Colin Lee: Missing a tenor? Blame the accountant...

Ahead of a Covent Garden opening, Colin Lee declares all his sources of income to Rupert Christiansen.

Colin Lee
Now Lee doesn’t have to share his role in 'La Fille du régiment' Credit: Photo: BILL COOPER

A modest tenor may sound like a contradiction in terms, but that’s how I’d describe Colin Lee. Even more exceptionally, he combines his international operatic career with work as a chartered accountant.

He has come to prominence through shadowing the Peruvian superstar Juan Diego Flórez, who insists on three-day breaks between performances. When opera houses have needed to cram extra shows in, Lee has been ready to step into Flórez’s shoes, and audiences (and critics) have often tweeted and blogged that Lee was not only refreshingly different but sweeter of voice and warmer of personality.

It could be a recipe for another All about Eve disaster, but alas for the scandalmongers, Flórez and Lee get on perfectly well at a personal level and there’s no overt rivalry between them – next season, they will actually be singing together in Rossini’s La donna del lago, a score which Lee says “includes one trio in which we will be firing top notes at each other”. Yet, in his amiably quiet way, Lee is very pleased that this month at Covent Garden he will have the field to himself, when he plays Tonio in Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment: last time round with this popular show, Flórez went first, despite the fact that Lee originally did the early weeks of rehearsal with the director Laurent Pelly. And the nice thing for Lee is that this sort of thing is happening more and more.

Born of English descent in Cape Town, Lee attended South Africa’s equivalent of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, but never thought of taking up music as a profession. Instead he took a university degree in commerce and then came to Britain in the mid-1990s to work at Ernst & Young.

“Although I’d done some barbershop and choral singing at university, I was never desperate to go on stage. I wouldn’t quite describe myself as a reluctant performer, but I’ve always been more fascinated with the technique of singing than actually doing it in front of the public.

“I was obsessed by a compilation record I had bought called Tenorissimo. I listened to it over and over again and wondered: how do they do that? I had always sung like a choirboy: people like Pavarotti were doing it some other way and making these extraordinary sounds.

“So I went on having lessons – I didn’t have enough money to go to a conservatoire – and I’m sorry if this sounds corny, but I gradually came to realise that through singing I was coming to know more truly who I am.

“Finally, I resigned my accountancy job, and spent three months singing on a cruise ship, before being cast as Nanki-Poo in The Mikado. That was very gruelling in its way, but I managed 142 consecutive performances, and it gave me a terrific grounding.

“After that, I got into ENO’s Young Singers programme, and I suppose the turning-point there was singing Almaviva in The Barber of Seville for the first time.”

Given the suitability of his high, light and flexible voice to this music, Rossini soon became Lee’s speciality and Almaviva is a role that he has now sung – sometimes alternating with Flórez, sometimes not – at several major houses, including last month the mecca of the Metropolitan in New York. “And that may be it; I think I’ve done it enough now, and it’s time to move on.”

Lee isn’t even sure how much he loves Rossini, “though I’m very grateful to him for the help he’s been in paying my mortgage”. He certainly prefers his more serious operas, like Ermione and Tancredi, to the more mechanically farcical ones, and within the bel canto repertory, he says he admits feeling “more personally connected to Donizetti and Bellini”.

In the interests of escaping typecasting, he’s been branching out in other musical directions, making recent debuts in Rameau’s Platée and Verdi’s La traviata – “I might be up for Rigoletto one day, too. But I have no desire to sing beyond my means. Yes, of course, it would be glorious to be Rodolfo, because I love La Bohème. But I know that I can’t and won’t.”

Meanwhile any idle hours are taken up with the accountancy that he undertakes freelance for fellow singers – “I do it for fun, really, and it pays for one nice holiday a year.”

Does it offer any common ground with singing? “Well, an ability to count, I suppose! But the attraction for me is that music can be quite frustrating, in the sense that nothing you do is perfect and the quest never ends. Accountancy, on the other hand, is clear-cut: everything is in black or white, and right or wrong. I’m a very ordered and disciplined person, so I find that peculiarly satisfying.”

'La Fille du régiment’ opens at the Royal Opera House (020 7304 4000) on April 19