What makes a winner?: ‘A winner is that person who speaks straight to the heart’

Successful music competitions are about much more than prize-winning performances. When I ask Dearbhla Collins, artistic administrator of the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, what goes into making a successful competition, she talks first about the jury.

“If you choose the right people for the jury,” she explains, “people who can give these young singers employment in the future, give them jobs and positions, depending on the level they’re at, you have a fantastic outcome for your competition.” She puts flesh on the answer by explaining that on the basis of a competition performance, a semi-finalist one year got a small role at the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex without having to do any further audition.

She invokes the competition’s founder, mezzo-soprano and teacher Veronica (Ronnie) Dunne, who died last year at the age of 93. “This was always a mantra of Ronnie’s. That the young singers should be introduced to and sing for the people that can employ them, and that have their best interests at heart.”

Getting the orchestra is “fantastic,” she says, referring to the National Symphony Orchestra under French conductor Laurent Wagner, who had a stint as principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the noughties. He’s another person “who understands young singers, and won’t be fazed by finding out the night before what arias he has to conduct the next morning.” And she also mentions the venue, “being able to say it’s at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, Ireland”.

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How different is 2022 going to be without Ronnie for the first time? “Entirely different. I have the most vivid dreams about her where she’s literally still there, right beside me, which’ I’ve never had before,” Collins says.

“We’re determined to try and make the hall as full as we can, to have it a really buzzy competition, because it’s the first after her, and we’re determined to make our mark, that we are going to make this competition even bigger and more successful without her.

“We will absolutely miss her, her charisma, her presence, there’s nobody like her. She was the most wonderful person for making the shortest speeches in the world. I never had to say to her, not too long. She summed things up and got it right. She inspired people around her in that way.

“She’d forget people’s names, but she’d still make them feel special. In a practical sense, we’ll miss her at the finals, when she always came out on stage and gave a royal wave. I’ll miss introducing her to all the young singers.” Ronnie was famous for her straight-talking, shoot from the hip kind of advice that brooked no contradiction.

The 2022 competition has not escaped the vicissitudes of Covid-19. It was originally scheduled for late January, and 63 of the 170 young singers who applied were accepted to compete in Dublin. “We did live auditions in Vienna, Warsaw, London, Munich, Florence and Dublin, and we had about 30 people apply who couldn’t come to any of those, because they lived too far away, and they sent in DVDs.” Collins and jury chair Jane Carty auditioned in tandem with people from local opera institutions. Networking is obviously the name of the game.

Because of the move from January to August, some of the original line-up have commitments which now prevent them coming. “We now have 45 left on our list, from 21 different countries. Which is absolutely fine.”

Although Collins is not herself on the jury for the upcoming competition, I ask her what makes a winner at the Veronica Dunne competition? “Somebody who first and foremost communicates,” she says. “Who comes out on stage and communicates the story of the aria they’re singing. It’s a given they’re going to have to have a very good voice. But the winner is that person who speaks straight to the heart, who you just want to hear again, and you just feel will represent the competition internationally with that kind of charisma, with that storytelling ability. Rather than somebody who’s rather perfect but dull.”

She looks back over the winners they’ve had. “Fatma Said won it six years ago, Will Thomas the last time. Fatma, and earlier Nadine Sierra, are exactly the sort of people I’ve just described. They have loads of charisma, they tell the story, they engage with the text, which is super important. You just know that the casting directors will want them, because they will immediately hear that this person stands out from the rest.” Language skills are especially a challenge for English-speaking singers who are likely to spend most of their careers performing in foreign languages rather than their native tongue.

Some of the people on the jury, she points out, are casting directors, “who sit for days and days and days listening to singers. I’ve seen it. They get very jaded. And you know that when a person comes and sings, suddenly – it can be the most often heard aria in the world that you think nobody will make sound new again, and somebody does. So you know that’s a special singer who can do that.”

And do the juries take age into account? “It’s a huge area, that. I’m planning the programme just now, and looking back at the last one, we do include the ages in it,” Collins says.

“It did cross my mind to maybe get rid of that information. In the work I do in London we’re more and more anti-knowing people’s ages. For the training programme in London, you’re training people, so you kind of need to know what age they are, coming in, so that you know the development they can do.”

She muses that it’s less important in a competition. “A singer who sings one way at 21 and one way at 31,” she says, “they’re a very different animal. The jury would never say they take it into account, and I would never tell them not to. But they’re human. It’s in there. We did have a very young Polish girl the last time, who was really beautiful. And there was a lot of talk about the potential that she did have.”

“I think singers at 29 and 30 often feel under pressure, that this is their last chance to do some of these competitions. And I would really encourage the jury to listen with the most open mind possible, and not think about that,” Collins explains.

“And there is of course unconscious bias which we all try to fight against. But there is an excitement, I suppose, about a 22-year-old who has this raw, not over-coached way of singing, an excitement which is very hard to deny. But on the other hand if the 29- or 30-year-old comes along and has done lots of roles and has all that experience behind them, they can easily win the day too.”

It is, she says, “a tricky one the world over”. But she rejects any suggestion that singers should be auditioned blind, as is common for positions in orchestras. “I would argue that you can’t. They’re actors. You need to see their faces. You need to see how expressive they are. You can hear the expression in the voice. But they’re singing actors. You’ve got to see what the overall package is.”

Not all competition winners go on to have great careers. What does a winner need beyond competition success? Collins brings it down to “focus”. For every singer who is successful, she says, “20 per cent is the voice, 20 per cent is something else, but the focus is the over-riding thing”.

“If they win a competition like ours, the hope is they’ll be taken up by somebody and brought into an opera house,” she says. “That doesn’t mean your career is made. You have to show that focus, be an extraordinarily nice colleague, know your music, be prepared inside out. They have to have their team around them, singing teacher, vocal coach and maybe a family member. They also need to know not to take everything they’re offered.”

This year’s competitors will have the benefit of a drop-in clinic with German performance psychologist and resilience coach, Ralph Strehle. It’s an important recognition of how competitors’ handling of stress can influence their performances and careers.

At various times and in various ways in our conversation, Collins comes back to what sounds like a core value. “Sometimes if you just hear somebody sing two arias, there’s something in there and I think, I’m not sure I really like it, but I want to hear it again.” They have to make you want to come back for more.

The Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition is at the National Concert Hall from Thursday, August 25th, with the final on Tuesday, August 30th.