Jane Irwin steps in for last minute role in SSO’s Tristan und Isolde

JANE Irwin might be a last-minute replacement for a key role in the SSO’s Tristan und Isolde but she’s well qualified for the role, and is working her way up to being able to play the lead

It’s an orchestral administrator’s nightmare. A soloist calls in sick with hardly a week to go to the concert. Who can they find who could step in at the last moment, and – more importantly – is actually free and in the right part of the world to make themselves available for the rehearsals and performance?

That was the plight of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra last week. The work in question is Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, being performed in concert tonight in Glasgow and on Sunday in Edinburgh. Not one, but two key members of the small cast had called off – Ian Storey as Tristan (a clash with rehearsals at La Scala Milan), who shone in that role in Act I a month ago; and Lioba Braun as Bargäne.

In the event, cover for Tristan was quickly found. Robert Dean Smith, scheduled to take over anyway from Storey in the concluding Act III in April next year, just happened to be free. But while finding a suitable Brangäne – Act II is where her meddling ways reach fever pitch – was not quite so straightforward, the solution the management came up with will certainly not turn followers off this act-by-act serialisation of opera’s greatest love story.

Brangäne will now be sung by Jane Irwin, a Lancashire-born singer who, for many years, was based here in Scotland, and whose rich and powerful mezzo-soprano voice was a regular knock-out in countless performances with all the Scottish orchestras, Scottish Opera, and regularly at the Edinburgh International Festival.

We haven’t heard so much of her recently, and the reason, it seems, is twofold. On the one hand, Irwin’s voice has been going through a period of major transition, shifting her previous emphasis on traditional mezzo roles to those of the dramatic soprano. On the other hand, she’s hardly been idle, singing major operatic roles as far afield as San Francisco and Berlin.

Mention of these particular cities is not coincidental. For in San Francisco Opera’s recent Tristan she shone as Brangäne (having sung the role in an Edinburgh Festival concert performance previously); and next year she will reprise the same role in a revival of Graham Vick’s highly acclaimed production for Deutsche Oper.

The common factor in both of these productions – and in this week’s BBC SSO performance – is conductor Donald Runnicles, former music director at San Francisco, current music director of the Berlin company, and better known here as the man currently in charge of the SSO.

“He’s a singer’s conductor,” says Irwin of the Scots-born maestro. “That’s a phrase I hate using, but it really is true in Donald’s case. He’s so empathetic to a singer’s strengths and weaknesses, and he’s always frank and honest, but in an encouraging way. It doesn’t do any good to do otherwise. He breathes with you, and has that sixth sense you find only among the very best operatic conductors.”

I imagine that kind of support is pretty important to Irwin as she works her way into roles more suited to her recently changing voice. But what exactly is driving this change from the warm mellow midrange reaches of the mezzo-soprano repertoire to the more showy, dazzling heights of the dramatic soprano?

For a start, she says, it’s quite a common change for mezzos. “I think there’s always been a bit of both in me. Although I spent most of my early career as a concert singer in mezzo roles, sometimes even easing into the alto repertory, in the back of my mind I knew where I wanted to go.”

“It happened as far back as my operatic debut at the age of 25 in Götterdämerung. Hearing the Brünnhilde in that production, I knew that was where I wanted to be, but that it would take time. To tackle it then would have been vocal suicide.”

Irwin “played safe” and stuck to the mezzo roles that brought her critical acclaim – think no further than the five-star performance she gave of Britten’s Phaedra with the Scottish Ensemble at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival, a work she will perform again this season with the same ensemble.

Now in her early forties, is she ready to tackle Brünnhilde? “Not quite”, she says. “I need to do my apprenticeship and take on smaller soprano roles. It’s like starting my career from scratch; I’m having to learn new repertoire and do auditions, a process that is much scarier than it was than in my mid-twenties.”

Those precious years of experience have their advantages though, especially in the role she leaps into for tonight’s Tristan. For in Irwin’s long-range sights is the role of Isolde, which the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme is undertaking in the SSO’s serialised unfolding of the opera. “I’ve actually learnt the whole of that role, but to be in such close contact with Nina Stemme as she sings it will be a true gift. She is the greatest Isolde of our time.”

And simply knowing that part inside out is equally beneficial when singing and understanding Isolde’s sidekick, Bargäne, a female role that straddles the grey area that often exists between the mezzo soprano and dramatic soprano. “Wagner classified it in the score as a soprano role, but it’s usually done by mezzos. It’s very comfortable for me,” Irwin says.

Even coming in cold to Act II of the opera – where Brangäne’s Act I manipulations (feeding Tristan and Isolde a love potion rather than the intended poison) create havoc – is an enticing prospect for Irwin. “Here things are not so rosy in the garden. Brangäne is beating herself up having caused such mayhem, not to mention the hurt Isolde’s blind love has caused King Mark, and the political ramifications of her action. And yet it all climaxes with Brangäne singing the most sublime music in the whole opera.”

Irwin may be here this week by default, but the odds are there won’t be a moment in her performance that would have us wishing it were anyone else up there on the stage.

• The BBC SSO performs Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, prefaced by excerpts from Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, at the City Halls, Glasgow, tonight and at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Sunday, www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/bbcsso