John Elwes is a tenor with a past. Born John Hahessy to an Irish father in London in 1946, from the age of 14 he lived with the family of the tenor Gervase Elwes (18661921, a famous Gerontius), and at 21 adopted their name as a token of gratitude. He became a chorister at Westminster Cathedral under George Malcolm and worked with Benjamin Britten.
After a long stay in France - he has long been renowned for his work in the demanding high tenor parts of French baroque opera - Elwes has come back to his paternal roots and now lives with his wife, the harpist Siobhan Armstrong, in Carrick-on-Suir. With a career that keeps him well in demand and the benefits of low-cost international travel, this may not exactly be France's (or England's) loss but it certainly is proving to be Ireland's gain. The next few weeks will be among his busiest in Ireland as a performer. Tomorrow afternoon, closing the Bach Festival at St Ann's, Dawson Street, Dublin 2, he sings a Bach cantata and nine tenor arias before turning to Handel for a Messiah in the evening in Maynooth. At the National Concert Hall on Sunday 29th, he sings the part of the Evangelist in Bach's St Matthew Passion with the Guinness Choir; and on Tuesday, April 7th, he's back at the same venue as the Evangelist in Bach's St John Passion with Polyphonia.
Elwes may not feel particularly Irish ("I wouldn't know what that meant," is how he puts it) but, wherever he's acquired it, he's certainly got the gift of the gab, and his conversation billows far and wide, both in and outside of music. Bach, it turns out, is a composer he's happy to be indulging in since, as he puts it, "something I suffered from in France was the lack of Germanic music". Unusually, for a singer, he will be directing the Orchestra of St Cecilia in tomorrow's programme at St Ann's. This is not a new experience for him. He has actually directed the two Bach passions before and found the experience "great fun", especially "sitting down and looking at all this music and digging out, extracting". Some music lovers may be a bit surprised that Elwes, much of whose work has been with period-instrument ensembles, will here be dealing with players on modern instruments. He doesn't see this as necessarily a problem, though, once the players have an open, questioning, listening attitude. Ultimately it's the musicians' intentions, what they have in their heads, their notion of style, that's more important than what they have in their hands, he says.
He speaks with passion about the difference between musicians interested in their instrument and musicians interested in the music itself. And a lot of the shortcomings he identifies he traces back to limitations in the way music is taught. It has to be good news, then, that some of the Arts Council's revived funding for early music is likely to involve projects where John Elwes will be able to pass on his wisdom to young Irish musicians.
