On Tuesday the National Concert Hall will bestow its lifetime-achievement award on the mezzo-soprano Ann Murray. As the hall notes, the Dublin singer’s “unforgettable performances have graced the stages of renowned theatres in cities such as London, Paris, Hamburg, Dresden, Brussels, Berlin, Cologne, Zurich, Amsterdam and New York”.
What’s missing is the mention of any opera venues in her own country. She appeared at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 1968, at the age of 19, when she sang the tiny role of the shepherd in Puccini’s Tosca. This did garner her a photograph on the front page of this newspaper. In Wexford in 1975, in the second of her two appearances there, she sang in Cavalli’s Eritrea, which was having its first modern revival after more than three centuries of neglect. And she didn’t get to sing with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra until the year of her 50th birthday.
The standout stage performance on this island was a gripping, intense performance of the title role in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, in a production Welsh National Opera brought to Belfast.
Murray doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings about the situation, and she describes the lifetime-achievement award as overwhelming, adding, “It’s not my bag, really. I can’t quite believe it.”
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She gives the impression of fully knowing her own value, appreciating her achievements and having that professional skill of knowing what to take on and what to avoid. But she spreads the credit around. “You don’t get there on your own. From my mother to my agent, and everybody in between, the influences and guidance I had. The experience I had with conductors, some who were difficult, some who were wonderful. Mostly they were wonderful. Accompanists, repetiteurs, make-up people. It makes the award somewhat humbling, I must say.” Those conductors include Lorin Maazel, Antonio Pappano, Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, Georg Solti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Charles Mackerras, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas and Neville Marriner.
The musical programme for the award concert on January 30th is a mishmash, bringing together colleagues young and old with the National Symphony Orchestra under Peter Whelan. The evening will celebrate landmark roles and operas from her career. Handel, Mozart and Strauss dominate; the evening will close with part of the end of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. “I’ve asked if I can join them, and we’ll all squawk our heads off. It’s not meant to be polished. It’s meant to be fun.”
Murray is now a teacher and a mentor, and she says she no longer worries about keeping her voice in shape. “I had a wonderful agent, Robert Rattray, to whom I was introduced in 1973. He stayed with me and ran my career, and a lot of my life, I must say.”
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He was the person who told her, some time before his death, in 2018, “It’s time you stopped. You’ll only be singing old-bag parts. You won’t be singing a role that starts at the beginning or is written on the front page, a role that you work your way through until you get to the end of the opera.” That extended kind of character development, Murray says, is the sort of challenge she always loved. “The other cast members won’t know who you are,” he said. “You’ll be sitting on your own, waiting for your little scene to come – Marcellina or something like that.” His advice was clear: “Stop while you’re ahead.” So that’s what she did.
You have to have an arrogant modesty, or a modest arrogance. That sort of feeling. You have to know your worth
Murray’s view is that she had a career in which “one thing led to another”. Not planned but a sort of serendipitous sequence. She offers an extreme example. When she was preparing to study in London, the pianist Darina Gibson, whom she didn’t know, wrote unprompted to Murray’s singing teacher, Nancy Calthorpe, to say there was a teacher in Manchester who had a very good reputation and it might be good for Murray to look for an audition there on her way to London.
She did. And her audition with Frederick Cox led to her spending four years in Manchester, the first two of which, she says, were entirely devoted to exercises. Incredible as it may seem, Murray and Gibson only recently met in the flesh for the first time, at a master class Murray was giving at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. “I had been waiting since 1967 to say thank you. She was amazing.”
Murray’s conversation is full of amusing asides, as when she gives some background to the Manchester experience. “I was only in there for about half an hour, and by the time I came out my mother had found an Irish Catholic hostel, run by nuns. I said I didn’t know if I was coming here. She said, ‘Ah, no. I found it. Sisters of Mercy. Up the road.’” She is also a wickedly sharp mimic, mostly taking off colleagues’ sharp-tongued remarks when something or other hadn’t gone as planned.
She comes across as a consummate professional, and reveals real fibre when talking about building a career, even though she also talks of working for nearly a decade before finding solid self-confidence. “If you’re at the beginning of your career, if you’re employed, yes, you will learn from the conductor, the producer, your colleagues. But you’re on an equal footing, no matter what you’re singing. You have to have an arrogant modesty, or a modest arrogance. That sort of feeling. You have to know your worth.” Part of her worth in her early years, “when everybody didn’t speak English”, extended to learning the language of the countries she would be working in.
It’s a harder world for young singers today, she says, and they move too soon into repertoire that’s too big for them. She likens it to “putting a child’s foot in a shoe that’s too small. There will be damage. If it’s too tight, it’s cartilage still, it’s not bone, and it won’t revive, it won’t improve.” And many of today’s conductors, she says, “wonderful as they are”, haven’t spent enough time in opera houses, and are no longer steeped in the repertoire and the world of singing the way previous generations were. She lives in London and remarks on the extra burden that British singers now face, with Brexit shutting them out of so many opportunities in other European countries.
Murray talks of her preparation. “When I worked I wrote out everything. There was no internet, so I had my dictionary, the score and my book, and I wrote out everything. I wrote out every song that I did, all the recitatives in a Mozart opera. It took forever. But, strangely enough, by the time I had done that, I had done half of the learning. I didn’t go to the gym, with my earphones in, and learn from somebody’s record,” something she thinks does happen “quite a lot” today.
She talks of what a singer does on stage.”It’s opening your heart. You haven’t written it. You’re the conduit. And you are allowing people to see what you have thought about it, as if you were in a book club or something like that. Your performance for the time that you’re doing it is the most important thing in the moment,” she says.
“The next performance will be different. It will be a different interpretation. How many zillion performances have there been of Marriage of Figaro? And every performance is different. Like reading a book for the second or the third time, you find something else in it. To be humble enough to know that you’re not the important person. It’s the genius that has come through you, as well as all the others that get you on to the stage. I think that’s the most important part of it all. That’s the joy and the privilege of music.”
She talks about Ireland. “I hope I don’t go teary now. But when I see the Irish coast, when we’re coming in to land, I find that heartbreakingly beautiful. I miss that. But I was away from my home since I was 10. I never actually lived in Glenageary, except in my childhood, between five and 10. Then I went away to school and then to Manchester, and I never went back.”
She does become teary. “If I’d had my time again, if the opportunities were such as today, back in the 1970s, then I think I would have stayed in Ireland. That’s one of my biggest regrets. I would love to have stayed at home.”
Small wonder, then, that the lifetime-achievement award means so much to her.
Ann Murray’s lifetime-achievement award presentation and gala concert are at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Tuesday, January 30th
