Celine Byrne was a late bloomer as a serious singer, but her fresh voice won her admirers and has landed her a role in Scottish Opera's La Bohème,writes MICHAEL DERVAN
KILDARE soprano Celine Byrne was a late starter, but once she started she rose rapidly. She was all of 19 when she decided to take singing seriously and get her voice trained. She was old enough to enrol as a mature student, and was already a mother, when she finally decided to study singing full-time at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama.
Yet she managed to win a prize at the first international singing competition she entered, taking the Brabants Dagblad press prize at the International Vocal Competition ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands in 2006. She then entered the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition in Dublin in January 2007, where she made it to and performed in the finals, despite being seriously ill – she collapsed two days later and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Her greatest success came later that year, when she took the top prize at the Maria Callas Grand Prix competition in Athens.
Singing, basically, was a hobby – school choir and roles in musicals – that became a career. It was in Italy (where else?) that her passion for opera was first stirred. She was working in Milan as an au pair, and when the family discovered that, although she loved singing, she had never been to an opera, they gave her a ticket to La Scala as a present. Her first opera was Verdi's La traviata– "the best one", she says, laughing.
“I absolutely fell in love. I couldn’t understand the language, because I was only learning it. But the music transcended it, and I could understand everything that was going on on the stage. I was just so engrossed in it, and so moved I said to myself, ‘this is something that I would actually love to do’.”
In spite of the encounter with Verdi, her goal when she went to have her voice trained was rather different. She wanted to sing like Barbra Streisand, and her initial reason for undertaking the training was “so that I could control my voice”.
As she tells it, she lacked confidence as a performer at first. She had no lack of confidence in her voice, but she was self-conscious about her lack of experience in classical repertoire, not least because she was surrounded by younger musicians whose experience was much greater. At times she felt “like a nervous wreck”. Part of the paradox was that, although her voice was mature, “I was still only young, vocally. I was still only learning.”
Maturity, of course, has its rewards, and she was always clear about her goals. “I do have a plan in life, and hopefully . . . well, God, of course, has my plan in life, but I try to live that plan as best I can to please Him. Everybody has a plan in life. I wanted to do my degree. I did everything I possibly could to earn that degree. And I got high marks in it. Then I did a Master’s. I don’t want to be 40 years of age, and then say, ‘Oh, I should have done a Master’s.’ Because if the singing doesn’t work out, then I can teach. I need to be sensible about this. I have a family, and I need to think ahead. Then I wanted to do competitions for a year, and if that hadn’t worked out I would probably have gone to London to study. But one thing led to another, and here I am today.”
Being something of a late bloomer seems to have been both a boon and a barrier. The upside is not just a sound head on sound shoulders, but also a genuine freshness in her singing, which comes across as unusually direct and unaffected.
On the other hand, the post-Callas competition years seem to have been both lucrative and a sort of limbo. She has performed as a support act to the likes of José Carreras and Roberto Alagna. She’s been heard at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the State Hermitage in St Petersburg. But no Irish opera company has yet offered her a role, and she found herself in a Catch 22 – needing a track record in opera that she didn’t have in order to get the roles that she would need to get a track record.
That negative loop has now been broken. She auditioned for Scottish Opera in 2008, and the company cast her as the seamstress Mimí in Stewart Laing's production of Puccini's La Bohème, which updates the story of young love to contemporary New York, and which has been seen in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen and Belfast, and is now coming to Dublin. Her reviews have been good, and professional response has been positive, too, leading to interest from other European opera companies, though not yet any in Ireland.
She’s fascinated by the differences between the concert platform and a major opera role. “In a concert,” she says, “you sing out to the audience, you invite them in by your charisma and your stage presence, you can look around, you can feel everybody. With the opera, you have to engage people in a different way. You have to kind of bring them in, as opposed to going out to get them. You have to draw them in. Sometimes you can feel it.
“With the aria Donde lieta, when I’m breaking up with Rodolfo you can actually feel that. You know you’ve created tension there. It’s just amazing. They’re two completely different feelings.”
Scottish Opera's La Bohèmeis at the Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Celine Byrne's début CD will be released on the RTÉ Lyric FM label later this year
celinebyrne.com
