#HOTSpeaks: Baritone Sings to Honor His Father

“If I sing, you are the music.
If I fly, you’re why I’m good.
If my hands can find some magic,
you’re the one who said they could.”

Leslie “Buz” Tennent sat in the Hawaii Opera Theatre rehearsal hall and read aloud the lyrics to “If I sing” from the musical Closer than Ever. The song inspired the name of the November, 2016 concert event with Hawaiʻi Public Radio.

The sold-out tribute concert commemorated the centennial of Buz’s late father and mentor, Arthur Tennent (1916 – 2004). Due to the concert’s popularity, Buz performed a reprise last week at the Mystic Rose Oratory as a benefit for the Hawai’i Vocal Arts Ensemble.

Arthur was an accomplished lieder and artsong singer, and a renowned choral conductor, voice teacher, actor, and author. “He generously shared with me his abundant gifts,” Buz said of his father. “I just thought it would be worthy to give back what he gave to me.”

At both concerts, Buz sang songs his father used to sing and that his father taught him, accompanied on the piano by HOT Education Assistant Eric Schank. Buz was also featured as a soloist at the HOT Opera Ball last year.

As a professor of voice at Chaminade and a private voice teacher, Buz’s life currently revolves around performing and teaching, but that might not have been the case if his father had never pegged him as a baritone and encouraged him to sing an aria in front of a crowd with his high school orchestra.

“He wanted me to sing,” Buz said. “And he was a tremendous teacher.”

Arthur humorously helped his son navigate the complexities of music theory, like the difference between “bel canto” and “can belt-oh,” while gracefully addressing more serious life issues, like coping with rejection.

“He taught me the idea of never giving up, to persevere and persist, and that it’s how we react to circumstances that matters – not that we get discouraged or knocked down, but that we stand up and just keep at it,” Buz said.

As a supportive father, Arthur went to all of Buz’s opera performances, he said, though he wasn’t particularly an opera lover, himself.

But while Buz was pursuing a Master’s in Voice at Manhattan School of Music in New York, Arthur joined Buz for a father-son debut concert at Carnegie Hall, where the two performed “The Pearl Fishers” duet from Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles.

dsc00803-2“We had a great time singing together,” Buz said. “We blended well together, and our voices were somewhat similar, albeit mine a little deeper.”

After leaving New York, Buz spent 12 years singing opera in Germany. But he returned to Hawaii in 2003 when he learned that his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer to care for his parents and place his father in hospice care.

That year, Buz decided to follow further in his father’s footsteps and start teaching. Until then, he had felt reluctant about pursuing voice teaching, even though his father called it a “noble art.”

“I think he was gratified that I did take up teaching, because I resisted it for a while,” Buz said.
In the last several months of Arthur’s life, he was able to see Buz take up his love of teaching.

“I think that meant a lot to him,” Buz said. “All of these things that I put into practice now as a teacher, I learned initially from him.”

The last time Arthur saw Buz sing live was at a Diamond Head Theatre production of the musical Ragtime in late 2003. He passed away in May of 2004, and Buz’s Mother died of cancer four years later.

“I don’t believe in closure. I just believe in acceptance,” Buz said. “There’s always that hole there, but you just learn to live with it. And you honor their memory.”

When he sings, Buz finds that acceptance. He continued to read the lyrics of “If I sing”:

“I never told you.
It took time ‘till I could see
that if I sing you are the music,
and you’ll always sing in me.”

Buz paused. Though his eyes began to well up, he smiled as he read the last lyric:

“Yes you’ll always live in me.”

 

Use the audio player  below to listen to a recording of the Buz and Arthur Tennent singing “O Mimi,  tu piu non torni,” Marcello and Rodolfo’s Act 4 duet from Puccini’s La Bohème.