SOPRANO Lynda Lee is a busy singer. She's back home in Dublin from her German debut in the title role of Handel's Agrippina in Karlsruhe. Tomorrow night she starts a Music Network tour, a "Schubertiad Evening" with clarinettist Michael Seaver and pianist Patrick Zuk, 12 concerts in 15 days.
The day after that ends, she's back in Germany for Handel's Xerxes in Halle, a role she was, fairy tale like, offered on the opening night of the Karlsruhe Agrippina. In the middle of the run of Xerxes she has to do a recital in Washington and also pay a visit to England for a performance of Chausson's Poeme de l'amour et de la mer. Xerxes, she explains, is going to be learnt during the tour around Ireland. "I'm used to learning things quickly. At this stage in my career, you don't get two years notice."
For the tour, she says, "I've tried very hard to pick things that are popular and will be quite well known to everybody. When you're doing 12 recitals around the country, some of Schubert's repertoire wouldn't be particularly suitable for a first hearing of Schubert". She's also included "this very dramatic song I hadn't been familiar with before, called Dem unendlichen which is quite Wagnerian in style, very dramatic". I can't help wondering whether this description is based on an encounter with the Kirsten Flagstad recording, in which the inherent drama of the music is most extraordinarily garbed with mannerisms of Wagnerian vocal delivery.
WITH a foothold in Germany, Wagner and Strauss are beckoning to Lynda Lee, but the roles she cites as current favourites are both from Mozart: Fiordiligi (Cosi fan tutte) and Elektra (Idomeneo). She understudied both of these last year (Glyndebourne and Scottish Opera) as she prepared to market herself afresh as a soprano rather than a mezzo soprano.
The change wasn't so much one of voice - the notes were always there - as one of selling. Performances of the alto: part in Bach's St Matthew Passion some years back helped her to an understanding that she was altogether happier with: "those dramatic roles that jump around the place". "I like things that you have to put a lot of energy into, because that's what I'm better at," she says.
"I'm not very good at being subdued on stage. The colour of my voice is wrong for that."
