Máire Flavin: Irish soprano on her role in Elektra, Strauss's famously dark opera
Máire Flavin has largely been based abroad in recent years.
Since her big break representing Ireland at the Cardiff Singer of the World a decade ago, opera star Máire Flavin has been based abroad. She and her Scottish husband, also a singer have recently set up home on the Fife coast in Scotland with their two-year-old daughter.
She returns as one of Ireland’s successful operatic exports with a growing reputation for her dazzling lyric soprano register and a charismatic stage presence. It is a combination that has secured her regular work with major companies. On disc, her voice is heard on a delightful recording of classic children's lullabies familiar from movies and musicals.
When I catch up with Flavin on a video call, the soprano is just out of quarantine and sitting in her childhood home on a sunny afternoon in Dublin. The family piano that the six Flavin siblings played growing up, frames the screen. On one of the hottest days of the year, she is jubilant at snagging the last paddling pool in her local LIDL and looking forward to getting back into rehearsals for her latest role with Irish National Opera.
In August she comes to Kilkenny Arts Festival to make her role debut as Chrysothemis in Elektra. For their return to live audiences, INO have eschewed the light and frothy and bravely gone where no Irish company has gone before. Richard Strauss’s version of the Greek tragedy revolves around what is arguably the most dysfunctional household in classic literature with a plot that would seem extreme for your average blood-soaked slasher movie.
Strauss’s opera picks up the story after the axe murder of King Agamemnon by his wife Klytaemestra, peeved at his sacrificing of their daughter Iphigeneia in a prequel. Daughter Elektra vows to avenge his death and is banished from the house to prowl around the yard. The task falls to long lost brother Orestes who returns to find Elektra unhinged and proceeds to do in his mother and her lover.
Whew! No surprise then that it caused a stir at the premiere in 1909. “It is a monster of a piece musically and dramatically but so rewarding and interesting. Chrysothemis is a lot less troubled than Elektra. There is less delving into a tormented psyche. She is younger- she still has hope and visions of a life beyond this hell that they are thrown into. I feel I have really lucked out with this part. She and her brother Orestes have some of the most beautiful lyrical music in the piece.”
Restrictions have necessitated changes to the rehearsal process. Gone is the customary sitzprobe where the orchestra and singers meet for a sit-down rehearsal. The orchestral score was pre-recorded with the principals joining online to observe a rehearsal. While ballet companies are accustomed recorded orchestral parts, it is a new way of working for opera singers.
The opera set in the mythical courtyard of Agamemnon’s palace will get its first Irish staging in an amphitheatre setting in the 12th century Castle Yard in Kilkenny.
Like so many in their profession, Flavin saw a year’s work shelved. She is upbeat though about the future; thankful that she had no outright cancellations but merely postponements and plenty of repertoire to work on in the lull.
Throughout our chat she is eager to acknowledge her collaborators. Making her INO debut is Giselle Allen in the demanding title role, a Belfast singer that Flavin describes as “phenomenal- a force of nature”.
She also acknowledges Fergus Sheil at INO for giving her first Mimi early on in her move into the soprano fach. Flavin doesn’t spend too much time looking back but pressed to reflect on mezzo roles that she has retired from her catalogue, she admits to an affinity with Strauss.
“I always wanted to do Komponist in Ariadne Auf Naxos. I sang an aria from it at Cardiff Singer but you have to look forward to what you are gaining and the other amazing repertoire that you can leap forward into.”
In the autumn, she returns to Opera North in the UK to begin rehearsals in the title role of Handel’s Alcina. “I go from one crazy Elektra to a mental sorceress which will be very different repertoire but wonderful.”
- Irish National Opera present Elektra in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival Aug 5th -15th www.kilkennyarts.ie
- Baby Mine: Maire Flavin, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Classic Film Lullabies From Our Childhood; Stone Records
