Cheryl continues to shine

Cheryl Barker continues to be one of the brightest stars in the Australian opera firmament. This year she sang two huge roles – Arabella and Desdemona – and she tackles her last big Australian role of the year, Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Secret, in Sydney this month. 

Emilia is both the most challenging and the most enjoyable of these roles, she says.  “Desdemona is lovely to sing but dramatically not much of a challenge and Arabella, while vocally very difficult, is one-dimensional as a character. The Makropulos Secret is dramatically fabulous and musically very complex.”

The challenge of the role is that Emilia undergoes many metamorphoses and that, having loved many people yet seen them grow old and die while she has survived, she has become world-weary. “Sometimes I can really identify with that!” Barker says, with a laugh.  She regards Emilia as a Don Giovanni-type character: charming, wild and humorous at the same time. Vocally the role is “angular and very heavily orchestrated”, so that Barker has to work hard to get the dynamic levels right.

She loves collaborating with Neil Armfield, whom she describes as an unintrusive director. “He might give you a clever little idea, but he won’t tell you how to do the role. Most directors are like that, I have found – they will only rein you in if things veer off course.”

Barker and Armfield’s vision of Emilia largely coincided, but this is not always the case. In Opera Australia’s remount of Otello earlier this season, for example, her interpretation of the role of Desdemona diverged in several ways from that of the original director, Harry Kupfer.  “Kupfer saw Desdemona as stronger and feistier than I did. I convinced [revival director] Cath Dadd to let me play her more vulnerable.”  If you have a different view from the director, you either have to convince him/her of your viewpoint, or he or she has to convince you of theirs, Barker says. “In this case I managed to talk the director into accepting my vision.”

But the most challenging aspect of Kupfer’s Otello production was not its music or its drama; it was its set. “Negotiating those slanted steps – on high heels – felt like being tipped downhill!” Barker says, and bursts out laughing. It was a great disappointment when her husband, Peter Coleman-Wright, had to cancel his role (Iago) in Otello due to ill health, since as a baritone/soprano pair, they have few opportunities to appear in the same production.  But that might be for the best.  “It helps if we are not all tensed up at the same time!”

In 2009 Opera Australia audiences will be seeing her as Butterfly and Manon, while in Europe she will be singing Butterfly at the Opera Bastille and Emilia Marty at De Nederlandse Opera.