Mixing drama and good taste

Irish mezzo Alison Browner used to think singers were stupid and was sniffy about opera. Then she became an opera singer. She talks to Michael Dervan as she returns to sing here.

On the face of it, Alison Browner is the most unlikely of individuals ever to have turned into a singer. Her first instrument was the violin and, as a teenager, she thought that singers had nothing in their heads "except maybe the idea of making nice noises".

She had scant regard for opera, another pre-conceived notion that from which she now, oh-so-carefully distances herself. Bach, Purcell, Schubert were then the composers she felt closest to, and in opera she was hooked on coloratura singing, particularly the work of Joan Sutherland: "She made the most wonderful sound. You couldn't understand a word, but at the time that wasn't important to me".

But singing and opera weren't going to remain out of reach. She opted to study music at TCD, where, for her practical exams, she chose to sing rather than to play an instrument. She completed her H.Dip before deciding on the move that probably sealed her fortune. She headed off to Germany on a DAAD scholarship to try her hand more seriously at singing.

"You don't consciously decide to become a singer. I think singing discovers you. It's the same as repertoire. I don't think a singer decides on repertoire. I think the repertoire finds the singer. Usually." And, as she tells it, the way singing most fully discovered her was through the great German bass, Hans Hotter. She was impressed with the length of his career, and by the fact that a man who'd worked so extensively in heavy repertoire was able to turn successfully to a Schubert song after the Wagnerian slog of 10 performances of Wotan.

She describes herself as lucky to have "a gift, a natural affinity for singing. I wasn't doing anything terribly wrong". She's not claiming an error-free approach, just asserting that her basic "vocal hygiene" was good. "A lot of right technique," she says, "is accidental. And a lot of it is a teacher and a student recognising when the right accident happens."

For her, Hotter seems to have been a teacher in a million, a man who wouldn't relent until his points were registered, not just musically and technically, but physically, too. Things had to be felt in a way that registered independently of music and sound. In venues where the acoustic doesn't provide sufficient feedback for a performer, the feeling of the sound a singer makes is the only thing left to rely on.

Before she actually got to Hotter, she had spent two years at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg, building with Claus Ocker on the foundations laid in Dublin by Cáit Cooper and Anne-Marie O'Sullivan. She joined the North German Radio Choir while still a student, and traversed a wide range of choral repertoire, much of it contemporary. When she finally moved to Munich to study under Hotter, she also got a place in the opera studio of the Bavarian State Opera.

The teenage sniffiness about opera was completely banished. She came to understand that "you have to be very smart, not just gifted, but clever, intelligent, sensitive, healthy . . . you have to be so many things in order to make it just to the middle, let alone the top".

Speaking of her years in Ireland, Browner talks frankly of works such as Verdi's Macbeth and Don Carlos as pieces she couldn't handle as a listener But she mastered the once alien-seeming world of opera in the analytically methodical way she's approached everything in her career. She cut her teeth on her core operatic repertoire when on contact to the opera house in Darmstadt, then she moved on to the much larger theatre in Mannheim, which she left to pursue a freelance career that has taken her from the major stages and concert halls of Germany to Covent Garden, Wexford and Melbourne.

After her late 1970s, departure to Germany, she didn't perform in Ireland for nearly a decade. When she returned, the changes to be noticed were remarkable. A voice once notable for its boyish agility had turned into a mature and noble presence, the tone fuller, the music-making altogether wiser. She describes the musical world in Germany as being so structured that everybody can find their own particular level. Singers are typecast by their voice-type, or "Fach", which provides, as it were, an industry-wide definition of exactly which roles you can be considered for. "The majority of voices benefit from that, certainly at an early stage. A young 22- or 23-year-old mezzo, is more likely to learn and to grow if she sings things like Cherubino or Sesto than if she does things like an Eboli or a Carmen."

On the other hand: "If you're young, have a good figure, nice face, good voice, are quick to learn, and if you're a soprano, you could be singing 17 performances a month at an opera house in Germany. That can, of course, be detrimental."

Opera, with its long rehearsal periods and multiple performances, is something Browner came to find damaging to motherhood and family life, so, of late, she's been concentrating on concert work. Bach, in particular, is a composer she never tires of, following the line of the great pianist Artur Schnabel, who wanted to spend his time working on music that was better than it could be performed.

Her ideals as a performer have moved worlds away from the simple Sutherland adulation of her youth. She struggles rather for the English words. She wants to sing dramatically and still be relaxed, to get totally into an aria without losing herself in it. What she seems to mean is that she actually does want to lose herself in it, but still have something, musically and physically, in reserve. It's the secret, she says, of baroque performance - and she's worked with some of the best conductors around, including John Eliot Gardiner. "You have to find the dramatic intensity, but without losing good taste."

Alison Browner tours with the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin to Tinahely (tonight), Mullingar (tomorrow), Galway (Monday), Ennis (Tuesday), Dublin (Wednesday), Castlebar (Thursday) and Clifden (next Friday). Details from Music Network: 01-671 9429.