Soprano Orla relishes new phase of career

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Dublin Soprano Orla Boylan will be in the spotlight next Thursday night, April 14, when the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by acclaimed Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann, presents a programme entitled Music as Poetry. It’s at 8pm in Leisureland.

The closing concert of Music for Galway’s Orchestral Season will feature Orla in Maurice Ravel’s Shéhérazade, which is inspired by the stories of The Arabian Nights. She will also sing in Jean Sibelius’s 1913 work, Luonnotar, a re-telling of a Finnish legend about the spirit of nature.

“This is good work and challenging for an audience,” says Orla as she settles back with a cup of tea for our phone interview.

She especially loves the fact that Jean Sibelius is on the programme, comparing his compositions to Irish music in “being so emotive and evocative”.

Sibelius has a connection to Celtic music, she adds, and was inspired hugely by nature.

“It’s really interesting music,” she reflects.

Orla Boylan is one of Ireland’s leading opera singers, with a successful international career which has seen her perform with some of the world’s leading companies in the great opera houses and concert halls of Sydney, Oslo, Auckland, Copenhagen and London.

There’s been “lots of good luck, a fair amount of talent and a lot of hard work”, in getting to where she is today, but Orla never started out with a grand plan to be a professional. She began taking singing lessons at the age of 12 with music teacher Mary Brennan and they continued into adulthood.

Initially, however, Orla followed an academic path, going to UCD where she graduated with a first-class degree in science.

She was continuing her scientific studies with a PhD in Botany, also at UCD, when she entered the inaugural Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, and won. The following year, she won an international competition for young singers in Milan, and her career path changed.

As a child, the idea of living abroad was abhorrent to her – yet that’s eventually what happened. Orla moved to Milan after winning her second singing competition, and was subsequently based in Manchester and London before buying a house at home in Skerries.

“There’s a certain time at which you have to make your choices. In August 2006, I came home.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.