Rhapsody for the Bohemian Girl

Acclaimed soprano Ailish Tynan loves to come back to Ireland when she can - but it's especially enjoyable when it's to perform in an opera written by an Irish composer, writes Arminta Wallace

IT'S A QUIET Saturday morning in the salubrious London suburb of Blackheath. Even the houses seem to be dozing under grey skies and a soft drizzle: but when I ring the doorbell of Ailish Tynan's house, I raise a whirlwind. The door is flung open and the singer throws her arms around me in welcome. "You poor thing - you must be starving!" she exclaims. "Come on in and make yourself at home."

Within seconds she is plying me with everything from muesli and fresh fruit to chocolate éclairs, and regaling me with tales of life on the international opera stage as she tut-tuts over the eccentricities of the London transport system and repeatedly replenishes my cup of tea.

Tynan has just returned to London herself after doing a recital in Los Angeles; before that, it was a three-month operatic stint in Stockholm. A singer's career can be measured in such dashes around the planet - but in the musical sense, she has well and truly arrived.

She is about to record a disc of Poulenc songs for the Hyperion label, and will shortly perform Mahler's Eighth Symphony with super-conductor Valery Gergiev. Before all of that, however, she will return to Dublin to sing in a concert performance of Balfe's The Bohemian Girl at the RDS.

"I love to come back home - for two reasons," she says. "Number one, because I'm Irish. And number two, because my mother lives in Mullingar and I've got an aunt who's in her 80s and who can't handle planes and stuff. So when I come home, Auntie Eileen gets to come to the concerts. And it's lovely to come back to Ireland to do an opera by an Irish composer - and to work with an all-Irish cast. I used," she adds impishly, "to live with the tenor."

Robin Tritschler was, it turns out, her lodger when she made her first step on the London property ladder. "But seriously," she says, looking anything but serious, "it's a big sing, The Bohemian Girl. It's very demanding, for both Robin and myself. But it's great music, and a gorgeous story. A real fairy tale."

THE STORY OF Tynan's success in the often precarious world of opera is also quite a tale - and one with a surprising twist, not at the end, but at the beginning. "I did an Education degree in Trinity," she explains. "And then I did two weeks of secondary teaching and I thought, 'My God, I couldn't stick this for the rest of my life'. I couldn't do it at all. I couldn't get anybody to listen to me."

The irony of this produces another peal of musical laughter. The first person to really hear Tynan's singing voice - and recognise it as a special instrument worthy of nurture - was a nun called Sister Immaculata. The second was a Sister Mullen, of Loreto in Mullingar.

"She had me in all the choirs. I remember one day getting a sore throat when there was a big choral competition coming up - and she made me drink a raw egg with honey in it. It did the trick, but I can barely stomach an egg to this day, let alone a raw one."

Further support - and lots of nurturing, both musical and personal - came from her teachers Jenny Reddin and Irene Sandford at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, where she eventually did a master's degree in Music Performance. But Tynan reserves her highest praise for the Royal Opera House at London's Covent Garden.

"I did the Villar Young Artists' programme there - which really was the makings of me," she says.

"It was a whole new level of discipline. You're surrounded by world-class singers, so you know that you can not be anything less that your very best - because you're 25, competing with guys like John Tomlinson, who have been knighted for their efforts for the cause. You have to be so on the ball. You're there every morning at half past 10. You do drama classes, movement classes, you name it. I even learned to sword fight. Now I hear they're paying gym membership and personal trainers for the young artists - which is the way the opera world is going.

"What people don't realise about singing is that you have to be very fit for it. I mean, you're not just up there standing idly by. People look up and say, 'Oh, isn't she glamorous?' Well, the dresses weigh about five stone for starters. And then you have the wig, which is plastered to your head - glued on, normally - and you've got an inch of make-up on your face. Then there's the sheer physical effort of filling a large auditorium with the sound of your voice, without a microphone, often against the tide of a full-sized orchestra and, sometimes, while standing on your hands.

"Okay, I've never been quite standing on my hands, but not far off it."

HER FIRST ROLE at the Royal Opera House was as Papagena in Mozart's The Magic Flute. "It was directed by David McVicar," she says. "Hang on. You have to see this."

After a bit of muffled rummaging she emerges from her study with a DVD, a book and a sheaf of photographs. "Now. Here are the costumes everyone else was wearing."

The outfits are 18th-century elegant, with a slight whiff of Pirates of the Caribbean anarchy. Papagena, however, spends much of the opera in disguise - traditionally as an old crone.

"Basically, he decided he wanted to have me looking like Bet out of Coronation Street. Tights ripped, a big fur coat that was all matted, a blouse that looked as if I'd thrown up on myself."

At the end of the opera, Papagena reveals herself to be a youthful wife and earth mother. "And that's usually," says Tynan, "when you get a fabulous costume. Not me. I got a boob tube and a pink leather mini and huge white stilettos."

Did she mind? Did she heck.

"I loved it."

In truth, it's hard to imagine Tynan being daunted by anything the operatic stage might throw at her. She has just returned from singing the role of the archetypal angelic young thing, Sophie in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in Stockholm.

"It's a very different system in Sweden. This production has been going since 1971 - so basically they have 30 different costumes that have been used over the years, and you get whichever one is the best fit."

She produces a photograph of herself walking down a Baroque staircase dressed in demure white lace. But there's demure - and demure.

"Towards the end of act two, with another good 15 minutes on stage, the whole of the back of the dress burst," she says. "I had to do a lot of this sort of thing . . . "

She gets up and pirouettes around the kitchen, all demure sighs and hands clasped to her chest.

"I was actually trying to hold it on from the top."

With her outgoing personality and irrepressible energy, Tynan is an operatic natural. But song is her first love. In 2003 she won the Lieder prize at the Singer of the World competition in Cardiff, becoming a BBC New Generation artist in the process.

"It's amazing," she says. "You go in to the BBC and there's a guy who runs the scheme. He says 'We want you to do a recital in the Wigmore Hall and in Aberdeen and at Hay-on-Wye. What would you like to sing?'

"So you pick mad stuff. I did Barber's Knoxville, and Ravel, and all sorts. And they say, 'No problem. We'll get you in to BBC Scotland for that.' Basically, you have at your disposal every big recital series you could imagine, and every major orchestra in the UK, for two years. And you get paid for it all."

EVEN FOR SOMEONE with Tynan's positive outlook, a career as a singer has its downside.

"It's fierce lonely," she says. "I'm on the road all the time. I spend half my life on planes and trains and the other half at my kitchen table learning music. If you had a family, or a husband, you'd never see them."

She's obviously close to her own family whose members are, she insists, totally unmusical. One brother is a solicitor, another a banker; another owns a shoe shop.

"They don't know the first thing about opera, but they come along to everything they can. My uncle Tony and my nephew brought my mother to Sweden to see Rosenkavalier for her 75th birthday. It's four hours long, and they sat through it all, and they thought it was great - and it was in German with Swedish surtitles."

Tynans, take heart - The Bohemian Girl will be a doddle by comparison.

The Bohemian Girl by Michael Balfe tomorrow at 6pm and Sunday at 3.30pm at the RDS in Dublin. Booking at LoCall 0818-300207, or online at www.RDStickets.com. Advance booking is essential