By the time Ema Nikolovska (PDP ’15) had finished several years of violin studies at Taylor Academy and four more years with GGS faculty Paul Kantor and Associate Dean Barry Shiffman, her heart was pointing her elsewhere. Her years of voice lessons for the joy of it with the RCM’s Helga Tucker and through the Young Artists Performance Academy (now Taylor Academy) were revealing a new truth: “A gut feeling that I might be happier on stage as a singer rather than a violinist, and that the work process of singers was something which felt more like the right fit for me.”
Five years later, after completing both a master’s degree and the opera course at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama and winning multiple competitions, Ema has joined the Berlin Staatsoper International Studio. She’ll cover and perform roles in Hansel and Gretel, The Magic Flute and Jorg Widmann’s Babylon, while balancing other professional engagements.
Chosen last year as a prestigious BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, Ema gave a recital last month in Wigmore Hall, where she had also been a prize-winner at the Young Classical Artists Trust Auditions. This summer in Banff she joined the New Orford String Quartet and pianist Philip Chiu, with none other than GGS Associate Dean, Barry Shiffman subbing in on viola, to perform Chanson Perpétuelle, Op. 37, by Ernest Chausson. Chamber music lovers can also hear the Brahms Piano Quintet, Op. 34, in this remarkable video:
Hint: Read on for a bonus video of Ema discussing how she worked with the poetry of Chanson Perpétuelle!
Sounds Like GGS! sent five questions to Ema and her thoughtful answers share valuable insight for all emerging musicians on building a musical pathway forward to success.
On nurturing your own uniqueness: “Perhaps it comes down to honing in on what only you can offer that nobody else can, and how you can allow that to be released into the world.”
On how competition preparation enlightens: “You understand your process, your strengths and weaknesses, and through a lot of digging, you get to know which repertoire brings you joy.”
On the European experience in London (“The pace of work was dizzying, the hustle was never-ending”) and Berlin (“It does not carry the gloss or epic energy of a metropolis, hiding no blemishes.”)
Primed for more? The perfection Ema strives for in her singing spills into her writing as well, so read on for her generous answers to our questions.
Sounds Like GGS!: One of the biggest right turns of your life was following your heart and pursuing voice instead of violin. Could you explain how you felt at that time, where your confidence came from for this decision, and how important these moments of self-realization are in life?
Ema Nikolovska: My decision to pursue voice full-time was something led by a gut feeling that I might be happier on stage as a singer rather than a violinist, and that the work process of singers was something which felt more like the right fit for me. When I finished my undergrad at GGS, I gave myself a year to test out that hypothesis – a year where I focused on singing full-time, just taking private lessons, and applying for auditions, courses, competitions (also balancing that with a violin teaching job at Sistema Toronto in Parkdale), with the goal of being accepted into a conservatoire for voice. Before that, I was casual about my singing, and viewed it more as a supplement to my work in violin, something fun which gave me a different perspective in music.
In fact, for most of my life I imagined I would be a violinist, and it was challenging to let go of that expectation and all the ‘shoulds’ that pervaded my thoughts when I realised, I wasn’t becoming the person I planned to be. During my undergrad I discovered that I loved playing for singers, especially in the opera pit (to this day, our production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen remains one of the musical highlights of my life – what a gift that score is! What vibrant writing!), and so I thought I might go in that direction. But by my last year, I knew I wouldn’t continue as a violinist – it did not feel honest to go on at the time, and I knew I would have had so much regret if I did not try to commit myself to the voice for just one year.
I was so lucky to have had such wonderful, high-calibre violin training in all my years in Toronto, and my decision to leave it in favour of voice had nothing to do with how the pedagogues, colleagues and institutions affected me – rather it was a feeling that I did not belong with that particular instrument and its daily work. I loved making music, and violin opened up the world for me, but I believe for some people, the choice of instrument is what makes all the difference, and perhaps it was so with me as well. My professors, Paul Kantor and Barry Shiffman, were incredibly supportive and delighted that I found this new truth. They always encouraged me to be myself in my violin playing, and to search for levity and humour – due to some personal baggage, I found this quite difficult despite absolutely enjoying music-making, but somehow it was in singing that I stumbled across that side of myself which they were trying to encourage, and it was not as present in my violin playing as it was in my singing. It’s a complicated concept which involves my particular character and reaction to violin itself and violin culture, and a host of other things, which I could write an essay about, but for the sake of brevity, I’d say when I made the decision to switch to singing, a certain friction I always had in the relationship with myself began to dissipate, because my relationship with singing came from a different place within me.
This instrument fascinated me, because it constantly exposed me to myself in extreme ways, and it demanded that I let go of certain preoccupations and analyses in my mind; almost every day with it felt like a reckoning, a confrontation, and as painful and confusing as this could be at times, I was always grateful for the growing pains and the increasing clarity which they yielded. My mind is a very intense place and singing teaches me how to channel that into trust towards my body, and presence within my body; it is like meditation, or therapy, and I was compelled to learn more about it because it taught me how to be well with myself. I can’t quite believe that at this point, I am a ‘professional singer’; I don’t have such a romantic origin story where I sang before I talked, or I always dreamed of this outcome. At the bottom of it all, I just wanted to make music with others, and be on a stage to share stories.
The transition from violin to voice was definitely rocky because it was a change of identity, and a leap into a strange abyss, because I didn’t quite understand what exactly life as a singer entailed. I was fascinated by vocal technique and its particular relationship to one’s psychology, with the instrument being its own immediate feedback mechanism (and how I could feel the body respond to different thoughts and judgments), and also I love words and languages. All that, plus a feeling of rightness and honesty of the pursuit was what convinced me to keep persevering. I just wanted to always be learning more and was actually very stimulated by this ‘underdog’ position created by my lack of vocal experience. I would jokingly say that learning how to sing in your late teens/early twenties (and especially as someone trained rigorously in a different instrument) is probably what it feels like to get chickenpox as an adult. Your ear is trained, you’ve heard good singing from professionals, and yet the body is so far behind the ears and the mind, and one must treat the body/oneself with so much love, kindness and generosity in order to survive this maddening dichotomy. You are so aware of how ‘horrible’, rough-hewn and green you are.
But I’d say any creative endeavour is like that – it takes a long time to build skills which can realise what is in your imagination, and it is a lifelong process. I realise increasingly what a gift these frictional instances are (whatever the iteration, be it learning a piece you dislike at first or tackling singing in a new language), when you truly question your process and stamina towards the feeling of being initially ‘awful’ at something – they are the moments one feels alive, striving towards something still amorphous, aware of how much is unknown, both humbled and emboldened by it all.
Sounds Like GGS!: Since moving to England, your talent, hard work, and competition wins have led to early success. What are the key choices you have made in the last four years that have nurtured this success?
Ema: I wanted to learn as much as possible about technique and repertoire, and to be involved in as many performances and projects as possible. Guildhall was the perfect place to set an intense pace, because there were always fantastic projects (especially for art song) planned for the year, and you could take on as much work as would suit your appetite. Since I didn’t come from a voice undergrad, I always felt like I needed to catch up, so I looked for every performance opportunity I could find. I noticed that as a young singer, you’re more likely to be on stage singing song than you are to do an actual opera role (an enormous physical and mental undertaking), and it’s safer like that anyway. Most opera work for young singers is probably comprised of being in chorus, doing small scenes or arias, some small roles – all valuable things which involve their own type of discipline (and there are young singers who are exceptions to this of course); however, this kind of stage activity is different to you being in the driver’s seat and calling the shots the way a director would, which is possible with song.
I found it more helpful to log my stage hours mostly in song at first, because I felt less pressure preparing a song programme, however short and for whatever occasion, than I did singing arias with their legacies, lengths, technical hurdles, and the natural peculiarity of how we mostly sing arias out of context for the bulk of our singing life (like orchestra excerpts almost), because it will understandably be a while until we’re able to sing a complete role. In opera, the roles we do are defined by our limitations. I don’t mean this in a negative way – being typecast is necessary in order to know which roles are written for where your voice currently sits. That means that you may not come into contact with many composers who are currently applicable to your voice in the operatic medium, whereas in a song recital, or preparing for a song competition, one could very easily go through upwards of 10 composers, and in addition to that sing in six languages over the course of a 30- or 60-minute programme, for example.
The potential for aesthetic variety and contrast is astounding. My search for aesthetic variety I think in part comes from my previous life as a violinist, where through playing in recitals, chamber music and orchestra, I came into contact with so many different sound worlds, and that’s what I was always hungry for – to hear different colours, approaches, stories. I had played Schubert, Ravel, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Mahler, Brahms, Janacek, Hindemith and so many others, and I wondered, how did they write for voice? I longed for that contact with those old friends, and since I couldn’t get it in the same way with opera (I was singing mostly Mozart and Handel arias), I found myself often dreaming about different song programmes, or going down deep research holes and discovering rare songs, and then becoming very curious about new music, about all the different ways we can use our voices, which in turn shape our definition of sound and atmosphere.
Very particular to Guildhall, and London, was an enormous and celebrated culture of art song and innovation in the medium; due to this, there were so many opportunities to perform song, to participate in rigorous courses, to work with legends in the art song world. The process of constantly making application recordings and doing auditions (again all of this often with song, and often with completely new repertoire) also was its own education – I had to learn how to tolerate the cringing my own audio and video recordings incited in me, to move past that and evaluate all these takes to choose the best ones to send off. With each session, regardless of its outcome, I learned multitudes about my voice, which approaches worked best for recording, and it forced me to question my decisions and my vocal development. I must have been recording once every month or two, always preparing for the next application or next grant. I was frequently averse to recording and performing the same repertoire, so I would set myself these challenges for learning new songs, to keep myself on my toes for recording sessions, and to also enable more interesting competition and recital programmes for the future.
I love opera, and I went through the rigours of auditioning endlessly, the search for the best arias, the joy and exhilaration of my two years on the Guildhall Opera Course and how that immensely changed my discipline and approach to opera and acting especially. However, I would say art song is what shaped me most of all as a singer; within it I felt a freedom to carve out my own path, and this gave me more confidence and technical release (which also extended onto the opera stage). I could perform frequently and own a stage with a duo partner in a way that’s not available in opera, and I could constantly offer new things to audiences, rather than the handful of arias that were appropriate for my voice at that moment. I didn’t think of myself as a certain ‘type’ of singer; I just did what made me happy, and I tried to question my taste through different projects and research – why do I gravitate towards certain types of poetry/song/opera and shy away from others? How I can feed myself with the opposite of my tendencies, how can I encourage growth? I am by no means saying something like ‘art song is better than opera’, but rather that opera and art song are interdependent, they need one another – each offers something unique and stimulating.
During my four years in London, I developed this philosophy, where I strived at any given moment to be preparing opera and song simultaneously, to always be fostering that dialogue between them. This way, the things I learn in a production rehearsal room are subconsciously or consciously influencing the recital programme I am preparing during this production and vice versa. I realised that I need this toggling between those worlds, as it reminds me that ultimately, we are not ‘song singers’, ‘opera singers’, ‘new music singers’, ‘early music singers’ – we are just people who tell stories, and it does not serve the music if we categorise one another then create expectations from those categories.
Sounds Like GGS!: Your love of poetry and words in general, combined with deep research, guides your choices for recital programs. How can all musicians, particularly singers, develop a closer relationship with text to enrich their performances?
Ema: When I was at the Schubert Institute in 2017, Deen Larsen had us write out the texts of our songs by hand before we started any work on the song itself. We’d spend time first with the poem, write it out a lot, recite it, form a relationship with it. Only then could we go to the song and see the composer’s perspective on the poem. It’s so important to treat poetry as a gift you can offer someone at any moment just through a recitation, as something to be discussed, a chance to inhabit a world of magic and incantations – this world of poets and how their words create little universes we can retreat to and share with one another.
I’d say it’s also important to read as much poetry as you can, not just that which is particular to the art song literature, but any poetry out there, to feel like this this engagement with the form is a fixture of your everyday life. It’s also fascinating to read about how poets and other writers describe what they do, to read about their process, and also perhaps to work with some poets, or start dialogues with composers about setting text. In the end, the words serve as tools to provoke your imagination – the audience reacts not necessarily to the words themselves, but by your energy as you react to the senses which the words inspire within you. Therefore, ‘inhabiting the text’ is a matter of becoming friends with it until you begin to naturally create a sensory subtext, a way to believe yourself so intensely when you speak or sing the words. Also, fascinatingly, vocal technique and vulnerability (presence/mindfulness/anticipating pleasure) are intertwined, so much so that singing from a ‘connected’ place inspires on its own a deeper connection with the text.
Ema recently posted a mini master class on how to engage with the poetry of a song, specifically Ernest Chausson’s Chanson Perpétuelle, Op. 37, which lays down a blueprint for working with song text. A must see-for singers.
Sounds Like GGS!: How would you order the importance of: competitions, festival participation, networking, research, marketing efforts, live performance, virtual performance, further education. How does a musician balance all this?
Ema: I think it depends on where you find yourself in your development, but I would say above all it’s important to nurture your craft and your research, and to find outlets for these things to be challenged. I’ve always seen competitions as another performance opportunity and a goal to help focus and structure a certain period of time; I see them also as this wonderful cooking challenge where you need to create something out of a limited number of ingredients – that can lead to new repertoire discoveries and opportunities for personal growth as you may tackle music you otherwise wouldn’t have known about or even considered learning. It’s important to get to know yourself as a musician, so preparing for a competition helps with this – you understand your process, your strengths and weaknesses, and through a lot of digging, you get to know which repertoire brings you joy. In fact, all these things – the festival/masterclass participation, research and performing, are opportunities for you to discover who you are and how you change over time; the more you understand yourself, the more intensity and force you’re able to offer with your artistic decisions, which influences the ‘career things’ like marketing and networking. It seems to me that most things happen naturally when you have a clear sense self and direction and maintain a constant curiosity which accompanies a rigorous daily practice.
Also important to note is that we are always changing, and we need an awareness of when our sense of self is shifting; I certainly feel that I’m at a creative crossroads at the moment, with my recent move to Berlin, and a working life which is more dominated by my formal job as an ‘opera singer’ on a Studio. So. I’ve noticed that at this particular point, I’m asking myself different questions and facing new personal and career challenges that I did not have even six months ago. I suppose it is a balancing act which has wonky proportions all the time, as we ask ourselves what we need, why we may be unfulfilled, and what skills we would like to develop in order to adapt to the current global musical situation. In the end, perhaps it comes down to honing in on what only you can offer that nobody else can, and how you can allow that to be released into the world.
Sounds Like GGS!: Does your Toronto education ever inform how you cope with challenges now, and how is your European experience enriching you differently?
Ema: A huge part of my identity and my joy in music was shaped by my upbringing in the Toronto music community. Since I started Suzuki at the RCM at the age of four, then went on to do the Taylor Academy, followed by my undergrad at GGS, I’ve been nurtured by the love of all the professors, colleagues, friends, staff and administrators around me. I must have spent more than half my life inside the RCM – everyone in it is always in my heart, and I think that everyone in it is part of my sound as well. This kind of community is a rare gift, and gave me a foundation which bolstered my musicianship, created confidence and a sense of endless possibility. So, when I moved to London, although obviously nervous at the newness of everything, I went with a lot of strength and love which I attribute to the RCM and GGS – all the wonderful things which happened at Guildhall were only possible because of how I was looked after in Toronto.
On the voice front, I was incredibly lucky that my first voice teacher, Helga Tucker, basically changed my life with her teaching – no hyperbole there. Helga taught me how to love my voice, and by extension to love myself in order to better serve the music and she is the one who turned me on to song and inspired me to fall in love with it – to find my own place within it. And also to find so much joy and excitement in programming! Helga’s teaching, the holistic and technical foundation which she set up in me was another source of strength and stability which eased me into my transition into life at Guildhall, and even now in Berlin.
I am very grateful for the experience of four years living in London, and now to have the chance to start a two-year contract in Berlin. In the London years, I did a lot of travelling for masterclasses, courses, festivals and concerts, and the relative ease of moving around Europe meant that I had a chance to meet so many different colleagues, learn from the very high level of competition, and be inspired by the diversity of ideas everyone brought to their music-making. Not to mention hear so many pieces and approaches with which I hadn’t come into contact. With London as a metropolis where so many top international artists lived or passed through, I was exposed constantly to performances and colleagues that blew me away and challenged me, and which inspired me to dare more. The pace of work was dizzying, the hustle was never-ending, and I believe I grew exponentially due to the high-pressure environment of London itself and the high demands of Guildhall. It felt like the entire world was there at your fingertips, a city packed to the brim with some of the finest live performance internationally.
Now in Berlin, I’m in a different phase in life where I have a job at the Staatsoper, so there’s this new transition from student to professional that I’m navigating. I always wanted to live in a place where I didn’t speak the native language, so I am working on my German and trying to use it as much as possible. I love that I am becoming more intimate with the language of Lieder, and also with the musical culture I have often most gravitated towards, even as a violinist. The music-making here is phenomenal and exhilarating, and I feel very lucky to be part of the Staatsoper. The pace is different than in London, mostly because of the effect of the pandemic, but I’d say spiritually, Berlin is so different than other major cities – it does not carry the gloss or epic energy of a metropolis, hiding no blemishes, and it serves as a living museum with its scars from the past. There is a simultaneous small-town and city feel, mostly because of the organisation of the neighbourhoods and many parks, and it feels like there is art and quirkiness everywhere. There’s also a dialogue between the past and present – I’ve noticed a lot of art here is interested in juxtaposing what we can learn from the past, with the sound or expression of our current moment. There are many exciting things happening here in the way of new music, and also adventurous programming which I’ve caught glimpses of online.
All in all, each day I wake up, I feel so thankful that I am here, that I have the opportunity to continue to learn and grow, and to be inspired by all the colleagues and coaches around me. It is a culmination of all the years of music and love in Toronto and London, and I thank everyone who has been part of the journey in any way!
Back to Issue 11 of Sounds Like GGS!
