Joel Fernandez is the postgraduate tenor choral scholar at Portsmouth Cathedral Choir. A strong choral singer looking to branch out into solo repertoire, he is particularly interested in the music of Byrd and Palestrina; on the solo side he is passionate about German lieder and the songs of Benjamin Britten. He sings on Decani as first tenor in the choir.
Simon O’Hea is in conversation with him.
Simon
Having done a lot of singing while studying Classics at Jesus College Choir, Oxford, you have come to Portsmouth. Have you definitely made the switch to looking for a career in music or are you going to pursue some other avenues?
Joel
Half way through my degree I realised that singing was something I really cared about, but I didn’t know how to pursue it or what to do. So I spent the second-half of my degree figuring out if I wanted to have a career in singing, and working out the hoops I would have to jump through so as to get there. I got to end of my degree and saw one big hoop to jump through, namely Conservatoire. I thought, “am I good enough for it?” Probably not. “Am I experienced enough for it?” Probably not. So I thought that I’d come here for a year and get some practice to test my voice, my musicianship, and my professional skills. And at the end of the year, if music is still something I want to do, then I’ll go and apply for Conservatoire as a singer and see what happens?
Simon
How did you get interested in singing? What were the influences on you at an early stage of your life?
Joel
I’ve spent my whole life running away from singing. I was a cathedral treble at Exeter under Andrew Millington, who provided amazingly inspiring musicianship. He was the sort of director of music that was annoyingly talented: he used to moonlight as a concert pianist sometimes.
I remember we had this amazing tenor lay figure who’s most probably the inspiration for Hagrid. In my final year at the at the cathedral school, he sang Nessun Dorma along with the school orchestra. I just loved that.
And then I went on to Winchester College, where I wanted to become a professional violinist for all of about 5 minutes. My teacher told me I had no chance. And so I kept singing all throughout that time. But it wasn’t something I took that seriously. And then when I went to Oxford, I ended up joining my Chapel choir by accident. I wandered in one day and then went to the taster rehearsal. The man who ran the choir, called Peter Parshall, said “you should really audition.” I spent much of my time saying, “Peter, I don’t think this is for me.” He would go, “Joel, let me buy you a coffee and we can talk about that.” He would give me a real schmooze: “I actually believe in you as a musician.” And I then thought “maybe I should get this a go.”
Simon
It’s amazing when you meet people like that, who’ve identified you as having real talent. It’s a lovely thing if you can make a living out of it.
Joel
I told myself that if the crazy thing doesn’t work out, I can always become a teacher or a solicitor, like half of my graduate year are doing. And I can do that and be happy. But if I went for the safer option, but always had the dream that maybe I could make it as a singer, I’d be waking up at the age of 35 and saying to myself “I should have given that go. But it’s probably too late now.”
Simon
So tell me a bit more about your role at the cathedral. What do you do on a regular basis and how is it all going?
Joel
My duties are many manifold. I sing six services a week – five Evensongs and one Eucharist. And then in addition to that, we’ll do funerals and weddings and the like on an ad-hoc basis.
The thing that I didn’t quite realise about cathedral music is the speed at which it all moves. So when you sing in a college chapel choir, you actually have a lot of time to learn music, but when you’re in a cathedral setting, you need to be on it. You need to be able to sight read very well. So that’s been like the biggest sort of thing for me. You might get one rehearsal before a service.
And then sometimes on a Tuesday afternoon, we’ll look through the music with Mr [Sachin] Gunga, who’s the sub-organist, but because there’s so much music we don’t really have the time to look through it in depth, so it’s it’s really sharpened up my technique. I remember at the start of the year I would have to spend time thinking about how I’d approach tricky passages. So I’d seen the passage in the rehearsal and not sing it well, for my standard. And then while I was having a cup of tea before the service, I would analyse it. But now it’s come to the point where if I see a tricky phrase, I’m already doing all the technical stuff in my head. So, the next time that comes up, I can always sing it better, even if not necessarily perfect from for me.
Simon
So there’s not much time for interpretation or thinking about it or considering how you might do it differently, then?
Joel
Well, I think David [Price] does a lot of that for you, when you’re in rehearsal with him. The thing about choral music is that – unlike with opera – you can’t just interpolate a top C. By that I mean adding a note in that’s not been written in the score. That doesn’t go down too well because all the other parts are written to merge in with that note – even there’s some potential for discordance. Choral music is very much a team game: you have to set aside your ego and understand that that you’re not the main attraction; the choir is.
Simon
I can see that – I can see that playing out in practice with my own choir [the Renaissance Choir], where people don’t get through the audition because the music director senses that they’re not going to be team players.
Joel
I think that’s something I’ve been getting better at because I arrived as a tenor with the view, “Everyone wants to hear me singing.” After a week I realised that was not the case.
Around five schools feed into the cathedral choir. I do other duties, including picking up the choristers and taking them to rehearsal. On Mondays, which is the training choir rehearsal, I sit with them during the rehearsal to make sure that they’re not giving Dr Price too much of a headache. They’re all around eight years old and already amazingly talented musicians.
So it’s pretty relentless.
You have to think a lot about vocal management.
I compare it to when I was at university and singing in Chapel two or three times a week. In that situation you didn’t have to worry so much about making sure your voice is always in tip top condition. Because, “Oh, I’m not singing well on the Tuesday, so I’ll take a day off,” can be compared to when you’re here and you say to yourself, “Right, I’m not singing. Well, perhaps I have to, because it’s a Tuesday, and I have to sing an Evensong in 15 minutes.”
So it’s really important that you ask yourself if there is a way (healthily, of course) that I can get the best performance out of myself on a particular day. And the other question is, how can I make sure that I can prepare myself so that I get to the Evensong in good voice.
Simon
What would you say are your top strategies are for maintaining good vocal form?
Joel
Firstly, not doing too much too soon. So whenever I warm up, I don’t go into full voice straight off. As always, I keep it very sotto voce here, so not using a huge amount of my instrument and just warming it up gently so that it’s prepared for me to sing in a more involved way.
Secondly, I drink lots of lemon and ginger tea. You can have a combination lemon and ginger tea bag, but if you want to really throw the boat out, you have actual lemon chunks and actual bits of ginger, and add either honey or even manuka honey. If there’s any crust or anything in the voice, it just gets rid of it. I always like a cup of tea before Evensong, which is quite nice.
Thirdly, just making sure that when I speak, I do so in a way that’s very supported, because if you speak with proper support, it takes the stress not only off your vocal cords, but on everything surrounding it – so, the muscles of the neck and jaw as well. That just makes it all easier. It’s really important for me because I also have a role at the Grammar School and in that capacity, I sometimes had to talk for hours! So, if in one day you talk for 2-3 hours at school and then go and sing in Evensong, you have to be really careful.
Simon
Give me one memorable performance-related experience.
Joel
I was booked to sing at a dating app start up launch party. It sounded really cool and glamorous. And I was just super excited. I turned up. They’d not booked anyone else. It was just me, which is awful. And then the next thing that went horribly wrong was that they had a DJ continuously playing in this drinks bar for the whole night, and they’d not told the founder of the app who booked this bar. So while I was singing Italian love songs, they was just playing a hard star Rihanna remix in the background. I only got through two songs and they told me to stop. My payment for that gig was as many free drinks as I wanted – and I made good use of that! Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong!
By the way, the whole point of the app was actually to make sure that people got off it and started talking to each other! So there wasn’t actually really any space for them to publish videos of me or other people singing.
Simon
What do you define by success as a musician?
Joel
I think there are a few components to being successful as a musician. I think that – unfortunately – one of them has to be commercial success. But the most important thing about being musician is actually being able to reach people and to elicit an emotional reaction from them. Because if I sing something and somebody is completely indifferent, then I feel to an extent that I’ve failed because I’ve not communicated anything. By contrast, if I sing listening to somebody, and they hate it or they think it’s ghastly for whatever reason, even if I’ve not made good music, I know that I’ve still touched them, in a very deep and final sense that much music touches people.
Simon
That’s fantastic. Absolutely spot on. It’s all about communication, isn’t it? And it feels bad if you don’t get a response to that, as in day-to-day communication. But there we go.
I have to ask you, what would you like to be doing in five years’ time?
Joel
The current timeline is to apply to a Conservatoire next year. I think that in an ideal world in five years I would have completed Conservative and had a lot of other experiences that would have shaped me and made me a better, more resilient person. I’d hopefully be out there singing for people, but if not, then doing something else entirely, but looking back on my singing adventure with fondness and the happiness and privilege that I was able to do something like that.
Simon
Are you thinking of a particular genre or career path at this stage? Would you like to stay within the choral scene or are you looking to go towards opera or anything else? Do you have a particular aspiration at this stage?
Joel
I am a big believer in that you take as much training as you can get, because that makes your opportunities as broad as possible. So I think the plan is to train as the singer and go as far as I can with that. And then if, once the dust settles, it turns out that opera is not something I like, then I can go into choral singing with a wider deep knowledge base instead. Or if I find I want to do some oratorio soloist work, which employs a lot of the same principles, I’ll be able to do that quite easily because I will have had all of this amazing soloist training.
