Sarah Tynan
Soprano
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan (credit: Chris Gloag) |
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Sarah Tynan: the girl next door grows up
Neil Fisher, The Times
February 2010
The soprano paid her dues by keeping it light — and working hard
If you were to draw up a corporate-style chart of results for the past six years at English National Opera, even the company’s staunchest admirers would have to admit that the graph would look pretty volatile. But there is one blue-chip investment at ENO plc that has consistently outperformed the market. She is Sarah Tynan, born and bred in Walthamstow, East London, who joined ENO in 2004 as a junior principal fresh out of college and in each successive outing at the Coliseum has excelled in the sort of roles — the maids, ingénues and soubrettes of the light soprano rep — that are notoriously difficult to make distinctive.
“There are a lot of singers who do what I do,” she admits. “It’s a massively overpopulated vocal area. And there are hundreds of other singers who could sing as well as I do, probably better. So I just try to create a believable character — start at the beginning in one place and finish at the end in another.”
Which makes it easy to understand why Tynan is particularly enjoying her latest assignation. In a noticeable step up from pert and perky types such as Yum-Yum in The Mikado or Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro she plays Adina, the flirty but deceptively complex heroine of Donizetti’s bel canto rom-com The Elixir of Love, who dismissively and frequently rebuffs the local dunderhead Nemorino, only to fall head over heels with him when he feigns disinterest. This being a newly imported Jonathan Miller production, Adina is not the wealthy owner of a farmhouse in idyllic 19th-century Italy, but a sassy working girl running Adina’s Diner in 1950s America.
“The way I’m doing it is that Adina certainly seems to be one of the crowd,” Tynan explains. “She’s very much one of the girls, and I guess Nemorino is just a sweet boy next door that she’s known for ever. And she doesn’t quite realise what she’s got with him until it’s forced into her face. If he would just come and sweep her off her feet then she would be more than willing to be swept.”
As was Tynan herself, it turns out. “My husband [the baritone Leigh Melrose] swept me off my feet,” she hoots. “We had both come out of relationships and neither of us was really looking for anything. We’d only known each other for about two weeks and he told me he loved me. And that was it. We moved in together, and that was nearly eight years ago.”
A large part of Tynan’s charm is how honest and plain-spoken she is — a quality that quickly transmits on stage, especially when singing in English. Miller is her kind of director, not just for the polymath’s intellect (“He knows so much stuff!”) but because he lets Tynan build her own character and make it work. “He plants little things and then he just sees what happens, and shapes it. So you feel like you have some input into the creative process as opposed to just being a puppet.”
Tynan started to hone those dramatic skills in unlikely surroundings — a local amateur Gilbert and Sullivan society, not in Walthamstow but in leafier Woodford, suggested to her by a school music teacher (opera was not a family pursuit). “I was 16,” she remembers, “and I was the youngest member by a considerable distance. But they were all absolutely adorable.”
She’s never lost her affection for G&S. “It’s a nice way to spend an evening,” she says, half-apologetically. “I love it, you can tell that audiences enjoy it, and that’s the best thing — you’re having fun, but you know that the audience is having a good time too.” On that basis she even has a good word to say about ENO’s critically reviled Kismet, a whimsical story of life in merry ol’ Baghdad that appeared on the stage when the Iraq war was at its height. “Well, talking about my G&S society — there was a big coachload of them who came to see it and they loved it. If you took it for what it was, it was a good evening.”
Musical candyfloss such shows might be, but the frothier pieces have also kept her voice fresh. When she was studying at the Royal Northern College of Music she was very aware of the burnout factor: “It’s hard as a singer not to get carried away. There must have been 18 of us who started on my degree course, and seven who finished.”
So Tynan kept her faith with the lighter rep — and got her big break while still at college, as a last-minute substitute in Katie Mitchell’s typically challenging Welsh National Opera production of Handel’s Jephtha (later seen at ENO). “It taught me how far you can go as a singer, how much you can commit to the drama and that the audience will go with you. They will forgive you if the note’s not perfect if you’re giving a committed dramatic performance.” Later this year she and Mitchell will team up again when Tynan plays Ilia in Mozart’s Idomeneo.
Tynan still gets indignant when the thorny question of access to opera raises its head. “It really does frustrate me,” she sighs. “When I first got into opera I didn’t realise there were people who thought it was elitist; I just took it for what it was.” But she’s frank about the problems some companies create for themselves. “There are places where I’ve been to see things and people are dressed up and they’re rude ... if people stopped doing that and others stopped saying it’s elitist, then maybe people wouldn’t be so frightened.”
So, Sarah Tynan, the people’s soprano? She winces at the suggestion of her becoming the next Lesley Garrett, but she shares Garrett’s down-to-earth appeal and love of musicals, and has forged as strong a connection with ENO as Garrett did. Full-blown musical theatre still tempts her, too. “I’ve flirted with the idea,” she admits, “but I think the things that make me tick are doing what we’re doing, making drama. I like the turnover — with musical theatre you’re in it for a year, two years. And I don’t really think television is for me. I don’t want to sell myself to the Devil.” Lucky ENO, which gets to keep its diamond asset for a good few years yet.
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