Ann Murray Gala Concert review: No name-dropping here as stellar singer’s life and work take centre stage

Ann Murray Lifetime Achievement Award Gala Concert

National Concert Hall, Dublin

★★★★☆

There are so many ways in which Tuesday’s Ann Murray NCH Lifetime Achievement Award concert and presentation were as low-key as her career was stellar. There was the reduced strength of the National Symphony Orchestra under Peter Whelan. The players had been shunted to the right side of the stage, and during the first half two armchairs were provided on the other side for a short conversation with the evening’s host, RTÉ presenter Seán Rocks.

The great singer and teacher herself was the epitome of modesty. She was undoubtedly a bit surprised and more than a bit overcome by appearing in the National Concert in an event that wasn’t actually about the composers whose music was being performed (Handel, Mozart, Strauss, Liszt and Britten, all composers with special significance for her), but about her, her achievements, her life.

She’s not exactly new to awards. In the 1990s she received an honorary DMus from the National University of Ireland, was made a Kammersängerin of the Bavarian State Opera and an honorary fellow of London’s Royal Academy of Music. In the 2000s she was awarded a DBE and the Bavarian Order of Merit. None of these, obviously, has turned her head in any way.

She chatted amiably and openly about her life and work. I can’t imagine I was alone in wanting that conversation to go on longer. But there was none of the name-dropping you might have expected. She didn’t even mention her membership of Graham Johnson’s ground-breaking Songmakers’ Almanac, which took thematically-programmed, multi-singer song recitals to a new level beginning in the mid-1970s.

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She gave the impression that she has viewed life as being as much about learning, collaborating and passing things on as anything else

So here’s a list of some of the artists she has worked with, culled only from her discography of studio and live recordings, conductors Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Herbert von Karajan, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Neville Marriner, Riccardo Muti, Vittorio Negri (as part of the earliest large Vivaldi recording project), Simon Rattle, Peter Schreier, Georg Solti, Klaus Tennstedt, and Michael Tilson Thomas; and singers Kathleen Battle, Montserrat Caballé, José Carreras, Renée Fleming, Nicolai Gedda, Edita Gruberova, Barbara Hendricks, Kiri Te Kanawa, Jessye Norman, Lucia Popp, Renata Scotto, Beverly Sills, Frederica von Stade and Bryn Terfel.

[ Ann Murray: ‘If I’d had my time again, I would have stayed in Ireland. That’s one of my biggest regrets’ ]

She’s done it all, and in the very best of musical company.

She gave the impression that she has viewed life as being as much about learning, collaborating and passing things on as anything else. And it was clear from the encomiums by tenor Robin Tritschler and Dearbhla Collins, the evening’s pianist, that she is as fully in her element as a holistic teacher and mentor as she was on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls.

The evening’s performing duties fell to a cross-generational selection of singers, sopranos Máire Flavin, Deirdre Higgins and Aimee Banks, countertenor Cameron Shahbazi and baritone Armand Rabot, along with Tritschler. The audience favourites were clearly Shahbazi and Rabot, but my vote would have gone to Tritscher’s pathos-rich singing of Britten’s arrangements of O Waly, Waly and The Salley Gardens.

Peter Whelan directed lively accounts of the two non-vocal works (Handel’s overture to Serse and Mozart’s early Symphony in G minor), and was a spirited partner in the vocal items.

The handing over of the award was as muted as you can imagine, perhaps because NCH chairwoman Maura McGrath had to remain on stage for the finale of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, in which she joined the rest of the vocal company side by side with an uncredited tenor, Murray’s son Johnny Langridge, for a bit of a romp in which everyone got to let their hair down.