Mezzo soprano Tara Erraught’s first solo opera gala with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is easily summed up: she came, she sang, she conquered.
The Dundalk-born singer shot to national attention in January 2007 when, at the age of 20, she took second prize at the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition. She joined the opera studio of Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper a year later and was soon making waves in major roles in the Bavarian capital.
A key opportunity presented itself in 2011 when, less than a week before the opening night of a production of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, she was asked to stand in as Romeo for the indisposed Vesselina Kasarova. She sang the dress rehearsal with the score in her hand, and on a Friday was offered the opening night if she could have the part by heart in time for the performance on Sunday.
She created such a stir in Munich that in 2013 she received the Bavarian state government's Pro meritis scientiae et litterarum award, which is given annually to up to eight individuals for outstanding contributions to science and the arts. She is only the fifth musician – and also the youngest – to receive the award since its inception in 2000. Previous musical recipients include the likes of soprano Julia Varady and conductor Zubin Mehta.
She hit the international headlines 12 months ago for all the wrong reasons. An all-male clutch of British music critics, in the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times, took exception to her appearance in the trouser role of Octavian in a Richard Jones production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Glyndebourne Festival.
What followed was an avalanche of comment, in print, online and on radio and television, condemning the nature of their negativity about her physique. The reverberations were long-lasting. At the end of September the issue was even raised in a BBC World News HARDtalk interview with Jessye Norman, who rowed in behind Erraught.
It can’t have been easy to weather on a personal level. But the law of unintended consequences made her for a while, as commentator Norman Lebrecht aptly put it, “the most famous mezzo on Earth”. Lebrecht further suggested that she “will never want for work. Nor need she fear further assault. The male critics will not dare.”
Key, of course, to that upbeat projection is the fact that no one was quibbling about her actual singing. And there was certainly nothing to quibble with at the National Concert Hall on Friday, where not only Erraught’s vocal adaptability but also her acting skills saw her step in and out of character with consummate ease. In concert she’s one of those singers whose voice, face and demeanour can change in a flash, drawing her listeners effortlessly into the emotional complexities of a series of operatic plots.
The programme was typical of an opera gala in that it was a series of overtures, orchestral interludes and arias. What made it unusual was that, sandwiched between favourite arias by Mozart and Rossini were less frequently aired ones by Berlioz (D'amour l'ardente flamme from Damnation de Faust) and Balfe (Non v'è donna from Falstaff).
Erraught has developed into one of those singers who allows you to take virtually everything for granted: clarity and beauty of tone, fine-tuned emotional and musical responsiveness, vivid communication, and security of technique and intonation.
In addition she has that elusive X factor, that hidden message saying that she’s standing on the stage for her own pleasure as well as for yours. She gives the impression it’s just the way she is.
The easy richness of her singing vaulted on to an even higher level for the evening's final two arias, Rossini's Una voce poco fa (from Il barbiere di Siviglia) and Non più mesta (from La Cenerentola). The coloratura had a spine-tingling, sparkling brilliance, as if any possible sequence of leaps or roulades could have been handled with delightful insouciance.
The purely orchestral pieces were handled with spirit although not always finesse by conductor Giacomo Sagripanti, who made sure that the orchestra’s partnership with Erraught was always well-judged and supportive.
The good news on the Rossini front is that Fergus Sheil's Wide Open Opera has signed her up for a new production of Rossini's Barbiere at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre next year. News on the company's application for Arts Council funding is due any day now.
Looking further ahead in the world of opera, word is out that Anthony Negus is to conduct Wagner's Parsifal at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2017. This looks like another brave move by the Kilkenny festival, as the Arts Council's current opera production funding is due to end next year.
Regular visitor
It is more than 10 years since the Paris-based Serbian-American pianist Ivan Ilic gave his first concert in Ireland. Since then he has become a regular visitor, with a penchant for the kind of music that most pianists seem happy to avoid. The first time I heard him he was offering Satie in company with Morton Feldman and Leopold Godowsky (some of the studies with heaped-up piles of notes that Godowsky created by filling in the gaps in studies by Chopin to make them even harder).
His lunchtime programme at the NCH John Field Room on Friday was typically idiosyncratic, and (also typically) was not the one he was actually advertised to play. He offered lesser pieces by Beethoven (an early rondo and a set of variations) and a pair of nocturnes by Chopin, all interspersed with fugues by Antonín Rejcha, a Czech contemporary and friend of Beethoven.
Rejcha, whose name is often spelled Reicha and who is now best remembered for his music for wind ensembles, wrote a set of 36 fugues for piano in 1803 and dedicated them to Haydn, a composer he held in the highest admiration.
The fugues are in a style so unusual that Beethoven said of them, “the fugue is no longer a fugue”. If you heard them without knowing what they were, you would find it hard to associate them with any particular time or place. Rejcha’s pupils included Berlioz, Franck and Gounod, and some of their unusual harmonic habits can be readily traced back to their now-neglected teacher.
Ilic’s delivery was a little stiff – more than a little for the Chopin Nocturnes. But his espousal of a handful of Rejcha’s fugues shows why he is so valued for his inquiring pianistic mind.
- mdervan@irishtimes.com
