It has long been a puzzle why Ann Murray is not more celebrated in her native land. Success with British opera companies came early, in the mid 1970s, and she also appeared at the Wexford Festival. She was quickly taken up by the record companies, and her international success has brought her to the great stages and concert halls of the world. She has performed at La Scala, the New York Met, the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna State Opera. She has sung with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. She has done the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall (and the First Night, too). Her recital activity - she was a founder member of Graham Johnson's Song-makers' Almanac and is featured in Hyperion's CD series of the complete Schubert songs - is hardly less distinguished. In short, Ireland hasn't produced a singer so successful or highly regarded since John McCormack. Yet here she is, in her 50th year, making her debut with her home town's symphony orchestra, and Irish audiences are still awaiting the opportunity to hear her in the flesh in a major operatic role.
Meeting her at her home in Surrey (the description "rural retreat" comes to mind, and the local train station is small enough to be unmanned), she is the antithesis of the opera star as prima donna. Unassuming, modest to the point of self-deprecation, she has clearly worked out a fine balance in evaluating the claims of career and home. She recently turned down a late offer of performances of Britten's Spring Symphony in New York with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andre Previn, as they would have eaten into time set aside to be with her son, Jonathan.
Looked at one way, her musical career was almost an inevitability. Two older half-brothers had both been musical but, mother's encouragement notwithstanding, had gone into other careers. With "a good ear and a sweet voice", a third opportunity was not going to be allowed to go to waste. Enrolment in the Dublin College of Music followed, with the usual round of feiseanna, then study abroad.
Looked at another way, it was all an accident of fate, attributable to the patience of her teacher Nancy Calthorpe, who "didn't push, allowed my voice to develop, and was gracious enough to say at a certain stage - I was at UCD at the time - `I think you need to go on to somebody better, with more experience'. "
The pianist Darina Gibson, then a student in Manchester, reported that Frederick Cox was producing great results there. An audition led to a scholarship (and the abandonment of plans for Trinity College, London), and, later on there was the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time. "There are," she says, "lots of people who sing as well as me, but haven't had that bit of luck.
"I never really felt that I had a particular ambition to be anything. I seemed to be on a travelator. I just happened to be on it. Because I had been brought up by Catholic nuns, because I'm the age I am, of the generation that I am, you did as you were told. When anybody came off that travelator, you couldn't believe they had the courage to do it." She gives the example of the impression made by a school friend who went to TCD, braving the rigours of the Catholic Church and getting the dispensation that was necessary at that time. Yet, ambition or no, "I wanted to do my best at whatever I was doing".
She was, she says, "frightened of making an eejit of myself to start with, I know that. I used to think, if I do too much, people will think I'm showing off. And if I don't do enough, they'll think I'm stupid. And you got yourself into such a tizz that you didn't know what you were doing. I was very much like that for about the first five or six years of my career." The turning point was a production of Mozart's early Lucio Silla in Zurich, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.
She was on top of her part. Ponnelle had responded encouragingly to improvisations and suggestions during rehearsals, joking "Why did that awful regisseur tell you to do something else?" "It was at that moment that I suddenly realised, if I'm going to do it, I've got to do it properly, and to hell with what anybody else thinks. You've got to give your performance. You can't please everybody, so why not interpret what you feel the music means to you? It may not be what anybody else feels; but at least you're being true to yourself, you're not trying to imitate or parrot somebody else."
Working in opera would seem ideal for someone who likes institutions and describes schools and hospitals as places she feels comfortable. "Even as a solo singer, you've always got someone with you." This may explain her relative failure on the harp ("I must have cut a year or two off Miss Calthorpe's life") and piano ("I remember a lesson with Miss Copeman when she said, `I don't think I've ever heard it played like that before'. Silence. `GET OUT!' ").
The singer's comfort, of course, is limited in other ways. There's the matter of health, shortness of career (admittedly not as severe as for dancers), and the lack of what you might call instrumental mobility. Violinists can choose what they play on, pianists take the very varied offerings that come with the hall, but the singer's situation is altogether more personal. You only have your own voice.
"Yes, you're stuck with it. It's like having parents. You can't change your parents. But you acquire your music from outside. You put it in your melting pot of your emotions or whatever you want to say. You do your work at home. And then, I think, you go out and, for want of a better way of putting it, expose yourself musically. You really put your feelings on the line, your emotions on the line, as to how the poetry or how the music has touched you. And you share that with how many people want to accept it or want to be there."
Study usually begins with the words. "I always write my words out in a book, translating if necessary, so I can see the poem as it is, rather than as it appears on the page of music." In opera, the recitatives come first, and although she has tried throughout her career to learn the finales first, she never does. "I always start at the beginning, instead of learning the big ensembles first. I always want to be able to know how far I've got." The initial effort is "to find what the words mean to me, and then to see what they must have meant to the composer. Then you can feel the atmosphere of the melody to go with the music."
The great German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, used to maintain that preparing just one song was as demanding as preparing a whole opera role. Ann Murray concurs. "I think he's absolutely right. Because in the matter of four pages, let's say three minutes, you have to create a whole opera scene. Not the whole opera, perhaps, but you have to bring people in (native speakers, too), paint the whole picture for them, open the curtain, give them the performance, and close the curtain. "And then you've got to say goodbye to that, so that they're ready for the next curtain. Yes, it's very difficult, and it's a very good discipline to have both, to have opera experiences behind you to sing Lieder and to have Lieder discipline to perform opera. Then you know how much you can project, and how important the words are."
Ann Murray's National Symphony Orchestra debut is at the National Concert Hall tonight, when she'll raise and lower the curtains in the songs of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete. Alexander Anissimov conducts, and the programme also includes Glinka's Summer Night In Madrid and Tchaikovsky's First Symphony (Winter Dreams).
