Christina McEwan
PLAYING the violin if you don’t practice enough is torture for someone with perfect pitch, says opera conductor and teacher Kamal Khan, and that’s why he gave up the violin, became a singer, pianist and conductor, and has tremendous respect for all strings players!
Khan will show Capetonians some of those sides when he conducts the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra in the CPO and Cape Town Opera concert Duet at Artscape on Sunday at 6pm, and sings alongside all those he is accompanying, audible to those close to him! Duet is the endowment trust established by the Cape Town Philharmonic and Cape Town Opera, the brainchild of Wendy Ackerman, board member of both companies.
Head of the UCT Opera School at the SA College of Music, Khan is devoted to those he teaches. As an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, he worked with greats like Kiri te Kanawa and Mirella Freni, Domingo and Pavarotti, and learned so much from them including work ethic and ethos that he decided that he needed to be part of the process to replace this generation.
“They had longevity. It’s very meaningful to be able to guide young people at a time of their lives when things can go so wrong, to be able to have a positive impact on their lives.”
One of the lives on which he has had an impact is Pretty Yende. He spent the last six months on sabbatical in New York, and accompanied her in recital at Carnegie Hall and then they went to the Kennedy Centre in Washington.
His commitments in Cape Town keep him from being there to support her in Berlin when she sings Lucia with Deutsche Oper.
Another is Linda Nteleza. Khan and three of his students – Nteleza, Thesele Kemane who is now studying at Juilliard, and Makudopanyane Senoana – were the subject of a PBS-Channel 13 documentary in America, I Live to Sing, which won the 2014 Emmy for best cultural programming. As a result of that, a Chinese composer came across Nteleza on the internet and invited her to sing in a new Ibsen-inspired opera, Nora as a Young Woman. Nteleza made her debut in China in October, and will tour Norway and Sweden in September with it.
On his decision to become a conductor, Khan says: “I found that so often I spent weeks preparing singers, lining up a voice in a specific role, only to have a conductor come along who didn’t know – or maybe care – about how to maximize that singer’s strengths and ruin it all. I would spend the next few weeks building that singer up again and I decided to tackle this from the inside. I took heart from what the great Italian conductor Tullio Serafin once apparently said to Pavarotti: ‘half of your applause is mine!’.”
The Met was a learning curve for him, and he had already studied conducting in Italy. Not only did he work as a rehearsal pianist, but they soon realized he could do more than play the piano and he found himself working alongside conductors like Levine, Thielemann and Marco Armiliato, a conductor like him who went the same opera house route.
Opera is in Khan’s blood but he doesn’t really know how. “My mother was an ardent enthusiast, and every year sang in the amateur Arlington Virginia Symphony Orchestra’s big event with the Fairfax Choral Society. At five, I was accompanying her to the Beethoven Missa Solemnis and fell in love with the violin solo in the Benedictus. My teacher realized I had perfect pitch and suggested I take the piano, as well.”
When he studied for his first degree at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, he accompanied singers to help pay his tuition but more importantly to put towards the $15 it cost him for supper close by and standing room at the Met.
The Duet concert will launch the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and Cape Town Opera joint endowment trust, Duet, The trust was established in last year for the advancement and preservation of the companies. The aim is to build a fund to ensure that there is sufficient income for both.
With the CPO and CTO will be the Cape Town Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, young choristers from St Andrew’s Primary School in Saldanha and vocal soloists Derick Ellis, Arline Jaftha, Bongani Kubheka, Goitsemang Lehobye, Mandisinde Mbuyazwe, Lukhanyo Moyake, Xolela Sixaba and Siphamandla Yakupa in a programme that includes Verdi, Mascagni and Puccini. Pianists Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhães will perform Poulenc and more. The concert is directed by Christine Crouse.
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