Glyndebourne: interview with soprano Lucy Crowe ahead of Little Vixen

Barely four months after giving birth to her first baby, soprano Lucy Crowe was suddenly confronted with the biggest challenge of her professional life. In mid‑March, the Royal Opera called her out of the blue, asking if she would be prepared to take on three performances of the leading role of Gilda in an April revival of Verdi’s Rigoletto, replacing another singer who had been obliged to drop out at short notice.

Crowe had been recommended to the management by the opera’s conductor, John Eliot Gardiner, but she had never sung Gilda before, didn’t know a note of the music and was told that there wouldn’t be any rehearsal on stage. It would be sink or swim.

“I absolutely love a challenge, but I did sit down and wonder whether taking this on would just be plain stupid. But then my natural ambition came over me and I thought, no, I’m just going to go for it. From then on, every minute of every day that I wasn’t dealing with my baby, it was just Gilda, Gilda, Gilda.

“But there’s only so much your brain can take, and the night before the first performance I felt like a bottle of Coke that had been shaken up and was about to explode. I kept bursting into tears – standing in the wings waiting to go on was much more frightening than giving birth. Anyway, I had fantastic support from John Eliot and my Rigoletto, Dimitri Platanias, and somehow I made it.

“After the first show was over, I felt a tremendous sense of achievement and had to stop myself punching the air, but it was only during the third performance that I actually began to enjoy it all. A fire alarm went off by mistake in the auditorium during my duet with Rigoletto. We had to stop and then start again, and somehow that killed my nerves for good. But I still feel that I’m unwinding from the intensity of the whole experience.”

Where better to do that than the rural idyll of Glyndebourne, where Crowe is now preparing for Melly Still’s new production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, in which she will sing the title role? The spring countryside is “a daily inspiration”, she says, and it’s a part she has known and loved for years.

“There is nothing very difficult about it vocally, and the character is such a complex and fascinating one. She’s very assertive and up for life. What you see with her is what you get, and she calls a spade a spade. But she’s vulnerable, too, and not as worldly-wise as she thinks she is.”

It’s a description that one feels might also have some bearing on 33-year-old Crowe herself. A Staffordshire girl, she fell in love with a record of Maria Callas’s greatest hits and started singing lessons at 10. There was never any doubt in her mind that she wanted to be an opera star (“I always say that I didn’t choose opera – it chose me”), but she had to withstand vicious bullying at her comprehensive school because of her unusual passion before moving on to the Royal Academy of Music for six years.

Having won a couple of major prizes, her big break came in 2007, when – again at very short notice – she stepped in to a new production of Handel’s Agrippina at ENO and rather stole the show. Since then, she’s sung throughout Europe and the US, maintaining a busy concert schedule alongside her operatic engagements.

After Glyndebourne, she’s off to Salzburg for Haydn’s Creation and then tours Australia in August with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, before making her Metropolitan Opera debut in November and a return to ENO in the new year. The longer-term plan is a focus on the bel canto repertory.

“I think I’m still seen primarily as a baroque singer, but my heart is with all those romantic tragic heroines like Giulietta, Lucia di Lammermoor and Violetta.”

Managing this alongside five-month-old Elsie and finding time for eight hours’ sleep a night and her enthusiasms for spin – “virtual” road-racing by bike – cooking, skiing, diving and the great outdoors, as well as involvement in a musical charity in Mumbai, make her sound like Superwoman. Crowe wryly admits that she is “a bit of an over-achiever”.

“But I couldn’t do any of it without my wonderful husband” – a horn-player with John Eliot Gardiner’s orchestra – “and my equally wonderful mum, who told me that she’s there for me whenever I need her. I do have a lot on my plate, but I love my life and I thrive on being on the edge. I’m determined to make it all work somehow.”

'The Cunning Little Vixen’ opens at Glyndebourne (01273 813813) on May 20