Maybe that's why there are hardly any female accompanists." "But you also get a soprano who says you've got to wear a more understated dress than hers so you don't upstage her. "There are singers you build up a rapport with," she says. Tilbrook knows what it's like to be regarded as the backdrop.
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"When a 'proper' pianist like András Schiff or Mitsuko Uchida plays for a singer, they will get half the review, whereas when I'm playing the same repertoire – or Roger, or any of us – we'll get one adjective, usually 'sensitive', and that's it." The irony is that the colour, range and collaborative alchemy that a skilled accompanist will deliver is precisely what a professional soloist, be it Schiff or Uchida, would struggle to create. It's not just in the fees that Burnside sees inequality, but in the promotion, the fact that the singer – or instrumental soloist – has their name in lights, while the pianist's name appears as an afterthought on the CD cover, poster or review. That's not what it's about: you're just asking to be taken seriously in your own right." If you insist on being called a pianist then people think that you're comparing yourself to Sviatoslav Richter. But unfortunately I can't think of a better one. "You can't deny there are connotations that it's a secondary entity. "I hate the term accompanist," continues Burnside. "Once you've got that idea in your brain, it's hard to be comfortable with the idea that what you're doing is merely ' accompanying'." And in Lieder, of course, it's the pianist who leads. "Hardly any of them sang," says Burnside.
After all, the great Lieder and song composers were pianists." This is a good point: think of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Fauré and Debussy. "I always think of what my mentor, Eric Sams, said – that the whole song repertoire is a piano art form rather than a singer's.
Iain Burnside, another seasoned accompanist, agrees. But is anyone really listening to what these toiling accompanists are doing? As pianist Anna Tilbrook – who plays for, among others, tenor James Gilchrist – puts it: "These songs would sound pretty strange without the piano." You would have thought that, by now, musical culture would have twigged that there's more to a song recital than the singer. Well, there's a great deal more to it than that." He looks so slender and shy and so modest that people think he's there just to do what he's told, to follow the singer through thick and thin. The most enchanting lady walks on to sing, and all the ladies look at her because of what she's wearing, and all the men look at her because – well, all the men look at her.
But I would like people to realise what extremely important people we accompanists are. "We accompanists," Moore said in his 1960s recording The Unashamed Accompanist, "have our minds above such mundane things as fees. The archetypal British accompanist was Gerald Moore, who lamented his plight just as passionately as Vignoles, despite the fact that he was assisting the likes of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. How would he sum up his craft? "I sometimes describe it as the art of getting what you want without the other person noticing." Vignoles will still be on the piano, of course, but for once it's his baby, his name in lights.
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Billed as a showcase of song that will celebrate the relationship between pianist and singer, the series features such sopranos as Joan Rodgers and Sandrine Piau. "That's what I'm staying for/ That's what I'm playing for/ Art is calling for – me!" And later: "You may think this job sucks/ When they get all the bucks/ Forget their lines, transpose/ And jump from page to page!"Īfter four decades at the top of his profession, however, Vignoles is finally getting to call the shots, having curated a series of eight concerts at the Wigmore Hall in London. "I only make believe I'm following their Lieder," he sings. It's a life that Roger Vignoles, the veteran British accompanist who has worked with everyone from Kiri Te Kanawa to Anne Sofie Von Otter, laments in his hilarious song The Battle Hymn of the Accompanist. The singers couldn't do it without them, but it's the braying sopranos and the yodelling tenors who get all the glory, as well as most of the cash and applause – despite the fact that all they've done is sing a few tunes, usually in a foreign language, while the pianists slog their guts out playing fiendishly difficult accompaniments by Schubert, Schumann or Britten. Being the pianist who plays for them can feel like the most thankless job in music. P ity the poor accompanist, condemned to sit in the shadow of the great voices and the even greater egos of today's singers.
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