‘It’s like love, but musically’: Dutch soprano Lenneke Ruiten on working with Finghin Collins

Dutch soprano Lenneke Ruiten’s childhood dream was to become a painter. But music took over in her mid-teens, and her busy singing career has seen her work with conductors of the calibre of John Eliot Gardiner, Emmanuelle Haïm, Christian Thielemann and Ton Koopman, with major orchestras (including the Vienna Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras) and at leading festivals and opera houses.

Music got in the way of painting because she went to a school with “a fantastic music teacher who made all the children, literally all of them” take part in end-of-year performances in works such as Brahms’s German Requiem, Verdi’s Requiem and Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.

“That was so inspiring for me,” says Ruiten,”that, yeah, I decided when I was 15 to leave school to do an audition at the conservatoire, and I was accepted.”

There are few 15-year-olds who know much about the nuts and bolts of the music profession. “If I had known,” says Ruiten, “I probably would not have dared. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I do this. It’s the love and the pleasure of sharing music. It’s such a business, it’s such a hard job in every way. It’s a miracle, almost, when you reach the level of becoming a real professional musician, actually earning money from it.”

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Before she came to singing she studied the flute, where you can see what you are doing while you are doing it. “With the voice,” she explains, “you cannot. It’s all inside. It’s very hard to explain or to analyse what is going on in there.”

She’s turned down professorships, because she’s not convinced she knows how to teach singing. “In essence, I was very lucky to have an easy voice.” She invokes the great Dutch soprano Elly Ameling, one of her own teachers. “She also had a very easy voice, therefore she said her whole life that she could only do a masterclass with singers who can already sing.” Ruiten loves to work with students but says that teaching “is actually too complicated, it’s really another profession. It’s not my profession.”

Her flute studies have stood her in good stead, she says, when it comes to vocal precision — of rhythm, articulation and intonation. “What I experience in the field is the big difference between singers that have done an instrument and that have not.”

Instrumentalists are often advised to imitate singers to cultivate a natural form of expressiveness. But classical singing is an extraordinarily artificial practise. How does Ruiten manage to sound so natural? “What’s important is the breathing, and also for violinists and pianists. If you start a new phrase, you breathe like a singer. The breathing is how people copy the singing idea. For singers, it the same. Breathing is the key to sounding natural.

“We sing on a breath. But singers don’t like to breathe. They want to hide it, they want to be like an instrumentalist and keep going endlessly. Singers think they have this ‘problem’ of breathing. But, actually, the breathing in is as important as the breathing out. If you have a very long legato line, you make sure to help yourself and to give pleasure to the audience, by taking a breath that is a complete copy of the phrase that you sing next. It’s like a tree and the roots. The roots copy the head of the tree. The breath is exactly that. If you deny your breathing you get problems, you get stuck, you cannot make the jumps. If you want to help yourself to make singing more natural, you make sure you really embrace the breath before. I think that is really the key.”

Ruiten planned her career in an unusual way, concentrating first on song recitals, then taking on works with orchestra, and finally adding in opera. Recitals are still what she loves most, and her upcoming visit to Galway is for an afternoon recital as part of Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival, which is themed around the seasons.

The festival’s big works are Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Irish Chamber Orchestra), Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons (pianist Freddy Kempf) and Schubert’s Winterreise (German baritone Jochen Kupfer with the festival’s artistic director, pianist Finghin Collins).

Collins partners Ruiten, too, in the final concert, which offers the weekend’s most mixed and varied programme. Ruiten says she didn’t find it at all straightforward to come up with her selection. “We did a lot of research together,” she says, “and Finghin is very picky.” And she herself was not all that happy with the first three programmes she came up with.

She describes herself and Collins as “very dear friends,” explaining that “the first time we met was in 2005, at the Delft Chamber Music Festival in Holland”. But they didn’t actually perform together. “I went to concerts where he was playing, and he went to concerts where I was singing. And we just fell in love with each other’s way of making music. That’s how we started.”

They teamed up for recitals, and she first came to Ireland for a tour in 2007. She gushes without being gushy when talking about their partnership. “It’s a way of working together that you cannot describe” she says. “It just happens. It’s like love, but musically. It’s something that just exists without trying to interpret what it is exactly. We feel each other perfectly.” Then she backtracks slightly and, smiling broadly, adds, “But he’s incredibly picky.”

That didn’t stop her trying to find ways around and sometimes away from his chosen focus on the seasons. It was tightness of that focus that created problems for her.

When she creates a programme, she says, “I try to see it little bit as a two-, three-, four- or five-course dinner. You can’t serve five courses of beef. You have to think about programming in that way. How do you start? When do you develop? When do you go back a bit? When do you do some fireworks? When does the audience get a little bit of contemplation? Or drama, or whatever you can think of?”

“With a programme like this,” she explains, “the theme is almost more important than the flow of the evening. I always struggle a little bit with that, if I have to programme just for a theme.”

In fact, she actually tries to avoid thematic thinking, because she feels there’s too much of it around at the moment. But, as she puts it, “I’m living in the now, so I adapt. We tried three or four different programmes, and I think we are now finally satisfied. And, actually, looking back on it, it’s almost all kind of my favourites together. So I’m not unhappy in the end. We will see how it works. Because it looks a bit messy, eight composers in one hour. That’s quite a lot.” It’s obvious that Collins is not the only picky one.

“I took on this programme to get over my own stubborn way of programming,” she explains. “Although I like my own way, for Galway I had to think different. So I took this idea of programming whatever together. And I think the programme will work - it is really, really nice.”

The negotiation resulted in a sequence of songs focusing on just two seasons, spring and summer, and while she says “I’m totally for female composers”, their goal of having a female musical voice included didn’t work out either. The eventual selection runs to Schubert, Hahn, Fauré, Berlioz, Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Strauss and Rachmaninov.

Given her unorthodox career path — recitals are a niche interest compared with opera, altogether less remunerative and considerably more demanding — what advice would she now give her younger self?

“Think positive, basically. And keep the dream. Because, if you start to think about everything that can go wrong in the job, you would not choose it. So, know what you’re good at, and I think I achieved well by never giving up. I think I did the right thing, even when taking risks. I would not give this advice to everyone, just myself, because I know myself. I’ve taken big risks for my career, and they worked out. I’m proud I did that. I’m happy I did that. And keep loving music. That’s the most important. Keep the original feeling that you started with, the spark that made you fall in love with it. No matter what, keep the spark.”

Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival runs from Friday January 20th to Sunday January 22nd. Lenneke Ruiten’s recital is at the Hardiman Hotel on Sunday at 3pm.