A dramatic turn that led all the way to centre stage

Acting was her first love, but soprano Claudia Boyle only found her calling when she decided she ‘didn’t want to be in the pit any more’

IF THERE’S ONE thing the rapidly rising 28-year-old Dublin soprano Claudia Boyle has in buckets, it’s enthusiasm. You can feel it when she’s on stage.

You can feel it equally clearly in her conversation. But music, it turns out, wasn’t her first love. “My first love was acting. I went to the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School – that was the highlight of my week. I couldn’t get enough of it. Meryl Streep was my biggest idol when I was younger. I just always wanted to do what she did, have great roles.”

Yet it was music that she chose for her degree, studying cello with Bill Butt at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. But halfway through the course, she began to envy two singers in her year, the soprano Mairéad Buicke and the mezzo soprano Una McMahon. “I was starting to look at what they were doing, and saying, ‘I don’t want to be in the pit any more, I want to be on the stage.’”

It wasn’t an urge that came out of nowhere. She had also been studying singing, part-time, with Anne-Marie O’Sullivan at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama. She followed O’Sullivan’s advice to complete the degree, took a year off to work at her singing, then did a master’s at the academy under Mary Brennan.

As she tells it, she was lucky. She joined Opera Theatre Company’s young artists’ programme (“I got to study with great teachers, do masterclasses and have great coaching sessions”), sang in the annual opera at the academy, got a small role with Opera Ireland, and “Vivian Coates of Lyric Opera has given me a lot of work”.

Strange as it may seem, she hasn’t been been a great opera-goer. “I’ve spoken to a lot of opera singers about this; a lot of [them] don’t really go to operas. It’s funny. They would go if they had a vested interest, if they wanted to hear a particular singer, if they loved a particular opera. I suppose if you’re doing it all the time, when you’re learning it, you’re singing it, it’s nice to have a break from it.”

She doesn’t put it this way, but maybe singing in the five-piece band Grand Canal constituted a kind of break. “I had to give it up about two years ago, because of time pressure. They replaced me with Bernard Dunne, the boxer; he’s turned his hand to singing.”

What was hard in Grand Canal “was that you’re yourself on stage, you’re not a character, and you don’t have lines learned to say already. It’s just you. I found the chat in between songs did take some getting used to, being yourself and talking to an audience. That’s tough. I’ve so much respect for comedians. It’s such a raw talent to have, to go up and make people laugh.”

In opera, you’re more tightly bound. “You have to keep to a certain structure. But there are so many ways you can put your stamp on something – the colour of your voice, the dynamics, the sentiment behind it, the emotion. It has to move people. If you have to pick the most important thing, it’s that you’ve moved an audience in some way, hopefully positively.”

Positives seem to be what Boyle deals in. She gets on with colleagues, doesn’t row with directors or conductors and enjoys the cut and thrust of international competitions – why wouldn’t she, when she came away from last year’s influential competition at ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands with two prizes?

When I spoke to her in Dublin, she was in between sessions at Salzburg – she’s one of 10 singers selected in 2010 for the Salzburg Festival’s young singers project, and has been working with the conductor Riccardo Muti.

After next weekend's appearances as Adele in Johann Strauss's Die Fledermausfor Loughcrew Garden Opera, she'll be at Wexford Festival Opera in October as the Countess in Thomas's La Cour de Célimène. She sang in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serailat the Opera di Roma in April, and has been asked back for Bernstein's Candideat Christmas and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dreamin June, and she has an upcoming Musetta in Puccini's La Bohèmewith Lyric Opera.

When we spoke, she was clear on what’s been most challenging so far. “It’s a stressful job, and there’s a lot of pressure. I would love to be a little bit more confident. I’m a little bit of a worrier anyway.” She e-mailed later, however, to say that being away from home, and missing her boyfriend and her dog, is even more of a challenge.

When it comes to opera itself, “the hardest part is five minutes before you sing, just before you’re about to go on . . . getting in the zone. The easiest part is about five minutes in, when you’re someone else – the performing, the acting, the drama, the combination of all of that. It’s a great feeling.”

Loughcrew Garden Opera's production of Die Fledermausis at Loughcrew House, Oldcastle, Co Meath, tomorrow and Saturday