PIANIST WILL LEAD OFF UCI MASTER CLASS

Pianist Roger Vignoles is accustomed to appearing with such international stars as soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, with whom he will share the stage on Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

But today he will share his expertise with a group of unknowns--young UC Irvine voice students--as he leads the first in a series of vocal master classes with five musicians at the university.

“I think there are actually a lot of very good voices around, particularly in the United States,” he said recently. “What I think we are short of these days--and this is the case everywhere--is a sense of people having time actually to develop and being prepared to take time to go through the classic steps in vocal training. . . .

“There is a slow process by which a voice develops and by which a singer absorbs the true elements of style in singing,” he said. “And most of us are trying to shortcut that these days, and that’s a pity.” Vignoles says that everyone shares the blame.

“I think we are all caught in the desire to succeed and the anxiety that if we don’t make a mark very early on, then we’re never going to do so. . . . And everybody is watching. Every manager and conductor wants to discover the next great world star. So they’re very greedy of young talent.”

As an accompanist, Vignoles feels that he has a unique perspective to bring to young singers.

“It’s not that I think that a piano coach could ever supersede the necessity for voice coaching,” he said, “but someone who sings knows what it feels like from the inside better than they know what it sounds like from the outside. “

In particular, Vignoles would like to focus upon characterization during his 1 to 3 p.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. classes in the UCI Concert Hall. The 1 p.m. session will be a movement workshop in collaboration with Clayton Garrison, head of UCI’s music theater program.

(These and all the classes in the series are free and open to the public.)

“The No. 1 question that any performer has to ask himself is who is singing this song and what are they feeling that makes them want to sing it?” he said.

“Any song is really a sequence of psychological events, and the performance is more or less successful according to how you gauge (that sequence) from the moment you start to play until the moment you finish.”

Vignoles does not differentiate between operatic arias and smaller-scaled lieder repertory in the need to determine this sequence.

“Personally, I believe that any song should be approached as theatrically and dramatically as if it were an operatic aria--not with that operatic style, but with that consciousness of the character involved,” he said.

“And, conversely, I believe every operatic aria should be sung with a kind of attention to verbal nuance, with that partnership with word and music that you would give the concert song.”

Vignoles, 42, traces the beginnings of his career to his teens when he accompanied his older brother.

“We cut our teeth together on the major pieces of the repertoire, like (Schubert’s) ‘Winterreise,’ which most people leave until they are 65,” he said. “In fact, I learned a lot from our mutual attempts to make some sense out of it and create our own performances of this music.”

He also was struck by the playing of Gerald Moore, who performed with nearly every major singer and instrumentalist in the world during his four decades as an accompanist.

“I think that (Moore) was my single strongest inspiration,” Vignoles said. “I was completely captivated by the sound of his playing, and I just longed to do it myself.”

Subsequent collaborations with different artists have been widely varying experiences, he said.

“Frankly, it’s a different relationship in each case. It depends on the relative experience or inexperience and the relative security or insecurity of either partner.

“I think that a good accompanist achieves a great deal by saying very little. Very often, it’s the gentle art of getting your own way without appearing to, simply because you can influence enormously how someone sings a particular phrase by what you do at the same time.”

His conception of the role of an accompanist also has changed radically during those years.

“When I was young, I had the idea that an accompanist was a blank sheet of paper waiting for a great artist to come along and scribble on it,” Vignoles said. “I can’t think of what the alternative metaphor would be, but now I try to present . . . a picture which is almost entirely filled in.

“It’s a bit like those old-fashioned 3-D pictures which you have to look at through a pair of glasses. . . . That’s a rough and very ready metaphor, but a singer brings one side of the glasses, the pianist brings another, and when you stick the windows together, you get a 3-D image.”

Other artists and the dates of their appearances in the series will be:

--Dec. 4: accompanist Martin Katz, 10 a.m to 1 p.m. in the Choral-Orchestral Room and 3 to 5 p.m. in the Concert Hall.

--Jan. 21, 1988: accompanist Gwendolyn Williams Koldofsky, 3 to 5 p.m. in the Concert Hall.

--March 8: Soprano Arleen Auger, 3 to 5 p.m. in the Concert Hall.

--April 5: Baritone William Parker, 3 to 5 p.m. and 7 to 9:30 p.m. in the Choral-Orchestral Room.