing stuff for anyone outside the music biz – although tongues have been wagging on the inside. She had been with her previous agent from the beginning, so why the sudden move to the massive corporate behemoth that is Askonas Holt? They have famously good Christmas parties. Perhaps it was that.

The once all-powerful agent Tom Graham once compared swapping agents to changing deckchairs on the Titanic. While DiDonato is hardly on a doomed

passage – far from it – I can only wonder what difference changing agents will make. Pin me down on it and I'd guess that Askonas Holt offers her a level of mass exposure that her previous agent could not.

Changing agents is a fraught business, almost exactly like the break-up of a romantic relationship or even divorce. ‘I feel it's time to move on, for both of us' – ‘It's just not working any more' – ‘It's not you, it's me'. In truth, the artist is actually thinking: ‘It's ALL you and nothing to do with me. I'm working my arse off – what are you doing? I'm outta here!' And the agent is thinking: ‘Fine, off you go. You were a pain in the backside and besides, there are plenty more fish in the sea.'

Agents are forbidden by their association rules from poaching artists. They can't offer an artist representation if they already have an agent; it's the artist who has to make the approach. That's not to say that agents don't make the signals obvious (flirting like ardent 15-year-olds at a school disco) but it's

the artist who has take the plunge, bringing with it all the feelings of guilt, shame and rationalisation of a sordid affair: ‘My agent doesn't understand me any more...'

I'm on my eighth agency, which makes me sound a bit of a scoundrel. In my defence, I moved with one agent to three different agencies, and three agents decided that agenting wasn't for them any more, leaving me in arranged marriages that didn't work out.

But good luck to Joyce in her new relationship. The champagne corks will certainly have been popping at Askonas Holt. Meanwhile at her old agency, Intermusica, it will be all empty boxes of tissues, getting up late and hanging around the house all day in pyjamas, sighing and eating Ben & Jerry's straight from the tub.

Metropolitan Opera boss Peter Gelb has written to principals asking them to give up seven per cent of their fees. Now Welsh National Opera asks singers to
part with five. It may not hurt the top stars, but what about the rest, asks Christopher Gillett.

When people hear that big opera stars are being asked voluntarily to drop their fees, I bet their reaction is similar to discovering that a banker has missed out on his bonus. 'Oh boohoo. Poor loves. One less Gucci handbag for them I guess.' And it's hard not to sneer just a little bit when we're talking about the likes of Domingo, Netrebko and Fleming , with their massive recording royalties, luxury goods endorsements and arena gig fees, as shining examples of selflessness.

Of course they accepted the cut. At that level it would be a marketing blunder not to.

Yes, they stand to lose perhaps $1,000 per performance, but in their general scheme of things that's pretty small fry. It's the sort of money any of them would drop on a meal for four, or on servicing a car (were it not that stars like these – as with top sportsmen – have their luxury cars provided and maintained for free). I'm not going to lose much sleep over those singers. What they've lost in revenue they've gained in publicity.

I'm more exercised by the effect this cut has on the hundreds of singers who aren't in that league. The 99.9 per cent. As I demonstrated a few months ago, most singers lead a far from lavish lifestyle, and it is these who are fretting over whether they should hand back a chunk of their wages. There's no PR gain for them. The Met can hardly advertise the names of all the singers who have generously accepted the cut without implicating any who decline.

The Met has said that the decision any singer makes will not have an impact on future casting decisions, which 'will all be made solely on the basis of our artistic judgement,' which I find a teeny bit disingenuous. Opera companies always cast with a budget in mind and singers operate within a market economy: a market – particularly New York, where the demise of the City Opera has halved the number of opera employers – in which supply far outstrips demand. Singers will now worry that, if it becomes a choice between Singer A who did take the fee cut and Singer B who didn't, Singer A will land the next gig. And if the Met really doesn't mind this time, you can bet that the next fee Singer B will be offered is lower than the one she's getting this season. At least seven per cent lower.

I expect most singers will swallow hard and take the cut, because most singers are nice people who worry about the future of their business. But it will be hard for them. How will the not-so-starry singer pay for the servicing of her car? The car she probably bought second-hand, in which she ferries the kids to school.

The Met is undoubtedly at the top of the fee tree and, by comparison, a five per cent cut in a Welsh National Opera fee will not be so keenly felt. The maximum anyone is likely to lose is £150 a show. Still, that's a chunk of anyone's personal budget. I've taken big cuts in fees in my time; it has become quite the trend these days for opera companies to plead poverty (even though I can't help noticing their bosses charging around the planet on generous expense accounts), but never after contract. Where the Met leads, other houses are bound to follow, so there could be some unwelcome letters hiding among the Christmas cards this year.

The last time I worked at La Scala they asked if I would mind paying the hefty airfare they were already contracted to pay. Given they didn't make this request to everyone in the cast, I was mightily annoyed and told them I would mind, very much. They paid it, but I haven't worked there since. I don't think those two facts are related but I'll never know for sure.

l was doing a new opera last year in Vienna. Barely had l crawled out of bed the morning after the premiere when my agent's assistant started emailing me with news of reviews. The reviews were in German, of course, and he wasn't sure if one of them was good or bad. lt turned out to be decidedly so-so.

l hadn't wanted to look at the reviews at all, but my agent's assistant, like an eager but untrained puppy, had done the equivalent of a poo on the sitting room carpet of my post-performance bliss. lt was going to be a while before l could get the stains out my inner shagpile.

There were also some good reviews, and these, of course, were put up on the agency's website for all to see. The bad one was supposedly forgotten.

Only it wasn't. Not by me at least. That's how it is with reviews – you only remember the bad ones.

So it must be very galling for Dejan Lazić, when he does the occasional online vanity search, to keep coming face-to-face with his own canine doo-doo. That's the trouble with Googling yourself: you will keep bumping into your own shortcomings – or rather, what other people think are your shortcomings.

My first suggestion to Dejan is that he stop the vanity searches, for that way lies depression. Though, having read the offending Washington Post review by Anne Midgette... well, if he thinks that's a bad one, he should take a look at some of the doozies l've had over the years. No, l'm not going to provide links.

Midgette has written a very personable and well-reasoned response to this media mountain-out-of-a-molehill that covers the legal implications of Lazić's request to have the 'bad' review taken down. She hits the nail on the head when she says: ‘l write for the audience, not for the artist, and l always encourage artists to do their best not to read reviews at all, since even the most kindly-meant write-up may contain a line or two that can lodge in the subject's brain and fester.'

Now that l'm looking at the flabby bulk of my career in the rear-view mirror, l can honestly say that no critic has ever said anything about me that wasn't fair. Painful, yes, but unfair, no. l hated some of the things that have been written about me, but then it's always hard to acknowledge one's own failings, let alone have them printed in a newspaper. l'm not the first person to point out that if you take notice of the good reviews you also have to hear the bad ones.

A big penny dropped for me recently when l realised that many performers think that good reviews come with some entitlement attached: 'l got good reviews, therefore l deserve better work.' That way lies madness. lt's much more complicated than that, and the sooner any performer can forget that little canard, the happier they will be – and the better they'll perform, too.

Here's a strange thing. Despite having sung in over 60 performances of Robert Carsen's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are whole chunks of it in which l have no idea what's going on. No, not the scenes l'm in (as Flute) – give me some credit, despite being a tenor and all that that implies.

No, there are scenes that l've simply never seen. The beginning of Act 3 for instance; l've always been pre-set behind the scenery with no view of the stage. l can hear what's going on, but when l hear the audience laugh l don't really know why.

Bottom's dream monologue? Never seen it – and as well as the Carsen production, l've done six others. lsn't that appalling? Especially when, with so many performances of it under my belt, some people might mistake me for an expert on the piece. Students, for instance.

This made me wonder how many other singers must be in the same boat. How many Don Giovannis have ever seen the duet between Donna Anna and Don Ottavio? l bet they've always been back in their dressing room popping on a new costume and tidying up their make-up.

And what about chorus singers? l was told the other day about a professional chorister who confessed he didn't know how half of the operas he has sung in actually end. There are vast swathes of the repertoire where the chorus disappears before the last act: La traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, Otello to name but a few.

By the time Violetta is wheezing her last breath your average chorister is long out of the stage door and half-way home on a train. For all he or she knows, back in the opera house the heroine has had a few spoonfuls of Benylin and is feeling as right as rain, the Almaviva household is being split asunder with divorce, and Otello and Desdemona are settling down for a good night's sleep with a lovely cup of cocoa.

Come to think of it, l rather like those endings.

There's a word you shouldn't utter in our house. It's ‘crossover'.

You shouldn't say it, not because it's nothing but wall-to-wall Wagner and Mahler where we live, but because it (the C-word) drives my wife in particular absolutely nuts. And that's not pretty. You don't want to be a part of that.

My wife, Lucy Schaufer, is not like me. She's unusual. She will sing anything, just as long as it's good. Classical, contemporary, musicals, James Taylor... It has to be good. She won't sing a Spice Girls number that has been translated into Italian (the standard trick for magically turning pop songs into ‘classics'). No, it has to be good.

This translating thing has surely gone too far. I saw the track list for a Katherine Jenkins album the other day, and every number that was originally foreign had been given entirely new English texts while all the English tracks had been bunged into Italian. It reminded me of a theory I once heard about the rise of ‘authentic' performance. The thinking went that we all have an innate taste for the new, and when contemporary music was at its most difficult (the 'squeaky gate' era), along came a way of hearing the familiar in an entirely new way, played on period instruments. Rather than listening to new music, we could now listen to new-but-old music. Our craving for the new could be satisfied and, boom, the authentic movement took off with a bang.

I'll grant you this might not be quite the same thing as hearing Katherine Jenkins reinventing a Dolly Parton number by warbling it in Italian, but you get my drift. At the risk of hearing crockery fly around the house, you might be tempted to call Jenkins a ‘crossover artist' – but in order to do that, she would have to cross from one genre to another. And she doesn't. She's not an opera singer, as she (I'm told) makes quite clear. And I've never seen her down to do a Handel Messiah, or a B minor Mass. So from what genre is she coming, and to which genre is she going when she does this 'crossing over'?

I tried it once. Sort of. I was in a close harmony sextet (along with Michael Chance and John Graham-Hall) that was cobbled together to appear on ex-prime minister Harold Wilson's chat show in about 1980. I sang the solo in ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' in my best ex-choral scholar croon. I was awful, mostly I think because I was a snob about it. Mind you, I wasn't as awful as Harold Wilson proved to be as a chat show host.

My wife Lucy, on the other hand, unburdened with snobbery, can move seamlessly from genre to genre without batting an eyelid and do it extremely well, as a career singing in both opera and music theatre will attest. As she says, ‘good music is good music and good singing is good singing'.

‘Crossover' has, in general, become a euphemism, a clue that what you will hear is neither good music nor good singing. Which is why you don't say it in our house.

I've been reading Stage Blood by Michael Blakemore, a compelling read for anyone interested in theatre and more particularly the National Theatre. Blakemore was brought in by Laurence Olivier as an Associate Director but he resigned in the Peter Hall years, unhappy with the way the NT was being run and unwilling to toe the party line. Anyone who isn't a fan of Peter Hall's will enjoy with particular relish the eye-popping observations that Blakemore makes about his boss.

Blakemore mentions something that I've been thinking about for a while: the difference between a Director and a Producer. Olivier thought about it too. Blakemore writes: ‘Films are directed but plays are produced, he [Olivier] would say,and he insisted on this old-fashioned usage on all National Theatre programmes and publicity. The indispensable components of an evening in the theatre were the play and the players who would bring it to life, and somewhere in the middle – sometimes useful, even brilliant, sometimes less so – there was this director/producer figure acting as a kind of mediator between these two indispensable components.'

When I was starting in the opera biz in the seventies, nearly all opera directors were known as producers. It was a distinction I found curious. In fact it seemed to be crucial to make the distinction between an opera producer and a theatre director, as if to get it wrong was a professional slur. Even Nicholas Hytner, back then, called himself an opera producer, his first port of call.

Not so today where the director is king/queen. And yet, if experience has taught me anything it has taught me that you cannot predict how much actual direction you will get. There are directors who most definitely are producers. They provide a setting for you to do your job, they tell you where to come on and go off, and the rest is up to you. And for this they need five weeks' rehearsal. Yet they pretend they are directors (usually when there's a photographer in the room). And there are directors who might more accurately be described as control freaks, who fiddle and tweak and manipulate and nag, and who would happily use six-inch nails to fix your performance to the story board that's playing in their head.

The best way you can guess which you'll be working with is to measure the size of the director's entourage. If it's huge – assistants, movement directors, choreographers, dramaturgs, translators etc etc – he's probably a producer. Woody Allen, when he ‘directed' Gianni Schicchi in Los Angeles reportedly had an entourage of about 15, and during the rehearsal period barely uttered a word. But the production was considered a success.

No, the ones you want to watch out for are the ones who work alone. The DIRECTORS. Especially if they're wearing a tool belt.

I guess that time has come, when the Facebook generation has not only had kids but they've grown up a little bit too, for last week my timeline was absolutely stuffed with photos of children going off to school for the very first time. And very sweet they were too.

It's a big day in a child's life, obviously, and in a parent's too. For the travelling singer-parent (most of my Facebook friends are singers and musicians) a child's first day at school is something they may not witness in the flesh — I know I didn't, twice — but even if they do, it's a day that marks a significant change in their family life. Now the kids are at school they are anchored to something. They're on a timetable. When they were babies or toddlers they could join you for lengthy visits abroad, the only downside being they would invariably bring along with them every cold virus known to man. Your other half could probably come too. You could live like a family.

Once school starts, that all goes out of the window. The majority of the family is stuck at home and the singer-parent spends a lot of time alone in foreign cities, on Skype or dashing home for the occasional weekend. On the plus side (about the only plus side) the singer-parent can return to his/her natural routine, which means spending half the day either in bed or watching lots of bad television. This — the dashing, the sleeping, the bad television — continues for the next thirteen years or so and there's precious little you can do about it.

Some certainly try. I've met singer-parents who home-school their sprogs, but for this to work there has to be another parent who will travel the globe being the teacher-parent. The singer-parent certainly won't have time, what with all the rehearsing and the performing (but no sleeping or bad television). It's not exactly ideal for the child, with no-one to play with but a couple of grown-ups, one of whom has a really weird job, bawling loudly in the evenings, and by their teens it really doesn't work at all.

One American tenor enrolled his kids in the Lycée, which meant they could travel around the world and keep exactly in step with the curriculum in pretty-well any major city, such is the French education system. Now he's divorced I'm not sure what the plan is.

When in the early 90s (long before Skype) I was booked for nearly a whole season at the Netherlands Opera, I looked into putting my children into the British School in Amsterdam, but it seemed unfair and unwise to uproot them from their happy primary school in England, so I didn't. Coincidentally, my first marriage didn't survive either.

So, when I see the beaming but nervous children on Facebook, decked out in their new uniforms, I hope their singer-parents do better than we did. I wish them all the luck there is. One thing I can predict: by the end of thirteen years they'll have watched a lot of bad television.

There's nothing quite like an American road trip. You just slide the car's gearshift to Drive, switch on the cruise control, sit back and watch the world go by. The only thing quite like it was a rather relaxed performance of Stainer's Crucifixion l once gave in Goring-on-Thames.

Gliding along the highways and turnpikes your mind inevitably turns to food. Well, mine does. Mine makes a beeline to finding a good, independent diner. lt's increasingly difficult, as is finding a good independent motel, but l'll do anything, ANYTHlNG to avoid the homogenised awfulness of modern chain glooperias, which are about as appealing as being stuck in a broken-down lift with a Jackie Evancho fan. No, to be fair, they're a tiny bit more appealing, but not very much.

How we could have done with diners in Britain, back in the 1980s when l was touring with Opera 80 (now called English Touring Opera), the late and hugely lamented Kent Opera, Sadler's Wells and Glyndebourne. Finding somewhere to eat between 5pm (when the afternoon balance rehearsal ended) and 7pm (when we had to get into make-up) was well-nigh impossible.

Pub kitchens were either closed for the day or waiting to open. There were no Marks & Sparks takeaway salads, no sandwich chains or nationwide coffee shops. You couldn't take fish 'n' chips back to the theatre as eating smelly food near costumes was, and is, a strict no-no. Apart from the odd Chinese or lndian, there was nothing. l could swear that l've seen tumbleweed rolling down half the high streets of England at six in the evening. Tippett 's King Priam was fuelled by pork pies and crisps.
lt was the same after the curtain came down. We ate a lot of very bad curries in the old days, mainly because there were an awful lot of very bad curry houses.

What a godsend a diner would have been, before and after a show. A slab of meatloaf at five in the afternoon? No problem. Eggs, bacon and pancakes at 11pm? Of course, sir! A slice of pie and coffee at 1am during the drive home? Certainly.

Frankly we could still do with diners in Britain, as any musician who has bought a cold Ginsters pasty from a garage and chewed it while driving home after a gig will attest. Heck, if it meant we could have diners, l'd even be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice: l'd get in a dodgy lift with a Jackie Evancho fan.

Landing at Denver airport can be unsettling for the unprepared Brit. If, like me, you set off from the gate at a good lick, eager to overtake the dawdlers, you quickly find yourself wheezing, your heart pounding in your chest. For Denver is a mile above sea level. The air is thin.

Drive west on I-70 from Denver and you'll be climbing into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the great continental divide which separates the massive eastern plains from the Pacific states. The landscape is impressive, swathed in pine forest, and frequently impassable in winter. The air is even thinner. It was here in the mid 19th century that prospectors collectively said to themselves "there's gold in them thar hills" and often prompted by nothing more than hunch (in other words men after my own heart), started digging.

In 1859 a man called John Gregory struck gold, literally; hordes of beardy men with names like Jeremiah and Elmer followed, and within a year, ten thousand people were living in what came eventually to be known as Central City (though by the time it was officially called that, two thirds of the prospectors had moved on again in search of other riches). All over the Rockies, small but immensely wealthy mining towns were springing up with delightful names like Golden, Fairplay and, my favourite, Leadville, which was originally called Slabtown but which actually prospered from silver. As Americans say, go figure. Central City became known as "the richest square mile on earth"; though given the national appetite for hyperbole, this is possibly a wild exaggeration.

A mere 18 years after John Gregory yelled "eureka!", with the population now standing at around 2,500, the people of Central City decided that what they really needed, like any small, mountain mining town at over 8,000 feet above sea-level, was an opera house. And so, a year later in 1878, shortly after Wagner had finished his gruelling, four-year struggle to open the Festspielhaus five thousand miles east in Bayreuth, one was built. Just like that, in the space of a few months. You could be forgiven for thinking that the driving force behind the project was a large body of Italian and German emigrées, but you'd be wrong. They were Welsh and Cornish, no doubt missing all of that opera pouring out of Wales and Cornwall at the time.

I jest of course. Back then, an opera house wasn't designed for the exclusive production of opera. The name was aspirational, designed to put the stamp of sophistication upon a town, to elevate it, to set it above its neighbours. A year later, not to be outdone, Leadville too built an opera house. It took only one hundred days to construct in brick, steel and stone, and Oscar Wilde lectured there, dressed in velvet breeches and diamonds; his subject: "The Practical Application of the Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration with Observations on Dress and Personal Ornament". It didn't go down terribly well with the audience of miners, many of whom fell asleep. Downing a post-show restorative in a Leadville saloon Wilde spotted "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across." Over the piano there hung a notice: "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best..."

Leadville wasn’t the only other town to build an opera house. You may have to sit down for the next bit. Between 1860 and 1920 a staggering 150 opera houses were built in Colorado, many of them in obscure corners of the Rockies. I’ll just repeat that number. One hundred and fifty. So, while we all imagine the so-called Wild West was nothing but gun fights, saloons and lynchings, in fact they seem to have been rather partial to a bit of Offenbach, Verdi and Gilbert & Sullivan. If Wagner had only been American, he might have had better luck getting his theatre built on time. The pity is that of those 150 houses, only a handful have survived.

Taking opera to the masses was quite a business, often undertaken by small troupes who would pick up extra orchestral players and chorus singers locally, if they could find the players and singers. Some of the big names – Patti and Melba for instance - sang in Denver, whose population rapidly grew from around 35,000 in 1880 to 135,000 in 1900. (In 1870, Denver’s population was just 4,700.) The appetite was for opera sung in English, though you might have to wait a while to catch one in the more remote houses. Central City’s first opera (though it’s really an operetta) was The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein and, as far as I can discover, they had to wait another thirty years before The Lombardi Grand Italian Opera Company dropped in to do Il Trovatore with "48 artists and singers”, for one night only and presumably in Italian.

As the precious minerals rapidly depleted so did the fortunes of the Colorado mining towns, not least Central City and its opera house. By 1910 the boards once trod by Buffalo Bill (who is buried not very far away), P.T. Barnum, and the 48 artists and singers of The Lombardi Grand Italian Opera Company creaked no more and the house became a cinema. The population of the town was rapidly diminishing. By 1920 there were only 552 people living in Central City, two more than the seating capacity of the one-time opera house that now only showed movies; which makes it all the more remarkable that three ladies from the dying town decided to turn things around. The opera house was given to the University of Denver and a summer festival was started, in 1932, when Lillian Gish starred in Camille. Plays dominated for the first few years, with only The Merry Widow and The Gondoliers for music fans, but from 1939 onwards (with a break for World War 2) opera became more dominant and it has remained so ever since.

The opera house billboards were painted in a distinctive Wild West font, the sort of thing you see on "Wanted, Dead Or Alive" posters, and still are to this day, and they have all been kept, lining the walls of rehearsal rooms. They read like a Who's Who of 20th Century American stage and opera. Mae West appeared in 1949 in her own play Diamond Lil. The 1963 board lists Richard Cassilly, Sherrill Milnes and Justino Diaz as three of its festival artists, but it doesn't tell you that Samuel Ramey was in the chorus that year. He was on the apprentice scheme that still continues. For two months, young singers get to understudy, sing small roles and work in the chorus. They also get training and coaching, and appear in their own small-scale productions and showcases. This year they did Trouble in Tahiti.

In 1956, Central City produced one of its most famous successes when it premiered The Ballad of Baby Doe by Douglas Moore. Like many American operas (except for those by the fashionable minimalists) it's a work that isn't widely known outside the States, where it has become a staple. Beverly Sills sang the title role many times and recorded it in 1959. Based on a true story, Baby Doe is local too. She came from Central City and ended up in Leadville after a scandalous affair with the silver millionaire who built Leadville's opera house and which bears his name, Horace Tabor. The price of silver crashed and so did the fortunes of Leadville, Tabor and Baby Doe, who died penniless in a shack; the very stuff of which operas are made.

Incidentally, Horace Tabor had also built and given his name to a large opera house in Denver. The Leadville opera house survives, almost unchanged, and is open for tours but little else. The Denver house was torn down in 1964.

Central City Opera has become the most enduring of America's summer opera festivals - of which there are many - which is truly extraordinary given that the town itself has continued to decline. The 1970 census listed just 228 inhabitants. In 1990, in a bid to revitalise the local economy, the town and its close neighbour Black Hawk were granted gaming licences, and the handsome Victorian brick buildings that line Main Street, once shops and hotels of varying salubriousness, became, almost without exception, casinos. Until recently, Black Hawk was first stop on the small switchback road from Denver and therefore used to catch all the gamblers driving up the hill. So, at a cost of $41 million, Central City had a four lane road built from the main highway that circumvented Black Hawk, dropping customers in the midst of its casinos. It will take a long time to pay for the road, but at least it makes the uphill journey to the festival easier for operagoers.

Central City now suffers from a sort of schizophrenia, struggling to be both a cultural hotspot and a somewhat dissolute gambling dive. There's nowhere to eat, nothing to do, that doesn't involve walking through the doors of a casino. Wild West-style gunfights are staged on Main Street while just around the corner, the audience waits to enter the opera house for La Traviata. Anyone who imagines, as I did, that this is some sort of American Glyndebourne should try eating out for breakfast. It's an eye-opening experience, munching on pancakes at 8 a.m. surrounded by slot machines, constantly flashing and chiming as sad-looking punters fill them with dollars, working the buttons. But then, perhaps this is not so different to how life was in the town when it was "the richest square mile on earth".

For the last eighteen years Central City Opera has been headed and managed by Pelham Pearce. Witty, avuncular, often dressed like a character written by Tennessee Williams (white hat, silk handkerchief and wingtip shoes), he could be mistaken for someone stuck in the past. He is anything but. Whereas his personal dream would be to perform every single Britten opera (he's about half way through the cannon) he has to be a realist and present a range of work that will challenge, entertain and put bums on seats. The current formula seems to be working: one classic from the mainstream opera repertoire, something less familiar that is modern or baroque, and a piece of music theatre. This year's productions were Le Nozze di Figaro, Dead Man Walking and The Sound of Music. Pearce has an infectious passion and the genuine will to do whatever it is that opera must do to change and survive. He may have a favourite catchphrase, delivered in a fine Southern drawl - "It's all good!" - but he knows that running an opera festival up a mountain in a Victorian jewel-box theatre is never going to get easier.

Central City Opera clearly doesn't rely on the patronage of its townsfolk. It couldn't. It survives thanks to the opera lovers of Denver. And they must love the art form a great deal. Since only 20% of the $5 million budget can be raised from box office, a lot of generous people are giving away serious amounts of cash. A $10 million endowment helps too.

My wife is singing in Central City this year, which is why I drove up the mountain. We'll be back next year too, spending the first week fighting for breath, coping with altitude sickness. The fees are modest, but are made up for by a generosity of spirit, a common determination in the company that, bonkers as it may have been for those Welsh and Cornish miners to have built an opera house in the middle of nowhere, at 8,500 feet, the pioneering devotion to an ideal of creating good art will be upheld as long as there is a gasping breath in their bodies. I think that's rather remarkable.

When l flew into the USA for my current trip, my first port of call was at O'Hare, Chicago. For the first time, l noticed that they have a special immigration desk for people who just have hand luggage. Seeing as this was all l had packed, l went for it. For one thing, there was no queue.

'How long are you staying in the US?' asked the immigration man. 

'About six weeks,' l replied.
'SlX WEEKS? And you only have one carry-on?' 

'l'm a very good packer. lt drives my wife mad.'
He laughed, took my fingerprints and let me through.

l bring this up because l've been thinking about singers with dogs. There are lots of singers with dogs. Little dogs usually, l grant you, but dogs nonetheless. And busy singers too – singers who travel a great deal with lots of luggage and paraphernalia. Singers, in short, who never get to use the hand-luggage- only queue. And on top of all that luggage, they bring their dogs.

Kiri Te Kanawa has a couple of small dogs. Frederica von Stade has one. l know a mezzo who carries a Yorkie around in her handbag. Denyce Graves, who has sung Carmen just about everywhere on the planet and probably in outer space too, had (or possibly still has) a little fluffy white dog called Madison that she would beckon to join on her on stage at the end of recitals. The ltalian buffo baritone Bruno Praticò has a little dog that he takes everywhere, working him into productions where possible. l'm not sure if the dog is a union member and picks up a fee as a result, but l've seen the little chap scene-stealing in a Barbiere di Siviglia with Juan Diego Flórez and Joyce di Donato no less, so he's no Z-list artist. The dog, that is.

Some opera houses don't allow pets, though l could swear that l've seen this rule bypassed for stars. (On a quick side note, l was once in an opera which briefly featured a large eagle. The eagle had his own dressing room. l didn't.) Otherwise, it's not uncommon to trip over a poodle in the corridor, mid-opera, possibly being taken by an amenable dresser for a 'bathroom break' outside the stage door.

All the bother of caring for a pet on the road is indicative of something, though – something which l can completely understand. A dog is a constant, faithful companion – all too rare for the jet-setting singer. A dog is a friend who will go everywhere and anywhere with you, who loves you no matter how the show went, who doesn't care if you hit the high note or not.

For the lonely singer, l can see how a dog can be worth ten times his weight in excess baggage.

Here's a paradox: there have never been more young artist programmes than there are now, yet it has never been harder for a young singer to break into the profession.

Back in my day, while it wasn't exactly a doddle, I'm sure there were more opportunities to get yourself noticed. In your early twenties you left university or music college (which had all been paid for by grants) and just got on with it, singing with a myriad of small companies, albeit for very little pay. Now, it's not unusual for singers to spend as many as eight or nine years closeted as a student, during which time they become saddled with staggering amounts of debt.

After that, if they are well-developed, lucky, or happen to tick the right boxes, the young singer may get taken by an opera house into its 'studio' or young artist programme (YAP), doing a lot of understudying and singing minor roles. Those that don't can find it very difficult to get noticed, some even resorting to paying small companies to allow them to sing principal roles.

We grew up in a time when there were proper opera companies with singers of all ages. Old men were sung by old men. The cynics among us saw the birth of YAPs as a way of filling small roles cheaply; particularly aggravating if you were up for a mature role only for it to be given to some kid from the YAP wearing a shaggy beard and a ton of make-up.

Filling small roles with YAP singers also fell into the trap of thinking that small parts are easy, when any old lag will tell you that singing small parts requires large amounts of experience, savvy and nerve. Faced with just a few bars to sing, an inexperienced singer will often panic and become frozen with nerves. It's perfectly understandable; your opportunity to make your mark is confined to a few phrases. Even a great singer may not impress if all he has to do is enter with a tray and sing that dinner is ready. Small roles rarely have the chance to show off their 'money notes'. Old hands worry less about such things.

Occasionally the young artist will get their big break as an understudy, but it's quite rare. Houses sometimes have a cover run, where the understudies get to do some (or even all) of the opera in front of management and other members of the company. This is the norm at Glyndebourne. When I covered Ferrando in Così fan tutte there in the 1980s, we had an hour in which to showcase our talents (Gerald Finley and Alison Hagley were two of my co-covers) and the bright spark of an assistant director, for whom this was also a chance to show off, suggested that we do our scenes in reverse order, effectively doing the story backwards. The idea didn't last long.

Opera Holland Park has come up with a brilliant and heartwarming solution. For one of its productions - this year it was The Turn of the Screw - it has a proper, public performance specifically for the young artists who have covered the rest of the shows. There are no half measures, no compromises. They get to do one performance and the public pays to see it. They even get their own dress rehearsal. I think that's just brilliant.

I take my hat off to Holland Park. Rather than showcases and concerts of bleeding chunks, their young artists are getting to do the real thing. And on the evidence of the Britten, they are rising to the occasion.

Isn't it odd how the words 'music festival' can evoke such different images? To the world at large a music festival is tents, mud, drugs, high decibels and veggie burgers. For the classical music fan it's string quartets, an opera or two, something with Simon Callow, smart dress and a good picnic. The only common denominators are portable loos and Paul Morley.

Even time is different. Glastonbury lasts just a few days whereas Edinburgh is a few weeks, and Glyndebourne several months. At classical festivals people actually get to sleep. In beds. Though not always their own, it has to be said.

Festivals are enjoying a renaissance and popping up everywhere – though many of the big festivals of my younger years have diminished considerably or even vanished altogether. Fishguard, Camden, Bath, Harrogate... either gone or a shadow of their former selves.

Festivals are good news for the humble freelance singer (is there any other kind?), for they provide summer employment, tiding you over during the times when the opera houses have decamped to their deckchairs. The lure of festivals is the prospect of lots of sun and a convivial, relaxed, fun atmosphere – often in compensation for a poor fee. Of course, the sun thing doesn't necessarily apply to Edinburgh, or most of Britain for that matter. For that you have to head south, to France, perhaps.

It's easy to get excited by, say, the prospect of a couple of months in Aix-en-Provence, scoffing delicious food, quaffing chilled rosé and sploshing around in a sun-drenched pool, forgetting that this is what the punters get to do, not you. Chances are you can't afford a pool. You're there to work. You have to spend weeks and weeks rehearsing in hot, dusty studios, minding you don't get dehydrated or overtired, staying in good voice.

Performance times can be deeply unsettling. In Aix, when you perform outdoors the curtain often doesn't rise until well after 9pm. When I last sang there I was launching into my aria at nearly one in the morning, hours past my usual Horlicks and bedtime routine. The result of performing so late is that you are usually wide awake until just before dawn.

The next day, when you had planned to really enjoy the summer – a wander around the market, a dip in someone else's pool – you are desperately trying to catch up on sleep, and by the time you emerge into the light, the market has packed up and the sun is already descending in the west. It's not exactly awful, but it's not what you imagined when you signed the contract, the word 'festival' winking at you like a suntanned starlet.

I really shouldn't sit down and write an article when I'm cross. I've tried to spend the last 24 hours stopping being furious, but it's no use; I've got to write the piece and cross I am. So there it is.

I suppose that this is a dilemma that critics face every time they review an opera. No matter what they're feeling when they sit in the dimmed auditorium, they have to put that aside and concentrate on the task at hand: reviewing the work.

It's curious then that on Saturday evening, a bunch of middle-aged men sat down to watch Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne as if they had only just been handed their diplomas from The School of Good Old-Fashioned Sexism and were simply too excited to forget about it. Clearly the School had taught them that the only thing attractive about a woman is her body, that no matter how well a woman sings and acts, it's all a waste of time if she's not fit to go on the front page of Vogue. Not only that but, as one of them pointed out, if they haven't sung as well in the past as they're singing now it's probably because they had to do stressful lady things like having children. (My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw that in the Daily Telegraph.)

What next? Are we soon going to be treated to a commentary on how Ms X's performance was better this time because she didn't happen to be going through her period?

My initial reaction on reading this bilge was to want to respond with a taste of their own medicine. I mean, let's face it, none of these men is exacty an Adonis. Indeed, at least one of them has a permanent look (to borrow a phrase) of a bulldog who has just licked piss off a nettle.

Ah, but it's not their job to look good. Well, curiously enough, it isn't really a singer's job either. A model's, yes. A singer's, no. And then, to make matters worse, even if a singer does have magazine cover looks, we get another middle-aged man drooling over reports of nudity (this commentator hadn't even seen the show) in terms barely short of 'Cor, Phew, Phwoar!'

I get to wear two hats. A singer hat and a writer hat. As a singer I've spent most of my working life being afraid of what the writers can do to me, taking the carps and moans on the chin as all my colleagues do; picking myself off the floor after a glib but devastating remark, pretending I don't mind. Well, now I'm really too old and too far into my inevitable decline to care anymore. This weekend a line was crossed. Not against me, but against my friends and extremely hard-working and talented colleagues.

I feel sorry for many critics. They aren't paid well at all and they struggle to keep their ever-shrinking column inches. But if some of them don't get their act together they can expect such a storm of disapproval that they'll look on the mild barrage that has come their way in the last two days with the warm glow of nostalgia.

There are two questions an opera singer can guarantee to be asked at some stage in their career; usually by a well-meaning but slightly drunk punter whose wife has dragged him away from the golf course to a night at the opera. The first is 'What’s your proper job?' and the second, 'How long did it take to learn your role?'

Subduing the urge to whack the punter with a five-iron, the singer launches into a lengthy explanation of Learning An Opera. This differs significantly from Learning A Play in that the singer has to know everything from memory before the very first day of rehearsal whereas the actor does not.

For the singer this means weeks and weeks of note-bashing at the piano, listening to recordings (if they're available and the singer on disc is getting the notes right), visits to coaches at your own expense, and half-singing to yourself as you, say, mop the kitchen floor. You get no help from an opera house. It's relentlessly boring. I spend a good amount of time on trains, staring out of the window and muttering recitative, which pretty-well guarantees me an aisle all to myself.

I'll hold up my hand that in my time I've flirted with danger and the strict meaning of 'learnt' as stipulated in my contract. There's what I like to call 'learnt to rehearsal level' which means that, no, I couldn't sing the whole role off-book with 100% accuracy on Day One, but I know it well enough to get through the rehearsal process and hold up no-one else (a cardinal sin), especially if there are six weeks to go before opening, and it's a new piece that no-one, even the composer and especially the conductor, quite knows.

In a difficult modern opera, a certain degree of unfamiliarity is tolerated. With standard repertoire it isn't, not least because if you don't know your role, there are many other people who do and your chances of getting sacked are infinitely greater. I once saw a lago disappear from the Royal Opera production of Otello this way, though officially of course he was 'indisposed'.

If I've flirted with danger there are some singers, many of them massively famous, who go out and skate on wafer-thin ice whilst wearing nothing but a jockstrap and a backpack full of rocks. How they do it is beyond me. I've shared the stage with a certain tenor whose grip on a score has been, at best, sketchy. But by dint of masses of chutzpah and a bond with the prompt box only superglue could rival, he managed his way through the whole opera, singing gloriously and fooling the happy thousands that the thing was in his very blood.

If you think I'm going to say who it was, you've got another think coming.

A lot of people who live in their mum's basement didn't like this piece. One called me a "snot-nosed limey opera fop", which pleased me so much I had business cards printed with my new sobriquet.

I'm having one of those days when I'm keeping an eye out for hard surfaces like walls and tables so that I can purposefully and frequently bang my head against them. Why? I've just heard that a nine year-old Dutch girl called Amira Willighagen has recorded an album of opera arias, Amira, on Simon Cowell's label Syco. I'd be banging my head if she were 19 years old, but nine? Ridiculous.

She's not the first. Somebody called Jackie Evancho paved the way in America; though when I say she paved the way I really mean that a bunch of adults who should know better saw a way of making a shedload of cash by exploiting a child and did all the actual paving.

At this point I expect the internet trolls will go into a complete meltdown. 'What do you know about it? You sad, mean cynic! You're just envious! Why can't you let a talented child make music that gives so much pleasure to millions?' I'll tell you why. Because when I hear these children sing I hear two kids on the fast track to vocal ruin.

These so-called prodigies are coached by 'vocal experts' who are no doubt happy to enjoy the rewards of being on a successful bandwagon but I'm left wondering how they look at themselves in the mirror of a morning. Hmm, if only I too were some sort of vocal expert, to back up my opinion. Oh, wait, it turns out I am! I would say these children have decent enough instruments, but in attempting to mimic women (and men, which is utterly barmy) at least three times their age, they are systematically damaging the delicate, infantile mechanisms in their throats. Given that opera singing is an extreme physical activity, requiring years of training, imagine instead that these children are wannabe weightlifters. Wouldn't the world think it was rather odd if young girls were attempting to lift 100lb dumbbells for the public's entertainment and for someone else's financial gain?

Wouldn't the world be appalled? I would hope so.

I wrote five pieces on Glyndebourne, here merged into one:

In the next few weeks I’m going to Glyndebourne to start rehearsing Der Rosenkavalier. Sometimes that keeps me up at night. This is because of two things: a) it’s Glyndebourne and b) it’s Der Rosenkavalier. 

I haven’t worked for Glyndebourne in over twenty years, the last time being when I sang on the tour. That was before they built the spiffy new opera house, and I’ve only been back there a couple of times since, to see Lulu and Giulio Cesare. On neither occasion I wore a dinner jacket, not really out of any sort of contrariness but quite simply because I don’t own one and I was buggered if I was going to shell out and buy one just for a night at the opera. I remember wearing a rather loud summer suit that I’d bought on sale, its very low price owing to the fact that the arms appeared to have been sewn on the wrong way round. No-one seemed to mind, except my arms, which the suit was systematically trying to pull out their sockets. 

Besides, most dinner jackets look like they've come straight from the Oxfam shop; moth-ridden, the trousers straining to confine a middle-aged spread that’s spilling over the waistband. There’s usually the odd button missing, a gravy stain or two and the acid whiff of old sweat. There are better ways to dress up. 

In 1983 I was in the chorus at Glynditz, as it’s commonly known in the profession, the name Glynditz being a neat amalgam of Glyndebourne and Colditz (as if I really needed to spell that out). We don’t call it that because they treat you like prisoners of war, but because once you’re there for the summer it’s almost impossible to escape. Set in the middle of the Sussex Downs, Glynditz has a campus feel to it. It’s a bit like a small public school. You can’t simply potter off to a greasy spoon for lunch or catch a movie on a free afternoon. Instead you must entertain yourself within the confines of the estate, by wandering around the lake, playing some tennis or gambolling with a flock of sheep. Well, that’s what we used to do. Now, they probably spend all day playing Angry Birds on their iPads.
I’m anxious about going back because it will feel familiar yet strange, like going back to your old school after a very long absence. Things won’t be where they used to be. I’ll probably regress into a pubescent version of myself, all spots, hormones and bad attitude. I wonder if everything will seem much smaller than I remember it. It was always sunny in 1983 – I have the photos to prove it. How can it possibly live up to my memories?  

And it’s Der Rosenkavalier, a proper opera. I don’t often get to do proper operas that people might have actually heard of. My meat and two veg is the weirder stuff that, when asked what I’m singing at the moment, provokes a look of slight pain on the face of my interlocutor, as if I’ve just described in vivid detail the various stages of bowel surgery. If opera were an art gallery, I spend most of my time in the Contemporary section. Now I’ll be in the Romantic section, where the paintings aren’t to my usual taste. They’re big and literal. People’s eyes are actually on their faces.
My role is not huge - the Italian intriguer and gossip, Valzacchi - my main function, it seems, to sing lots of words incredibly fast. In fact I could neatly describe my role as someone who’s trying to sing his way through the entire Vienna phonebook in the space of two minutes in an Italian accent. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about Valzacchi in the next few months. I’m going to have to live with him until the end of July, so we had better remain on good terms.
My first priority though is to make sure my iPad has the latest version of Angry Birds.

--

It's Glyndebourne's 80th anniversary - making it the oldest professional opera company in Britain. I may not be quite as old as that, but thanks to the company, I've made a connection (albeit one of them extremely tenuous) to two great tenors.

After my first blog about Glyndebourne I got a message from Stephen, a director friend. In 1964 his dad had been in the Glyndebourne chorus and he too had written something, for a local school. Would I like to see it? As Stephen's dad was the great tenor Philip Langridge, I of course said yes.

In 1964 Philip was just 24, fresh out of the Royal Academy, still working occasionally as a freelance violinist, and recently married. The Glyndebourne Chorus was his very first job in an opera house. Stephen (no slouch himself - his most recent production for the Royal Opera was Parsifal) was a toddler, learning to walk on the Glyndebourne lawns. With Philip that year in the chorus were Ryland Davies, Richard Van Allan, Anne Howells, Elizabeth Bainbridge and Stafford Dean; big names to singers and fans of my generation.

 I won't regurgitate the whole piece that Philip wrote, called 'Sussex in the Summer' but here are some snippets, written in a style that reflects not only his own youth but the different age in which he was writing.

'Just four miles from Lewes stands the village of Glynde, surrounded by the South Downs and some very beautiful countryside. On the outskirts of the village stands a country mansion - Glyndebourne - which has been the centre of public interest since 1934, when Audrey and John Christie produced a summer festival of opera there.

'Before an opera can be performed, months of preparation are required. The company begins work at Glyndebourne in April. The principal artists rehearse their individual parts with pianists, discussing all aspects from a musical point of view. The head of musical preparation has already been working with the conductor (who may well be in another country until the week before the performance) and is able to give everyone some idea of tempi, dynamics and, to some extent, general interpretation.'

Ah, the habits of conductors haven't changed over the years... No, that's unfair. There's no way the conductor would be allowed to roll up a week before the show opens. Robin Ticciati is here for all six weeks of Rosenkavalier rehearsals.

'As soon as the music has been prepared (usually about two weeks) production rehearsals begin on the stage. The producer, together with the sub-producer and the stage staff, uses the two weeks to plot the opera on the stage. Sometimes the producer speaks very little English and the sub-producer translates everything for him. Gradually the opera takes shape and after two or three days the whole company is geared to a high-speed organisation.'

Two weeks. Ha! In those days, in opera, the director was always called the producer. I'm not sure exactly when that habit changed. Probably as opera became more director-led. In the 1960s the job of the director was pretty well limited to getting people to stand in the right place.

'Eventually the first night arrives and when all is ready the conductor is signalled to begin. The overture is played while the singers wait anxiously for the curtain to rise. Below the stage in the dressing rooms other artists are making up their faces and getting into their costumes...

'This is my first season in an opera house. It is hard work but great fun. I arrive at Glyndebourne at 10.30 am and leave 12 hours later every day of the week including Saturday and Sunday. Occasionally there is a free day but these are few and far between. Altogether we have our own little world which seems divided from the other by the footlights.'

One of the operas in the 1964 season was Idomeneo. In 1983, when I sang in the chorus alongside Susan Bullock and Peter Coleman- Wright, to name but two, we also did Idomeneo and Philip Langridge was gob-smackingly magnificent in the title role. I understudied the late, tragic Jerry Hadley as Idamante, Idomeneo's son, but I never got to go on. When Philip was in the chorus, Idamante was sung by a young chap called Luciano Pavarotti .

So, there you are you see, me, Philip, Pavarotti... Well, it works for me.

--

There's only a week to go before Der Rosenkavalier opens, on May 17th, which also happens to be the Glyndebourne Festival's 80th birthday. To say we have been working hard in the last six weeks would be like saying Rembrandt knew how to draw or Mary Berry can knock up a passable Victoria sponge.

We have rehearsed six days a week, morning, afternoon and evening, including Good Friday and bank holidays, stopping only on Sundays to do laundry and draw breath. It's only with the arrival of the orchestra that we are now able to have rest days between our stage rehearsals, though, as the first night approaches, the media circus begins. For, as in any field of entertainment, it's part of our job to give interviews and feed the marketing beast.

Next week I'm doing a spot on BBC Gardeners' World, no less, bluffing that I know the difference between a daisy and a dahlia, and last week I was interviewed for a BBC4 documentary that will be going out in a month or so, in which I was asked about Richard Jones's ‘take' on Der Rosenkavalier. I said I don't think Richard ‘interprets' the opera, he just tries to tell the story in a way that makes absolute sense.

No doubt some will disagree because they see any production that isn't filled with tights and powdered wigs as a distortion of the composer's intentions, and frankly this baffles me. I was in a production a few years ago in Los Angeles of The Marriage of Figaro in which Figaro and all the servants wore livery but other characters wore 1950s costumes and the Countess used a telephone. This sent some critics and online commentators into a mild apoplexy. ‘It doesn't make sense!' they yelled, electronically, over what they perceived as anachronisms.

To these people I would say: look at a day in the life of the Royal Family. A flunky in 17th century livery will open the door of Prince Charles's classic Aston Martin. Out he steps wearing a suit that looks as if it were designed in the 1930s, while a guardsman in Victorian uniform presents arms with his 21st century semi-automatic. The prince enters an 18th century palace festooned with 16th century tapestries, past a security guard in a polyester suit, wearing an earpiece, talking into his wrist.

Do we think that these visual contradictions pose a problem? Of course we don't.

If you really want something that is utter nonsense, try a good old Lucia di Lammermoor where everyone is strutting about in tartan kilts. It may satisfy the cookie-cutter sensibilities of someone who really believes that Scotland is all Walter Scott, scones and Edinburgh rock, but it is complete and utter tosh.

Watch Glyndebourne's Der Rosenkavalier and make up your own mind. But if anyone gets their knickers in a twist about 'which period it is set in' they'll have me to answer to. And my tartan-clad army.

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We're into the run of Der Rosenkavalier, and, with the international media hullabaloo provoked by some of the reviews well behind us, it's down to business as usual. I gave up my local digs immediately after the first night and now, rather than a five-minute trip to Glyndebourne I have a three-hour drive or an even longer train journey. Between shows I go home and do what normal people do: wash the kitchen floor, sort the recycling, shout at the television. That sort of thing. Meanwhile the Europeans in the cast are ensconced in East Sussex, with swathes of time to kill.

They are an interesting bunch.

Lars Woldt (Baron Ochs) has his wife and young daughter in tow and takes his family for walks on the South Downs. He's a generous, bright man; a top musician who studied composition and who enjoys a quiet post-show pint of Harveys bitter. The veteran bass Gwynne Howell (Notary) is in the next dressing- room to mine. Before every show I hear Gwynne warming up by crooning the Matt Monro hit ‘Born Free'. Then Lars pops into Gwynne's room and they run through their tricky little scene together. Michael Kraus (Faninal) is also an interesting man. He spends the days between shows either working on his book- length dissertation on the politics of opera production in postwar Germany, or on a trip to a church or country house clutching his newly-bought National Trust annual pass. As Lars has no car, Michael has fitted a child-seat into his and he often takes the Woldt family on days out.

Robert Wörle (Innkeeper) has visited every cathedral in the southeast, some of them twice. He's an ex- monk (he says he was too fond of women to stick at it) and we always have a good chat backstage before we start Act 3. Last week he went to see the HMS Victory, something he has wanted to do since

childhood. I asked him if he had ever made the Airfix model. ‘But of course!' Tara Erraught (Octavian) is Irish but lives in Munich. She has spent the first fortnight keeping her head in the game with spectacular strength and cheerfulness while the world has gone bonkers around her. Her dad is a chef and she once brought to rehearsal some slow-cooked belly of pork that was nothing short of miraculous.

Helene Schneiderman (Annina) was born in New Jersey but has lived in Stuttgart for 30 years. Helene bakes decadent brownies and distributes them amongst the company. She lent me a fascinating and moving book, I Sang To Survive, written by her mother, Judith, which chronicles in searing detail her experience of the Holocaust. In between Rosenkavaliers, Helene has had to fly back to Stuttgart a couple of times, to sing in performances of La sonnambula.

During the long interval we all tend to convene in the green room where we flop on sofas, still in our make-up with dressing gowns over our costumes, and natter about anything and everything. The actors playing mute roles usually join us too, or the small children of Kate Royal (the Marschallin). Some of us eat – home-made snacks or ready-to-eat salads - and someone will always volunteer to run to the staff café for a Kit-Kat if somebody else is craving chocolate.

On Sunday 8 June the pressure will be back on when the HD cameras are in, but a more mutually- supportive, convivial company it would be hard to imagine. Sometimes it doesn't feel like work at all.

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That's it, it's over. Finished. Done. No more giggles for the bed in the Act 3 panto, no more pelvic flinches as Tara Erraught's Octavian plunges the silver rose into Lars Woldt's Baron Ochs's buttock, no more wincing when Paul Hopwood's Doctor whips out his tube of ointment... I'm sorry, none of this means anything to you if you never saw Der Rosenkavalier, but for me and everyone else in the show, this is the stuff that has filled our waking hours for the last three months.

Only it's not over. Well it is but it isn't. There's still the Prom to go, 19 days after our last performance, which made for a strange atmosphere at the closing-night party. It was a like saying farewell at Heathrow to a load of new friends you've made on holiday, before bumping into them again on the Piccadilly Line.

The day before the Prom, the cast (but not the chorus) will reconvene at Glyndebourne, many flying in from abroad, to spend a day rehearsing it all over again. This is going to present a couple of challenges.

First, in the Royal Albert Hall we won't have the set. We may have some furniture but to be honest I don't know. We've not been told. In the absence of a stage crew and, thus, people to move furniture around, it seems highly unlikely. Without a set and stuff to sit on, we will have to do a completely different production. And anyway, whereas Glyndebourne's theatre is small and intimate, the Royal Albert Hall most certainly is not. There's also no pit, and we have yet to discover if we are performing in front of the

orchestra, watching Robin Ticciati in TV monitors, or behind them. We'll figure it all out, but as it's a lengthy opera, we won't have much time. We will be in costume, but as several singers normally have quick changes, we don't know how that will work either.

Second, I hope we can remember it. That may sound daft, but spacial and physical memory play a big part in remembering how the thing goes. If you're not seeing what you are used to seeing, the brain plays funny tricks. I'm used to delivering pages and pages of very rapid patter whilst walking backwards across the stage with my right eyeball focussed on Robin. It's pretty-well Pavlovian; set me walking backwards and a stream of Strauss-Hofmannsthal comes pouring out of me. What if I have to walk forwards and watch Robin with my left eye?

Well we'll find out soon enough. And with only about five gazillion people in the audience there shouldn't be much pressure.

Nine years ago I was doing something very odd. I was photographing everything I ate. Not just fancy meals that were pleasing to the eye, but every single bowl of porridge, pork scratching and piece of toast. I kept it up for a whole year, eventually turning the photos (all 2500 of them) into a massive collage which was displayed in a local art gallery.

Many people thought I was completely bonkers, several pixels short of a panorama, but to someone who gets up on stage and sings for a living, frequently wearing women's clothing or half naked, it didn't seem too far outside the norm. Opera singing and eating have always had a reputation as co-dependants. Yes, mention 'food' and 'opera singer' in the same breath and everyone's imagination leaps to monumental bowls of spaghetti and straw-wrapped flagons of Chianti being wolfed down by a fat tenor with a beard.

Most singers, even those I've heard refer to McDonalds as 'my outside caterer', love food and I'm no exception. Away on the road I fantasise about eating at nearly every restaurant I pass, and usually fill the empty hours wandering around markets and delicatessens, dreaming of magnificent meals I could put together: massive paellas busting with shellfish, a coq au vin made with a real cockerel, a choucroute piled with steaming meats… The problem is that, for the most part, a singer's life is solitary and quiet, which means lots of cooking for one, so the usual stuff of which gastro-dreams are made of are completely unsuitable. Once, I went a bit stir-crazy and cooked about a gallon of boeuf bourgignon on my two-ringed stove in Rennes. By the seventh day of piling it on my plate for dinner I was suffering from my own version of mad-cow disease.

Another spanner in the gastronomic works is the very fact we have to sing, which requires a lot of energy and flexibility, so you have to eat sensibly. It also often involves projecting large quantities of breath into the face of someone with whom you are supposed to be passionately in love. Precede a show with a slab or two of garlic bread and you won't be the most popular person on stage.

Our dinner times are very strange, mostly because we're getting down to work when normal people are tucking a napkin under their chin. On a show day I'll eat a large lunch – usually pasta for the slow-burn carbohydrates – at about three or four in the afternoon. That and a banana in the interval will see me through until after the performance. That's when I commit every single cardinal dietary sin known to man. Back in my digs, hungry and still full of adrenalin, lonely and a bit bored too, I can easily pig out on cheese, crackers and chocolate until well past midnight, while waiting to get sleepy.

Sometimes there's an extravagant post-show dinner laid on by a promoter, especially in Spain when eating much before 11pm seems to be considered eccentric. Stuffed with suckling pig, I've stumbled out of Madrid restaurants at nearly two in the morning, just as they seem to be getting lively, my belt straining and my digestive tract in turmoil.

It's hardly any surprise then that the very last thing I pop in my mouth before bed is anti-reflux medicine.

In my last column I was quite rude about conductors. Far from unleashing the dogs of musical war, this prompted a lot of support from my fellow singers and musicians, and a few conductors to boot - one of whom, a friend of mine, described his fellow tradesmen as 'awful; conductors are just so greedy.' (Yes, surprisingly, I do actually have conductor friends, not one of whom was the target of my bile).

In the wake of Claudio Abbado's death, one of the greatest conductors, it might be a good time to examine the role of the conductor and their place in our affections. Abbado was respected, loved and admired, principally I think because he was humble yet inquisitive, rather than arrogant and domineering. He was highly professional too, taking his preparation extremely seriously. Like all the conductors I admire, he left his ego out of his work and strove to let the musicians play with as little of his interference as possible. The older and more experienced he got, the humbler he seemed to become. I saw him conduct some Bach about five years ago. He seemed to regard his very presence on the podium as unnecessary, as something of a joke, and virtually hid behind the players at the curtain calls.

I just wish I could say the same about some of his fellow baton bandits, some of whom seem to spend more time working on their hair than they do on their music-making.

Why are conductors so revered by publicists and managers yet so often disliked by working musicians? (The answer to that could well be buried in the question.) Why are all conductors, as an orchestral flautist said to me, 'guilty until proven innocent'? Is it simply because they earn so much money for making absolutely no sound?

A successful conductor, one that's charging from one continent to the next, possibly with a couple of music directorships in his pocket, can gross a million dollars a year without even being a household name. The big stars, the ones who head up the big orchestras, make several times that. God only knows what Valery Gergiev, who regularly gives around 250 performances a year - a figure which almost beggars belief, the equivalent of conducting every single weekday of the year - must earn. Many, many millions. How do we judge if someone like that is giving good value for money? You can hear when a player or singer is overworked, but if a conductor is not functioning well, who except the highly astute will hear the difference?

The difference between a conductor's massive fees and a musician's paltry one might spark resentment, but the rift runs deeper. I can't claim to represent all singers but this true story I'm about to tell you is an example of the sort of thing that gives some conductors a bad name. Every singer will have an equivalent story. Excuse me while I change all the names and places, just to give me some hope of ever working again.

A few years ago I was booked by the prestigious 'Morotavian Opera' to sing an obscure role in a big romantic opera that the the company's music director, let's call him Bilbo Waggins, had conducted before in concert. My role was in a scene that is usually omitted from the opera, as it had been when Bilbo had previously done it. On the first day of rehearsals we had a music call with Bilbo and he didn't have the score for my scene. He claimed he had no idea we were doing it, which was odd, given he had been at several meetings during which it was discussed. The fact he didn't know it was in itself no great shock. I have worked several times with conductors whose scores bear all the tell-tale signs of never having been opened – a cracking sound as the spine is flexed for the first time, pages that won't stay open, a complete absence of any pencil markings, to name but a few clues. Bilbo said I should sing the scene for him so he could hear how it went, not a luxury I, a lowly singer, am ever allowed. I was contractually obliged, as ever, to have my part memorised in time for the first day. I'd like to see how it would go down if I asked to be shown how a scene went. I'd be fired on the spot.

I sang it through, guiding the pianist as to how I thought it should go, and that was the end of the rehearsal. I assumed that Bilbo would take the score home, learn it, and all would be fine. We spent the next month staging the opera in a studio but every time we did my scene, Bilbo wasn't there. He was “otherwise engaged” or simply left early. So his assistant conducted instead. Oddly, I wasn't called to any sitzproben¸ (when we sing through the opera with the orchestra without any acting). I didn't even see Bilbo at any stage and piano rehearsals. The first time I saw him since that first day was at a stage and orchestra rehearsal, a full five weeks later.

I hurtled on stage for my scene and within a few bars it was chaos. The tempi were wrong, Bilbo was lost, and the orchestra didn't have a clue what was going on. He still didn't know it. We crashed to a halt and Bilbo, desperately trying to cover his shortcomings, yelled “I don't like this scene. It should be cut!” This was, let's be clear, my only scene, though it involved several others and the entire chorus. An argument ensued with the director and we eventually staggered on to the end of the scene in tatters, while I wondered if Bilbo could possibly be so lazy as to plan to have a scene scrapped rather than learn the damn thing. The dress rehearsals went a bit better but on the first night, nerves kicked in and Maestro Waggins messed it up again, leaving me and my colleagues in the pit to rescue something from the rubble.

I was taught to apologise for musical mistakes, to hold my hand up and admit the error, thus making it clear I knew that I was wrong. Sometimes a good conductor, especially a great one like Abbado, will apologise for his mistakes. Bilbo, of course, said nothing. And that's why we think conductors are 'guilty until proven innocent'.

Ah, money. At this time of the year, who has any? In my job you're not supposed to talk about money, except to your agent, with whom you talk about very little else. There certainly exists a conceit that to talk about money is unseemly, and inconsistent with being a true artist. Well, that's just tosh and nonsense.

Everybody does talk about money in my business – rather a lot actually – but very rarely does anyone talk about their fee. Fees are a closely guarded secret. Comparing your fee with another singer is ripe with danger. If their fee is bigger, you will be miffed that your services are being undervalued. If their fee is smaller, while you may enjoy a brief frisson of smugness, it will come at the price of their resentment. So, very rarely does the subject come up except in sweeping generalisations. ‘I can't believe I'm doing this job for the crap fees they pay here', someone (usually a tenor I'm afraid) will share over coffee. ‘In Madrid they pay me three times what I'm getting for this.' This leaves the bragger's confidant to do a mass of wild calculations and estimations, particularly if he himself was actually rather pleased with the fee he was getting for the job. Of course, the bragger may be fishing, trying to get the confidant to reveal his fee, but if the confidant has any sense he won't. Until now.

Let's get down to basics. How much do we singers get paid? It's a very broad topic and one I can't possibly cover in its entirety in the space of one blog, but the popular myth is that it's absolutely shedloads of cash. Well, that's also tosh and nonsense.

A tiny few get paid a lot. When I say a lot I mean $16,000 (£10,000) per performance. Sources tell me that's roughly the fee for a star singer of the likes of Renée Fleming and Jonas Kaufmann; someone who is carrying the weight of a show at the Metropolitan Opera, probably the highest paying opera house these days. Stars will get bigger fees for special events in far-flung places – an arena concert in Dubai perhaps – but for an opera the budget is tighter.

For those of us further down the food chain the fee structure is more erratic and your fee will depend on your experience as much as the size of the role. A young singer who is offered a large role will probably be offered a low fee, with the argument that the opera house is taking a risk and it's all about the opportunity for the young singer to prove herself (or himself). The rationale is that the singer should be grateful and any fee is, frankly, a bonus. Young singers, in general, are very poorly paid and you'll find many of them doing other jobs simply to pay the rent. Most of them won't get a proper fee until they hit their thirties and then they might have 20 or so decent years of earning ahead of them, if they're lucky.

What about someone like me, a ‘jobbing singer' with over 30 years' experience? Abroad, I get from €3,000 to €5,000 a performance, depending on the opera house. In Britain, where fees are historically low, I get about half that, again depending on the house. That's for a small role. Note for note, I'm doing pretty well. When I first sang at Covent Garden in 1984, I was paid £145 per performance. That's now the equivalent of £395, so the internet tells me. At the time, it seemed pretty good. It did seem like a bonus, especially as I'd just been working at Sadler's Wells singing a lead role for a paltry £90 a week, which was just £5 a week more than the chorus.

I should spell out some home truths. First and foremost, the very nature of opera means that we don't sing that many shows in a year. An in-demand singer might do 40 performances or so, but that could be pushing it. Long rehearsal periods, for which it is extremely rare to be paid anything at all, as well as essential rest gaps between shows mean that doing any more is well-nigh impossible. I haven't had 40 shows in a year for quite a while, and certainly not at my top fee.

More crucially, these fees are gross fees and after we've paid foreign taxes (which are taken straight off the gross fee, often at the rate of 30 per cent; in New York it is 36 per cent), agents (there goes another 10 to 17.5 per cent), landlords (we usually have to pay for our digs), airfares, union dues (compulsory in the USA), accountants, vocal coaches and all the usual paraphernalia of running a small business, we're lucky to walk away with 50 per cent. A famous soprano once told me that she had so many people on her payroll that she rarely netted more than 25 per cent of her fees. Apply that to a £10,000 fee and it doesn't look so whopping anymore. We're not singers strutting around there on stage, we're a veritable small business park that's bawling high notes.

If an opera singer misses a performance through illness or even a strike - so through no fault of his own - he doesn't get paid one penny. But a lot of the constant expenses (the costs of doing business in a foreign city) still remain in place. And of course, every sensible singer is saving for the day they can't sing any more, and who knows with any certainty when that day will come? Then there are the rogue employers who fail to pay up. Rome Opera has been taking over three months to pay its singers, often longer, after they've finished the job and left the city. (Italy is the only country where I was never paid, for three concerts, and it looks like it is slipping back into its bad old ways.)

At the end of the year the so-called star diva, whom you imagine is bedecked in fur coats and Rolex watches, living in a gilded apartment, is probably taking home less than an NHS GP or a country solicitor. The middling singer would probably be financially better off as a teacher or truck driver. So, if anyone reading this is thinking of having a go at being a singer just for the money, I suggest you think again. Try conducting, where the fees are much higher, the necessity to turn up to rehearsals is less rigorous, the obligation to learn the score in advance is lightly understood and the inability to play an instrument or sing a note, or even to be able to beat in time, is not a barrier to advancement.

Or become a stagehand. At the Met you could earn over half a million dollars a year...

Excuse me while I get myself a toolkit and a donut.

Chances are you're reading this after a night when you've drunk far, far too much, danced the conga with your co-workers, and photocopied your bottom on the office copier. In case you hadn't noticed, Christmas is coming. It's party season.

It's also one of the busiest times of the year for professional musicians. There are more Messiahs and carol concerts in the musical diary than fainting grannies at an André Rieu concert.

Christmas poses a dilemma for the sociable singer - and by and large we are a fun-loving bunch: how to mix all that work with the desire to have fun? Booze, talking over noise, and lack of sleep are a singer's worst enemies. The vocal cords, delicate at the best of times, are under bombardment at Christmas parties. Alcohol dehydrates the delicate membranes, thickening the vocal cords, and staying up late, glugging a glass too many of Bulgarian merlot while yacking loudly over Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everybody' will shift your voice from having the agility of Olga Korbut to the grace of Nellie The Elephant.

My Messiah days are probably over - it's not a piece that they generally ask an old lag like me to sing - but when I was young I did loads of them. I'd like to use this organ to apologise to the good people of Hartford for my part in their 1978 performance. After a friend's 21st birthday party, followed by a drive from Guildford in the back seat of a car that didn't actually have a back seat, I was very tired. Which is why I nodded off in the concert during Part 3, in full view of the audience, waking with a start as my vocal score started to slide off my lap. I've always hoped I got away with it but as the choral society never asked me back, I can't be too sure.

A few weeks later it was Christmas Eve. I was in my last year as a tenor in the King's College Choir, and after the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols the men of the choir had to sing Midnight Mass. It was always a lovely service, made all the lovelier by a good dinner the College threw on for us beforehand. We were in a celebratory mood, with the stress of the broadcast carol service behind us, and to add to the jollity there was a long tradition of playing balloon netball - 'The Balloon Game' as it was called - in the College Hall after dinner. If you've had a few glasses of claret, running around, whacking a balloon over a high net is destined to help the wine circulate in a particularly perky way.

This particular Christmas Eve it was one of the basses who felt the effects, acutely, mid-way through the Mass. In a quiet moment he suddenly blurted out something utterly incomprehensible ('blaurgh di flafa madderlic' is a close reconstruction) and keeled over in a neat arc, before slumping open-mouthed into his stall, thus proving effectively, once and for all, that celebrating Christmas and celebrating Christmas don't always go well together.

We sent Christopher Gillett on a mission to pair up fine wine and fine music. He found inspiration in a most unlikely place - the Glasgow home of his redoutable Aunt Dodo - who turns out to have a prize-winning palate.

My aunt, Dorothy Anne, or Dodo as she is always known, is seriously knowledgeable about wine. In 1971 she was the Daily Telegraph's ‘Lady Wine Taster Of The Year'. Her husband Graham is equally enthusiastic, and over the years they've acquired and drunk an extraordinary range of wines, most of which they've bought direct from the growers, rolling up in their tatty little Peugeot, a copy of Le Guide Hachette des Vins under the seat, the boot stuffed with cases acquired from little-known vineyards.

As it happens they are music-lovers too. So, given this perfect excuse, I flew to Glasgow and spent two days tasting wines, discussing pieces of music and investigating Dodo's suggestions online. This is the result of my selfless and exhaustive research. There is no science to matching wines with music. Most of the suggestions are based on reflex and instinct. The music isn't chosen to mirror the wine, or vice versa, but to balance or complement it. Is this an unrecognised form of synesthesia, drinking wine and hearing music? Dodo taught me a long time ago not to drink sweet wine with pudding. All that sugar is too much. It's far better to serve so-called ‘dessert wine' with a rich, fatty appetiser such as foie gras or pâté. And that, generally, is the approach I've taken here.

Somellier Christopher's recommendations for wine and music pairings:

 
Red

Torre di Falco, Nero di Troia with Handel : Any Concerto di Grosso, opus 3 or opus 6 but if I have to pick one: opus 3, no 2 in Bb. HWV313

I was singing in Bari a few years ago and Nero di Troia was served everywhere, including at a farming co-op's little store near my digs, where they would fill your bottle from a steel tank. Grown almost exclusively in Puglia, Nero di Troia produces an earthy, rich, fruity red and I love it. It was almost impossible to find outside of Puglia, especially in Britain, and then Waitrose started selling some. It's not sophisticated but it's delicious, and a bargain. More interesting than the now-ubiquitous Primitivo. Pairing this wine with Handel is purely for my own enjoyment. I love Handel's Concerti Grossi, which I find complex yet thrilling. Same too for the wine. It's a no-brainer.

Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon with JS Bach : solo cello suite No. 1

This was Aunty Dodo's pairing. I've singled out one Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon but really the important thing is the grape, and Chile will give you the best value for money at the moment. Hunt around. The point was to pair a big, classic, red wine with a piece of music that is small in scale yet big in body. The first undulating movement even sounds like wine being slowly poured into a big glass. Can any musical instrument sound more like a rich red? I agree with Dodo; it's a perfect combination.

Côtes du Rhone, 2010 E. Guigal with Haydn : Symphony 104, London.

I'll come clean. I like my reds big. Call me a philistine but, unlike Paul Giamatti's character in the film Sideways, I actually prefer Merlot to Pinot Noir. This is a Syrah/Grenache and it's full of flavour. I think this should go with some Haydn, which is not heavy but certainly robust enough to take the weight of the wine... like some delicious lamb chops. People make the mistake of writing Haydn off as a jobbing lightweight, but the his symphonies combine brilliant classicism with startling ingenuity, ebullience with deep sincerity.

Vina del Portillo, Navarra 2002 with Mendelssohn : Piano duet, opus 92

We drank this one over a classic Scottish lunch of mutton pie and baked beans. It's quite lean, oaky and leathery but as soon as I tasted it I said, with typical pretentiousness, 'Mendelssohn chamber music!' Oddly, I had no idea that my Uncle Graham's great-grandfather was a minor composer, Emil Steinkühler, who, as it happens, was a friend of Mendelssohn's. So that sealed it. Navarra is a neighbour of the pricier Rioja region, so if you can't get any Navarra a Rioja will have to do. Stick with the Mendelssohn thoug

Rosé

Foncaussade Parcelles, Bergerac with Berlioz : Harold in Italy

There's a lot of duff Rosé out there. Dodo reckons Bergerac produces the best, though it's tricky to find outside the region. I've tracked one down and I'm matching it with Berlioz, partly because Bergerac-Berlioz has a certain ring, but mainly because it seems like a good combination. There's heat in the music that the chilled wine will quench. As you glug it down, imagine yourself as the solo viola, Byron's Childe Harold, on your romantic adventures through Italy, sometimes melancholic, sometimes frenzied. It's the sort of piece for which neither a white nor a red will fit the bill, so a good rosé is perfect.

White

Villa Maria Riesling, 2012, NZ with Rameau : Suite from Dardanus

For good value, quality white wines, New Zealand has to be the destination. I'm not a great fan of Chardonnay so I'm not listing any. (It's my column….) We've gone for a Riesling with a bit of fruity zest and I think that Rameau will keep it good company. Rameau deserves more listeners. His operas can often seem incomprehensible so this suite is a good place to sample his limpid melodies and quirky counterpoint. It's an unfamiliar soundscape and the Riesling will help you through. Some of his dances reduce me to tears. They sound like forgiveness.

Quincy 2012 Jean-Charles Borgnat with Stravinsky : Pulcinella Suite

We were after a Sauvignon Blanc and this is exceptional. A less famous appellation than Sancerre, but equally good. I'm not going to do that thing where you try and describe the wine using all the adjectives that you'd normally expect to find in a Mills & Boon novel. Just trust me. Or, rather, trust my expert aunt. To me it has a vitality that made me think of neoclassical Stravinsky, vibrant like a freshly restored Raphael painting.

Chateau Les Sablines, Monbazillac, 2010 with R Strauss : Der Rosenkavalier

A sweet wine to rival Sauternes. And, again, another happy coincidence as I'm singing in a new production of Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne this coming summer. This was Dodo's choice. Her reasoning was that the rich, sweet wine with its hints of 'noble rot' would be perfect for the poignant scene in which the ageing Marschallin says goodbye to her young lover, Octavian. It all depends if you find Strauss's music sweet like apricot jam or rich like foie gras. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Once you've tasted the sweetness emerging from the shrivelling, botrytised – there had to be an occasion to use that word – grapes, you'll see this combination is a winner.

Champagne, Nicolas Feuilatte 2006 with Janacek : Cunning Little Vixen Suite

This is the one higher-priced bottle I was allowed to select. Dodo suggested vintage Champagne and this is the best bet for the price limit. She urges you to eat food with it, just nibbles of some sort, rather than on its own. It's the French way. We both liked the idea of Janacek, the old, vintage composer who was obsessed with a sparkling young woman. Dodo wanted the Kreutzer Sonata string quartet but I've plumped instead for the Cunning Little Vixen suite. You could listen to the whole opera but you'd never make the bottle last long enough.

Port

 Quinta do Noval, late bottled with Elgar : 1st Symphony

Not really a proper vintage port but good nonetheless. Port and Elgar, like Spotted Dick and Custard, Lord's Cricket Ground and red trousers: made for each other. If you're not openly blubbing at the glorious return of the main theme in the strings during the last movement I'll eat my very English hat.

Only someone banged up without many rights in a Siberian prison can have missed the news about protests at recent concerts conducted by the LSO's chief conductor Valery Gergiev. Arguments rage about whether a classical concert is a suitable place to make a political protest. Personally I find it interesting that the debate focuses on the behaviour of the audience. No one seems to wonder what the orchestral players on stage with the controversial conductor think about gay rights in Russia and whether musicians should make a political stand.

I'm not party to the day-to-day conversations taking place at the LSO but I think it would be utterly wrong to assume that by turning up and playing, anyone in the band is nailing their colours to Gergiev's mast when it comes to his political views (whatever those really are). Musicians have a long tradition of soldiering on and doing their jobs, working with people they may secretly and not-so-secretly dislike, or playing works by composers in possession of some despicable beliefs. In Britain at least, political unease in the ranks rarely manifests itself - though it used to in the 1970s when compulsory membership of the Musicians' Union was, for some, a thorny issue.

It can be extremely tricky for performers. We have to work with a lot of people with whom we hold deeply felt disagreements. Where do you draw the line? I once sang with an American baritone who was keen to tell me how many firearms he kept on his boat and how he'd use them to 'protect his property'. It was a conversation I didn't want to have at any time, let alone just before singing the gorgeous sextet in Le Nozze di Figaro. I have worked with misogynists and homophobes. Racists too, I have no doubt. Unfortunately, sublime music doesn't always make for sublime personalities and I would be appalled if by singing with them anyone thought I was supporting their views.

The nearest I ever got to a political protest at work was in the late 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister at the time, came to see Otello at Covent Garden. The cast was asked to stay on stage after the curtain calls to meet her. She was an avowed enemy of public arts funding and I found the idea of fawning on her absolutely abhorrent, so I buggered off before she could come round. I don't suppose the absence of the minor-role Roderigo made the slightest bit of difference to her evening but, for once at least, I knew where to draw the line.

When I started out as a professional singer in the late 1970s, technology played a very small part in my life. At the risk of coming across as a fuddy-duddy (and let's face it by even using that word I could be nailing my colours to the mast), the only fancy equipment a singer craved back then was an answering machine, and even that was pretty damned cutting-edge. If you had an answering machine you were one step ahead of the pack. Now we all have the internet.

A few days ago, as my wife and I sat guzzling cake in Vienna's delightfully retro Café Prückel, a couple nearby tapped at their laptops and fiddled with their smartphones. Perhaps I was set off by the faded decor - about the same age as me, I reckon - but I postulated to my ever-patient Mrs whether it would be possible for a singer these days to eschew the internet altogether. The answer was, of course, 'no'.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite. I'm a complete and utter social-media tart. I spend hours on the internet every day. I understand entirely its place in the modern world. I would hardly be writing this if I didn't. But now there's a whole new thing the internet has dumped upon the jobbing singer: live streaming.

Last week I was visited in my dressing room by someone from the Theater an der Wien's management. She clutched a contract to live stream one of our performances of A Harlot's Progress, and for various possible spin-offs like a DVD. This might all seem terribly exciting and financially rewarding but there's actually no extra fee for this particular live stream, so we can nip any idea of massive financial gain in the bud, thank you very much. While I'm mostly thrilled that our show can reach a wider audience and people who can't make it to Vienna can see our work in some shape or form, I do have moments - as I did while spooning Café Prückel's Strudel mit Vanillesoße into my capacious gob - when I would like to set the clock back to a fuddier-duddier age.

I like to think of a simpler time when a troupe of singers descended upon, say, some small Italian town and played Le nozze di Figaro to a local audience. Eight hundred punters and a dog or two. No tweeters, bloggers or online critics from whose every word thousands of worldwide opera enthusiasts draw their own conclusions to be further disseminated over the web; just a group of people who have bought a ticket and showed up, hungry for entertainment, thirsty for great music, and filled with the yearning to be transported into a different, alternative world for a few hours. Back then, the show was done purely for the people inside the theatre. Back then, the only people you had to 'sell' your performance to were the paying punters. These days nearly every opera I do comes with a media package attached. I can barely remember the last opera I did where the stage wasn't bristling with microphones and TV cameras. And who am I performing for? The people in the stalls in Vienna or some opera fans in California who are still eating breakfast while watching the show on an iPad?

I understand exactly why live streaming is becoming all the rage. In an age when we have to spend more and more of our time as artists marketing ourselves, dare I say it branding ourselves (ugh), anyone who doesn't keep up with the latest media trends runs the risk of falling off the map. As people sit at home in front of their computers watching our live stream, they will be unfettered by the usual constraints of an opera house. They can eat, drink and chat. They don't even have to listen that hard or stay to the end.

Above all they can open their Twitter accounts and give a running commentary on our performance. They can spread the word. All over the world.

Now if that doesn't make me want to jump on a rattling old tram back to the fading Café Prückel and order a huge slab of good old-fashioned Sachertorte I don't know what does.

Last night I sang in a world premiere in Vienna: Iain Bell's A Harlot's Progress, starring the incredible and delightful Diana Damrau and four of the loveliest cast-mates it has ever been my privilege to work with. It was what the papers like to call "a glittering occasion", the audience stuffed to the rafters with Europe's operatic senior management, the air thick with expensive perfume and high expectations. It was terrifying and thrilling in equal measure.

I've been trying to figure out if there's a particular pressure, singing a world premiere rather than a new production of a standard repertoire piece and because I haven't reached a conclusion, I think it's safest to say it's just different. Yes, there is the responsibility of creating a new work, of delivering what the composer and librettist want, of selling an unfamiliar piece to an audience that hasn't come simply to hear their favourite arias; but on the plus side, there are no expectations to meet. There's no previous incumbent of your role with a performance to rival your own, no inner voice which says to you as you go for the high note: "your top C isn't as good as Pavarotti's and it never will be".

Mind you, I found myself with other things to worry about. Two weeks before we opened I came down with a cold. No big deal, plenty of time to recover. Besides, we had already done four weeks of rehearsal and everything was in good shape. The rule at the Theater an der Wien is extremely civilised and one which should be adopted the world over. You are sent to see a doctor (I was sent to a very good ENT specialist) and his prognosis and his alone decides when you return to rehearsal. The specialist said I needed three clear days to recover, so the theatre didn't call me for any rehearsals during that time. No-one tried to guilt

me into coming back sooner. This is so sensible; for one reason it avoids the risk of someone returning to work too soon and infecting everyone else. And just as well, as on this show we don't have understudies. If anyone goes ill, there's no-one else on the planet who knows our roles.

The ENT gave me various drugs and potions, I went back to work as planned and one week after starting the cold I was back in full voice. Hurrah! But then something very strange happened. It turned out that I was allergic to one of the drugs I'd been prescribed and my entire body, except my face and hands, developed an angry rash that was itchy and unsightly. This would pose a problem not only for my personal comfort but for the show, as I have two scenes in which I drop my trousers and there's only so much you can expect an audience to put up with. The costume department tried to spare my blushes by kitting me out with some long johns but an accidental flash of my midriff during rehearsal one day undoubtedly put a dent in the sales of lunch at the theatre canteen.

I was sent to hospital and prescribed a course of steroids and anti-histamines. Both of these are worrisome for a singer as they play havoc with your breathing and muscle control, and can even cause you catastrophic damage. But needs must, I took the drugs. (Only, it turned out, the rather young assistant at the fancy pharmacy which dispensed my prescription gave me the wrong medicine and it was two days later, with the premiere now only three days away, that I found out I had actually been ingesting an ulcer treatment rather than cortisone. And no, I wasn't very pleased.)

In the course of the final week I made three visits to hospital between rehearsals. My body came through in the nick of time and by the first night I was drug-free and able to reveal my legs once more.

If I'd been singing a standard repertoire piece, the theatre might have called in a replacement. But since it was a world premiere, no-one had any choice but to cross their fingers and hope wildly that I'd get better. And that's the thing about world premieres; they're just so exciting, but not always for the obvious reasons.

It's a beautiful, bright, sunny day in Vienna. The sort of day when you'd like to wander the streets, visit a gallery and palace or two and end the day tucking into yet another Wiener Schnitzel and a few glasses of local wine at a jolly restaurant. And that's how I guess you imagine we opera singers spend our days in the many glamorous cities we get to work in.

Well, my day - it's Saturday - is pretty typical of how it really is for 99 per cent of my profession, and it isn't like that at all. But I'll get to that in a moment.

I've been in Vienna for five weeks so far. The Theater and der Wien has no large rehearsal space on its premises, so every day we've travelled by U-bahn and tram to a pre-war film studio out in the suburbs, and after every day's work we've journeyed back into the city and gone back to our separate digs and our separate lives. In five weeks I've dined out just four times, three of those times at the end of the working week on a Saturday night (for opera singers work a six day week). The truth is that going out in the evenings is simply far too exhausting, and talking above the hubbub of a popular restaurant is a killer to your voice. We're not being paid to party after all, we're being paid to sing.

The commonly asked questions on Facebook by singers are not 'where shall I eat' or 'good bars in Copenhagen?' but 'how can I watch British telly on my computer when I'm abroad?' or 'does anyone know any cheap digs in Berlin?'. We may work in gilded opera houses but we spend most evenings unwinding with soap operas and our digs are anything but fancy. My essential needs are met by good WiFi and a washing machine. Anything more than that is a bonus. I found my digs here on AirB&B and they are certainly not luxurious; an old apartment filled with IKEA furniture and a bizarre three-ringed stove. It's fine and it fits my budget. (By the way, I reckon, from experience of digs around the globe, that 90 per cent of the world's books are sitting on Billy bookshelves. Thought you should know, next time you're buying bookcases.)

So my Saturday looks like this (this week Saturday is our free day as we're working tomorrow):

1. Get up late.

2. Dose up against the back end of the cold I'm battling.

3. Buy groceries from Lidl (which they call Hofer here) a few doors from my apartment.

4. Do laundry.

5. Write this.

6. Go back to bed and listen to Radio 4 all day on iPlayer.

7. Cook dinner and watch a movie on my iPad.

8. Go back to bed.

Thrilling stuff, eh? In the next six days I have six orchestral rehearsals and three dress rehearsals. I'd be mad to do anything else.

We've been together, Sinfini, you and I, for almost a year now. It's really about time we talked about sex.

If you were raised, as I was, on a diet of Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, your mind was probably engraved with the idea that opera singers are all like the diva Bianca Castafiore - large, batty, very loud, doomed to sing nothing but the Jewel Song from Gounod's Faust, and as sexually appealing as a tin of pilchards. Not only that, in a film, perhaps, whenever there was a bit of opera, physical contact between two singers - assuming there was any at all and they're weren't just bellowing sweet nothings across a vast and empty stage - was usually depicted as if lovers in opera don't so much as embrace as arm-wrestle at a safe distance, while wearing massive costumes and even more massive wigs. Well, it isn't like that.

Oh, OK, it's sometimes like that, in the sort of opera that a lot of people think is the only sort of opera - that is, most of the stuff that was written in the staggeringly prudish 19th century.

Step either side of the 19th century and opera is absolutely stuffed with sex. One of the very first operas, Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, is heaving with it, Mozart's Da Ponte operas (Don Giovanni, Figaro and Così) are about little else and even Verdi hinted at it by writing an opera (albeit rather coyly in my opinion), La traviata, about a high-class call-girl. Seventy years later, once the 20th century turned up and Victorian sensibilities had waned, it was back to rumpy-pumpy around the clock. If you don't believe me, take a look at half of the operas by Richard Strauss.

In my first ever opera role - Nero in The Coronation of Poppea at the tender age of 19 - I was half-naked, thrashing around in bed with a half-naked soprano. I'm still at it, in a new opera - A Harlot's Progress by Iain Bell and Peter Ackroyd - which I'm rehearsing in Vienna, in which I have a full sex scene with furious, orchestrated humping topped by an impressive orgasm (though I say it myself, who probably shouldn't). In the 36 years since Nero, I've cross-dressed, been gay, bisexual and incestuous, played paedophiles and perverts, danced around the stage with a sex doll, watched writhing strippers, and (as readers of my book Who's My Bottom? will be all too aware) I've had sex with a soprano via the rear end of a horse.

Amazingly, I've never had to be totally naked, which is a blessing for all concerned.

Tintin's creator, Hergé, hated opera. If he knew what it was really like, Bianca Castafiore would have been chasing Captain Haddock around the piano, dressed only in fishnet stockings and wielding a whip. Now there's a comic book for boys that would fly off the shelves.

Socks, dark - 6 pairs Underpants, plain – 6 pairs Vests, white – 6

It's that time of year again. Autumn is coming and I'm packing. Packing to go away. I suppose everyone has this feeling in early September. The summer holidays are nearly over; time to go back to school.

Trousers, various – 3 pairs

Where have the last two months gone? What have I done? I certainly didn't sit on a beach or laze by a pool at a Spanish hotel. I rarely seem to 'do' holidays in the conventional sense. There's always something that needs to be done, much like there always used to be a school Holiday Reading List of worthy books, most of which never got read; something I used to fib about once term started. It's not so easy, though, to be blasé about a new role that starts the new season. Can't bullshit about that.

Shoes, formal – 1 pair

At school, whenever I was set the inevitable English essay to write, ‘What I did during my holidays', I would chew my pen and stare at the wall for an eternity before finding anything to say. I'd do much the same today. I seemed to be busy all the time but I just can't remember actually doing anything.

Shoes, informal – 2 pairs

When I have done ‘proper' holidays, I've often found myself having to do some singing – unbelievably tedious vocal exercises and scales, usually in the shower – just to keep myself in shape. You tend to feel like a social pariah, belting out some Berlioz in a Benidorm hotel, but the singer's trick of practising an aria while you hold a pillow over your mouth will at least prevent the rest of the hotel from breaking the door down and holding the pillow for you.

Pyjamas - 1 pair

Sunbathing, holiday overindulgence and singing do not go well together, especially if you've got to work within a couple of days of getting home. You'd probably rather not sing at all. It's just a good idea to keep the engine ticking over while you're away; which rather defeats the whole object of the exercise - having a holiday - in the first place.

Jacket, casual – 1

The other problem with holidays is that there's a good chance you've spent much of the year away. All you want to do during a break from work is to potter about in your own home, fixing the dripping tap in the bathroom or painting a child's bedroom.

Suit, formal – 1

Besides, there is always something else needing your attention – taxes or some other thrilling piece of administration. And then there's always that learning. Much like the English teacher's reading list, there's the pile of music to be studied and memorised. There's only so much you can cram in, in a state of panic, during the last week before term starts. No, to do it properly, you really have to spend months learning a new role.

Penknife, Swiss – 1

That's it though. Too late now. Term is about to start and we'll see how well I've done with the Holiday Reading List.

Raincoat – 1

Unlike school, I'm looking forward to getting back to work. I just wish I could remember what I've done all summer.

Toiletries – toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo…

Many things baffle me - the allure of liquorice, the Duckworth-Lewis Method, bra hooks, the plot of the first Mission Impossible film, to name but a few - but few things baffle me more than the habit of booing at the opera. Now, given that I'm a tenor, bafflement comes easily, but this one has really got me in knots.

As far as I can tell, audiences only boo in two forms of theatre: opera and the panto. But these are also two different forms of booing. The tradition of booing a performer that you don't like surely goes back to the days of the claque, probably beyond, when theatre-going was generally a rowdier experience. Back then it was as common to hear booing at a play as it was at the opera. So why did straight theatre give up a practice that remains strong in the opera house? I've shared the stage with very fine singers in very fine opera houses whose performance didn't match the expectation of some vocal members of the audience and it's a shocking and crushing experience to hear your colleagues booed. I've sat in theatres and watched some truly awful performances in plays, the only dissent being expressed by unenthusiastic applause or the sound of emptying seats. Never, ever, boos.

The other form of booing, panto-booing, is an altogether different beast with its roots in commedia dell'arte. It's about audience participation. Fine, I get that. But why has it become commonplace at the opera to hear evil characters greeted with panto-boos at the curtain calls? It doesn't happen in straight theatre. It would be shocking to hear Rory Kinnear's Iago at the National Theatre being greeted with panto-booing when Kinnear, not Iago, takes his bow. It would be thought to be crass. Yet every time a tenor who has worked his tits off singing Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly steps forward for his curtain call, you can bet that he'll be greeted by the tell-tale low groan of panto-booing. It makes no sense.

It's not as if panto-booing is limited to England. It happened to me once in Amsterdam and it's common enough in America where very few people have even heard of panto (except possibly as some patented device for keeping the crease in your trousers: ‘Pant-O! For pants that really get the job done!') and those few that have, think it's just plain weird.

I was peeved to hear that just the other day, at the first night of Glyndebourne's Billy Budd, mixed in with the rousing cheers for Brindley Sherratt there were some panto-boos, aimed entirely at his character, the villainous Claggart. It turns out that I was more peeved than Brin, who said he didn't mind; though it should also be remembered that Brin is a genial bass and not a neurotic tenor, psyches as far removed as the Dalai Lama and Norman Tebbit, so this may be a considerable factor in his attitude. Likewise another great British bass, Clive Bayley, defends the right of an audience to react in any way it likes, and rather enjoys being panto-booed as Claggart.

But none of that makes any difference. It still doesn't explain why audiences show a completely different level of respect in the theatre than they do in the (supposedly) more refined opera house; why the gloves are resolutely on in the one yet the fists are freely exposed in the other. It's one of those baffling mysteries. Like Justin Bieber. Or why anyone would put pineapple on a pizza.

Performers argue a lot about whether or not we should read reviews. I've haven't yet met a singer who doesn't; perhaps not straight away, but at some time or other. Even if you try to avoid reviews, there'll always be some bright spark who's only too happy to thrust them in front of your face, particularly the bad ones.

From September we needn't bother looking in the Independent On Sunday any more, as the paper is reportedly axing all its arts reviews and replacing them with a digest of what critics from other papers have written. This seems like an odd thing to do for a major newspaper, tantamount to admitting it has no opinion of its own since it's quite happy to poach everyone else's.

I can't say I'm surprised; we've seen this coming. Over the years, the column inches given to reviewing classical music have shrunk like a diva's boil-washed ballgown. Open a 30-year-old broadsheet and you'll find entire half-pages devoted to reviewing new opera productions. These days you'll be glad of five paragraphs and a photo. As a singer you'll be lucky to get a mention, spoiled by more than a few words. All those weeks of rehearsal, the challenge of singing a long and fiendishly difficult role, rewarded simply by a single-word description in the paper: ‘So-and-so was an earnest Ferrando.'

You might think that performers would be enjoying a fat helping of schadenfreude with an extra portion of gloat on the side, seeing critics lose their jobs. ‘Haha! Serves them right. A taste of their own medicine, etc etc...' but I certainly am not.

I'll admit, over the years there have been one or two critics I'd have happily nudged in front of a bus, but much as we moan about them - and boy, do we moan - their gradual disappearance sets lots of alarm bells ringing. Our greatest fear isn't that we won't get our name in the papers; it is that our art form will be further sidelined, pushed entirely into the wings by popular culture. 

Popular culture is all very well, but it is usually driven by forces other than the pursuit of quality. Without critics to keep a beady eye on them, the ‘arts' that succeed will simply be the ones that splurge the most on the dark forces of Public Relations, whose so-called ‘features' garner the most readers for the paper, and if the Independent on Sunday thinks that I, for one, am going to bother to buy a newspaper that simply regurgitates marketing puff as arts news, then it can kiss my wrinkly old backside.

This Sinfini blog caused a rumpus, mostly because, I believe, people didn’t read it properly. I’ll just say this: I have absolutely no influence on ticketing policy at the Proms, I’m a regular user of Head & Shoulders on my middle-aged, thinning hair, I carry stuff around in plastic bags, and I sometimes hope safari jackets might come back into fashion.

I suppose most people reading this will have been to a BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. I used to prom a lot when I was a student. I lived within walking distance and, bored off my nadgers during the holidays, I would wander over to the hall and hear just about anything that appealed, usually from the Gallery as there was no way I was going to spend hours queuing for the more popular Arena. As a wannabe singer, I would often wonder what it would be like to sing in that vast hall, with its huge audience

and dodgy acoustics. Nerve-racking, I imagined. Back then, prommers wore student clothing of the era - safari jackets and bell-bottoms - and we had longish, lank hair, centre-parted and festooned with dandruff. We carried all our stuff - copies of Gramophone and miniature scores of Havergal Brian symphonies - in plastic carrier bags.

Apart from a single appearance in the Glyndebourne Chorus I then gave the Proms a wide berth for many years. In 1995 I took my American wife-to-be, Lucy, to hear her first Prom and we decided to try for the Arena. I'd given Lucy the full hype on the Proms, lauding their music-for-all idealism and telling her to expect a jolly, youthful crowd. If only that had turned out to be true. Almost 20 years since my last visit, there again were the same safari jackets, albeit over bulkier girths, and the centre partings had expanded into follicular deserts, dusted with even more dandruff. Even the plastic bags looked the same. Sadly, the season ticket holders were rude and bossy, imagining themselves to have some authority over those of us who had come for the solitary evening. And the famous prommer jokes hadn't changed one bit. What once seemed fresh and witty now struck me as tired and strained.

A couple of years later I finally sang in my first Prom as a soloist (and yes, it was as terrifying as I had imagined), and I've done so several times since. It's a strange thing: as you age yourself, policemen really do get much younger but prommers seem to get much, much older. Where are all the fresh youngsters whose photos the BBC likes to vaunt as the typical prommer? Oh, they're several rows back, their behaviour closely scrutinised, not by the hall's own stewards but by the fearsome people occupying their daily spots by the front rail, who imagine themselves to be the guardians of proper concert behaviour.

Now, I'm no great fan of any movement that attempts to make concert-going more appealing to the young at the expense of the middle-aged and elderly. Why should the young have everything their own way? But I really think the Proms needs a shake-up, to break the stranglehold the ageing, die-hard prommers now have on this extraordinary festival.

My solution is quite simple: get rid of the season tickets entirely and lower the price of day tickets by 20 per cent. That would open the Arena to everyone and anyone, and it would end the practice of hogging the front rail. Though, I'll admit, if the Proms did lose its hardcore season ticket holders, I'm not sure how many people would actually turn up for some of the grittier late-night Proms that have been been my bread-and-butter as a performer over the years.

Something needs to be done, and if my radical suggestion were to be taken up I fully expect to have a plastic bag full of Havergal Brian and dandruff chucked at me when I'm singing at next year's Proms.

Screaming Russian blondes, dodgy English weather, Pimms, strawberries and cream, the highs, the lows... it's the time of year when a singer's mind focuses on one place. No, not Glyndebourne. Wimbledon.

Opera singers and tennis players have a huge amount in common, but before you struggle with the stereotypical image of some vast Brünnhilde waddling around Centre Court in horned helmet and trainers, I'll tell you why. Oh, too late. Well, I'll carry on anyway.

No matter what anyone thinks about the physique of singers, we are athletes, our particular physical skill relating to various muscles dotted around our bodies. Like professional tennis players we spend a lot of time travelling, spending our days practising and our evenings in hotel rooms, being careful what we eat, resting and watching bad television. We are as susceptible to the foibles of illness and injury. The affections of the crowd can be as fickle; uplifting when we're in favour, crushing when we're not. A top singer's entourage may not include quite as many coaches and physiotherapists as a tennis champion's but it can sometimes get pretty close. The star performers even gets to promote the same expensive watches.

Those similarities are just on the surface. It's inside the brain where it gets really interesting. The difference between, say, the Andy Murray who can never win a Grand Slam title and the Andy Murray who can has, it seems, little to do with his technical ability but more to do with the idea in his head that he can. It's the same with singing opera.

Most people think we sing with our vocal cords when in fact we sing with our heads. The great singers have the ability to focus on how to win the match, no matter what gets thrown at them. In tennis, unlike football or most first-past-the-post sports, the player will inevitably lose games in the course of winning the match. It's the way the sport is designed. The weak player will lose a game and start to think that that's it, they're playing badly, they can't get the serve in or make a decent return. The good player, however, loses a point and moves swiftly onto the next without getting bogged down in a postmortem. It's the hardest and yet the most crucial thing to do.

And so it is with the great singers. They don't let a vocal blip or any disappointment in their own performance weigh upon them. They pick themselves up and move on. It's as thrilling and fascinating to watch as any Grand Slam match.

Me, I've never made it anywhere near the finals. But I keep showing up for the tournaments, making a little progress, some days more than on others, but increasingly ending up in the commentary box for the last week.

Pass me those strawberries, will you?

I turned 55 last week and while that's no great milestone, it did have me rummaging through my pension policies and pondering how many more years I've got left in the singing game. There's no obvious reason why I couldn't squeeze another 20 years out of my tonsils but if truth be told, it's not necessarily down to me.

For a lot of singers the phone simply stops ringing well before they're prepared to call it a day. Others soldier on, the performing bug so powerful, their ambition so undented that they really don't know when to stop. Some even announce their retirement and give loads of positively-final-appearances, only to be lured back on stage for a few comeback performances or two. Or three. Or, ooh, for that fee, four! 'I tried to retire but they keep asking me back!' is the somewhat immodest refrain.

Singers, especially in their early years, spend huge amounts of their life struggling to get a career going and to keep it alive; it's something over which we actually have very little control, so much being governed by luck and the whims of others. Yet, oddly, given that the desire for control is something that figures so strongly in any singer's psyche, retirement - the one thing we really can control - is also the thing that few of us ever want to talk about.

Rather than face the inevitability of getting older, some singers choose to reach for the hair dye and lie about their age. Google and high definition video have probably made the reinvention of one's birth date a tricky practice these days but it used to be common, especially amongst lyric tenors and sopranos. To be

fair, in big opera houses it isn't always easy to tell a singer's age, even from the stalls. A large auditorium will knock a good 10 years off a tenor's years and given he might have brought his birthday closer by another five or so, someone my age can be passing himself as a lithe and lissom 40-year-old.

Personally I'm happy to have acquired a few grey hairs and wrinkles. Having played a plethora of teenagers and girls over the years, and before that, white-haired old men, it makes a refreshing change to play my actual age (and my sex for that matter). Besides, if luck is on my side, I can press many more years yet out of singing the slimy old gits that have now become my stock-in-trade. You never know, it might even stop me reaching for my pension policies for a while longer.

I wrote four consecutive pieces about the Aldeburgh Festival production. Here they all are:

Grimes on the Beach - Day One

It's twenty past six in the morning. I'm on a train to London from my home in Wiltshire for the first day of production rehearsals on an opera, and we're about to stop at Trowbridge. Surprisingly, those last two snippets of information do actually have a connection. The poet George Crabbe - usually associated with Suffolk - was rector of

Trowbridge from 1814 until he died. He's buried there.

Four years before he moved to Wiltshire he wrote a heroic poem, a collection of ‘letters', The Borough. The 22nd letter is called 'Peter Grimes'. As we pull into this scruffy county town, I wonder if Rector Crabbe could ever have imagined that his work would inspire an opera, let alone one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.

It's Britten's Peter Grimes I'm off to rehearse, in a warehouse near Wimbledon. My role is the Rector Horace Adams. Despite my ramblings about Crabbe and the felicity of coincidence, that's not what is really on my mind. The thing that I'm really anxious to know is how on earth we are going to perform Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach. It's Britten's anniversary year and this event is a highlight of the Aldeburgh Festival 2013.

You might think I'd have some idea about this already. I was booked a year ago, and we've already had some music rehearsals, but still I have no idea about anything to do with the production. I'd like to think it's all an elaborate secret but the fact is that, when it comes to opera, the last people who find out the production details – the concept, the design – are the people who have to go on stage and actually make it happen: the singers.

Today is the day we are finally told, and it's always an occasion pregnant with anxiety. I can only guess how the cast of Lyon Opera's recent Fidelio felt when, after they'd prepared themselves to sing a 19th- century opera based in a prison, discovered instead that the director had opted to set it in space with the singers whirring around the stage on Segways. I suspect the cast went straight to the pub after that particular director's introduction.

I'm not anticipating anything like that (though I'm not referring to the pub). My hunch is that the costumes will be conventional but probably not 18th-century. Actually I don't spend much time speculating about what I'll be wearing. It's everything else that intrigues me. Will we be playing in the round? Where exactly on the beach will we be? Will the sea, one of the key players in the opera, be in front of us, or behind us? Where? It's no secret that the orchestra will be pre-recorded, which is in itself the most daunting prospect and far outside the realms of what we usually do. How will that work exactly? How will we hear the orchestra, see the conductor, be heard? What will we use for dressing rooms? Loos? How much is the weather going to affect the process, let alone the performances?

Rehearsing an opera is mostly about reducing the probability that something will go wrong. Old lags like me are well versed in seeing the usual pitfalls and assessing how to deal with them, but I anticipate we're going to have to hone a new set of skills for this production. Patience will probably be at the top of the list.

Anyone who is familiar with Grimes and Aldeburgh has surely stood on that beach and heard Britten's score playing in their head. Heck, sometimes you feel you can hear it coming out of the sea and the stones. To actually, physically make that happen will be an extraordinary thing. Without, I hope, destroying any of mystery of theatre, I'll let you know how we get on along the journey. More immediately I'll let you know what I discover at today's first rehearsal.

All has been revealed. Well, most of it...

I was surprised to see two cows being led into the rehearsal complex this morning, but it turns out they were for a different studio. I don't think our budget runs to cows. Nor to Segways.

I can reveal that the sea will be behind us, as it has to be, really. You can't have the audience gaping at the roofs of Aldeburgh while we on stage get to see the sea. That would never do.

We'll have to time the start of the performances so that it is almost dark by the third scene, the one set in a pub during a storm. And we, as well as the audience, will have to wear lots of warm clothes – the beach, we have been warned, gets very chilly after dark.

The beach at Aldeburgh tends to shape itself into a three-tiered slope and the plan is to build the set on the middle tier with the audience sitting slightly above, on the top tier. (There was a rumour once that we would be doing each scene ‘on location', though I never understood how that could possibly work, the Moot Hall being far too tiny.) So, yes, there will be a set, in essence a 40-metre long, semi-derelict jetty scattered with boats, erected right on the pebbles.

The conductor, Steuart Bedford, will be half-submerged in a hole in the beach, which is, many would argue, the very best place for a conductor. There'll be all sorts of electronic wizardry to help us, and a few lighting and stage effects that will be utterly spectacular if they work. That isn't meant to sound negative; we just have to accept that a lot has to be left to experiment and luck. As Tim Albery, our director, said today: ‘The worst-case scenario is that the weather is too awful to rehearse but perfect on the performance dates.' If that happens, it will be quite terrifying. The beach also has a habit of shifting – quite a lot, as it turns out – so the set may twist itself into interesting shapes.

There will be no wings, just beach for miles and miles, and as for loos, no-one seems to know yet.

And with all this information marinating in our heads, we set about staging the Prologue. ‘Peter Grimes, Peter Grimes!'

Grimes on the Beach - Arriving in Aldeburgh

After three weeks in London, in a stuffy, gloomy rehearsal studio big enough to take only half of the set, the cast of Peter Grimes was ready in more ways than one to hit the beach. On Sunday we checked in to our various digs in Aldeburgh, mine a lovely house in the middle of the High Street which I'm sharing with Stephen Richardson and Henry Waddington (Hobson and Swallow in the opera). Stephen and I shared a house this time last year when singing in Peter Grimes at La Scala and at times I feel like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day, only this time round Stephen has the opportunity to do a lot of fishing, which will make him happy.

I always get excited going to Aldeburgh, so much so that last time I got a speeding ticket and a visit to a Speed Awareness Course. A word of warning on that: Suffolk police put a lot of camera vans on the A12 and near Snape where it's very easy to drift over the limit. I hope no-one spoils their evening at the Festival by rushing to get here.

To any singer who grew up under Britten 's spell - and let's face it, most British singers did - coming to Aldeburgh is a pilgrimage. I first got to sing here when I was just 21. Britten had died two or so years before and Peter Pears was the dominant presence. He made a brief appearance in Alice, the opera I was in at the Jubilee Hall, in a nightgown and cap, reading Lewis Carroll's 'The White Knight's Song'. He was also doing the bit part of Monsieur Triquet in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at Snape Maltings, probably the only time (as the tenor singing Lensky observed) that Triquet has ever taken the final curtain call.

Since then, Aldeburgh has changed as a town. No longer entirely the preserve of retired colonels and their intimidating wives, it has modernised. At the moment it manages to keep a foot in the past and one in the cupcake-loving, latte-drinking present. Amazingly, given the easy supply of fresh fish, no one yet sells sushi. Give it time. Thankfully, you can still buy little wooden boats to sail in the pond by the Moot Hall.

Yesterday, our first day of beach rehearsals, the place was full to bursting point. Fine weather had brought in the bank holiday crowds. The queue outside the fish and chip shop was 60 deep, the ice cream parlour a jam of buggies and impatient toddlers.

While the crowds pottered about in shorts and sandals, the cast of Peter Grimes decked themselves in fleeces, hats, scarves, windbreakers and suntan lotion in order to rehearse on the beach. A brisk south- easterly wind was blowing in off the North Sea and though the sheltered High Street basked in sunshine, we at the water's edge were taking no chances. Wisely too, as it turned out. After a few hours on the beach we all felt as if we had been out at sea all day.

Moving a production from the studio to the stage is a process rather like a classical painter transferring a sketch from his cartoon to the canvas. Certain points are marked out but a degree of rearranging has to be done in order to accommodate the new space, especially when you are trudging over shingle to make an entrance.

The biggest difficulty we are having to overcome at the moment is the amplification. These are early days, but singing with a Madonna mike complete with wind-guard is well outside our comfort zone, and until we are given in-ear foldback (hi-tech hearing aids, to all intents and purposes), we are floundering about (I might as well use as many fishing metaphors as I can) with good old-fashioned loudspeakers parked in front of the stage, our accompaniment a clunky electric piano. From time to time the amplification stops working and we are left high and dry, our mouths working like a freshly-landed cod, no sound making it over the soldiering wind.

Grimes on the Beach - Aldeburgh gets ready

It's been a busy week on Aldeburgh beach. The chorus, made up from the Opera North chorus and students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, joined us for the very first time and what a lovely and utterly professional bunch they are too.

Compared to my last experience in Peter Grimes in Milan, this is utter bliss. I'm trying to imagine La Scala's chorus rehearsing for six hours on an overcast and chilly Suffolk

beach, an easterly wind bringing with it the occasional biting drizzle... well, it simply wouldn't happen. This lot takes it in their stride. Yes, I know most of them live in Leeds and are no strangers to challenging weather but I haven't heard anybody complain. The only surprise was the so-called ‘rake break' that has to be taken every hour, a quick 10-minute respite from standing on a sloping set; though I can't imagine the undulating shingle offers much in the way of relief. But rules are rules.

While we've been working on the beach - what a luxury it is to be living less than a minute from the stage - Steuart Bedford has been at the Snape Maltings rehearsing the Britten-Pears Orchestra. Terribly good and terribly young, they will accompany us in two concerts this weekend, the first of which will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and from which there will also be a CD. Not only that, but they've been recording the entire score, without singers, to accompany us for the beach performances, making it possibly the most complex karaoke tape in musical history. We're in the middle of a session right now, recording the offstage church music for Act Two. I took a bus from Aldeburgh, failing to spot that it also went via Leiston and Knodishall, and only made it to the Maltings five minutes before the red light.

It's a strange experience for the orchestra; they're living with this opera every day, yet they are all due to leave town after the concerts and will never see what we're doing on the beach, let alone hear their own contribution.

The weather has taken a sharp turn for the better in the last few days and the sun is blazing. The easterly wind, though, is still strong and chilly, about Force 6 today. Until that drops or moves to another quarter we'll have to keep wrapping up well. It's like rehearsing an opera on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry. I'm not sure if anybody has actually tried that yet, but I guess it can now only be a matter of time before someone stages Billy Budd on the Pride of Calais.

The town, meanwhile, is gearing itself up for the Festival. A pop-up restaurant will soon be erected on the seafront, bundles of asparagus sit in the delis, the fish-smoker is working overtime and piles of Britten-related books (including mine, fancy that!) are stacked in the bookshop. And with the stench of shameless plugging hanging in the air I must return to the breezy beach to rehearse my aria.

Grimes on the Beach - Performance night

A few years ago l was rehearsing a production of Le nozze di Figaro in Amsterdam and the strapping Texan singing Figaro was not getting on with the diminutive German director, at all. Things came to a head during a stage and piano rehearsal when the the Texan suddenly said: ‘Why don't we go and settle this outside?!' l'd never actually heard anyone say that before, nor had the German director, who just said with

understandable incredulity: ‘You want to fight me?' Thankfully, they never came to blows but l'm trying to imagine what the same Texan would say here in Aldeburgh, given that trying to settle everything outside is the default position. That could be misinterpreted as implying that tempers have been fraying in the final week as we get Britten's Peter Grimes onto the beach, but that's far from true; everyone has remained remarkably cheerful, despite rehearsals that have taken us well beyond bedtime. Well, my bedtime, that is. lt must be a strange experience for the burghers of Aldeburgh, as they stand in their kitchens stirring their cocoa, to hear our director Tim Albery's voice booming all over the town as he delivers production notes over the PA system.

There have been times when the whole undertaking has seemed as bonkers (and as cold) as Scott's expedition to the South Pole, his equipment only a stout tweed suit and a pot of Gentleman's Relish. l suppose that's a terribly English thing. Like test cricket. Who on earth would think that devising a five-day outdoor sporting event was a wise move during an English summer? What planet did whoever dreamt up Grimes on the Beach come from, thinking that putting on an opera a couple of feet from the North Sea

was a good idea? And yet, like Scott and cricket, it's the very folly of the enterprise that gives it such appeal. l have to say, though, that despite the amount l, for one, have banged on about the weather, it is not the thing that has been the biggest challenge. We have lost only one rehearsal to rain.

No, the greatest difficulties we have had to overcome have been electronic. First of these is the amplification, without which the whole thing would be unthinkable. Madonna mics are all very well but even with foam covers they pick up a lot of wind noise, and if the breeze gets above 20 km/h it can sound like we're singing on Piccadilly Circus station. Second, our in-ear-monitors (or lEMs as the techies call them) have been giving us a lot of grief. These are like wearing a Walkman with tight-fitting earbuds; fine if you're just listening to a bit of Britney Spears but distinctly odd when you have to sing. You don't hear the sound of your voice as you usually hear it. You hear it after it has been through your Madonna mic, over Wi-Fi, through a mixing desk and back again. Most of us have taken to using just one earbud, especially as the radio packs have a habit of losing the connection, leaving you hearing nothing at all but a loud hiss and feeling that you are singing your head off but absolutely no sound is coming out.

Our very biggest hurdle has been getting used to the pre-recorded orchestra. After two live concert performances this has been particularly hard. ln a normal opera performance, there is a degree of give- and-take, a running dialogue between stage and pit. Here there is none. Whereas a good conductor will normally accommodate variations in tempo, here he is powerless and his role has been reduced to that of a glorified metronome. ln the pit (quite literally) Steuart Bedford watches video of himself recording the orchestral track and relays the same tempo for us. lf anything is at a speed that is a bit adrift from what we had in mind, tough potatoes, there's nothing that can be done about it.

So what with the noise of wind, the hissing and popping lEMs, the intransigent maestro (through no fault of his own) and his tapes, the complexities of opera singing have been taken to a whole new level. A similar experience, l imagine, would be trying to sing an opera on a plane, while simultaneously watching an inflight movie wearing headphones and explaining to the attendant that you'd like the beef rather than the chicken.

By the time you read this, the curtain (if there were one) will be about to go up on the premiere and it will become the audience's task to decide whether or not the adventure has succeeded, or whether we, like Scott, should have been better off staying indoors.

My abiding memory will be of the dress rehearsal. Waiting, out of the cold, in a hut by the beach, l was watching one of the many TV monitors that relays a view of Steuart. So that we can see him better he wears a heavy, builder's hi-viz jacket, which sits at odds with his somewhat professorial appearance. Act 3 begins with an orchestral Sea lnterlude which, as it is recorded, he doesn't have to conduct. So Steuart took the opportunity to eat a biscuit. While the audience imagined a maestro in tails steering the orchestra through a stunning depiction of the moon on the sea, there Steuart was, on the monitor, looking exactly like an elderly geography teacher out on a field trip, with a finger of shortbread dangling out of his mouth.

How familiar is this scene? You're applying for something online. You've registered with your favourite colour and first pet's name. You've given not only your address but the address where you first lived. You've found and entered your passport number, your mother's maiden name, your bank details and your credit card details. Finally you hit APPLY but your only reward is a page in fierce red: ‘YOU MUST ACCEPT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS!' You hit the Back button to discover all the information you had just

entered has completely disappeared, but there, throbbing in red is a tiny box that you had failed to notice or click.

This is how I imagine the head honchos in the arts feel this week. They have been told by the Culture Secretary that they must stress the economic value, not the artistic value, of the arts in order to secure public funding. Quite apart from the fact that this smacks of advertising spiel (and our Culture Secretary has a background in those dark arts), with its twisted logic that tells me I'll be orgasmically happy if I wash my hair with something that has something loosely to do with fruit in it, I thought that we in the arts have been banging on about the economic benefits of the arts for decades. What did we do wrong? Did we fail to click the box accepting the Terms and Conditions? How many times do we have to keep refreshing the page?

It turns out that I've been stupid, that I thought we were now beyond the idea that the arts represents very good value for money, and that we could accept the idea that the arts was one of the things this country excelled in, that the arts were an essential glue in an ever more disparate society. Aside from the fact that I've yet to meet an artist who didn't want their work to be successful - there's no lack of motivation in the arts world - there is surely something to be said for an approach to life, a responsibility beyond our selfish

selves perhaps, where the first goal isn't merely financial gain. Surely even the greediest capitalist can see that art rarely succeeds where the only motive is profit. In short, do we really want to entrust the arts to accountants? Do we really have to justify the value of the arts with spreadsheets?

My local postwoman in Wiltshire has a boyfriend and he drew up a bucket list. One of the items on the list was ‘Go to an opera'. So for his birthday she bought him a CD of Tosca, they listened to it a lot, then bought £16 tickets to sit in the amphitheatre at Covent Garden. They were absolutely overwhelmed. They loved it. That, Culture Secretary, is the value of public arts funding.

I worked with Colin Davis just twice, first in Peter Grimes with the LSO, and second in The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden, the latter just three years ago, when he was 82.

Like any musician of my generation, I grew up listening to many Davis recordings, be they of Mozart, Berlioz, or Tippett (his brilliant recording of The Midsummer Marriage bringing on something of an epiphany), so when I finally got to meet him, at our first Grimes piano rehearsal, I was utterly terrified. He once had a reputation for fierceness and hot-headedness (not my favourite attributes) but here instead was a beaming, white-haired gent, softly-spoken and self-deprecating. Problems made him giggle rather than fly off the handle. When things went wrong, this didn't lead to soul-searching and recriminations; mistakes to Colin Davis seemed to be a natural function of the human condition. What mattered wasn't what had just happened, but what would happen next. And what mattered above everything was the musi

It seems to me that truly great conductors share the same goal: to get out of the way, to be a conduit rather than a director, to be a conductor only in the same way that copper conducts electricity. Colin Davis was the epitome of this and seemed bemused by the fuss that was made of him. Sometimes, during Figaro, he would stop beating altogether or would appear to gesture out of tempo, as if some new impulse, some new voltage had passed through him and he was simply trying to release it. But underlying

this was the wealth of his experience, the confidence we had in him (and he in us) and the sense that we were communing with something mysterious and wonderful, something greater than the sum of all our parts.

He wasn't chummy or matey – I don't know if he ever learned my name but with the vast number of singers he had worked with, who can blame him? – but he glowed with bonhomie, his face almost permanently creased with a smile. The LSO adored him and his rehearsals were filled with laughter.

During the run of Figaro at Covent Garden, I was sitting in my dressing room during Act 1 when I heard a commotion in the corridor outside. I went and had a look, to see David Syrus, the head of music, running towards the stairs while putting on a bow tie. At the end of the act Colin Davis left the pit and David replaced him for the rest of the show. There had been rumours that Sir Colin's wife Shamsi was unwell, though nothing official had been said and he certainly had kept it to himself. During Act 1 he'd received a message that she was critically ill and he rushed home to be with her. She died that night. The opera house contacted the cast to say that Sir Colin wanted to conduct the next performance, three days later. Erwin Schrott, our Figaro, organised flowers from us all and we did our best to console Sir Colin through our music-making. I can't presume to know what was going on in his head and his heart. My guess is that of all the places he wanted to be, cushioned in Mozart's life-affirming score was a better place than many.

News from Milan that the dress rehearsal of Raskatov's opera A Dog's Heart had to be curtailed – leading to cancellation of the first night, postponed until Saturday - when a 25 kilo stage weight fell and nearly hit two performers has stirred memories of a few close scrapes, though none of them, for me at least, life-threatening.

Standing on a stage, looking up at the hundreds of stage lights hanging on fragile- looking cables inside the fly tower can evoke similar feelings to sitting on a jumbo jet

and wondering if it's right that such a huge piece of metal should be up in the sky. Only with the fly tower you find yourself pondering whether it's a good idea to be standing underneath so much dangerous- looking, dangly ironmongery. So far, like plummeting jumbos, I have been spared stuff falling on my head. Except for rain, which regularly used to drip freely through the roof of the Coliseum and onto the stage below.

The real danger is falling. Not just falling over, which I've managed for unintended comic effect a few times, but falling down trap doors or other holes in the stage. Modern stages owe their design more to aircraft carriers than architects, the surface of the stage moving and sliding to reveal vast chasms beneath. A good stage these days can open up to a depth equal to the height of a house. It can be truly terrifying.

Above the stage, you are rarely allowed to step anywhere that doesn't have a guard rail and if you do, you will be made to wear a harness. This is sharp contrast to the 1980s. When staging Covent Garden's production of Verdi's Otello for the first time, Elijah Moshinsky asked me if I would have a go at jumping off a rather high watch tower, straight down to the floor, before singing my very first line as Roderigo. Eager to please (I was 28) I said I'd give it a go. It felt like jumping from a high-diving board with no water beneath. I hit the ground with a very loud thud, wobbled about for a bit, missed my cue and limped through the rest of the scene while several of my toes turned a deep blue inside my shoes.

Amazingly, nothing was broken but thereafter I jumped off a canon instead.

I was lucky. I've known singers who have fallen in the pit and broken limbs and worst of all, a dancer in Amsterdam who fell off the stage and died. During Turandot in Wembley Arena, I was singing one of the three ministers, Ping, Pang and Pong, with Simon Keenlyside. Simon was unbelievably impressive with the gymnastics he would perform in the show, but it was eventually his undoing. In Act 2 we had to leave the stage by running down some steps and out through the audience. One show, there was a tardy light cue and we couldn't see where we were going. Pong and I (Pang) held back, waiting for some light, but Simon, undaunted, did an extraordinary leap into the black void. It looked fabulous, but he landed badly and fractured his ankle. It didn't stop him finishing the show, which he did by performing his gymnastics on one foot with extravagant hops. It looked brilliant and strange, but he went to hospital, had his leg put in plaster and missed the rest of he run.

While singing an opera based on Alice in Wonderland, I and the entire cast entered a stage that looked like an enormous chess board. Several of the squares doubled as trapdoors that could swivel and open at the press of a button. As we walked on one night, the Red Queen, just in front of me, stepped on a square which hadn't been properly fastened. It swivelled and swallowed her up like a dog swallowing a biscuit, then swivelled shut again. One second she was there, the next she had utterly disappeared, the stage apparently intact. I was in a state of shock. By my reckoning she had plummeted at least two metres. Was she alright? What if she were seriously injured? Shouldn't we stop? Could I ensure I wouldn't stand on the same square? I looked around. I stared at the conductor, willing him to stop the show, but it had all happened so quickly he had no idea she was missing until the moment she was supposed to sing and she didn't.

The show went on, the cast in an unfocussed daze. It wasn't until I left the stage at the end of the scene that I saw her, unhurt but in shock, her voluminous dress having cushioned her fall. On stage it's not what hangs above your head that will probably get you. It's what lies beneath.

I've spent a few decades as a singer and a lot of that time has been spent under the hot gaze of scrutiny. Your early years are spent being constantly examined and auditioned by the zoo-keepers of the musical world before they feel ready to release you into the wild. Eventually you are considered ‘big game' and you become the delicious, juicy target for all kinds of dangerous predators, all too ready to rip the very flesh from your body. I'm not complaining. It's what we signed up for.

Somehow I've managed to keep all my limbs and emerge to the other side, the side where you find yourself peering down the telescopic sights and examining a younger generation of singers. For these days I find myself judging young singers and doing it for a living. Well, for a tiny bit of a modest living. I seem to have become A Member Of The Establishment and it's very strange. Often it is hugely uplifting; like yesterday, for instance.

I was at Oakham School to co-judge their annual English Song Competition. A staggering ONE HUNDRED children, aged from 10 to 18, took part, each of them performing from memory. And they weren't singing show tunes or anything like that. These were proper classical songs from Quilter, Vaughan Williams, Rodney Bennett, Butterworth, Finzi… the list was huge and there were barely any songs I heard more than once.

At the junior end there were little girls squirming with nerves (been there, done that) and boys bursting into puberty at such a speed you could hear their bones growing and their voices breaking. One girl wriggled around so much that I feared she was signalling that she was about to have an accident. The

seniors showed amazing insight and control. The overall winner was simply extraordinary.

Of course, most of the voices are barely formed but we weren't really there to evaluate vocal technique but to judge the singing of songs, and these are two different things. Amongst all the hey nonny noes and boughs hung with blooms there were startling moments of music-making and story-telling. I can't think of anything more pleasing than to hear a young singer get a song. It was marvellous and the day passed in a flash.

There's hope in them thar hills. There really is.

A musician's work is largely governed by the seasons, and so soon after the Christmas mayhem comes another key date in the jobbing muso's calendar: The January Tax Bill and Tax Return. Contrary to what you may expect from reading the newspapers, not all of us live in tax exiles or receive hush-hush 'special expenses' in brown envelopes. Most musicians lead a pretty hand-to-mouth existence, staggering financially from one job to the next, burdened with massive and complex expenses for which we will usually only be compensated months later. It takes a special sort of mind to cope one moment with dissecting the complexities of a Birtwistle score, the next with figuring out if you'll actually be able to claim lunch on your tax return using the Caillebotte v Quinn setaside ('any fair sum for UK victuals while freelancing over five miles from home'). A bit like Birtwistle, I don't really know what that means, but my accountant tells me to use it.

So, in January you'll find most of us not at the piano, practising our notes, but at our desks or kitchen tables, noting our practices. Or quite possibly ferreting around the back of the sofa, desperately hoping we'll find a lost receipt or, even better, some loose cash. Like any other self-employed workers (and most musos are that) the tax bill couldn't come at a worse time. The credit card bills from Christmas are on the doormat, promoters haven't paid you for all those Messiahs (they often wait three months) and you have to put down a large deposit for some digs you're renting in March.

I managed to get my tax return done during the summer, but many will now be fighting their way through stacks of receipts, frantically trying to prepare figures for tetchy accountants, most of whom cannot get a grip on the oddness of a musician's income and expenses. I'm lucky on that score, my accountant being an eccentric who exclusively handles musicians and who, unlike most tax inspectors, actually understands the mind-boggling absurdities of, say, foreign tax credits. On the other hand, he is the accounting equivalent of an early music fanatic, the nearest you can get to 'Authentic Practice' transplanted from the

music world to tax land. He refuses to use any sort of computer, preferring instead an adding machine, and will only communicate by phone or letter. He types my accounts on an old typewriter, using carbon paper. He's brilliant and odd, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

No, I'm feeling pretty smug right now. I'm all sorted tax-wise. Except that I have to do my VAT return in the next few days. Oh, and the US tax year has just ended so I'll have to start preparing my figures for my American accountant.

Frankly, it's amazing that we get any music-making done at all.

The superstar tenor Jonas Kaufman has had some flack recently for refusing to shake the hands of the fans that greet him after a show, lest one of them unwittingly transmit a cold or flu bug. Pavarotti famously sat onstage in Chicago during concert performances of Verdi's Otello with what looked like the entire stock of Walgreens at his elbow. 

The anticipation and avoidance of infection makes up a very large part of a singer's psyche, to the point of hypochondria. It can even induce a more advanced form of bonkersness where the singer, all too aware that cold symptoms can be psychosomatic, tries to convince himself that the best form of prevention is to pretend you don't care at all. That works fine until the moment someone close to you starts sneezing. Then you quickly find yourself squirting First Defence up your nostrils by the pint-full. 

My travelling spongebag rattles with medicines garnered from across the globe, all of which battle some of the symptoms of a bad throat. The conventional offerings in Britain, which "civilians" take, are no good for us. Lemsip and Night Nurse both contain antihistamines, which might clear a blocked nose but will quickly render you voiceless. Any medication that claims to get a "civilian" straight back to work is, frankly, a bloody nuisance as it just encourages highly-infectious cold sufferers to wander the streets when they should be isolated at home, well away from self-employed singers like me, thank you very much. Many of my standby medications come from the USA, where hypochondria is more popular than baseball. 

My wife (also a singer) and I have also bought various steamers and humidifiers in many countries, only to leave them behind for lack of packing space. We now have Humdiflyers, from Australia. A Humidiflyer is a transparently plastic mask, like an oxygen mask, that helps you maintain a good level of humidity when you fly. It also makes you look like a character from a David Lynch movie, but in the battle to sing well that's a small price to pay. 

No, I'm 100% with Jonas Kaufman on this one. It's bad enough running the gauntlet of taking trains or buses, filled as they usually are with barking children and sniffling students for whom a cold is just a mild nuisance. For a singer, a cold is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster and all the hand-sanitizer on the planet will not convince me that touching sick people is a risk worth taking.

I often tell the story of how, when I was rehearsing Otello at Covent Garden in the 1980s, I fell into conversation with Carlos Kleiber about the New Year concert in Vienna which he'd conducted the year before. In spite of his ebullient and extrovert conducting, Kleiber was a shy and self-deprecating man who, it seemed to me, was bemused by all the fuss that was made over him. I'd say he confessed to me, but that might give the impression that he gave a toss about what I thought about it, so I'll simply say that he told me that he didn't really know one Strauss waltz from another: "You know, za problem wiz all zat Strauss is it all sounds za same. I had no idea which piece was which. Zo I put down a downbeat, waited for it to start and then I thought "oh yes, it's zis one, off ve go!" I suspect he was playing me like a violin as I stood there in open-mouthed awe to the man I held, and still hold, to be the greatest conductor I've ever seen and heard. 

I'm trying to imagine today's most successful and famous Strauss-performer, Andre Rieu,  playing me like any sort of violin and though I don't know him, the image is not exactly working for me. 

Two more polar opposites than Rieu and Kleiber, it is hard to imagine. And you could say the same of their Strauss concerts. The rarified atmosphere of the Musikverein, whose audiences don't so much applaud as rattle their jewellery, sits in striking contrast to the vast sports arenas across the globe where Rieu's glitzy, pastel offerings enchant his adoring fans, and whereas to play in Andre Rieu's orchestra the possession of an ample bosom would appear to be something of an advantage, for the Vienna Philharmonic there's no doubt that having breasts of any description is a serious bar to membership.
Take your pick. Not being much of a Strauss fan I find those Viennese concerts as appealing as a barium meal, in which the barium has been replaced by an enormous wedge of cream-topped sacher torte. 

At about 3 o'clock every Christmas Eve l become nervous, edgy and short of breath. This is not from a surfeit of mince pies or the sudden realisation that l've forgotten to buy my wife a Christmas present; it's because the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols

from King's College, Cambridge is about to start. The response is Pavlovian. l can't help it. l was a tenor choral scholar at King's in the late 1970s, singing in three carol services, and so intense was the anticipation of this global event that the anxiety has stuck with me ever since. l've tried ignoring it, finding any excuse to be nowhere near a radio, but it hasn't worked. l still find myself looking at my watch and muttering ‘uh oh, any minute now...'

Things kick off at King's well before Christmas Eve, starting with the Advent carol service in early December which marks the end of the university term. For the next three weeks the choir is on a heavy schedule of services and concerts, sometimes with a recording or two thrown in. There's usually a TV special; my first year we went down to the BBC to record a programme with André Previn and the LSO.

The night before Christmas Eve is when the enormity of the next day comes into focus. A queue starts forming outside King's College. There are very few tickets - it's a service for the city - and most of the congregation is there on a first come, first served basis. By breakfast on the day, the College gate has been opened and the queue is already bigger than the capacity of the Chapel.

There's a rehearsal in the morning and the Organist tests several of the trebles on the opening verse of Once In Royal David's City, which is famously sung as an unaccompanied solo at the start of the service. A soloist is not selected however. The Organist will leave that decision until much later, to prevent a surfeit of nerves.
Other solos are assigned. Traditionally, the adult solos are meted out to choral scholars in their third and final year; the sizeable solos being for baritone in Three Kings and for baritone or tenor in In The Bleak Midwinter. My last year, l'm assigned the latter.

At lunch we have no appetite. We're nervous. We're about to sing for an audience of many, many millions, a little statistic that is bound to pop into your head when it's least welcome. We return to the Chapel and put on our choir robes, the cassocks a bit whiffy from our heavy schedule. Outside it's chilly but we are hot with nerves. The choir processes and stops under the organ loft. The organ improvisation ends on a quiet chord of G major. The Chapel falls silent except for the odd cough and the pounding of our hearts in our chests. We wait. The Organist now decides who will open the proceedings and points at one of the trebles, who steps forward. A red light, visible through the organ loft door, illuminates. An upbeat and the boy starts: ‘Once ln Royal...'

The choir, unaccompanied, joins for the second verse. The acoustic of the Chapel feels odd, muffled by the winter coats of the congregation, who are jammed into every cranny of the glorious building. At the third verse the organ subtly joins, everyone straining to hear if we've stayed perfectly in tune, while we glide into the choir stalls. lt's not until the congregation sings with the fourth verse that the breath comes easier, and when the trebles soar into descant on the last verse, Christmas finally arrives.

It's Messiah time of the year and, in churches around the country, elegantly-dressed quartets of fresh-faced soloists will spend Saturday nights slowly turning blue with cold while choirs of dubious ability do battle with Handel's famous oratorio. Having sung a gazillion of the things, most of them in the first five years of my career, it's a piece I'll probably never sing again, and frankly I'm relieved. Messiah may appear to be a straightforward sing. It lures you into thinking that because of its sheer popularity, but in fact it's a piece which is easy to sing badly. It's a piece you can bluff your way through long before you've properly learned how to sing. It's so difficult to sing really well that I really wish they wouldn't give it to youngsters to sing at all, because I'm not sure it's doing British singing any good.

When young singers are starting out, the thing they want more than anything, more even than food or sex, is work. Meanwhile, all those impoverished choral societies across the land are after cheap soloists, so they turn to the music conservatoires for help. In my day at the RCM there was a stern lady called Viola Tucker (I'll spare you her nickname) whose job it was to designate which students would be given, say, the Tiddlemouth Choral Society's big Christmas concert for which they were prepared to pay the soloists £10 each, rehearsal on the day, with hospitality or "hostility" as it was more commonly known, provided.

I actually sang the tenor solos in Messiah for the first time, long before my stint at the RCM, at the age of 17, in Milford-on-Sea. James Bowman was the alto soloist. Just 21, I sang Messiah From Scratch at the Royal Albert Hall. For that I was paid what I thought was an enormous sum: £60. Though I could get around the solos alright, I don't suppose I was really any good. In fact it wasn't until my 30s that I set about re-learning how to sing Messiah, taking the time I should have given it as a student. Bodging your way through Messiah at an early age leads to a lot of bad, lazy habits, habits which stick, and lures many British singers into singing in a way that might get them through low-grade choral society gigs but which will not be much use for anything else. Besides, no-one actually comes to all those Messiahs to hear and judge the soloists. They're there for their wives and husbands singing in the choir, for the mulled wine in the interval, and to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus.
I was asked the other day by an opera casting director why I thought America produces so many better-trained voices than we do. There are plenty of reasons, but I think one of them is all those freezing performances of Messiah handed out by the likes of Viola Tucker. Just imagine what British singers would be like if every choral society in the land did Verdi's Requiem instead. Then we'd really have to pull our socks up.

While rehearsing Britten's A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Bari three years ago I bumped into our not-very-good Oberon at the train station, his suitcase at his side. He said chokingly that his mother was not well and he was leaving the show to be with her. I did my best to console him, in spite of the excited text message I'd just got from Snout telling me that a Brit counter-tenor was on a plane to Puglia because the Italian one had ‘just been sacked!'

I bring this up because there's a lot of hoo-ha about the replacement of a soprano, by ‘mutual consent', on the eve of the dress rehearsal of the Royal Opera's new Robert le diable. It's something I've witnessed many times. One day, usually with the premiere just a few days away, a singer is audibly struggling with a role, and the next day they've vanished. There's no warning that this will happen, apart from your own gnarled instincts that it might, and there's usually no announcement from anybody higher up the food chain before or after it happens. Hey presto, Singer A is gone, forgotten, and now we have to start all over again with Singer B.

Singers know when we're not doing well enough. Even when we're ill we just hope no-one will notice, but when The Management starts hanging around rehearsals having whispered conversations with the conductor, you can bet that someone is in for the chop. You just hope it's not you, though there's every chance that one day it might well be.

In these circumstances, one singer's loss is another's gain, for a jump-in can be lucrative and exciting, despite the jump-in nightmare being the number one, most commonly-dreamt nightmare among opera singers throughout the world. This is a dream in which you find yourself standing onstage (that's if you can

even find the stage) trying to perform a role you've agreed to sing but which you actually don't know at all. You're just la-la-laaing your way through, say, Rigoletto, ignorant of the tunes or text except for the well- known bits, while a massive audience looks on in stunned silence. You're probably naked to boot.

A jump-in is rarely simple. Once, asked to jump in for a concert in Berlin, I was already busy with my promise to take my daughter and all her stuff back to university in Leeds. I had to make both things work. Up before dawn, I drove her the 250 miles from Somerset to her new digs, carried furniture, boxes and books up four flights of stairs, before driving down to East Midlands Airport to catch a late Ryanair flight to Berlin, where I managed a few hours sleep before my rehearsal first thing the next morning.

And you thought we just lie around on elegant chaises longues waiting for the phone to ring.

In the mid 1980s I sang Hermes in Kent Opera's production of Tippett's King Priam. A very puny 25-year-old, I was given almost nothing to wear, and from Plymouth to Norwich (and eventually on television) I appeared on chilly stages with only a gold nappy and a lot of gold make-up. Every night the poor make- up girl had to paint me from head to toe in a thick coat of gold, except for the middle of my back which was never visible. Small wonder, then, that the James

Bond fans in the orchestra took to calling me Shirley Eaton. Some theatres had miserable washing facilities – Brighton had only a bath that filled at a trickle – so I often travelled home after a show covered in gold from the neck down, my clothes caked with pancake and glitter on the inside.

Back then no-one went to anything called a gym. Gym was something you did at school between Latin and Chemistry. Gym was when you moaned to Sir that you couldn't jump the horse because Cartwright had just given you a dead leg.

Oh my, how things have changed. My pathetic little chest wouldn't pass muster these days. For now we have entered the era of the ‘barihunk'.

I dislike a stereotype as much as the next man but it doesn't seem so very long ago that baritones were podgy, jolly types who liked the pub. Rather too many wore villainous goatee beards and big hair but not many, in my circle at least, were fitness fanatics. Yes, one American baritone did ask me to spray paint over his bald patch before a Carmen, but generally it was we tenors who were considered preening and vain.

Now the competition among baritones doesn't seem to be so much about who can sing the better ‘Largo al factotum' but who can take off their shirt as fast as possible and show off their unnaturally polished pecs. If you don't believe me then just spend a few minutes on the Barihunks website, which is ‘dedicated to any hunk who sings in the baritone and bass/baritone range. Singers must be professional, semi-professional or serious students with real potential.' Potential for what exactly?

Inevitably, there is now a generation spending more time in the gym than in the practice room, and whose ambition seems focused less on achieving success through fine singing and musicianship than being branded as the newest, hottest, low-note stud-monkey.

I bet Tito Gobbi could only bench-press 60 pounds in his day. What a wimp. Hope someone gave him a dead leg.

As a performer, I’ve always worried that the responsibility for whether or not an audience has a good time largely rested on my shoulders. Well, it seems that if I’m singing at the Royal Opera House, I needn’t worry anymore! Apparently concerned that the experience of going to the opera isn’t turning out as well as it should, the ROH is recruiting a HEAD OF VISITOR EXPERIENCE.

Curious to see if the ROH is being turned into a theme park, I looked up what this job entails. The advert says they want someone “to further develop, champion and embed the highest customer service standards across all of our customer-facing departments” and to develop “a set of service delivery targets for all key aspects of customer service.” Being a tenor, the very first thing I noticed was the fee. £50,000. That might seem like peanuts to the many ex-BBC managers in the audience but to the jobbing singer it is an enviable sum to fork out for someone who (as far as I can tell from wading through the gobbledegook) is in charge of the ice-creams, especially when you compare it to what you get paid for actually going out on the ROH stage and singing the opera. I’d apply for the job myself but, despite 30-odd years in the opera business, I’m not qualified. I have no experience of “the delivery of revenue targets, ideally in a large-scale customer-facing sales environment.” Or have I? I have absolutely no idea. I’ve probably spent too much time customer-facing in a musical target environment. 

Still, when ROH punters start receiving nuisance phone-calls asking them to “rate their recent visitor experience” they’ll know to whom to complain. That is if the Head of Visitor Experience hasn’t already climbed the managerial ladder and, terrifyingly, been given an entire opera company to run.