IT SOUNDS like a cliche. But, when Orla Boylan won the first Veronica Dunne Singing Competition in January 1995 no one was more surprised than Orla Boylan herself. At that time she was studying in UCD, "supposedly doing a Ph.D in electronmicroscopy in botany". Singing, though, had long been part of her life. She started having lessons with Mary Brennan around the age of 12, and had always kept it up, even though, now and again, it would "fall by the wayside because I was doing my other work".
At the time of the competition, the research work didn't appear to be going too well, but the singing was on an upward surge. "A year before the competition, I began to sing in public. I did my first competition in Christmas of 93. I won it. After that, I began to enter more competitions, Feis Ceoils and things around the country. I was winning them. Then the science just began to fall by the wayside. It kind of turned into a Master's, and then it died quietly."
The research had always seemed too lonely a pursuit. Whereas, through the singing: "Because I was getting out in front of people, meeting lots of interesting people, it was just so different being out there with the public. Just the buzz you get from singing, apart from winning. The winning was just a bonus."
When the Veronica Dunne Competition came up, Orla Boylan remembers thinking:
Ah, sure I'll do it. Just for the laugh. I'd never dreamed that anything would happen. I was still doing my work, going into college every day." And the same easiness of attitude prevailed as she passed through to the quarter finals and the semi finals, then the finals and the top prize.
"After that there was a lot more work, and it just changed my mind. I had to make a decision. I just wasn't getting anywhere with the science. I was getting somewhere with the singing, and I was loving it. So she opted to drop the science and get on with the singing. "You can get as much advice as you want, but you have to decide yourself what you feel better doing."
It's clear from talking to them just as it's clear when you listen to her, that Orla Boylan feels secure and comfortable with her voice. "Obviously there are problems, and sometimes I have problems just with certain notes, or whatever. But I feel very comfortable with it. I don't know whether it's a bad thing or not, but I'm not very big on technique. This is a thing that I need to work on in the future, but I feel that it comes naturally to me. I was a mezzo to start with - or we thought I was going to be a mezzo - but then, all of a sudden, I just found the higher voice. It's not something that I worry about. I never worry about my voice, and I suppose that's a tell tale sign that I don't find it a problem.
IN SPITE of this enviable sense of security, when she was offered a place at the opera studio of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich it felt like too much, too soon, so she turned it down. She makes it sound like an easily reached, instinctively sure sighted decision. But she has moved abroad, to Milan, as a result of winning the AsLiCo competition, which, she says, "is about the most important competition in Italy for young singers". Her prize places her on a two year course which involves not a great deal of formal tuition, but real life preparation and performance, which have already brought her valuable stage experience in touring productions of Cosi fan tutte and Rigoletto.
"The main problem for me is the change of lifestyle, and going away. I didn't want to go away at all in April. I just dreaded it. I won the competition to go to Italy in January. I was delighted. It was incredible, to go, and sing, and to win, and to come home and say you sang in La Scala and you won the competition and you were the only soprano to win. You come home, and everybody's thrilled.
"Then, all of a sudden, you realise, you're going to Italy, and it hits you. It was horrendous. There were hours crying in this house, not wanting to go.
I really found it very difficult. I didn't have a word of Italian. You had to sit through four hours of lectures on Rigoletto and not understand anything.
It sounds like something that could have turned into a disaster. But she wanted to do it, so she mastered it. "Now I just love it, and the language is grand, no bother at all." So much so, that when her two years in Italy are over, she expects to be ready for another country, Germany, and another language.
As a full time singer, who never studied music at school, and for most of her life had as little to do with theory as she could get away with, she says she's "big time on catch up at the moment". And the catching up is not just in matters of theory, harmony, technique or music history. When she Fiordiligi in Cosi for AsLiCo it was her "first time on an opera stage, first time ever doing a full role, first time acting, and was straight into the lead role".
Italy has been an exciting but also a sobering experience, the encounter with hard nosed professional attitudes to performance taking some of the romanticism out of singing. "They're not behind the door in telling you you're not singing well, that you need more energy here, you need more energy there. That's hard. When you feel you've done well and you come off and the conductor's giving out to you ... You have to get used to that."
SHE agrees that her voice has changed since she's gone away, but thinks that's more to do with natural development than with anything specifically Italian. On the other hand, it's true that now "I can sing for three hours non stop, in big arias and ensembles and I'm not tired at the end of it." She says this without a hint of pride, as something in the nature of a matter of fact which through good fortune happens to be in her favour, just as she says that when she's in Italy and singing every day, she can "get up at nine o'clock in the morning and sing a top C". Basically, she says, I'm following my nose at the moment. I can't say where I'm going to be in five years time. I just know, in general, that what I'm doing is alright, and the way I'm doing it is right."
At the end of the interview, I ask Orla Boylan if there's anything we haven't touched on that she'd like to mention. There is. "I think the support that somebody gets over here is just amazing. From everybody. I used to sing in Clarendon Street Church, and people would come in from the congregation and say, I'm praying for you.' I have people up in Ballymena who are praying for me. It's amazing the number of people who will think of you while you're away. It makes you feel like, you are doing this, you have a gift, and you're not just doing it for yourself, you're doing it for everybody else. A musical talent is for everybody, as well as yourself."
