AS YOU might expect of “one of the most distinguished Irish sopranos of her generation”, Virginia Kerr knows how to make an entrance — even when she’s running 20 minutes late. She is apologetic, but far from flustered. The poise comes not only from her experience as a stage performer, but perhaps also as a qualified psychotherapist, who has studied the entrances and exits of her peers from a professional point of view.
“I’m very interested in the mindset of musicians, and people; why is it difficult for somebody to go on stage?” she says. “Or what happens if your voice goes? I once decided to do a bit of work around the psyche of a musician, and the psychology of it, so I went back to college to do a master’s. My thesis was about performance anxiety, and then I was asked to write a book.”
Stage Fright, which was published last year, explores the notion that, for every successful classical singer, there are others for whom a career was not possible due to crippling performance anxiety. Even for some successful singers, the terror of appearing on stage can persist throughout their careers.Kerr never suffered from performance anxiety for any lengthy period of time: “Not to the point that I can’t get out there,” she says.
“But I remember seeing somebody backstage literally pushing a tenor onto the stage, because he would be sick. I wondered, ‘God, how could he feel like that?’ Because I love it.
“If you’re well prepared and in good voice and feeling well — like any performer — then you’re keen to get out. If you’re not feeling well, then you have to look at it and wonder, ‘Should I be doing this now if my voice isn’t right?’ Or, ‘Have I learnt the music?’ If it’s the latter, it can be controlled.”
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Kerr’s career in opera — which goes back to the 1970s — happened by accident. The family business is racehorses, and her uncle Bert Kerr co-founded bloodstock agents Kerr & Co in 1920. A horseshoe-shaped pendant around her neck is proof of her ongoing love of the animal. “I’ve been riding horses since I was two, and when I started off in this business I always thought I’ll make enough money to have a stud farm, or a rest home for old horses, or something like that,” she says. “But this profession is just a way of life now, and it’s something I love doing.”
Kerr trained on the piano and the harp as a youngster, and was inspired by seeing Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968). “I remember saying to Daddy, ‘I want to sing like her’,” she recalls, laughing. However, opera seemed a flight of fancy while she grew up around stables, stud farms and the equine industry in Co Meath, but then she attended Mount Sackville Convent, a girls’ boarding school in Chapelizod, Dublin.
“My mother died when I was about 13 or 14,” she recalls. “I was troublesome after that at boarding school. I suppose, looking back on it now, it was a reaction to losing my mother. But a nun, Sr Peter Cronin, came to Mount Sackville and was full of singing and putting on shows. Because I’m tall, she thought, ‘She’ll be great as a soldier in the chorus.’
“She died a few years ago, and I said at her funeral that she’d met a very troubled 14-year-old, but when I left school at 17, she had a very happy, focused girl.”
Kerr studied at the Royal Irish Academy before winning a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. “I still remember the first morning in the hostel there,” she recalls. “I had brought this little radio that my mother had, and I woke up and looked at it and thought, ‘I can’t stay here. I can’t do this. I want to go home.’ But I stayed and was very happy there — though I used to come home a lot.”
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She made her Royal Opera House debut in London in 1994, has sung in productions from Moscow to Glyndebourne, and with orchestras including the Halle, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Royal Philharmonic. Her memories of touring Janacek’s Jenufa around the Scottish Highlands, travelling with the company in a Post Office van, are recounted as fondly as anecdotes about Placido Domingo and singing at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 1981, she founded Young Irish Artists with the baritone Joe Brown. “When I started, there were no opportunities to do opera with an orchestra and a director in a theatre,” she shrugs. “So two of us started an opera company, hired the RTE Concert Orchestra with Prionnsías Ó Duinn, and put on The Marriage of Figaro in Wexford.”
While still performing, she is also training the next generation at her former alma mater, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, following an invitation from a former director. “It’s funny how things happen,” she muses. “A relationship broke up, I’d been living in London for eight years, but I never saw myself retiring there. I’d been there an awfully long time — so in 2004 I moved back, but had no intention of teaching. John O’Conor rang me up one day and said, ‘Would you be interested in teaching?’ I wasn’t sure because I was still travelling a lot, but I said, ‘OK, I’ll come in and have a chat.’”
It was around this time she qualified as a psychotherapist, which goes hand in hand with what she descibes as her “holistic” approach to voice training. She is enthusiastic about the current standard of both teachers and students in Irish opera. Yet though the opportunities are more abundant — thanks to companies such as Irish Youth Opera, Opera Theatre Company and Wide Open Opera — the lack of a national opera company since the demise of Opera Ireland in 2011 has left a yawning gap. “If we had a national opera company, in addition to all the other companies, that would be brilliant,” she says. “The Arts Council is very good, but there needs to be more money for the arts across the board. People see opera as being elitist, but it really isn’t — it’s expensive, but it doesn’t have to be elitist. We are exporting an enormous amount of very good singers, and have done for years, so why the money is not coming into the art form, I don’t know.”
Kerr pledges to continue to do her bit for what might now be referred to as “the old guard” of Irish opera. Still in fine voice and with requests for recitals continuing to roll in from around the world, her career in teaching and psychotherapy are complementary of, yet remain secondary to, her first love: singing. “I’ve never thought of giving it up, ever,” she says passionately. “There have been times when it’s been a difficult, but there was never a time that I haven’t wanted to sing. It’s my No 1 thing; I love it best of all. I think I’m sensible enough to be able to judge my own voice as to whether it’s time [to quit]. I’ll know. Until then, I’ll sing as long as I can sing.”
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Virgina Kerr performs at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, as well as recitals in Listowel, Co Kerry (Sept 9), Limerick (Sept 10) and
Armagh (Sept 11)