Baritone Stephen Varcoe talks to Christopher Morley ahead of his Worcester Cathedral performance.

Baritone Stephen Varcoe has a long history of performing and recording (more than 150 discs with some of the country’s greatest conductors), and on Saturday he brings his expertise as soloist to the Midland Festival Chorus, when Malcolm Goldring conducts the Bach Magnificat and Mozart C minor Mass in Worcester Cathedral.

The rehearsal schedule for these amateurs who come from far and wide is carefully planned, with cassettes of each vocal part sent out for the choristers to use for practice, and then a few days of intensive “live” ensemble work.

Stephen’s presence in Worcester is testimony to the incredible amount of performing he still undertakes, though he says, as he gets older, the onus is less on travelling and more on teaching.

“I don’t do as much (travelling) as I used to. I’m of an age now where in some ways I’m pleased to have the opportunity to teach, because there are lots of wonderful young singers coming up, and one of the joys about teaching is that sometimes one finds oneself on the same platform as one gave some coaching to in the past.

“It’s very gratifying, but you know, the green-eyed monster, you could get... but it’s lovely to see.

“I think there are people that look back on their careers, and get very cross about the young ones, and say ‘ah, it’s not like it was in my day’, and all that kind of thing. I don’t feel that at all.

“I think there are some really, really good singers nowadays, wonderful young singers, and it’s a pleasure to be involved with them, to offer them my experience and all that kind of thing.”

There is a cheap cliché that singers don’t have anything between the ears, but that’s in fact not true. So many of the singers I have interviewed over the years have brought bright, questing intellects to their work, and Stephen himself has gained a doctorate, exploring the whole idea of singing in performance.

He now teaches at London’s Royal College of Music, and at Clare College, Cambridge.

“I think one of the things about singers is that the voice develops later than an instrumental skill.

“So when you’re at music college, say at the age of 18 or 19, the instrumentalists will have been playing for 10 years or more, and the singers may have been singing for only three years, four years, fairly seriously.

“The voice takes a long time to mature. At that age they’re very young vocally, whereas your pianist is playing the same Steinway that his teacher plays. The singer is having to create his own instrument.

“It rather amuses me, people talk about musicians and singers as if they’re two different animals!”

Singing students seem to have a habit of staying on at college doing post-graduate course after post-graduate course, as the voice develops. But how much work is there for them after that?