Byrne's brief 'Rusalka' exposure pays off handsomely

TO BE A successful musical performer, it’s important to have strong self-belief

TO BE A successful musical performer, it’s important to have strong self-belief. And it’s also useful to have a lot of self-doubt. One is a help in doing what you have to do, on the stage and in the matter of persuading potential partners and audiences that you’ve got what it takes.

The other helps you hone your delivery as you strive to optimise the talent that you have. But you also need opportunity and probably a fair bit of luck into the bargain. If you don’t get the chance to present yourself in the first place, then you’ve nowhere to go at all.

Music schools are full of hopefuls – diligent, determined, hard-working, talented individuals, many of whom spend more hours than there are in a normal working day in the isolation of the practice room. Most of them you’ll never hear of. And if you were to hear them you might never want to hear them again. The bar to success is set very high. It’s not just about consistently meeting the standards of the profession. It’s also about communication and personality and the je ne sais quoi that makes for audience engagement. You can work and study as hard and as long as you like, but some of the essentials are almost impossible to teach or to acquire.

There’s no law to stop young hopefuls dreaming and aspiring. And one of the most frequent of those dreams is about getting a break or being discovered. Leonard Bernstein stood in for an indisposed Bruno Walter to make his debut with the New York Philharmonic on November 14th, 1943, and never looked back. The 24-year-old Gustavo Dudamel made his debut with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms in 2005 as a last-minute replacement for Neeme Järvi. A year later he was announced as the orchestra’s new principal conductor and a further year on he was named music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Such stories are legion, and provide essential sustenance to everyone who believes they could be a star.

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But, in truth, the break itself is not the issue. Dramatic, 11th-hour replacements are part and parcel of the performing world, and you tend not to hear about the ones that simply never work out. It’s the return engagements that are key. For every last-minute replacement that becomes a success story, and every prestigious debut that works out, there are dozens that lead nowhere. When you read the potted biography of a performer in the printed programme at a concert, you need to know if the appearances with major orchestras or at major festivals were one-offs, or if they generated an ongoing relationship.

Kildare soprano Celine Byrne was in the news at the beginning of March when she stood in, mid-performance, in the title role of Dvorak’s Rusalka at the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, taking over for Camilla Nylund, who had been afflicted by allergies. Byrne had been Nylund’s understudy, so she knew the role and the production. But all she had was a half an evening in the limelight. Nylund recovered, and Byrne was not needed again. Think of her as a substitute being called off the bench in the second half after a dramatic injury, and doing all she had to do. That’s still not a starting place on the team.

She has since gone one stage further. She’s going to sing Mimì in a production of La bohème that opens in Covent Garden on April 30th. She secured the role after another enforced dropout – the original soprano was German singer Anja Harteros, who cried off “for personal reasons” that meant she was unable to take part in the rehearsals.

It’s a real feather in Byrne’s cap to have secured the role, which will bring her seven performances on one of the great operatic stages of the world. And I’m inclined to suspect that it’s actually the best possible outcome of the exposure she got through Rusalka.

You might want to argue that being cast as a first-choice singer for a major role in a future season would be even better. Perhaps. But that’s a much bigger issue for any opera house that cares about its reputation, and it might be inclined to wait longer before taking such a risk. The most obvious next step after Rusalka would have been a smaller role in a future production.

Singing Mimì in the place of Harteros is a more fortunate and quicker way forward. There’s less pressure all round although still plenty of it, if you look at some of the feedback to the announcement on the Covent Garden website. And if it works out well, then a healthy future at Covent Garden, and elsewhere, surely beckons. Before that there’s a Celine Byrne Summer Gala with the RTÉ NSO under Robert Houlihan at the NCH on Friday, June 1st.

There was singing and other strange vocalisations of a sort you won’t often hear in an opera house at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin on Sunday. Two composer/ performers, Jennifer Walshe and Alessandro Bosetti, had teamed up for a programme called Voices and Devices using voices and a laptop.

During the first piece, prolonged repetitions of the phrase “I have been looking”, slips of paper were given out by the performers as the moved around the gallery. I ended up with two. One of them read: “The theme of this story: epic action. The main character: negative scientist. The start of the story: theft. The end of the story: spying.”

The other was completely different. There were ramblings about shades of the colour blue that wandered in and out of language and on to gesture and singing in a way that ranged from the oddly matter of fact to the fraught.

* There wasa bit of Kurt Schwitters's seminal Ursonate with electronic background, sometimes organ-like, sometimes voice-like. There were lots of sounds of human stress and distress, multiple languages, words that made some kind of sense, words that made no sense at all, words that were indecipherable for any number of reasons, and speech that morphed into gibberish.

It was a fantastical and fascinating presentation, often as context-shifting as it would have been had the performers started walking on the walls. The results did not, however, appear to be to everyone’s taste, with each and every round of applause prompting early exits by audience members. I haven’t seen as much of an exodus from a concert since Ivo Pogorelich’s controversial piano recital at the NCH in June 2010.

* The Orchestraof St Cecilia began the second year of its six-year survey of the complete symphonies of Haydn at Newman University Church on St Stephen's Green on Sunday afternoon. Conductor Proinnsías Ó Duinn, who likes to offer spoken introductions to the pieces, made a surprise reference to metronome marks in Symphony No 5, the surprise stemming from a disparity of dates – the symphony was written around 1760, Haydn died in 1809, and the metronome was not invented until the following decade. Those marks cannot be Haydn's.

The pattern is as before, three symphonies at a time, each from a different period, with Sunday offering numbers 5, 41 and 76. The orchestral playing is a little rough (the horns had a hard time with some of the high-altitude writing) and the conducting not as alert as it could be (it was far more on the mark in last year’s opening concert).

But the music is inventive, fecund, and, as Ó Duinn rightly pointed out, remarkable for the sense of well-being it both conveys and induces.

This year’s series, in a church that’s no longer chilly (the heating has been improved) continues until May 20th.